The covenant - James A. Michener [450]
'Certainly not, sir.'
'I saw it with my own eyes. I've had various reports. Couldn't believe them. After all, these are decent human beings. But at the Battle of Driefon-tein, I watched as they did it.'
What Kitchener objected to, and most strenuously, was the Boer habit of ransacking the bodies of dead English soldiers and appropriating articles of needed clothing: 'The ghouls appear in our khaki. At fifty paces can't tell they're enemy. That's breaking the rules of civilized warfare.'
The English leaders made a great fuss over these rules of civilized warfare; they felt that an enemy should behave much like the barefoot Indians and Egyptians: stand in line with their rusty guns; wait as the phalanx of red-coated battalions marched at them; fire; run when the cavalry charged; surrender and go back to their land when the war was declared over. It was disturbing to think that men of European heritage would fight the way the Boers did, with trickery, speed, and the nasty habit of dissolving back into the landscape instead of surrendering. And the fact that these Boers were well supplied with the best German Mausers and French Martini-Henri rifles was distressing.
But the Boers, too, had their grievances. Like General de Groot, they felt it to be inhuman and far beyond the principles of civilized warfare for men to sit astride big horseslike those from the farms of America and the Argentineand to ride them in among the commandos, cutting and slashing as they came. Hundreds of Boers, who started with no more than sullen resentment against the English, grew to detest them because of the cavalry charges, and when De Groot and his men destroyed the Argentine horses they applauded.
Even worse they deplored the English habit of firing their guns at two hundred yards, and then a hundred, and then fifty, and finally charging in with bayonets, a weapon the Boers never used. 'To come at a man with cold steel,' De Groot said, 'that's inhuman.' Many an Englishman who should have been captured and led away to safe imprisonment lost his life because he fought with a bayonet, for Christian men did not do that.
Between the combatants a kind of chivalry did exist, based on real respect: the English were redoubtable foes, willing to absorb tremendous losses; the Boers were often willing to go up against unbelievable odds, and many of the most unusual gestures of courtesy were extended by these rude farmers. But on two points of difference they were adamant, and when the English refused to concede on these, a deep bitterness was engendered, with each side actually flogging and shooting prisoners captured from the other.
The deepest difference, perhaps, concerned black troops; each side used African scouts, but increasingly those with the English turned up with arms, whereupon word would flash through the countryside: 'The English are arming the Kaffirs.' This was intolerable, for no matter how desperately the two white armies fought each other, in the backs of their minds the real enemy was the black man watching from the side.
English commanders were aware of Boer feelings on this point, but that did not prevent them from enlisting and arming Coloured units from the Cape, and for this the Boers would never forgive them.
Besides, for the English to use these Coloureds only deepened the Boers' resentment of the fact that so few Afrikaners from the Cape volunteered to help. Many still hoped for a massive rebellion against the English in the two colonies, Cape and Natal, but no more than thirteen thousand crossed over. What was especially galling, thousands of Cape citizens of Dutch ancestry joined men of English descent in colonial regiments which fought in British armies against the Boers. Many in the north