The covenant - James A. Michener [455]
'Little help you voracious men gave me in arguing for the park. All you wanted to do was shoot elephants for their tusks.'
When General de Groot came by to pay his respects, Kruger said, 'I hear you're keeping Sybilla with you. Splendid idea, Paulus. Boer women thrive on battle.'
'You and I are the only ones left who were in the Great Trek,' Paulus said, and tears came into his eyes as he recalled those days.
'Wasn't Mzilikazi a fearful enemy?' Kruger asked. 'He fought us all day, killing and slaying, then prayed with the English missionaries all night, telling them how his heart bled for his people.' The weary president shook his head, then added, 'I must say, I've never cared much for missionaries. How can the Bible produce such a bad lot?'
'They use a different Bible,' De Groot said.
Kruger slapped his leg. 'I agree, Paulus. The Bible in English, it doesn't sound the same. They do something to it.'
'What will you do, Oom Paul, if the English come down the railway line?'
'They want me to go to Europe. To stir up the nations. Find allies for us in our struggle.'
As the two old Pauls spoke, a cadre of officers came to the railway coach to inform them of disturbing news: 'We're taking you down to Waterval-Onder. Safer down there.'
At the new headquarters, De Groot was assigned the pleasant job of serving as a kind of liaison between the Boers up on the veld and President Kruger sitting in a small white house down among the tropical growth, where the air was soft and warm. But within days news of the war grew ominous: 'Oom Paul, General Roberts is coming at us along the railway line. General Buller moves up from the south.' And then Paul Kruger demonstrated just how deeply he believed in the covenant his people had made with the Lord.
'De Groot, I want you to help me draft a last message to your Venloo burghers,' he said, and laboriously, but with a kind of grandeur in their hearts, the two old men, veterans of the Great Trek to freedom, lined out the message, parts of which would be memorized by the Venloo men to whom it was read:
Burghers, in all ages the Craven Beast has had the power to persecute Christ. Today, when God's nation put here by Him to defend the Word is assailed by His enemies, every man who loves God must rise to defend Him. The time is at hand when God's people are to be tried in fire, and those who are true to the faith and fight on in the name of the Lord shall be received in Heaven and enter into everlasting Glory. To those who talk of surrender I say that is a falling away from God. To those who are forced to lay down their arms and take an oath I say, 'Go in again at the first opportunity and continue fighting.' And to all I say that we fight on the side of God, and He will surely protect us. Read this message to officers and burghers at every opportunity.
When General de Groot took the message up to be copied and circulated, he learned that Waterval-Boven was in peril from approaching English forces. When he returned to Oom Paul's little house, he stood for some moments among the trees, looking through the window at the bearded man who was about to lose the republic he had worked so diligently to bring into being, and tears started to his eyes, but he fought them back: Nou is nie de die tyd, De Groot! (Now is not the time.)
Entering the room Kruger used as his office, he said brusquely, 'Oom Paul, you've got to go. A ship will meet you at Lourengo Marques.'
'I cannot go,' the old man said, but he went.
In doing so, he created a profound moral problem for Boer historians. They would find it impossible to say flatly that in time of deepest crisis their president had fled his country, abandoning it to the enemy. They would devise all sorts of explanations, all kinds of justifications: 'He went to enlist allies. He went to represent us in foreign capitals. He took our gold to safekeeping. We sent him away, he didn't go.' But the fact would always remain that history was replete with examples of other beleaguered