The covenant - James A. Michener [459]
Now the old man faced a different problem. All the adventurers wanted to join him, and the name Venloo Commando flashed across the world. It struck in the north. It appeared out of the mist in the far reaches of the Orange Free State. Newspapers fought desperately to catch photographs of Sybilla de Groot driving her old wagon, or of her husband standing beside her with his tall hat in his hand.
He had ninety men, then a hundred and fifteen, and finally the maximum he felt he could handle, with Van Doorn's help: two hundred and twenty. They were the best riders, men who could load and fire at a gallop, and they had no reason to halt anywhere, for they could not return to their homes.
When Kitchener found to his grim dismay that the Boers did not intend to surrender, as a defeated rabble should, he became distraught and issued orders that the farms of dissident commando members be burned to the ground, their fields ravaged and their livestock driven away: 'They may fight, but they won't feed.'
Before he left South Africa, Lord Roberts had applied this scorched-earth policy selectively, putting to the torch only those farms known to be collaborating with the commandos, but by the time Major Frank Saltwood was transferred from Buller's defunct command to Kitchener's, the practice had spread. 'I really don't think it will have much bearing upon the burghers,' Saltwood warned when he studied the figures, but Kitchener was adamant, and for the first time Saltwood saw the steel in this man's fiber. Clean-shaven except for a distinctive mustache, trim, rigid, accepting no nonsense from anyone, he seemed the right man for the unpleasant task of cleaning up the few recalcitrant rebels like old Paulus de Groot.
'Shall we burn his farm?' an English aide asked, and before Kitchener could reply, Saltwood volunteered: 'That would be a mistake, sir. Already the man's a hero. Simply create more sympathy.' When these prudent words were spoken, Lord Kitchener stared at his South African liaison, trying to assess him: Is this man to be trusted to put England's interest first, or is he infected with local patriotism? This time, however, what he says makes sense.
'Do not burn the De Groot farm,' Kitchener ordered, and for the moment it was spared, but when the wily old man continued to strike at unforeseen places, making fools of the English, Kitchener became coldly furious, and although he did not yet burn De Groot's farm, he ordered a wide swath of desolation on either side of the railway leading to Lourenco Marques. As soon as this was done, the Venloo Commando swept in and cut the railway in four places, to the intense delight of the French correspondent who accompanied the raid.
This was important, because the press of the world, especially the cartoonists, turned savagely against Great Britain, lampooning both her and Kitchener as murderers and bullies. Hardly a day passed that the influential papers in Amsterdam, Berlin and New York did not crucify Kitchener, showing him as a tyrant burning the food needed for starving Boer women and children. When one of the noble lord's English aides saw a selection of the worst cartoons, he grumbled, 'Damned few of those great fat Dutch women are starving.' But the corrosive propaganda continued, until it appeared that the entire world was opposed to England's performance in South Africa, as indeed it was, save for countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which retained legal