The Visitors

by Mascull, Rebecca

  I am sorry to end my letter on such a sad note. But now the fun of the early battles is done, I look into the future of this war and see little but the hit-and-run tactics of Boers on horseback and their endless pot-shots – such excellent shots they are – and us sweeping across the veldt, corralling up who we can, laying waste to the land, and still more Boers will elude us, as we can never catch them all. It is not what I imagined as war, it is not what you will read about in the newspapers. If I had a pound for every time we read that the war will be over soon, I’d be a millionaire. And still the war would drag on.

  I am hoping that all is well in Whitstable and Edenbridge, that the oysters are spatting nicely, that the hop flowers ripen in the Kent sun, that life continues there exactly as it has always done and will never change. I have that to hope for, that when I return it will all be as I left it. Here the wind whips up dust into storms and I marvel that the Boers love this dry land with all their hearts. But love it they do and will never give it up. If someone tried to take our oyster beds, churn them to ruin, or trample the Golding hops and set fire to the oast house, would we stand idly by? Would we surrender? Would we forgive?

  With best love,

  Your Caleb

  Frankfort Garrison,

  Orange Free State

  13 August 1900

  My dear ones,

  I have a lot to tell you in this letter. I have been present at a great spectacle, perhaps to be one of the most enduring images of this war: the surrender of Prinsloo. I also have a more personal encounter to relate, which has changed my feelings on the nature of this war and its cost. First, the military part. In mid-July, several thousand Boers under General Prinsloo were in the vicinity of Brandwater. Our forces moved to surround them on all sides. By the 18th of July, the British had broken through at Slabbert’s Nek and Retief’s Nek. The battle over the next few days cost many British lives and was carried out in the miserable cold and icy rain of the valley and snow in the mountains. The Boers made a hasty retreat, while we edged ever forward on all sides, aiming to block off their escape routes. I came up under General Rundle at Commando Nek and we secured the exit there, luckily with no casualties for our company, as the Boers were nowhere to be seen. They had vanished into the mist.

  Once we heard that the trap was set, we marched – well, I’d say sauntered, as there was no hurry now – down to Fouriesberg to see how many lobsters were in the pot. Coming down I saw the marvellous sight of our horses in long snaking columns splashing through the shallows of the river. We heard rumours that Prinsloo had asked for an armistice for six days to take counsel, yet not surprisingly our great leader refused. There was no way out for the Boers by now, only a tiny pass over the hills towards Natal. But that is a British stronghold, so what place for them there? Also, they would have had to leave their wagons behind, something a Boer hates to do, so caught up is his life with this simple item, a life spent before this butchery on the flat veldt with his animals, his rifle and his wagon, on the trek or settling finally at his farm. So on the 29th July Prinsloo and 4,000 Boers under him surrendered unconditionally. We were all astonished at how easily our catch was had. I truly believe those 4,000 souls spoke with one voice, despite any anger from their Boer generals elsewhere. They just wanted to take their wagons and go home.

  No home for them though, not yet. We heard Prinsloo asked that all burghers should be allowed to do just that and not be treated as prisoners of war. Our commander General Hunter of course refused – I mean to say, why should the fighting Boers not be POWs? What is to stop them from going back into commandos in the future and killing Tommies once more? Instead, General Hunter was very generous in his offer that they should be allowed to keep their private property and personal effects, including their horses to ride away on, a courtesy never extended to British POWs as far as I know. The actual surrender itself was a picture I will never forget. It took days to complete. The valley was filled with Boer wagons, pouring into Fouriesberg. The Boers themselves came in groups of several hundred, handing over their arms. Each man would have his Mauser taken, the barrels would be opened and ammunition removed, which was thrown on to a huge bonfire that burned all night and day, every now and then a great spluttering of Mauser cartridges exploding in the heat, and black smoke hanging above. The Boers themselves were not proud or haughty, not angry or ashamed. They were only interested in their property and quite cheery about the whole thing. It is hard to dislike them. They were then marched off south to their fate, POW camps or perhaps abroad to British colonies, such as Bermuda, St Helena or Ceylon, a long way from home. You might think that the surrender of this massive number of prisoners would mean the end of the war is in sight, but I doubt it. Rather I think it will serve to encourage the others to fight harder.

  The next day, I was called by my commanding officer to complete an unusual task. A woman and her son were part of the surrendering Boer forces. As she was armed, it was decided that she had been fighting with the men. She could not be sent off with them to be a prisoner of war, as there was no provision for women in these circumstances. It was decided instead to interrogate her, as she has been travelling throughout the OFS for months and may have some useful information about Boer movements. I was told that after interrogation she was to be taken to a camp for women and children. She was interrogated for several hours and then I was called to collect her and take her to Harrismith. There is a railway station there from which we were to take the train north to a camp near Johannesburg. She had requested to go to this camp as she believed she had some family there.

  The lady I was told to accompany has the wonderful name of Mrs Uitenweerde, but luckily she allowed me to call her by her first name, the much simpler Maria. Her husband, Hermanus (I believe that is correct, though these Boer names are devilish for spelling), was killed at the Battle of Modder River, yet she calls it the Battle of Twee Rivier (which means two rivers), last November. She is a very young widow, perhaps in her early twenties, with a seven-year-old son called Jurie. She must have married very young. After the death of her husband, she left her farm a few miles north of Pretoria with Jurie and followed commando groups in which her cousin Michael fought. Sometimes she returned back to her farm and other times she rejoined the commando. She tired of this life and returned to her farm in June, only to find it had been burned out. I’m only glad it wasn’t me who did the deed, as I know I did not set afire any farms up there and certainly not one called Mimosafontein. Such a lovely name, I would have remembered it.

  By July, she was travelling with her cousin’s commando as part of Prinsloo’s forces and this is how she came to be involved in the surrender at Fouriesberg. She hates the British, to be sure. When she first set eyes on me, she looked me up and down in one swift movement just like Ma used to when we had committed some crime and she was about to reach for the cat-o’-nine-tails. Maria would not speak to me at first, only whispered to her son in Afrikaans. He was a talkative little fellow, but would not speak to me. He looked around her skirts at times to spy on the Englishman, but always hid again if I looked back or winked at him. We arrived at the railway station in Harrismith, Maria directing me as she knew the place, in a civil tone and perfect English, though she spoke no other words to me on this long and bumpy journey over the veldt in the rough Cape cart we had been assigned.

  The train was steaming in as we arrived, so I found us a carriage free and we got on. We sat on opposite benches. Each compartment is separate on these trains and the guard has to edge along a nine-inch step that runs outside the coach, as the train speeds along. Rather him than me. I put my hat over my eyes and took a nap for a while, as she would have had to jump off a moving train with her child to escape. There were no dining cars, so we had to wait until the next station before taking some lunch at a restaurant on the platform: cold soup, tough meat and knives so blunt they couldn’t cut butter. In all this time, neither the woman nor her son said a word to me. After the meal, she said to the cook in English, ‘H
e pays,’ pointing at me and swept out on to the platform, head high. I was like her servant, not her guard!

  Once back on the train, I watched her for a while. Her chin still jutted out and her gaze outside was a thousand miles long. Her son slept. I said that we were to be on this train for two days at least, so it would be more pleasant to pass the time of day. She looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘What did you do in England, before the war?’ I told her and she responded, ‘Why does an English farmer like you take up arms against us Boer farmers thousands of miles from home?’

  To my shame, I honestly couldn’t answer her. I did not know what to say. The conversation ended there. An hour or so later, I tried again. I asked her what had happened in her interrogation and she said that they had gone on and on about how the Boers lived, what they ate, how much longer they would fight, how they managed to blow up the railway lines and so on. Then she added, ‘I told them nothing and will tell you nothing either, Khaki.’ I said I only wanted to know if they had treated her kindly. She said that Captain Cox was actually very nice to her, that he told her that if she didn’t want to speak nobody could force her to, and that he admired her courage. I told her I was glad she was well treated.

  ‘Have you treated Boers well?’ she asked.

  ‘I hope so,’ I replied.

  ‘Have you burned farms?’

  I didn’t want to answer her question and looked away. What a coward I was! But my feelings for my fellow countrymen welled up and I felt I was on the defensive.

  ‘Your fellow Boers. Don’t they enter the homes of loyalist people and loot them, throw the people out, treat them very roughly, perhaps even abuse them? Not to mention the way you’ve treated the blacks all these years. They were in Africa first, after all. When your burghers capture us, they strip off our uniforms and send us starving and thirsty out on to the veldt to fend for ourselves. And don’t some of your Boer commandos range around in lawless gangs and mutilate the bodies of dead British soldiers?’

  ‘Lies!’ she cried, and the boy, asleep with his head in her lap, stirred. She stroked his hair and he slept on.

  We argued for a long while about the rights and wrongs of it all, who did what and when, and it was clear never the twain would meet. But by the end of it, I think we had a new understanding and looked at each other differently.

  The passenger trains only run during the day and so by the time we reached Volkrust, the train stopped for the night. The boy woke for some bread and dried meat his mother gave him. I purchased some more food from the station before it closed and gave him some milk, for which his mother thanked me. We talked through the night as Jurie slept on. Maria told me of her life on her father’s farm as a child, a simple life of meat, milk and fruit, where they took the water from the earth and the sun grew their vegetables and they sang old songs and read the Bible. I told her of the oysters, the moods of the sea, the scent of hops. We slept for an hour or so before dawn, woken by the train’s blast as it let off steam, then jolted onwards towards Johannesburg.

  For the rest of the journey, we spoke of the war in better terms. I told her about Wallis and how we escaped the fire. She told me of her numerous escapes from British soldiers, or ‘Khakis’, as she calls them. She has a different term for just about every category of person you might find in this war: she calls us Khakis, Tommies or Engelsman, she calls her menfolk burghers, she calls the blacks Hottentots. She reserves her sourest face for those of her kind who have collaborated with the British: there are the Khaki-Boers, people who help the British in any way, but worst of all to her are the Joiners, those who have joined and fought for her enemies. When she speaks of us with such disgust, I feel the bile rise in my throat and want to shake her. But I have to remember where she comes from, her life before all this, her youth and her dead husband. Then I forgive her hatred. I only hope that by conversing with me, and seeing the kindness of Captain Cox, she perhaps has a new idea of what an Englishman can be.

  Late that afternoon, the train arrived at Johannesburg. We sat and watched the bustling station, the Boers and English, the Khaki-Boers and Joiners and Hottentots going about their business. Suddenly she leaned forward, her arms about her son and a look of great intensity on her face.

  ‘Let us go,’ she said. ‘Let us get out here. You can say I tricked you. Say I said my son was sick. I got away from you in the crowd at the station. You can say that.’

  I told her I could not and would not do that. My orders and my duty were to take her to Camp Irene and that was what I was going to do. She begged me, and her boy pleaded too in perfect English.

  ‘Have you been to the camps?’ she asked me desperately. I had not. She told me they were places of horror, where people starved and children died of the cold and diseases raged. ‘The angel of death walks through those places.’

  I was too shocked to respond. The train lurched on towards the camp, now just fifteen miles away. I assured her that these were only rumours spread around by Boers to stop women from going there for help. I explained that the camps had been set up to welcome and care for refugees, those cut off by the war, those who had lost their men or their livelihoods, to save them from the threat of Kaffirs interfering with them if they were left alone and unprotected out on the veldt. I told her that I had heard that the camps were run efficiently and fairly by the British and no harm would come to her there.

  At this point, she grabbed at her hair and almost tore it from its roots.

  ‘How can you be so stupid?’ she cried and broke down weeping, her son stroking her face and whispering to her, soothing her, stealing glances of pure hatred at me, her persecutor.

  She did not speak to me again. When we arrived at the camp, I walked her to the gates. White tents stretched away in a dozen rows up an incline, the canvas flapping in the cold wind that swept down on them from the veldt. It did look a desolate place, but I could not believe her fears. This was run by the British after all, and if you cannot rely on British civilisation, what else is there? I was not able to say goodbye to Maria and Jurie, as she ushered him away from me without looking back. And I had to entrain and make my way back to Frankfort, a garrison town where the East Kents are to be stationed for the meantime, from where I write this letter to you now.

  I trust that she has settled at Camp Irene now and has resigned herself to her temporary fate. After all, once the war is done, she will be able to begin a new life with her son. She is only young. And they say those who have lost their homes will be compensated after the war. She only has to wait and look forward to better times. I will try to visit her there if I can and see she is well.

  I am only glad my girls are safe home in England.

  I will write again. It does not look as if the war will be over soon, as we hear Kitchener has asked for stores for another six months. I wonder if the British public will get tired of this war too. If the Boers had made a big fight of it and then surrendered I am sure we would be very popular at home and return to street parties and hats thrown skyward. As it is, I fear the country will forget us and we will slink back in a year or two and never speak again of South Africa.

  We are to be here in Frankfort for some time. It is a nowhere place of thorn trees battered by dust storms, a sorry place.

  Love to you both,

  Caleb

  To read those words, to hear his voice in them, is joy and pain entwined. Lottie and I weep afterwards and hold on to each other, spreading the letters out on her bed and poring over them. The tears return as I read passages again and my handkerchief becomes a wet rag. Lottie comforts me, she watches me. But she does not question me in my distress. I suppose she knows my regard for him all these years, even without our secret. We talk of his experiences, the danger that surrounds him, the changes in his views that have turned him from the Tommy we read about in the newspapers to this thoughtful man who questions the war. I am proud of him for that, for all of it. But another emotion clouds my thoughts and brings forth bitterness. This woman, this
Maria. The way he writes of her makes me hate her. I pity her, who could not? I see why Caleb does. But I am so jealous of her, it freezes my blood. I do not tell Lottie this, of course. She waxes on about what a good man her brother is to care for this woman and child. But in this dark moment I curse her and I will him never to return to that camp, to her, or even to a thought of her.

  A Visitor appears beside Lottie’s bed. An old man I have seen in the dining room before, dressed in black with a white bow tie; a butler from the old days before I was born. He once revealed that he collapsed while serving at a grand dinner party. He is still mortified that he has caused any inconvenience to his master. He looks at me curiously.

  I did not mean to trouble anyone.

  I know.

  My wife was housekeeper here. She died, when was it? She just went to her bed and said she was weary and did not wake up. No trouble to anyone. An admirable woman, don’t you agree?

  My tears fall again.

  Do you cry for the dead?

  No. I cry for myself.

  How desperate I was for news of Caleb. Now I feel more wretched than ever.

  13

  Father has taken to his bed. This morning, as I am coming down the front steps, book in hand, heading for the orchard to sit and read in the spring sunshine, I see him walking up the drive with a hand against his chest. His hair is sticking up at angles, as if he has been swimming. But I learn later this is sweat. His face is red-gold, like the beer brewed from his hops. I run to him and he gasps for breath as he grips my shoulder. I feel his weight release itself on to me and we both go crashing to the ground. Others come running – Mr Davy the head gardener and Maid Edith – and we are helping him up. I see him say, ‘It is all right. I’m all right.’ He rights himself and brushes down his trousers.

  ‘Are you all right?’ he signs to me.

  I nod and we all walk beside him into the house. He turns and dismisses us, a gentle wave of the hand sending us away with all our unnecessary fuss. But I see him whisper something to Mr Davy. I run to tell Lottie.