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By Root 3583 0

then they looked with awe at their destination. Their camp lay at the edge of one of the loveliest lakes in Africa: a surface shimmering in sunlight, hills rising softly from the shore, flowers in beds, and a hint of animals hiding in the glens. Saltwood said to a member of the Welsh Fusiliers, 'If you must have a prison camp . . . the clean air . . . the sunlight. . .' In months ahead when the name of this camp echoed with shame, he would concede that it was at least a place of physical beauty. To it he delivered Sybilla de Groot, Sara van Doorn and the four Van Doorn children, but as he did so he noticed by sheerest accident a tent in which three young children lay sleeping, he thought; on closer inspection he saw that they were awake, too emaciated to respond when he spoke to them.

Rushing to the commandant's office, a doctor from the English Midlands, he cried, 'Sir, those children in the tent at the bottom of Row Eighteen. Sir, those children are starving.'

'There is no starvation here,' the doctor said sternly, as if reporting on his hospital to a village committee of inspection.

'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 bellowingwhat'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