‘For the last two days I have been unable to make any notes. During these two days and nights I have not even seen my bed; continuous work, interrupted only by visits to the hut to snatch a hurried, scanty meal. Finally, I was compelled to throw myself on my bed, and stay there for three hours, with as fine and vigorous an attack of fever as anyone could wish to see – temperature 103.1. A glass of whisky and some heavy sleep pulled me round, and I resumed my duties. My poor fellow nurse is growing worse and worse, and I am very much afraid that typhoid will have her in its clutches before many days are over.’1
ALICE BRON ARRIVED in South Africa as a member of the Belgian–German Ambulance, but she was also the correspondent for Petit Bleu, a socialist newspaper in Brussels. Because her nursing qualifications were questioned, the head of her unit, Dr Frans Coolen, had to issue a certificate as to her competence. Alice kept a diary, but wrote little about her co-workers, none of whom she mentions by name, and factual information regarding the clinical aspect of her nursing is scant. Nevertheless, her diary provides a vivid account of her humanitarian work in two opposing camps and on both sides of the lines. She arrived in South Africa with strong pro-Boer feelings, but left disillusioned – not unlike several other foreign volunteers. And when she returned to the country for a second stint, it was to work on the British side. But she always stayed true to her motto, ‘In my eyes, the wounded have no nationality’, and remained committed to her task, despite experiencing great suffering in the process.2
By the time Alice arrived in South Africa, she’d had extensive experience caring for the poor in Belgium. Born on 28 October 1850 in Brussels, the daughter of barrister and Liberal politician Louis Defré, and Julienne Asselberghs, Alice devoted herself to charity, particularly caring for the sick, from an early age. During the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), she joined the staff of a private Brussels hospital, where she nursed war casualties. Three years after the war ended, she married Arthur Bron, a man ten years her senior. An engineering graduate of the University of Liege, her husband was a prominent manufacturer, and it was through him that she came into even closer contact with the poor and their suffering. She helped to establish schools and hospitals for the working class, and at times she even nursed the sick in their homes. These experiences greatly influenced her socialist views, and she was sympathetic to the Belgian Workers Party. Writing under the pseudonym Jean Fusco, she originated the slogan ‘equal pay for equal work’ in the newspaper Le Peuple in the early 1890s. She eventually withdrew from the party, however, as it seemed to have lost its focus on social problems, and committed herself more fully to hospital work. She was serving in a private hospital – to which she also gave financial support – when the Anglo-Boer War broke out; the opportunity of joining the Belgian Ambulance and the chance of caring for the wounded and sick of the Transvaal and Free State underdogs leapt out at her, and she couldn’t resist. She was forty-nine years old at the time.
The Belgian Ambulance was an initiative of the Tweede Boerenbeweging, which had been inspired by the spirit of the Algemeen Nederlandsche Verbond established in Brussels in 1895. On 9 October 1899, the ‘Hulp-komiteit voor Transvaal en Oranje-Vrijstaat’ was founded to organise a Red Cross ambulance to aid the Boers in the field. Twenty-five Belgian Red Cross ambulanciers (twenty Flemish and five French) went to South Africa as part of the Belgian–German Ambulance Corps. The group included Marie-Louise Caroline Laridon from Ostend, a great aunt of the Belgian premier, Jean van Houtte, and Maurits Josson, a prominent figure in the Flemish Movement.3
The ambulance, under Dr Frans Coolen, assembled in Amsterdam, where Dr Jozef de Landsheere from Belgium, and German doctors Albrecht, Leitz and Tilemann joined it. In Naples, two more German doctors – Dr Fessler and Dr Bertelsman – came on board. The group sailed from Brussels on the Herzog on 25 November 1899, but their voyage lasted fifty days. On the pretext that the Herzog was carrying contraband, the British cruiser Thetis apprehended the ship outside Lourenço Marques harbour and escorted it to Durban, where the passengers were delayed before being allowed to return to Lourenço Marques three days later. Alice confessed in her diary, ‘I had gone no further than Lorenzo Marquez, [when] I felt that my enthusiasm was collapsing.’ But she nevertheless managed ‘to collect the scattered fragments of my enthusiasm, and to struggle against so rude a shattering of my beliefs’.4
The party eventually arrived in Pretoria on 12 January 1900, where the Belgian and German groups immediately divided their equipment and split up, as it had become clear that the two could not function as a unit.5 Some of the Belgians went to Glencoe, where Laridon worked ‘with heart and soul, especially doing night duty following the arrival of the trains with the wounded’.6 Dr De Landsheere and three male attendants accompanied the retreating Boers from Glencoe to Ermelo, though, eventually, members of the ambulance became so scattered across the country that the corps disintegrated, and they returned to Belgium individually and not as a unit.
After repeated appeals for trained nurses by the First German Red Cross Ambulance under Dr H. Matthiolius at Jacobsdal, Alice and another Belgian nurse, Sister Willems, were sent to the Boer typhoid hospital in Jacobsdal.7 Alice was enormously impressed with their setup: ‘This German ambulance is simply perfection.’8
Alice started work in Jacobsdal around 20 January, and although she sent letters and articles to the Petit Bleu in Brussels, her first diary entry was only made on 11 February. At the time, the British troops were closing in on the besieged Kimberley, which was relieved four days later. Outflanked by General French’s dash to relieve the siege of Kimberley, General Piet Cronjé had retreated to Jacobsdal, but on 15 February, as the British approached the town, he departed with 5 000 men, women and children. Later that day, the British captured the town, making Jacobsdal the first Orange Free State town to be occupied by the British.
‘Sixty Boers, with a Maxim, have just come past, about 50 yards away from the hospital,’ Alice wrote on 11 February. ‘All clustered together on horseback, with their big hats and unkempt beards, they make fine figures. The Boers are extraordinary horsemen, riding bareback at eight years of age, and developing into so many chase-loving centaurs.’9 Her next entry mentions fighting at Ramdam (which Alice calls ‘Namdam’).
She was less complimentary about the Boer wives, however, who visited their husbands in the hospital. Many of them had come from great distances and were allowed to stay a few days. ‘Some adore us on bended knees, so to speak, and watch us with grateful and affectionate eyes as we tend their dear ones,’ she wrote. ‘Others – the majority – look sourly at us criticising everything, and do not even say, “Good day”, in spite of our patience with their squalling children, who get in our way.’ Her entries also glance at the pathos of poor Boer widows – ‘make him very handsome’, one begged, when Alice was about to put her husband in a shroud.10
At first, Alice waited till she was on night duty to jot down her notes, but as the condition of her patients improved, she started writing in full view of the sick and wounded Boers. Ironically, these Boers were worried that half an hour’s writing would be too much for her, yet they were less concerned by the fact that she was on duty practically twelve hours at a stretch, hardly sitting down at all during that time.
It was the middle of summer, and the fierce heat exacerbated the situation.
I am told that it has seldom been so frightfully hot here as it is now, although the temperatures in the Orange Free State are more extreme than in the Transvaal. Even those who have spent all their lives here are overcome. Cases of illness are beginning to occur in the neighbourhood, and we are threatened with an epidemic of typhoid fever.11
With the British approaching during their march on Kimberley, Alice could actually see the flashes from their guns.
This is becoming terrible. The din tells on one’s nerves, no matter how hard one tries not to notice it. We are so close! The men are pale, and I am too, no doubt. Shells are falling only twenty yards away from the hospital … The noise is frightful. It sounds as if everything were being blown up and shells were bursting right in the hospital.12
On 15 February, the day of the relief of Kimberley, the British troops entered nearby Jacobsdal. Some soldiers went inside the hospital after hoisting a white flag where the Orange Free State colours had been flying from the roof, with the Red Cross flag above. The soldiers were polite, and life went on much as usual for Alice.
For the last two days I have been unable to make any notes. During these two days and nights I have not even seen my bed; continuous work, interrupted only by visits to the hut to snatch a hurried, scanty meal. Finally, I was compelled to throw myself on my bed, and stay there for three hours, with as fine and vigorous an attack of fever as anyone could wish to see – temperature 103.1. A glass of whisky and some heavy sleep pulled me round, and I resumed my duties. My poor fellow nurse is growing worse and worse, and I am very much afraid that typhoid will have her in its clutches before many days are over.13
There were two hospitals for typhoid cases in Jacobsdal: one was set up in the Dutch Reformed church, and it contained sixty beds; the other, where Alice was stationed, was in the local African church, and had only twenty beds. Two English doctors asked Alice to take charge of forty cases of fever and minor wounds for the night, but what to do with only twenty beds? They told her to put the worst cases in the beds, and to lay the rest on the floor. All forty men arrived that same evening, ‘haggard, wretched, and utterly exhausted’. Accompanying them were some men from the Royal Army Medical Corps, who helped her put the wounded to bed. It was unfortunate timing, since she had recently, for the second time, been ‘robbed of everything’, and so she had to go into town to buy linen and work at night to make herself some aprons.14
The ambulance corps members who saw to the Boers were, in a manner, prisoners; they were not permitted to leave the area, though they were otherwise free to do as they pleased. British military hospitals had in the meantime been established at Modder River Station, while the hospitals at Orange River and Kimberley were being used more effectively. As a result, the number of British soldiers treated at Jacobsdal declined, and the African mission church became obsolete. The hospital in the mission church was then evacuated, and the German doctors asked Alice to join their typhoid hospital, where there were Boer as well as British patients. But around the same time, the English doctors requested her to attend to about 100 wounded men, whom they expected to arrive at any moment. In a diary entry on 25 February, she remarked that her position was rather complicated: she was in an English hospital, but attached to a German ambulance that was in effect controlled by German doctors. She was taking orders from, and working with, both English and German doctors, and there was friction between the two groups. On one occasion, a German doctor told her to remove dressings that she had just applied on instruction from an English doctor, and to redo the dressings from scratch in the way he described. She also had to deal with the behaviour of members of the Royal Army Medical Corps, who, without being impolite, showed considerable reserve.
‘I have no less of the incessant labour I had before,’ she wrote, ‘but I am perpetually on the qui-vive. Night and day I am summoned to attend to men whose wounds have been hurriedly bound up on the battlefield, and who are brought here like half-slaughtered cattle.’
Apart from exhaustion, she now also experienced severe hunger. The thousands of soldiers who encamped in or passed through the town slaughtered the cattle and fowls, so there was no milk or eggs for the typhoid patients or for anyone else. Also, the stores had been looted, with little left on the shelves. She found herself day-dreaming, imagining a certain chic restaurant in Brussels, with its fine ladies and gentlemen eating succulent dishes. ‘For twelve hours I have known what it is to be really hungry,’ Alice recorded. ‘It is not at all nice. Vertigo comes on immediately, owing, perhaps, to the atrocious climate and overwork.’15
To make matters worse, a hot, dry wind had been blowing for over a week, and ‘thousands of horses’ had to be watered. The food was being rationed, but at least there was water to drink, and still enough for washing, ‘which is a blessing, seeing that we live in an atmosphere of blinding, suffocating dust that sometimes looks like a moving wall, and makes us frightfully dirty’.
Alice and two other nurses were staying in a hut, a place where ‘no foreign ambulance surgeon would have dreamed of putting his nurses’. Apart from their bedroom, the interior was ‘repulsively dirty’. In the den that served as a dining room, fresh meat was dumped on the floor, where it was often left to lie for days on end. At other times it was cooked immediately after the animal was slaughtered, and the flesh was tough to eat. Goat meat was especially tough, and what they ate resembled nothing so much as ‘fiddle strings’. Yet somehow the women became accustomed to it. One dark evening, Alice cut herself a slice of bread and hastily spread it with the remains of currant jam, only to discover that she was eating ants along with the jam.
No sooner had Alice assisted the English doctors with their wounded soldiers, than the Boers and two male attendants began to show a marked coldness, not only towards her, but also towards her companion, the daughter of an Afrikaner mother and English father. Things got worse when the Free State commissioner for supplies and rations, who had until then taken his meals at their table, stood up and left with the two orderlies. From then on, their supply of provisions was cut off – no more bread or meat, and Alice and her colleagues were reduced to eating scraps of biscuit, with some jam, and a little cocoa. With ill-concealed sarcasm, the commissioner suggested that Alice ask the English for food, as she was now working for them. Yet she refused to beg anything of either the English or the Germans, despite the debilitating effects of the poor diet she endured: ‘I can assure you that I was not much good for much when I resumed night duty on nothing more substantial than a cup of cocoa and an army biscuit.’ The next evening her hunger caught up with her, however, and her knees gave way. Fortunately, the British commanding officer, General Wavell, stepped in to ensure that the hospital and its staff were provided with food.16
Apart from the wind, there were also violent storms, and Alice dramatically describes one such event:
I shall never forget the sight. The sky, lurid as in a vision of the Apocalypse, is swathed in inky clouds. The lightning, at first hurled down from heaven to earth in narrow, close-set lines, now spreads out into a sheet of flame, and turns the desert into one vast blaze … The clouds were belching down great hailstones … the majority quite as big as the egg of a pigeon.17
She goes on to describe the terrified horses, how some broke loose and ran off. Soon the door of her own hut was torn off its hinges as hail and rain swept through the abode, a sick nurse shrieking with fright, and they had to take shelter in the kitchen until the storm had passed. The torrential rain turned the surrounding roads into quagmires.
It soon happened that Alice’s Boer patients, who were convalescent and able to get about, began to visit her hut every morning, making themselves at home and asking for something to eat and drink as they complained about being kept on rations at the hospital. British soldiers also came to visit, so that the hut became a place where Boers and British mingled in a friendly atmosphere.
After the surrender of General Cronjé at Paardeberg on 27 February 1900, Alice left with a medical contingent, following a long, roundabout route via Bloemfontein, Pretoria, Klerksdorp and Christiana, to Fourteen Streams, just north of Warrenton. Fourteen Streams had been occupied by a Boer force under Field-Cornet Bosman on 17 October 1899. Following a skirmish at the Fourteen Streams bridge on 28 March 1900, the village was returned to the British on 6 May, when Boer troops under General Sarel Petrus du Toit retreated before a British force led by Major-General Sir Archibald Hunter. By then, Alice and her group were already at Fourteen Streams, having arrived in early March, when the village was still in Boer hands.
The ambulance was headed by Dr Feodor Weber of the Russian– Dutch Ambulance – Weber had formerly been a surgeon at the Mary Magdalene Hospital in St Petersburg. The contingent consisted of twelve nurses (eight Afrikaners, three Swedes and Alice Bron), and about thirty men, including doctors, hospital attendants, a Protestant minister, transport service officers, and government officials, whose duty it was to register the names of dead and wounded Boers; in addition, there was a group of black drivers. The three Swedish nurses were Elin and Anna Lindblom and Hildur Svensson (see Chapter 3), whom Alice befriended. After four days’ travel, the women were inseparable, and Alice had also developed an easy friendship with the Afrikaner nurses.
The group was transported in nine vehicles, including wagons, wagonettes and a broken-down landau. Alice and the Swedish nurses took their meals with two Swedish attendants, probably Oscar Hedberg and Axel Anderson, who took turns to fetch wood and water. Along the way, they helped themselves to fruit from the farm orchards they passed. Alice recorded:
During the day we take our meals lying flat on our stomachs under the wagons and imagine we are in the shade. The sun is almost hot enough to fry us alive. The nights are pleasant, but are getting decidedly cold. We try to warm ourselves by laughing at all the amusing reminiscences we can muster.18
After a few days, they found the road strewn with dead horses, mules and oxen, which had perished through exhaustion and were creating an appalling stench, ‘far worse than anything I ever met with in a hospital’, Alice wrote. The contingent caught up with British troops that had left Jacobsdal a little before them, at Bradeley’s Farm, whose owners had fled. Alice described the deserted area as a charming spot, a delightful oasis bordered by a wood. After a day’s rest, they left the farm two hours after the British troops, which were also heading for Bloemfontein but along a different road. From there they trekked through ‘a great, immense plain, bordered on the one hand by a range of dark, low hills, and on the other by the shining waters of a small lake’. Soon they encountered a party of some thirty Boers who, on questioning them about their nationalities, sang the praises of the Scandinavian Corps, and Alice in particular, before disappearing again.19
The ambulance eventually reached Petrusburg, a small town eighty kilometres west of Bloemfontein, where they came across the German sisters who had been with Alice on the Herzog. They spent a few hours there, before moving on to Bloemfontein. Not long after their departure, General Tucker’s troops occupied Petrusburg unopposed on 10 March. On the day Alice left, a hot wind was blowing, the dust getting into everyone’s eyes and noses, and covering their food. ‘We have now been bumped and jolted about for nearly a week, and find it ten times more exhausting than the hardest hospital work,’ Alice lamented. But finally they reached Bloemfontein, and took the train to Pretoria.
Alice and the Swedish nurses travelled together in the same compartment, but when they arrived in Pretoria, they had to part ways. The Swedish ladies went to a hotel where they passed the night before going on to Johannesburg, but Alice had to join her compatriots, whom she mentions merely as ‘Monsieur and Madame –––’. She said goodbye to the Lindblom sisters and Hildur Svensson the next day at the railway station, and remarked, ‘To my great regret, we never met again.’20
In describing Pretoria, Alice wrote:
This little town is really very pretty. In ordinary times it must be a restful sort of place. Except for two business streets of handsome and well-stocked shops, the town consists of single-storeyed villas, buried in flowers and verdure. Pretoria and Johannesburg form a complete contrast. Before the war, Johannesburg was a lively, bustling, cosmopolitan city, but now it is dull and desolate, all its animation having been transferred to Pretoria … There are incessant comings and goings, the hotels are crammed, the cab-horses have no rest, and the station is one perpetual block of wounded coming, troops going, people hanging about for want of something better to do, and relatives and friends greeting or bidding farewell to those dear to them.21
In Pretoria she made the acquaintance of a French officer, Lieutenant Galopaud, who had been with the Soudan Expedition and was now in command of a detachment of French volunteers. She described him as ‘an elegant cavalier of adventurous character and, perhaps, rather devil-may-care disposition, but the most obliging of men’. Galopaud had also got over his enthusiasm for the Boer cause, saying that he had had ‘enough of risking my life for these fellows’.22 Interestingly, in 1903, the devil-may-care Galopaud was sentenced in Brussels to three years imprisonment for swindling.23
Alice was anxious to go to the front, and soon paid a visit to the state secretary of the South African Republic, Mr F.W. Reitz, to ask for a letter of introduction to the Medical Committee. The secretary of the committee was not much help, however, suggesting that Alice go to Mafeking – where there was no fighting at the time. Undaunted, she arranged to meet with Galopaud, who was then in the company of Madame Thouvenot, who headed a group of French nurses. With his connections, Galopaud obtained official promises that both Alice and Madame Thouvenot would be sent to the front, either to Christiana or Fourteen Streams. He himself was to join the Foreign Legion of Colonel De Villebois-Mareuil. In the event of the postings to Christiana and Fourteen Streams not materialising, however, Galopaud promised that he would arrange for an ambulance, appoint them both to it, and attach it to the Foreign Legion.
On 20 March, Alice wrote from Klerksdorp, complaining that they had been waiting for the Boers to supply them with a vehicle, animals and a driver. At last, on 21 March, they left for Christiana by mail cart, arriving there the following day. But a week later, she complained again in her diary that there was as little fighting there as in Mafeking, and that the nurses had been twiddling their thumbs for a week. They were staying at the hotel, kept by some Germans, who were very hospitable and obliging. Many Boers dropped in ‘for a glass or more – generally more. They are very lively. They dance, sing, and play hymns on the organ. We hold aloof of them. My companion [Madame Thouvenot] does not understand either English or Dutch.’24
By 6 April, Alice had at last arrived at Fourteen Streams, along with Dr Weber and Madame Thouvenot. The village consisted of ‘exactly five buildings – the station, the hotel and refreshment room, the post and telegraph office, a warehouse, the station master’s residence, and nothing else; not even a hut’. On the other side of the river lay Warrenton, a village where British troops were encamped. The small medical group established themselves in the station master’s house. Their accommodation was extremely basic; empty provision cases served as chairs, others were broken up and made into tables, and plain stretchers served as beds. There was hardly anything to eat, and for twenty-four hours they had had nothing to drink, not even ‘the brackish water that is sowing the seeds of typhus in the neighbouring laagers’.25
They were soon visited by the Boer commander General Du Toit, described by Alice as ‘a very good looking man, as polished as a prison door’. Du Toit warned them that their position was dangerous.26 Indeed, less than a month later, on 6 May, Du Toit and his men were forced to retreat before the British advance on the village.
Neither Alice, Madame Thouvenot, nor Dr Weber (who did rounds at the Boer laager) had any patients, even though there was artillery fire every morning. During the first week of their arrival, when Alice and Madame Thouvenot were sitting in the morning sun outside the house, there was a sudden burst of shells nearby. The fleeing railway and telegraph hands, led by a Boer, told them to run away. ‘The cowardice of this Fleming [the Boer] made my own Flemish blood boil within me,’ Alice recorded, perhaps somewhat unfairly. Alice and Madame Thouvenot stayed put, though the dwelling of an English couple not far away was blown into the air, and the railway station and the post office fell down. They were right in the line of fire, and were joined by the English couple, who also suggested that they run for their lives. This time, the two women demonstrated less bravado. ‘At every bang we threw ourselves full length in the brushwood,’ Alice wrote. ‘Then we picked ourselves up, crawled for a few yards on our hands and knees, and started off again … The bombardment lasted a good half an hour. We returned at nightfall.’ Back at the house, a worried Dr Weber awaited them.27
A few days later, on 10 April, Alice received a postcard from Lieutenant Galopaud, from Kroonstad, dated April 4: he was leaving that evening with his detachment to join General De Villebois-Mareuil. He invited her to join them as soon as possible. But on 15 April, they heard that De Villebois-Mareuil had been killed – the general had fallen at the Battle of Boshof on 5 April.28 The next day, Alice telegraphed the French consul in Pretoria, Monsieur Charlier, saying that she wished to return to Pretoria. The Medical Committee agreed, undertaking to pay all except hotel expenses.
In a diary entry on 21 April, Alice mourned the death of General De Villebois-Mareuil. Her sense of loss here is poignant:
I had only spoken to him once, but the news of his death saddened me as only the loss of an old and very dear friend could have done. In imagination I saw him again, with his graceful, fascinating manners, and his keen, clever face lit up by a kind smile as he uttered the flattering words – ‘If I have to be nursed, may it be by you!’ Many a time at Jacobsdal I have driven to the cemetery with a coffin bumping up and down in the cart, and hitting me in the back. Often there was no coffin for the remains, and have had to confine myself to sewing them in a blanket. I have rendered these offices, and said last prayers at the graveside without, I confess, feeling any particular sorrow … but in this case it would have been different.29
Shortly afterwards, she left Fourteen Streams for Pretoria in the company of a Russian doctor, Lev Bornhaupt; they travelled by mail coach via Christiana to Klerksdorp, and from there by train via Johannesburg to Pretoria. While resting in Pretoria for a couple of days, she heard that Colonel Yevgeny Maximov, who had taken over the command of the Foreign Legion, wanted a small field ambulance to follow behind the legion. Alice applied through her consul, and Maximov suggested that she go to Kroonstad to make arrangements with the Russian Ambulance. At the time, Maximov was being treated in Kroonstad for wounds he had sustained at the recent Battle of Tobaberg. However, when Alice arrived in Kroonstad on 8 May, the eve the British seized the town, she found that Maximov had left for Pretoria to meet with Free State president M.T. Steyn.
As luck had it, she was able to return to Pretoria with an ambulance train to catch up with Maximov; among the patients were thirty-three wounded, and ten who were suffering from typhoid or gastroenteritis. She was introduced to Mr Van der Heyden, an official of the Nederlandsche Zuid-Afrikaansche Spoorweg-Maatschappij (NZASM), which ran the train, and his kindness to the nurses and patients greatly impressed her. The train consisted of two large ambulance cars, with two rows of berths – upper and lower – on either side of each car; a third car was divided into compartments for the doctors, assistants and Van der Heyden himself, and included a dispensary, while a fourth car was used as a store. Alice described it all as ‘a perfect tower of Babel. Our patients include Boers, Germans, Dutch, Irish, Americans, two English officers (prisoners), and a Frenchman.’ The work itself was ‘difficult on this train, the cars not being connected by a vestibule, so that we were compelled to jump from one car to another, often with our hands full … The surgical arrangements on the ambulance train left something to be desired. These defects were inexplicable, seeing how admirably the train, as a whole, was organised.’30
The train arrived in Pretoria early the next morning, and Alice visited Maximov later that day, once she had completed her duties. They agreed to travel back to Kroonstad together the following evening, and on 11 May they arrived in Kroonstad, where they stayed at the hospital of the Dutch–Russian Ambulance. The next day, Alice discovered that Maximov had left, in a valiant attempt to get on with his duties. When he returned that afternoon, it was already time to evacuate, and in the evening, about an hour before the British showed up in Kroonstad, Alice and Maximov left the hospital for the train station, which was situated a considerable distance away on the other side of town. The colonel travelled on horseback, while Alice travelled with his secretary and attendant in a kind of dog-cart, which was heavily laden with packages. The two trek horses were in poor condition, weak with fatigue and hunger. Maximov was in great pain, and eventually switched places with his secretary. He and Alice then took turns to drive the cart in the bitter cold, but eventually he gave up, and Alice made every effort to make him comfortable as he lay on the baggage. She drove on, compelled by ‘a fatalism’ which, she confessed, ‘takes the place of courage … My fingers were numb with cold, and the horses were half dead.’31
At one point, large numbers of Boers retreating northwards from Kroonstad overtook them. ‘Flemings, these fellows? No, mere flamingos,’ Alice cursed them in her diary, as the Boers abandoned the ambulance staff to their fate.32 They had to travel in the dark through the veld to get to the station, and Alice was relieved when they eventually arrived there. However, she had difficulty finding a place for Maximov in a train full of snoring Boers, all bound for Pretoria, until a Boer commandant came to her rescue and unceremoniously kicked out three of his snoring compatriots. The train reached Pretoria the next morning.
Alice continued to nurse Maximov, who held out despite his terrible wounds. A Russian nurse, Sophia Izedinova, who was rumoured to be in love with him, wrote that he suffered a badly damaged shoulder, as well as a skull injury and a wound to the temple.33 After his arrival in Pretoria, Maximov was elected vechtgeneraal, but the severity of his wounds forced him to leave for Europe at the end of May, just a few days before the fall of Johannesburg and Pretoria. It is clear that Maximov did not share Alice’s negative views of the Boers.
Alice was still in Pretoria when, on 14 May, she received a telegram informing her of the death of her husband Arthur. She boarded the Messageries Maritimes steamer Iraouaddy at Lourenço Marques, and landed at Marseilles on 28 June. ‘I had left Europe on the 25th of November [1900] with my heart full of pity and sisterly love for the Boers,’ she concluded in her diary. ‘I returned home depressed and heartsick. My eyes were opened. My readers will realize that this destruction of my faith, my beliefs, and my delusions, noble and humanitarian as they were, was indescribably painful to me.’34
After initially praising the Boers in an article for Petit Bleu, she was now accused of ‘weathercockism’, as she put it. However, she offered the excuse that she had written the article after only three days in Pretoria, and had mistaken ‘the Dutch colony for Boers!’35
The Boers themselves would have been horrified to read what she had written in her diary about them, particularly with regard to comparisons she made with the blacks of the country:
What clod-hoppers the Boers seem in comparison with this clever, intelligent, and active race! To think that most of the cabbies – little nigger boys of twelve or fourteen – speak English, Dutch – and nigger, of course! These blacks are amusing, kind-hearted, original, and very intelligent. The Boers have swindled and robbed them, and driven them out and maltreated them. If I were a Kaffir, shouldn’t I chuckle now! There is a day of reckoning for nations as well as for individuals.36
She added, somewhat harshly, perhaps, that the Boers ‘are thieves, liars and utterly immoral. They are without the merest elements of patriotism, and each individual only fights for his own farm.’37
This, however, was not the end of Alice’s love/hate relationship with Africa. As soon as her personal affairs had been settled in Belgium, she returned to South Africa – but this time to care for British soldiers. For a while, she worked on the hospital train that ran from Bloemfontein, through Kroonstad, to Wolwehoek; these trains each had a capacity of 114 beds. Wolwehoek was the southern anchor on the line of garrisons, fortifications and blockhouses stretching all the way to Irene, near Pretoria, and was established during the latter half of 1900.
Then, for some time, Alice held a post at No. 10 Stationary Hospital in Naauwpoort, which had been built on the farm Hartebeeshoek, along the railway line to Colesberg, in 1883–84.38 Situated on barren veld dotted with stone koppies, the hospital was tormented by freezing nights, fierce summer days and frequent dust storms. ‘Naauwpoort is not a stately town,’ observed Sir William Thomson. ‘A few red brick cottages, and some dozen or more pretentious single-storey cottages, all with roofs of corrugated iron; two stores or general shops; a railway station; the Standard Bank, which occupies a tiny two-roomed shanty; these practically comprise the town of Naauwpoort.’39
One of Alice’s first duties at Naauwpoort was to attend to the wounded of Commandant Hans Lötter’s commando, which had been captured on 5 September 1901 at Paardefontein – the British War Office believed that her knowledge of Flemish would be useful in dealing with Boer patients.40 Conditions were harsh, as is clearly evident from the tone of her interview with the Belgian newspaper Le XXe Siècle:
During the winter I passed at Naauwpoort, five thousand feet above the sea, where the cold is awful, do you think that there were any fires in barracks or in our rooms? Do you think that on night duty, when rounds have to be made in snowstorms, with sheets of rain and wind dashing out your lantern and compelling you to stand with your feet in pools of water while you light it – while all the time sniping is going on close at hand – to go afterwards to sit by the bedside of a dying man – do you think, I say, that that is comfortable?41
Alice was eventually stationed at Wynberg, in Cape Town, where both No. 1 and No. 2 General Hospital were based. By the end of 1901, she was still at the Cape, but had fallen ill – probably with typhoid – and was forced to return to Europe, where she struggled to regain her health. Having spent eventful years nursing others to health in a foreign land, Alice Bron eventually lost her own struggle to get well, and, on 26 February 1904, at the age of fifty-four, she passed away in Cannes. There, she was laid to rest in a graveyard close to the Mediterranean Sea.