The Visitors (18 page)

I have attended at several burnings now and this is the way it generally goes. We ride up to the farmhouse. The women are often outside, watching us and pointing. At first, they think we are stopping for refreshments but then our officer tells them we have come to burn their farm. It is a horrible moment and mostly I look away. Some get angry and curse us, or fly into hysterics and collapse. Others are simply downcast and miserable. We give them a short while to get all their things out of the house. Sometimes we help them with the heavy furniture. It is all piled away from the house and they stand amongst their higgledy-piggledy possessions, looking forlorn. We fetch bundles of straw to get the thing going and we set the fire. Sometimes you see Tommies chasing chickens and ducks around to take for food, while others are driving off the horses and cattle or trampling the crops, taking away the wagons or burning them too. We often dig up any newly-made graves; I know this sounds ghoulish but the Boer women often hide weapons and valuables there. I’ve heard of some Tommies sent to burn stocks of grain and even sheep, leaving them half-dead in agony, rotting under the sun. I want you to know I haven’t done this particular act myself. Some of us are sent to the nearest patch of high ground to look out for trouble. More than once I’ve seen Boer commandos on horseback watching the destruction of their homes from far away – too far for us to bother engaging them – only to turn dejectedly and amble away.

Once we are sure the buildings are burning well, we go, the little group of women left watching their home burn to the ground, holding on to each other. Some of the women cry, while others hold up their chin or even raise their fists to us as we leave. The children always watch the fire with big eyes, like we do on Guy Fawkes’ Night. I think the little ones have no idea what the fire means for their future. They are just awestruck by the sight. I’m afraid they will understand it soon enough.

All across the veldt you can see columns of black smoke dotted throughout the landscape, as another farm goes up in flames. Wallis says the Boer men are a mean type of humanity with low cunning stamped on their faces, while Boer children are mostly brutes and the Boer women are stupid and stubborn and they’re all spies and deserve what they get. They certainly are stubborn. When they do talk to you, it is astonishing how sure they are of their success. They say they shall fight for ever, that they will never give in, that they are only waiting for us all to pack up and go home. There is a kind of calm acceptance that this may take a long time, that the Tommies will do as they like in the meantime, that their men will be away for months, perhaps years, and that even their homes will be burned and their livelihoods destroyed. But still they believe they will win in the end. I think it comes from their belief in God, that He is protecting them. In every Boer home you visit you see an heirloom Bible in pride of place and find one in many a Boer haversack or pocket.

But it’s more than that, it’s about patriotism too. They believe completely in their right to that land. They have fought the Kaffirs for it and won that hard fight at great cost. Now they will never give in. It is this attitude – one you find in every home and every heart – that I believe will doom this war to years of fighting. It will take great hardships to break these people. And all that will be left of this land is desert. When you think of those children with frightened eyes watching their homes burn down, this will kindle a deep hatred in them of the British which will last all their lives and surely be passed to their children and their children’s children, and so it will go on. The farm burning begins it, and who knows what will end it?

I am sorry to end my letter on such a sad note. But now the fun of the early battles is done, I look into the future of this war and see little but the hit-and-run tactics of Boers on horseback and their endless pot-shots – such excellent shots they are – and us sweeping across the veldt, corralling up who we can, laying waste to the land, and still more Boers will elude us, as we can never catch them all. It is not what I imagined as war, it is not what you will read about in the newspapers. If I had a pound for every time we read that the war will be over soon, I’d be a millionaire. And still the war would drag on.

I am hoping that all is well in Whitstable and Edenbridge, that the oysters are spatting nicely, that the hop flowers ripen in the Kent sun, that life continues there exactly as it has always done and will never change. I have that to hope for, that when I return it will all be as I left it. Here the wind whips up dust into storms and I marvel that the Boers love this dry land with all their hearts. But love it they do and will never give it up. If someone tried to take our oyster beds, churn them to ruin, or trample the Golding hops and set fire to the oast house, would we stand idly by? Would we surrender? Would we forgive?

With best love,

Your Caleb

Frankfort Garrison,

Orange Free State

13 August 1900

My dear ones,

I have a lot to tell you in this letter. I have been present at a great spectacle, perhaps to be one of the most enduring images of this war: the surrender of Prinsloo. I also have a more personal encounter to relate, which has changed my feelings on the nature of this war and its cost. First, the military part. In mid-July, several thousand Boers under General Prinsloo were in the vicinity of Brandwater. Our forces moved to surround them on all sides. By the 18th of July, the British had broken through at Slabbert’s Nek and Retief’s Nek. The battle over the next few days cost many British lives and was carried out in the miserable cold and icy rain of the valley and snow in the mountains. The Boers made a hasty retreat, while we edged ever forward on all sides, aiming to block off their escape routes. I came up under General Rundle at Commando Nek and we secured the exit there, luckily with no casualties for our company, as the Boers were nowhere to be seen. They had vanished into the mist.

Once we heard that the trap was set, we marched – well, I’d say sauntered, as there was no hurry now – down to Fouriesberg to see how many lobsters were in the pot. Coming down I saw the marvellous sight of our horses in long snaking columns splashing through the shallows of the river. We heard rumours that Prinsloo had asked for an armistice for six days to take counsel, yet not surprisingly our great leader refused. There was no way out for the Boers by now, only a tiny pass over the hills towards Natal. But that is a British stronghold, so what place for them there? Also, they would have had to leave their wagons behind, something a Boer hates to do, so caught up is his life with this simple item, a life spent before this butchery on the flat veldt with his animals, his rifle and his wagon, on the trek or settling finally at his farm. So on the 29th July Prinsloo and 4,000 Boers under him surrendered unconditionally. We were all astonished at how easily our catch was had. I truly believe those 4,000 souls spoke with one voice, despite any anger from their Boer generals elsewhere. They just wanted to take their wagons and go home.

No home for them though, not yet. We heard Prinsloo asked that all burghers should be allowed to do just that and not be treated as prisoners of war. Our commander General Hunter of course refused – I mean to say, why should the fighting Boers not be POWs? What is to stop them from going back into commandos in the future and killing Tommies once more? Instead, General Hunter was very generous in his offer that they should be allowed to keep their private property and personal effects, including their horses to ride away on, a courtesy never extended to British POWs as far as I know. The actual surrender itself was a picture I will never forget. It took days to complete. The valley was filled with Boer wagons, pouring into Fouriesberg. The Boers themselves came in groups of several hundred, handing over their arms. Each man would have his Mauser taken, the barrels would be opened and ammunition removed, which was thrown on to a huge bonfire that burned all night and day, every now and then a great spluttering of Mauser cartridges exploding in the heat, and black smoke hanging above. The Boers themselves were not proud or haughty, not angry or ashamed. They were only interested in their property and quite cheery about the whole thing. It is hard to dislike them. They were then marched off south to their fate, POW camps or perhaps abroad to British colonies, such as Bermuda, St Helena or Ceylon, a long way from home. You might think that the surrender of this massive number of prisoners would mean the end of the war is in sight, but I doubt it. Rather I think it will serve to encourage the others to fight harder.

The next day, I was called by my commanding officer to complete an unusual task. A woman and her son were part of the surrendering Boer forces. As she was armed, it was decided that she had been fighting with the men. She could not be sent off with them to be a prisoner of war, as there was no provision for women in these circumstances. It was decided instead to interrogate her, as she has been travelling throughout the OFS for months and may have some useful information about Boer movements. I was told that after interrogation she was to be taken to a camp for women and children. She was interrogated for several hours and then I was called to collect her and take her to Harrismith. There is a railway station there from which we were to take the train north to a camp near Johannesburg. She had requested to go to this camp as she believed she had some family there.

The lady I was told to accompany has the wonderful name of Mrs Uitenweerde, but luckily she allowed me to call her by her first name, the much simpler Maria. Her husband, Hermanus (I believe that is correct, though these Boer names are devilish for spelling), was killed at the Battle of Modder River, yet she calls it the Battle of Twee Rivier (which means two rivers), last November. She is a very young widow, perhaps in her early twenties, with a seven-year-old son called Jurie. She must have married very young. After the death of her husband, she left her farm a few miles north of Pretoria with Jurie and followed commando groups in which her cousin Michael fought. Sometimes she returned back to her farm and other times she rejoined the commando. She tired of this life and returned to her farm in June, only to find it had been burned out. I’m only glad it wasn’t me who did the deed, as I know I did not set afire any farms up there and certainly not one called Mimosafontein. Such a lovely name, I would have remembered it.

By July, she was travelling with her cousin’s commando as part of Prinsloo’s forces and this is how she came to be involved in the surrender at Fouriesberg. She hates the British, to be sure. When she first set eyes on me, she looked me up and down in one swift movement just like Ma used to when we had committed some crime and she was about to reach for the cat-o’-nine-tails. Maria would not speak to me at first, only whispered to her son in Afrikaans. He was a talkative little fellow, but would not speak to me. He looked around her skirts at times to spy on the Englishman, but always hid again if I looked back or winked at him. We arrived at the railway station in Harrismith, Maria directing me as she knew the place, in a civil tone and perfect English, though she spoke no other words to me on this long and bumpy journey over the veldt in the rough Cape cart we had been assigned.

The train was steaming in as we arrived, so I found us a carriage free and we got on. We sat on opposite benches. Each compartment is separate on these trains and the guard has to edge along a nine-inch step that runs outside the coach, as the train speeds along. Rather him than me. I put my hat over my eyes and took a nap for a while, as she would have had to jump off a moving train with her child to escape. There were no dining cars, so we had to wait until the next station before taking some lunch at a restaurant on the platform: cold soup, tough meat and knives so blunt they couldn’t cut butter. In all this time, neither the woman nor her son said a word to me. After the meal, she said to the cook in English, ‘He pays,’ pointing at me and swept out on to the platform, head high. I was like her servant, not her guard!

Once back on the train, I watched her for a while. Her chin still jutted out and her gaze outside was a thousand miles long. Her son slept. I said that we were to be on this train for two days at least, so it would be more pleasant to pass the time of day. She looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘What did you do in England, before the war?’ I told her and she responded, ‘Why does an English farmer like you take up arms against us Boer farmers thousands of miles from home?’

To my shame, I honestly couldn’t answer her. I did not know what to say. The conversation ended there. An hour or so later, I tried again. I asked her what had happened in her interrogation and she said that they had gone on and on about how the Boers lived, what they ate, how much longer they would fight, how they managed to blow up the railway lines and so on. Then she added, ‘I told them nothing and will tell you nothing either, Khaki.’ I said I only wanted to know if they had treated her kindly. She said that Captain Cox was actually very nice to her, that he told her that if she didn’t want to speak nobody could force her to, and that he admired her courage. I told her I was glad she was well treated.

‘Have you treated Boers well?’ she asked.

‘I hope so,’ I replied.

‘Have you burned farms?’

I didn’t want to answer her question and looked away. What a coward I was! But my feelings for my fellow countrymen welled up and I felt I was on the defensive.

‘Your fellow Boers. Don’t they enter the homes of loyalist people and loot them, throw the people out, treat them very roughly, perhaps even abuse them? Not to mention the way you’ve treated the blacks all these years. They were in Africa first, after all. When your burghers capture us, they strip off our uniforms and send us starving and thirsty out on to the veldt to fend for ourselves. And don’t some of your Boer commandos range around in lawless gangs and mutilate the bodies of dead British soldiers?’