The Covenant

by James A. Michener

  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 the women lacked not only the stamina to do this, but also the will. In a daze of terror she left the three youngest Van Doorns in the tent and drew Sara and Johanna out into the open, where she took each by the hand, squeezing until her own fingers hurt. ‘We must not surrender. The children will live only if we live. We must never give in.’ Looking alternately at her two friends, she asked them, ‘Do you swear?’ They swore that they would not surrender.

  When the first of the two children died, in terrible emaciation caused by a combination of typhoid, dysentery and inadequate food, Sybilla tried to mask the fact from Detlev, only six years old, but he knew what death was, and said, ‘The little girl is dead.’

  The entire tent—that is, those who could walk—attended the funeral. Camp attendants, who seemed to be quite healthy, came down the lane between the tents, collecting bodies, and at Sybilla’s they lifted up the little corpse, then reached for the other child, who lay inanimate. ‘That one’s not dead yet,’ Detlev said, and the attendants passed on.

  The attendants carted the bodies to a busy burial ground, where a carpenter from Carolina had volunteered to build rude caskets from whatever odds and ends he could scavenge. He was Hansie Bronk, descendant of that Balthazar Bronk who had protested the marriage of Sybilla and Paulus de Groot; big, round-shouldered, blessed with a rural sense of humor, he was a civilizing force, his most appreciated contribution being not his caskets, but his ability now and then to find extra meat and vegetables in the countryside.

  When Detlev appeared at the burial ground, Hansie chucked him under the chin and said, ‘Nou moenie siek word nie, my klein mannetjie.’ (Now don’t you fall sick, little man.)

  This day there were four caskets, and beside their shallow graves stood Dr. Higgins holding a Bible. He despised every moment of his service in this horrible place but felt obligated to oversee all that happened, as if he were both the cause and the participant, and he strove to make the burials decent. Detlev listened as the doctor prayed.

  The boy was in the tent three days later when the other little girl died, her arms like threads, and he walked with the attendants as they collected the bodies of those who had died of fever in the preceding hours. He was always present at the burials, and always Hansie Bronk told him, ‘Nou moenie siek word nie, my klein mannetjie.’

  His watchful eye noticed when the older of his twin sisters—Anna, who boasted of her precedence—began to waste away, but he was not prepared for what happened when he said to his mother, ‘Anna needs medicine,’ for Mevrou van Doorn uttered a piercing scream and started running down to the doctor’s quarters—but there were no medical supplies.

  ‘My God!’ Sybilla cried, running after her, slapping her and bringing her back to the tent. ‘We swore an oath, Sara. We have got to protect the children.’ When food was doled out, a meager amount, the hungry women apportioned much of it to the twin, who nevertheless grew weaker each day.

  ‘Is Anna going to die?’ Detlev asked.

  ‘Don’t say that!’ his mother cried, whereupon old Sybilla shook her again and made her sit down, and she became quiet.

  In time Anna did die, just as Detlev had expected, and at the funeral he watched attentively as Hansie Bronk placed her thin body in one of his caskets. On this day there were four other children to be buried, and when Dr. Higgins tried to read from his Bible he could not control his voice, so Sybilla took the book and finished reading the Psalm. Detlev listened to the sound of earth pitched upon the caskets.

  The death of her child had such a debilitating effect on Sara that she seemed to wilt in the intense heat like one of the flowers. At night it was extremely cold, and this sharp fluctuation aggravated whatever illnesses the internees contracted, but in Sara’s case it was merely lack of will power.

  One week the supply of Boer meal increased noticeably, and everyone in the tent received an extra portion, but this did little good for one of the women whose children had perished. She ate a little, smiled at Detlev, and died. At her burial he wept for the first time.

  But if Lord Kitchener believed that by imprisoning the Boer women he would break the spirit of their men, he misconceived the nature of these people, for when the women were thrown together, their resolve doubled and they, even more than the men, grew determined to see this war through to victory. When four had already died in her tent, Sybilla de Groot wrote a letter, which was reprinted in hundreds of newspapers:

  Chrissiesmeer, Transvaal

  Christmas Day 1901

  General Paulus de Groot,

  Never surrender. If you have to fight on foot, one against five hundred, never surrender. Carry fire to all parts of the land, but never surrender. They think that because they have thrown us here and because they deny our children food to eat that we will urge you to stop. They miscalculate. From the bottom of our hearts we cry to you, never surrender. We send you our kisses and our love, and we pray for your victory. Run, hide, retreat, burn, dynamite, Paulus, but never surrender.

  Sybilla de Groot

  Sara van Doorn and 43 others

  Lord Kitchener’s relentless pressure began to produce limited results. Certain weary men, contrary to their wives’ pleas, did surrender. They were called contemptuously ‘hands-uppers,’ and in the early years of the war would have been shipped off to imprisonment in Ceylon or Napoleon’s St. Helena. But now, with the war approaching an end, it was deemed economical to incarcerate them within the country; with their farms burned and their families scattered, the only reasonable solution was to add them to the concentration camps. This was a dreadful mistake, for when two of these men were billeted at Chrissie Meer, Sybilla, Sara and the other incarcerated wives marched to the doctor’s office and warned him: ‘Get those “hands-uppers” out of here or they’ll be murdered.’

  ‘Now wait, that’s a fearful thing to say. These men—’

  ‘Get them out of here,’ the women cried in unison.

  ‘Ladies,’ the doctor said in an attempt to restore sanity. Death from disease was one thing, but planned murder was another. ‘Will you listen to reason?’

  ‘If they sleep here tonight,’ Sybilla said slowly, ‘I myself will murder them.’

  The doctor gasped. This was not a wild phrase thrown out in the heat of protest; this was the calm threat of a resolute old woman who could be depended upon to fulfill it. ‘We’ll move them away,’ he said, and the women departed.

  That was the last gesture Sara van Doorn was able to make. She was so weakened from continued fever that one morning, on a fearfully hot day, she had not the strength to rise, and Detlev went running for Sybilla, who was always up early to see if she could add a little food to the ration. ‘Tant Sybilla,’ the boy cried. ‘I think Mother is going to die.’

  ‘You’re not to use that word.’

  ‘She can’t lift her head.’

  ‘Then we must see what’s the matter,’ the old woman said, and she led the boy back to the tent. He was right, his mother was about to die. The long ordeal of keeping her family together without a husband, and now without proper food and medicine, had been too demanding. Her strength was gone, and even when Sybilla and Johanna pleaded with her, reminding her of her promise, she was powerless to respond, and toward noon, in the blazing heat, she expired.

  Five in this tent had now died, so after the attendants took away her body they moved a new family of four in to take their places, and Detlev watched with equal interest the departure of his mother and the arrival of these four doomed women. But then he realized that he would never again see his mother, and with a half-wail he ran after her, clinging to Johanna’s hand as the body was placed in one of Hansie’s caskets. When Detlev sought consolation from this kindly carpenter, Hansie had to turn away, for he was weeping.

  ‘A
lmighty God,’ intoned the weary doctor, ‘take these Thy children to Thy bosom.’ He looked as if he might topple into the grave with them.

  Of the four newcomers, two died quickly, and Johanna, watching her brother carefully, worried that he had now witnessed seven burials of people with whom he had shared the tent, two from his own family, and she asked Sybilla what the effect might be. ‘Children can stand anything, if even one person loves them,’ she said, remembering the days after Blaauwkrantz. ‘You and I must love that boy, Johanna.’

  ‘What about Sannah?’ the girl asked, and the old woman said harshly, ‘Death is upon her.’

  And with dreadful speed it came. Her frail body, fourteen years old and at the height of its beauty, wasted so swiftly that even Sybilla, who had anticipated this, was aghast. The child was laughing wanly one day, unable to move the next.

  ‘Oh, Sannah!’ the little boy wept. ‘I need you.’

  ‘I need you, Detlev, my dear, dear brother.’ Limply she extended a hand, and he sat holding it through the night, but before dawn he crept to where Sybilla slept and whispered, ‘I think she’s dead.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ Sybilla sighed.

  ‘Shall I tell Johanna?’

  ‘No, she needs her sleep.’ She rose wearily, near fainting from lack of food, and went to the cot on which the dead girl lay and sat beside her, taking her lovely head in her lap. Detlev joined her, not crying, just sitting there in the dark. When he took one of her hands he could feel no flesh, only bones, and as he clasped it the hand grew cold.

  ‘You are very dear to me, Detlev,’ Sybilla whispered. ‘You are my own son, the son of General de Groot, too. He and your real father, they fight for us, and in the years to come you must fight for us, too. You must remember these nights, Detlev. Never, never forget how Sannah felt in your arms this night. It is nights like this, Detlev, that make a man.’

  They were sitting there when the attendants came, but when Johanna, waking tardily, saw them reach down for her beautiful sister, she started screaming ‘No! No!’ and it was Detlev who had to tell her that the girl was indeed dead. But this time at the grave he could no longer constrain himself, and when the attendants placed her in a box he started shivering as if this were some entirely new experience, and Sybilla took him in her arms.

  With three of the Van Doorns dead, and both Johanna and Detlev obviously weaker each day, Sybilla de Groot realized that the salvation of this camp depended upon what women like her accomplished in the perilous days ahead. If they flagged in their dedication, the death of despair could sweep the camp, but if they sustained hope, and encouraged discipline and fortitude, lives of enormous value could be saved. She took as her litmus paper young Detlev: If I can save him, I can save the Boer republics.

  Weak though she was, and close to her own death, she rallied the children of the camp about her. ‘I am General de Groot’s wife,’ she told the parents, ‘and while he is on commando in the field, you and I are on commando in this prison camp. I want your children.’

  With indomitable force she organized a system whereby the children could receive just a little bit larger share of the daily ration. She persuaded Hansie Bronk to steal just a bit more food, then teased him about his notorious grandfather. But most of all she concentrated on the children, instructing them in the legends of their people.

  ‘I was at Blaauwkrantz,’ she told them. ‘I was no older than you, Grietjie, when Dingane’s men came after me. And do you know what I did?’ The hollow, ghostly eyes of the children would stare at her as she acted out that night. ‘My father placed me under a tree, in the darkest hours, and what do you think he told me?’ And she would watch quietly as the children pondered, and always someone, enchanted by the story, would guess that her father had told her to be quiet, and she would smile at that child.

  She told them of the long years she and Paulus de Groot had waged their battles, and of Majuba, where she saw the charge up the hill, and of recent Spion Kop, where a handful of Boers had beaten back the entire English army. She sang songs with the little ones, and played easy games that required no motion, for they were too weak, but always she returned to the theme of heroism and the simple things one man and one woman could accomplish: ‘The battle was lost, no doubt about it, but General de Groot saw a weakness in the line and drove his men right at it, and we triumphed.’

  ‘Were you afraid?’ a girl asked.

  ‘I am always afraid,’ Sybilla said. ‘I am afraid that I will not be brave, but when the test comes, we can all be brave.’

  And at some point in each session she spoke directly to Detlev, whose salvation was paramount in her plans. She told him of how Boer boys were supposed to act, of how they had sometimes run at night to alert the villages, and of the joys they had known during long treks. Day after day she hammered into his soul the binding nails of patriotism, and reverence, and persistence. And each day she saw him grow physically weaker.

  When Jakob heard that his wife and the twins were dead, and that his son Detlev was near death, and his farm totally destroyed, he became a somber madman, eager to support the wildest schemes of his general, and when De Groot suggested that the commando make a swift foray through English lines and down into the Cape, he was first to volunteer.

  ‘I want no more than ninety men,’ De Groot said. ‘Forty extra horses and some of the best scouts. There’s little chance we can return. Five hundred miles down, five hundred back.’

  ‘What are we going to do?’ one young fellow asked.

  ‘Burn Port Elizabeth.’

  The crowd cheered, and within a minute the old man had his ninety, but enthusiasm was tempered when plans showed that they would be forced to cross both the Vaal and the Orange … twice. Some wanted to know if that could be done, and he said sharply, ‘It has to be.’

  The Vaal, smaller of the two, would present most dangers, because the drifts were heavily guarded with extra blockhouses and mobile troops who patrolled it constantly; Lord Kitchener, having driven the various commandos into pockets, did not want them coalescing. During a dangerous reconnoiter Micah Nxumalo located a spot where the guard seemed to be relaxed, but as he explained to De Groot: ‘That’s because the riverbank there is steep. Difficult to ford.’

  ‘We can’t have everything,’ De Groot said, but since he treasured his men, he wanted to see the terrain himself, so he went out with Micah and saw that what he had said was true: weak defense but perilous crossing. For a whole night the two men searched the area, concluding in the end that Micah’s spot was best.

  ‘We go!’ De Groot said.

  It was to be a brutal affair. Cut the barbed wires, overwhelm two blockhouses, killing all the guards, and gallop the ponies over the steep banks and into the Vaal River, trusting to luck that no mounted English patrols would be astir. They would do it at twelve thirty-five, an odd and arbitrary hour, and as it approached the ninety whispered among themselves, ‘On to Port Elizabeth,’ and they laughed to think how surprised those people would be when their town was ablaze. That the odds against such a success were in the order of five thousand-to-one did not distress them.

  At midnight they approached the blockhouses, each with seven soldiers, two ordinary posts among the eight thousand. At twelve-thirty no armed patrols had appeared, and at twelve thirty-five the Boers rushed forward. The wire cutters went to work, and the men reached the corrugated-iron silos before those inside could fire. All fourteen were slain before they could signal the next blockhouse in line.

  But soldiers in the distant houses had detected that something was wrong, and they telephoned for help. An armed patrol in the district asked for directions and began galloping across the veld, but as they reached the threatened area, they saw only the flanks of many ponies thrashing through the dark waters. There was firing, but not to much account—and in Pretoria, Lord Kitchener was awakened with the news that General de Groot had broken loose once more.

  ‘Do the correspondents know?’

  ‘Everyone knows.�
�� As Lord Kitchener had said several times, ‘I’d like to shoot every damned newsman. They make these damned Boer banditti the darlings of Fleet Street.’

  It was a gallop for two days, then a canter for seven through the loveliest parts of the Orange Free State. They bivouacked for some time near Thaba Nchu and listened to De Groot tell about his first great battle, when Mzilikazi’s men killed his entire family: ‘I was a coward hiding in the wagons of this man’s father.’ And he slapped Van Doorn.

  They rode in a kind of dream world, with the veld stretching in all directions, never a tree in sight, only the sweeping valleys, the lovely flat-topped hills, with now and then a herd of antelope moving against the slow motion of the horsemen. Thousands of skilled soldiers were hunting for this little group, but still they rode in comparative safety, the distances were so vast. When the meerkats spied on them, De Groot called down from his pony, ‘Hurry and tell Lord Kitchener you saw us. And demand more pay.’ Only the sky, and the distant hills, and the gentle sweep of the barren land. ‘This is earth we must keep,’ De Groot told his men as they rode easily, one foot in the stirrup. ‘We could ride like this forever,’ Jakob said quietly to a friend. There was no war, no chase, no sudden death.

  The crossing of the Orange was not especially difficult because no one dreamed that a Boer commando would try anything so preposterous as an invasion of the Cape, but when the news flashed that Paulus de Groot had forded the river between Philippolis and Colesburg, the world came to attention, and diverse reactions were voiced. Those who wished England well were disgusted that the Avenger of the Veld had been allowed to run loose yet again, while those who hoped to see England humiliated, the greater part, reveled in his escapade. It was predicted that he would head west to pick off some town like Swellendam, but instead he turned sharply east to avoid Graaff-Reinet, which would be well defended; he came at last upon his original De Groot homestead, now owned by an English family.