The covenant - James A. Michener [474]
When the remaining Boer generals met to consider what they must do in the face of the overwhelming pressure brought against them by Lord Kitchener, they realized that in order to have an orderly discussion they must somehow muzzle Paulus de Groot. They knew that he would bellow 'No surrender,' and they were willing to have him say this once, to clear his conscience, but they did not want him repeating it every ten minutes to the detriment of sensible evaluations.
'We are not defeated,' one of the younger men said. 'The English have lost six thousand men killed. Sixteen thousand more dead in their hospitals. Twenty-three thousand more or less seriously wounded.'
'What have our losses been?' an older man asked.
'Maybe five thousand killed, but they were our finest.'
'How many children have died in the camps?' the old man asked.
'Twenty thousand.' From the rear of the room a man sighed. It was Jakob van Doorn, there to support his general.
'More than all the men on both sides, we have lost our children.'
'There was nothing we could do about it,' a young general said.
'There's something we can do about it now,' another man said. 'We can surrender.'
This was the word that De Groot was waiting for. Quietly he said, 'We shall never surrender. We can carry this fight for another six years.'
'We can indeed,' one of the younger generals said. 'But can our children?' And the debate continued.
On a day in late April an event occurred at the Chrissie Meer camp which worsened, even more, English-Boer relations. As Detlev van Doorn was about to eat a spoonful of meal, his sister Johanna rushed into the tent and knocked the bowl away.
'Don't touch it!' she screamed.
He was so ravenous that he automatically fell to the floor, grabbing for the mealies, but again she cried, 'Don't touch it!' and although her own body was wasting away with hunger, she ground the food into the dust.
'Johanna!' he pleaded, bewildered by her action. 'They've mixed ground glass in our food. Mrs. Pretorius ate some and died.'
There were sixteen good medical reasons why Mrs. Pretorius should have died that day, and the seventeenth was most forceful of all: typhoid. But the prisoners began to believe that she had died from eating powdered glass, and no amount of logical persuasion could convince them otherwise. Thus the hideous legend festered and spread.
The little doctor, whose voice so often rose to a scream in this charnel house, came out to the women to swear upon his sacred honor that the English would never do anything like that. He himself ate the pap. Would eat another dishful right now, taken from anywhere. 'The English,' he insisted, 'do not put ground glass in people's food.'
'Kitchener would!' a woman cried, and all his efforts were fruitless. As Johanna told her hungry brother that night, 'Always remember, Detlev. When we were starving the English tried to kill us with ground glass in the mealies.'
At the final meeting of the generals it was agreed that Paulus de Groot be kept away. They had heard his speech on bitter-ending; they respected his heroism; but the time had come when further resistance was futile. The Boers were ready to surrender.
After the painful decision was reached, they sent the young lawyer Jan Christian Smuts to inform the old man. Smuts, having been a courageous commando leader himself and one of the youngest, carried good credentials, and when he appeared, De Groot could guess his mission: 'It's all over, Paulus. You can go home.'
'I would like to fight once more, Jan Christian.'
'So would we all. But the children . . .'
'The children most of all would understand.'
'You must go home.'
'Let me have my Venloo men and we'll go.'
'No.' Smuts laughed. 'None of that, old man. We've sent the Venloo men on ahead. We couldn't trust you.'
'Can I be at the surrender? I'd like to smash that Kitchener.'
'No, it's best if you go home.'
'Perhaps so,' the old man said, and without farewells he