The covenant - James A. Michener [214]
It was impossible to detect at any moment in this vast struggle who was winning. At the beginning of 1778 Guzaka gained a signal victory by razing the hut of Adriaan van Doorn, but in the spring of that year Vicus retaliated with his famous 'tobacco commando.' Recalling his tactics with the Bushmen, when he used a rhinoceros to wipe them out, he scattered tobacco on the ground a Xhosa war party would traverse; when they bent to grab at this prize, they perished in a hail of lead. In 1779 recognized warfare erupted, black regiments pitted against white field forces, and this was repeated in 1789 and 1799, bloody preludes to the more terrible wars that would continue through the next century.
During the battles Lodevicus never equated the Xhosa with the Bushmen, those troublesome little animals that had to be exterminated. Since the Xhosa were large men like himself, they commanded respect. As he told Rebecca, after one arduous expedition, 'When we pacify them, they'll be good Kaffirs.'
Guzaka had no intention of becoming a good Kaffir. Six separate times he threw his warriors against De Kraal, still convinced that if he could humble it, he could break the spirit of the trekboers, and six times the protecting hills enabled the embattled farmers to repel the invaders, and in the chase that always followed, to massacre them. But on the seventh try, in 1788, Guzaka and his warriors broke into the valley unexpectedly and came upon Rebecca van Doorn as she was going from the cattle byre to her house. With flashing assegais they cut her down, and she died before Lodevicus could reach her.
In contrast to the rage he felt at the similar death of his mother and father, this time he fell silent, brooding upon the harsh fact that God was not giving him the easy victories Dominee Specx had spoken of in those exciting days of revelation at Swellendam. He was also plagued by memories of that morning when his wife and his mother resorted to the Bible to answer the question of what would happen when the Xhosa struck, and the mocking words reverberated: 'An hundred of you shall put ten thousand to flight.' One of that ten thousand, the damned Guzaka, had killed his father, his mother and his- wife. The New Jerusalem had not been established on the far side of the Great Fish; the Canaanites had not been expelled from the house of the Lord; indeed, they seemed to be chopping that house to bits.
And then, in the depth of his despair, when it seemed that his mission and that of the trekboers had been completely frustrated, God visited him again, in the person of a girl of nineteen who came riding alone into De
Kraal on the back of a white horse. She was Wilhelmina Heimstra, from one of the irreverent families down by the sea, and her mission was forthright: 'I cannot live in idolatry. I cannot exist without the presence of God.'
'You can't stay here,' Lodevicus said. 'I have no wife.'
'That's why I came,' the girl said. 'When the messenger told us that the Xhosa had killed Rebecca, whom I knew . . .'
Lodevicus, then forty-nine, the Hammer of the frontier, stood silent. In all the territory he commanded there was no predikant to give direction, not even a sick-comforter other than himself, and he did not know what to do. But then he recalled the patristic figures of the Old Testament and how often they had been faced by such problems on their lonely frontiers: older men without wives, heads of families with no one to assist them, and his mind fell especially on Abraham, that first great trekboer:
And Sarah was an hundred and