The covenant - James A. Michener [508]
When the South Africans were finally relieved on the fifth day of battle Roger Saltwood, as senior in command, reported: 'We took 3,150 men into the wood five days ago. We are marching 143 out.'
Delville Wood, as the battle became known in English, represented perhaps the high spot in human courage during this war. The South African volunteers had given new meaning to the word heroism, but the cost could not even be calculated by critics who were not there. In the pompous tradition of the time, British headquarters issued a statement that was supposed to compensate for the terrible losses, as if this had been a kind of rugby game: 'In the capture of Delville Wood the gallantry, the perseverance and determination of the South African Brigade deserve the highest commendation.'
This suicidal action had been devised and ordered by Sir Douglas Haig, one of the young generals who had learned their trade with Redvers Buller during the Boer War. Unfortunately, few of them had acquired his concern for the fighting man.
The two surviving Saltwoods, Roger of Cape Town and Timothy the V.C. from De Kraal, managed leaves together. They spent them at Sentinels with their Salisbury cousins, and as they sat beside the River Avon and looked across at the timeless cathedral, it was Timothy who told the local Saltwoods, 'We did lose three of us, yes. But it was only what we should have done for England.'
At Stellenbosch, as the war in Europe stumbled to an end, there was considerable commotion. One of the university's most promising recent graduates was announced as offering a series of four lectures on the moral bases upon which any government of the country must rest. Detleef was especially interested in the event because the speaker was Reverend Barend Brongersma, his own predikant. He invited Clara to hear the lectures with him, and her parents asked to come along, as did one of her brothers.
At Brongersma's request, the assemblies were held not at the university but in the largest of the local churches, and all seats were taken. Brongersma was now thirty-seven, at the threshold of his powers and the apex of his appearance. He was tall, slim, with a head of dark hair, and he appeared modern in every way as opposed to the older Dutch and Scottish theologians who normally occupied podiums at the university. He was different from them, too, in that he did not address himself to abstruse philosophical problems, but to the down-to-earth difficulties a politician met in running a proper government. His voice was equal to the task; Dutch Reformed congregations appreciated a predikant who could storm and thunder, and he could.
He was certainly not a coward. At the opening of his first lecture he said that the future of this nation depended upon the way it managed its relationships with the various racial groups, and so that his listeners would know what he was talking about, he invited them to write down the figures he was about to recite: 'They deal with the actual and projected populations of this country.' And he gave these data:
THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA
Actual
Group Population 1950 Estimate 2000 Estimate
Afrikaner 800,000 2,700,000 4,500,000
English-speaking 400,000 900,000 1,500,000
Coloured 525,000 1,200,000 4,200,000
Indian 150,000 366,000 1,250,000
Bantu 4,100,000 8,600,000 33,000,000
Without comment on the relative strengths of the five groups, he launched into a review of the positions the Dutch Reformed Church had taken on the matter of race during the past two and a half centuries, reminding his listeners of things they might have forgotten:
'Under Jan van Riebeeck, whites and blacks worshipped together, which was sensible because there was no alternative. In the frontier churches at Stellenbosch