The covenant - James A. Michener [466]
'What would your precious wife make of that?' Lord Kitchener asked, fastening his hard eyes on Saltwood.
Saltwood, having once denied his wife in the presence of a strong man, had no intention of doing so again: 'I think, sir, she would say that such a report does both you and the king an injustice.'
An explosion without specific words erupted, after which Kitchener roared, 'Are you impugning the integrity of Dr. Riddle?'
Taking a deep breath, Saltwood replied, 'I am saying that his report does not begin to cover conditions at Chrissie Meer, and, I suspect, at a lot of other installations I haven't seen.'
'But your wife has seen them?'
'Sir, the day may come when you will be eternally grateful that my wife spoke out in these bad days.'
'Bad days, damn you! We're winning along the entire front.'
'Not in the camps, sir. You run great risk of damaging your reputation because of what's happening'
'Show him, Riddle,' Kitchener said. 'Show him the other page.'
'I'll read it,' the ebullient doctor said, not wishing this secret part of his report to fall into other hands, even temporarily:
'The complaint of the Boers that their women and children are dying at an excessive rate is belied by the statistics of our own forces. To date 19,381 such Boers have died in the camps, but it must be remembered that in the same period 15,849 of our soldiers have died under similar circumstances. It is not our barbarity that kills, nor starvation on the diet we provide; it is the physical nature of the camps and the hospitals, the incessant spread of dysentery and typhoid, and these strike Boer and Englishman even-handedly.'
'And what do you think of that?' Kitchener snapped, but Frank was too ashamed of the mendacity of this report to say what he thought: The English soldiers went into their hospitals wounded or already near death from disease. Most Boer women and children went in healthy. Both died, and at equal rates, but from much different causes.
'Well?' Kitchener asked. 'They're equal, aren't they?'
'In war, unarmed women and children do not equal men in uniform.'
'Get out of here! You're dismissed from my headquarters. I will not have a man around me who cannot control his own wife.' When Saltwood remained at attention, Kitchener repeated, 'Get out. You're dismissed with prejudice. You can never again serve with an English unit. You are unreliable, sir, and a disgrace to your uniform.'
In a calm such as he had not known since he began serving under General Buller, Frank Saltwood looked down at Lord Kitchener at his desk, arranging reports which proved that England was winning the war. 'Permission to speak, sir?'
'Grantedthen begone.'
'If you pursue the war along these lines, you'll be remembered as the general who lost the peace.' With that he saluted, marched from the room, and headed for the Johannesburg railway. At Cape Town, hungry for the civilizing spirit of his wife, he burst into their quarters to find her gone. The maid said, 'She's out to inspect the camps, Mr. Saltwood.' When the girl left, he bowed his head and mumbled, 'Thank you, God, for showing at least one of us his duty. I mean her duty.' In the morning he would find where she was working, and join her.
When Sybilla de Groot and the Van Doorns were deposited at their concentration camp, they were assigned to a small bell tent that already contained a family of four, the two youngest of whom were near death. Sybilla, white-haired and somewhat stooped, came into the tent, saw what needed to be done, and said quietly to the Van Doorns, 'We can make do.'
She moved the cots of the dying children to where they would catch a breeze, then did what she could to encourage the women to get up and see if they could scrounge even a little extra food for the children, but she saw to her amazement that