'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:

  My dearest darling Maud,

  I have never before addressed a letter to you like this, because I did not appreciate how desperately I love you and how much I need you. I have been to Chrissie Meer, to the big concentration camp there, and I am shattered. You must do all you can to alleviate the condition of these pitiful people. Food, blankets, medicines, trained people. Maud, spend all our savings, volunteer yourself, but for God's sake and the reputation of our people, you must do something. At this end I shall do whatever I can. An evil fog has fallen over this land, and if we do not dissipate it promptly, it will contaminate all future relationships between Englishman and Boer.

  When I rode back from Chrissie Meer, I reflected on the fact that the three men who were spoilers of this land, Shaka, Rhodes, Kitchener, not one of them had a wife. I fear that men without women are capable of terrible misdeeds, and I want to apologize to you for having allowed Mr. Rhodes to delay our marriage as he did. I was as evil as he in conforming to that hateful posture, and I bless you tonight for the humanity you have brought into my life.

  Your most loving husband, Frank

  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:

  'The Boer women and children are noticeably better off than they would be if left on their abandoned farms. They receive adequate supplies of the most healthful foods, on which they seem to prosper and if—'

  '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.

  'Whatever illness appears in the camps is due primarily to the Boer women themselves. Having been raised on farms without privies, they cannot learn to adopt the sanitary measures which alone prevent the spread of epidemics. And when illness does strike, they insist upon resorting to country measures that have not been used in civilized nations for the past sixty years. They wrap a measled child in the skin of a freshly slaughtered goat. They grub in the countryside for old herbs which they claim can reduce fever. They recite rhymes as if they were witch doctors. And they will not wash their hands.'

  '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.'

  'So I must conclude that the English authorities are doing everything humanly possible to protect the women and children in our charge. I found them in good condition, reasonably happy, and with every probability of leaving the camps in better condition than when they entered.'

  '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:

  'The complaint of the Boers that their women and children are dying at an excessive rate is belied by the statistics of our own forces. To date 19,381 such Boers have died in the camps, but it must be remembered that in the same period 15,849 of our soldiers have died under similar circumstances. It is not our barbarity that kills, nor starvation on the diet we provide; it is the physical nature of the camps and the hospitals, the incessant spread of dysentery and typhoid, and these strike Boer and Englishman even-handedly.'

  '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.

  The attendants carted the bodies to a busy burial ground, where a carpenter from Carolina had volunteered to build rude caskets from whatever odds and ends he could scavenge. He was Hansie Bronk, descendant of that Balthazar Bronk who had protested the marriage of Sybilla and Paulus de Groot; big, round-shouldered, blessed with a rural sense of humor, he was a civilizing force, his most appreciated contribution being not his caskets, but his ability now and then to find extra meat and vegetables in the countryside.

  When Detlev appeared at the burial ground, Hansie chucked him under the chin and said, 'Nou moenie siek word nie, my klein mannetjie.' (Now don't you fall sick, little man.)

  This day there were four caskets, and beside their shallow graves stood Dr. Higgins holding a Bible. He despised every moment of his service in this horrible place but felt obligated to oversee all that happened, as if he were both the cause and the participant, and he strove to make the burials decent. Detlev listened as the doctor prayed.

  The boy was in the tent three days later when the other little girl died, her arms like threads, and he walked with the attendants as they collected the bodies of those who had died of fever in the preceding hours. He was always present at the burials, and always Hansie Bronk told him, 'Nou moenie siek word nie, my klein mannetjie.'

  His watchful eye noticed when the older of his twin sisters—Anna, who boasted of her precedence—began to waste away, but he was not prepared for what happened when he said to his mother, 'Anna needs medicine,' for Mevrou van Doorn uttered a piercing scream and started running down to the doctor's quarters—but there were no medical supplies.

  'My God!' Sybilla cried, running after her, slapping her and bringing her back to the tent. 'We swore an oath, Sara. We have got to protect the children.' When food was doled out, a meager amount, the hungry women apportioned much of it to the twin, who nevertheless grew weaker each day.

  'Is Anna going to die?' Detlev asked.

  'Don't say that!' his mother cried, whereupon old Sybilla shook her again and made her sit down, and she became quiet.

  In time Anna did die, just as Detlev had expected, and at the funeral he watched attentively as Hansie Bronk placed her thin body in one of his caskets. On this day there were four other children to be buried, and when Dr. Higgins tried to read from his Bible he could not control his voice, so Sybilla took the book and finished reading the Psalm. Detlev listened to the sound of earth pitched upon the caskets.

  The death of her child had such a debilitating effect on Sara that she seemed to wilt in the intense heat like one of the flowers. At night it was extremely cold, and this sharp fluctuation aggravated whatever illnesses the internees contracted, but in Sara's case it was merely lack of will power.

  One week the supply of Boer meal increased noticeably, and everyone in the tent received an extra portion, but this did little good for one of the women whose children had perished. She ate a little, smiled at Detlev, and died. At her burial he wept for the first time.

  But if Lord Kitchener believed that by imprisoning the Boer women he would break the spirit of their men, he misconceived the nature of these people, for when the women were thrown together, their resolve doubled and they, even more than the men, grew determined to see this war through to victory. When four had already died in her tent, Sybilla de Groot wrote a letter, which was reprinted in hundreds of newspapers:

  Chrissiesmeer, Transvaal Christmas Day 1901

  General Paulus de Groot,

  Never surrender. If you have to fight on foot, one against five hundred, never surrender. Carry fire to all parts of the land, but never surrender. They think that because they have thrown us here and because they deny our children food to eat that we will urge you to stop. They miscalculate. From the bottom of our hearts we cry to you, never surrender. We send you our kisses and our love, and we pray for your victory. Run, hide, retreat, burn, dynamite, Paulus, but never surrender.

  Sybilla de Groot Sara van Doorn and 43 others

  Lord Kitchener's relentless pressure began to produce limited results. Certain weary men, contrary to their wives' pleas, did surrender. They were called contemptuously 'hands-uppers,' and in the early years of the war would have been shipped off to imprisonment in Ceylon or Napoleon's St. Helena. But now, with the war approaching an end, it was deemed economical to incarcerate them within the country; with their farms burned and their families scattered, the only reasonable solution was to add them to the concentration camps. This was a dreadful mistake, for when two of these men were billeted at Chrissie Meer, Sybilla, Sara and the other incarcerated wives marched to the doctor's office and warned him: 'Get those "hands-uppers" out of here or they'll be murdered.'

  'Now wait, that's a fearful thing to say. These men—'

  'Get them out of here,' the women cried in unison.

  'Ladies,' the doctor said in an attempt to restore sanity. Death from disease was one thing, but planned murder was another. 'Will you listen to reason?'

  'If they sleep here tonight,' Sybilla said slowly, ‘I myself will murder them.'

  The doctor gasped. This was not a wild phrase thrown out in the heat of protest; this was the calm threat of a resolute old woman who could be depended upon to fulfill it. 'We'll move them away,' he said, and the women departed.

  That was the last gesture Sara van Doorn was able to make. She was so weakened from continued fever that one morning, on a fearfully hot day, she had not the strength to rise, and Detlev went running for Sybilla, who was always up early to see if she could add a little food to the ration. 'Tant Sybilla,' the boy cried. 'I think Mother is going to die.'

  'You're not to use that word.'

  'She can't lift her head.'

  'Then we must see what's the matter,' the old woman said, and she led the boy back to the tent. He was right, his mother was about to die. The long ordeal of keeping her family together without a husband, and now without proper food and medicine, had been too demanding. Her strength was gone, and even when Sybilla and Johanna pleaded with her, reminding her of her promise, she was powerless to respond, and toward noon, in the blazing heat, she expired.

 

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