The Covenant (133 page)

“Stand back, you fool!” Saltwood cried, but as he did so he looked into the eyes of this embittered girl, and she remembered who he was: “Mother! He’s the spy.”

From her wagon, Sybilla looked out to inspect the man in charge of this destruction, and she, too, recognized him: “The spy!” The twin girls, peering from beneath the canvas, saw who he was and they joined the lamentation: “The spy! He’s Saltwood the spy.”

When Frank dismounted to reassure the two Van Doorn women on the stoep, Johanna spat in his face: “They should have hanged you.”

“They should have hanged you!” the twins shouted, and Detlev, finding sticks in the wagon, started throwing them at their betrayer. Meanwhile, the fires raged.

It was only thirty-eight miles from Vrymeer to the cluster of large lakes which the English called Chrissie Meer. Here the concentration camp had been established, but in that distance Major Saltwood’s column had collected five additional wagons filled with women and children from farms en route. Since all buildings had been burned, the women were sooty and weeping as they turned the last corner; then they looked with awe at their destination. Their camp lay at the edge of one of the loveliest lakes in Africa: a surface shimmering in sunlight, hills rising softly from the shore, flowers in beds, and a hint of animals hiding in the glens. Saltwood said to a member of the
Welsh Fusiliers, “If you must have a prison camp … the clean air … the sunlight …” In months ahead when the name of this camp echoed with shame, he would concede that it was at least a place of physical beauty. To it he delivered Sybilla de Groot, Sara van Doorn and the four Van Doorn children, but as he did so he noticed by sheerest accident a tent in which three young children lay sleeping, he thought; on closer inspection he saw that they were awake, too emaciated to respond when he spoke to them.

Rushing to the commandant’s office, a doctor from the English Midlands, he cried, “Sir, those children in the tent at the bottom of Row Eighteen. Sir, those children are starving.”

“There is no starvation here,” the doctor said sternly, as if reporting on his hospital to a village committee of inspection.

“But those children! Legs like matchsticks!”

“We are all like matchsticks,” the doctor cried, his voice suddenly rising almost to a scream, as if his earlier composure had been tenuous. “And do you know why?” He uttered a string of obscenities Saltwood had not heard for years; they were not used at officers’ headquarters. “It’s your goddamned Lord Kitchener, that’s who it is. Go back and tell him what you saw.”

“I can’t leave my women here …”

“You’re right, Colonel … What’s your name?”

“Saltwood, and I’m a major.”

“English?”

“I’m from the Cape. And I’d appreciate your telling me where to take these women.”

“Where? Yes, where?”

“Doctor, lower your voice. You sound demented.”

“I am demented!” the little man screamed in a Lancashire dialect. “I am demented with shame.”

With a sudden swipe of his right arm, Saltwood knocked the agitated man against a wall, then pulled him up and sat him at his desk. “Now tell me without bellowing—what’s the matter?”

“Typhoid’s the matter. Measles are the matter. And dysentery, dysentery’s the matter.” He broke down and sobbed so pitifully that Saltwood had to cover his own face in compassion.

“Tell me in an orderly way,” he said, touching the doctor’s shoulder. “I can see it’s horrible, but what can we do?”

The doctor jabbed at his eyes, rumpled through some papers, found a report, and covered it with his hands for a moment. “We’re
at the end of the supply line here, Colonel. Headquarters can’t send us enough food. But the diet would sustain life, except for the incessant illness.” And here he repeated his litany of death: “Typhoid, measles, dysentery. We could fight any one, but a body already weakened by stringent diet, it hasn’t the strength. These figures tell our story.” And he shoved the paper forward. “Deaths per thousand, months of February, March, seven hundred and eighty-three.”

“My God!” Saltwood cried.

“Those were the bad months. Chrissie Meer’s average is usually less than three hundred.”

“But even so, that’s one in three.”

“Yes,” the doctor said. “Of the thirty-seven women and children you delivered today, maybe fifteen, maybe twenty will be dead at the end of six months, if dysentery runs wild again, if the food supply weakens.”

“Doctor, you are in very sore condition yourself. I think I should take you back to Pretoria.”

A nurse heard this proposal and stepped forward, an extremely gaunt woman. “Dr. Higgins controls his feelings most of the time. We all try to. And when we get fresh vegetables or meat from the countryside, we keep many people alive. But without medicines …” She shrugged her shoulders. “Dr. Higgins is a very strong man, spiritually. He does what he can.”

“What do you need?” Saltwood asked.

She hesitated, looked at Dr. Higgins, and saw that she would get no help there. He had withdrawn from the discussion. “We need everything. Hospital beds. Medicines. We have no toilet paper. Dysentery runs wild, and children seem to starve, as you saw. If we don’t get help soon, and I mean nourishing food in better supply, all the children you brought us will be dead.”

Two nights later, when he was back in Pretoria, he found that there were no additional supplies for Chrissie Meer, at the far end of the line: no extra food, no medicines, no sanitary aids, and he could see his children, the ones he had taken to the camp, dying. Retiring to his room, with dull anguish assailing him, he wrote a love letter:

When word circulated at headquarters that Maud Saltwood was creating disturbances—“Not riots, you understand, but real annoyances, questions, and all that, you know”—Lord Kitchener was enraged. It infuriated him that one of his own men should be unable to control his wife, permitting her to make a fuss over the camps, where, as he pointed out again and again, “the women and children are much better off than they would be in their own homes.”

“Bring Saltwood in here!” he thundered. When the major stood before him he used his baton to indicate a pile of papers. “What’s all this—these reports—about your wife, Saltwood?”

“She’s doing what she can to alleviate conditions—”

“Alleviate? There’s nothing to alleviate.”

“Sir, with all respect, have you seen the death rate—”

“Damnit, sir, don’t you be insolent with me.” The noble lord looked as if he could bite Saltwood in half, and would relish doing so. “You sit down there, and listen to someone who knows.”

He summoned a Dr. Riddle, from London, who had just returned from a tour of the forty-odd camps. He was a cheery man, obviously well-fed, and seemed full of enthusiasm. With alacrity he took the report Lord Kitchener held out to him. “I wrote this, you understand,
Saltwood. Done on the spot.” From it he read his major conclusions:

“Did you get out to Chrissie Meer?” Saltwood interrupted. “Listen to the report,” Kitchener snapped. “I wasn’t able to get that far east,” Dr. Riddle said.

“I am seriously thinking of bringing criminal charges against some of these mothers,” Kitchener said with great irritation. “They should be tried for murder. It’s all their fault, you know.”

“What would your precious wife make of that?” Lord Kitchener asked, fastening his hard eyes on Saltwood.

Saltwood, having once denied his wife in the presence of a strong man, had no intention of doing so again: “I think, sir, she would say that such a report does both you and the king an injustice.”

An explosion without specific words erupted, after which Kitchener roared, “Are you impugning the integrity of Dr. Riddle?”

Taking a deep breath, Saltwood replied, “I am saying that his report does not begin to cover conditions at Chrissie Meer, and, I suspect, at a lot of other installations I haven’t seen.”

“But your wife has seen them?”

“Sir, the day may come when you will be eternally grateful that my wife spoke out in these bad days.”

“Bad days, damn you! We’re winning along the entire front.”

“Not in the camps, sir. You run great risk of damaging your reputation because of what’s happening—”

“Show him, Riddle,” Kitchener said. “Show him the other page.”

“I’ll read it,” the ebullient doctor said, not wishing this secret part of his report to fall into other hands, even temporarily:

“And what do you think of that?” Kitchener snapped, but Frank was too ashamed of the mendacity of this report to say what he thought: The English soldiers went into their hospitals wounded or already near death from disease. Most Boer women and children went in healthy. Both died, and at equal rates, but from much different causes.

“Well?” Kitchener asked. “They’re equal, aren’t they?”

“In war, unarmed women and children do not equal men in uniform.”

“Get out of here! You’re dismissed from my headquarters. I will not have a man around me who cannot control his own wife.” When Saltwood remained at attention, Kitchener repeated, “Get out. You’re dismissed with prejudice. You can never again serve with an English unit. You are unreliable, sir, and a disgrace to your uniform.”

In a calm such as he had not known since he began serving under General Buller, Frank Saltwood looked down at Lord Kitchener at his desk, arranging reports which proved that England was winning the war. “Permission to speak, sir?”

“Granted—then begone.”

“If you pursue the war along these lines, you’ll be remembered as the general who lost the peace.” With that he saluted, marched from the room, and headed for the Johannesburg railway. At Cape Town,
hungry for the civilizing spirit of his wife, he burst into their quarters to find her gone. The maid said, “She’s out to inspect the camps, Mr. Saltwood.” When the girl left, he bowed his head and mumbled, “Thank you, God, for showing at least one of us his duty. I mean her duty.” In the morning he would find where she was working, and join her.

When Sybilla de Groot and the Van Doorns were deposited at their concentration camp, they were assigned to a small bell tent that already contained a family of four, the two youngest of whom were near death. Sybilla, white-haired and somewhat stooped, came into the tent, saw what needed to be done, and said quietly to the Van Doorns, “We can make do.”

She moved the cots of the dying children to where they would catch a breeze, then did what she could to encourage the women to get up and see if they could scrounge even a little extra food for the children, but she saw to her amazement that the women lacked not only the stamina to do this, but also the will. In a daze of terror she left the three youngest Van Doorns in the tent and drew Sara and Johanna out into the open, where she took each by the hand, squeezing until her own fingers hurt. “We must not surrender. The children will live only if we live. We must never give in.” Looking alternately at her two friends, she asked them, “Do you swear?” They swore that they would not surrender.

When the first of the two children died, in terrible emaciation caused by a combination of typhoid, dysentery and inadequate food, Sybilla tried to mask the fact from Detlev, only six years old, but he knew what death was, and said, “The little girl is dead.”

The entire tent—that is, those who could walk—attended the funeral. Camp attendants, who seemed to be quite healthy, came down the lane between the tents, collecting bodies, and at Sybilla’s they lifted up the little corpse, then reached for the other child, who lay inanimate. “That one’s not dead yet,” Detlev said, and the attendants passed on.