‘We feared for being overwhelmed by the English troops and therefore we all went to bed in our clothes, ready to show ourselves at the alarm. I also followed this instruction; with my suitcase at the foot end of the bed, my drink noggin tied to my waist and hat and coat at the head end, and the big boots on my feet, I lay listening with a thumping heart.’1
AT THE OUTBREAK of the Anglo-Boer War in October 1899, Lisette Hellemans was well established as a nursing sister at a surgical clinic in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. But when the opportunity arose, she demonstrated no hesitation in sacrificing the comforts of Europe to serve with a Dutch ambulance in war-torn South Africa. She had no idea at the time of the trials and tribulations awaiting her in Africa, but she was the kind of woman who would have done it all over again if she could. Her discipline in keeping a diary in all kinds of conditions is itself testimony to the grit of this remarkable woman.
It was in rain and sunshine, in-house or on the road, on the bank of a small waterpool, in a dry riverbed, or high on a kopje in the open, that I wrote my diary; it was in sad, difficult days that I took up this collection of my so precious memories, and dwell in the impressive past, and had a desire to tell the Dutch people what glorious, great work our Dutch Red Cross achieved in this Boer War of Independence.2
Not only did she leave an extensive and vivid record of her time in South Africa, but in later life she also drew on her harrowing Boer War experiences to establish the Koloniale School voor Meisjes en Vrouwen, a school that prepared young women for life in new and unfamiliar environments, especially in the colonies. At the time, this was a unique concept in education, both in the Netherlands and internationally.
Lisette Magdalena Hellemans was born on 27 January 1873 in Dordrecht, the second child of Johannes and Atje Hellemans. Lisette – or Lies, as she was generally known – had an older brother, Johannes, two younger brothers, Thomas and Adrianus, and a younger sister, Wilhelmina. The Hellemans’ first child, also Wilhelmina, had died in infancy three years before Lies was born. Johannes senior was a gymnastics teacher by profession, and Lies grew up in the middle-class society of Dordrecht. As the oldest city in the Netherlands, Dordrecht was rich in history and culture, and as such was a fine place for a child to grow up. Lies could have chosen to spend her life as a housewife, like her mother Atje, but instead she chose a career in nursing. Young Lies Hellemans entered a profession that had already become the domain of middle-class females.3
Owing to the lack of formal medical organisation in the Boer republics, the Transvaal and Free State Red Cross societies eagerly and gratefully accepted the offer from neutral countries to provide the two republics with medical assistance, and the Dutch Red Cross ambulances, one of which Lies belonged to, were the first to arrive in South Africa. It was not long, however, before there were several foreign ambulance units in the field: three Dutch Red Cross ambulances and a Dutch East Indies ambulance, as well as ambulances from Russia, Belgium, Germany, Scandinavia, France, and Ireland/North America. The foreign ambulances went wherever they were needed, but were not always properly utilised by the Boers because of their universal distrust of foreigners, whom they called uitlanders.
With the outbreak of hostilities, the First Dutch Red Cross Ambulance, under Dr G.W.S. Lingbeek, was immediately sent to South Africa; it arrived in Pretoria on 8 December 1899, and was located at the Staatsmeisjesschool in Pretoria and at Modderspruit. The Second Dutch Red Cross Ambulance, under Dr I.D. Koster, assisted by doctors W. Schelkly, C. Pino and L. Metz, followed soon after; Lies had not originally been selected for this ambulance, and only went as a replacement for Sister Boer of The Hague.4 But in the months to come, she would prove that the Red Cross organisers could not have wished for a better person.
After their arrival in South Africa, the Second Ambulance reached Harrismith in late January 1900; from here, they extended their activities into Natal before going on to Christiana and then back to Pretoria with the final Boer retreat. The ambulance suffered great hardship, and it was harassed by the British, who arrested its members twice before eventually deporting the female members, including Lies, to the Netherlands, and sending the males to Ceylon as prisoners of war.
Lies’s great adventure in South Africa began on a grey winter’s day in 1899. On 24 November, she said farewell to her family, before sailing from Amsterdam the following day with the Second Ambulance on board the Herzog. With her were members of the Belgian–German Ambulance, who had sailed via Lisbon, Naples, Port Said and Beira. However, early in January 1900, outside Lourenço Marques harbour, the British cruiser Thetis apprehended the ship on the pretext that the Herzog was carrying contraband, and escorted it to Durban. There, the passengers were delayed for three days before being allowed to return to Lourenço Marques, from where the Second Ambulance travelled by train to Pretoria. ‘In the beginning of the journey, the landscapes reminded me of Gelderland, but soon the region became mountainous,’ Lies recorded in her diary. She and her colleagues were heartily welcomed by officials at Komatipoort, the first station on Transvaal soil, though Boers from a laager nearby were far less friendly. When Lies mentioned the close ties between Boer and Hollander because of their common Dutch language, a Boer remarked, ‘Yes, but the child is often better than the mother.’5
The ambulance reached Pretoria on 5 January 1900, where they had a good look at the work of the First Dutch Ambulance at the Staatsmeisjesschool before moving on towards Harrismith twenty days later. Their first stop was Modderspruit, where the Pretoria–Ladysmith railway line terminated, and it was there, on a visit to the Transvaal Red Cross Ambulance, that they had their first taste of South African biltong and wine. They were at Modderspruit for a while, as not enough wagons had been sent by the Boer government of the Orange Free State to collect them. Additional arrangements had to be made to get to Harrismith before the end of January, and while waiting, the staff visited a Boer laager, which Lies described as ‘dirty and untidy’.6
Eventually, Lies and the other female members of the ambulance were on their way, travelling by donkey cart to Smith’s Crossing, the first station on the Ladysmith–Harrismith line. In her diary, she described the harsh conditions: ‘[T]he sun burns through the canvas of the wagon, the road is dusty and dry, while we continually bump over rocks and little hills, lifting the whole piled-up sister corps into the air, accompanied by all kinds of shrieks, grumbling and laughter.’7 Crossing the Klip River, the wagon got stuck in the sand, though they managed to make it to Smith’s Crossing, where they found a Boer hospital. According to Lies, the hospital was not up to acceptable standards of cleanliness, a situation she ascribed to untrained staff working under difficult conditions.
The next day, their train – overloaded with patients – steamed up Van Reenen’s Pass to Dr Reinecke’s hospital at Albertina station, where they looked down upon a beautiful landscape. After the flatness of the Netherlands, this was truly a sight to behold: ‘[T]he sun spreads its golden glow across mountains and valleys. The great mass of mountains, on the south side, covered in bush, formed through its variation of size, shapes and shadows an impressive sight.’ They found Dr Reinecke’s hospital full of patients, though with very few medical staff.
Afterwards, shortly after their arrival in Harrismith, the Second Dutch Ambulance took over the hospital that had been established by Dr Zuurdeeg of the Free State Ambulance in a newly built school. Lies and her colleagues were quite satisfied with their hospital; she and Sister Westerbeek were in the internal section, sisters Charbon and Stoffers were in the surgical ward, while Sister Slot, the head nurse, took charge of the household. Lies soon noted that the English sisters at the hospital had a ‘totally different perception of the job than the Dutch sisters’, a situation that, in the beginning, she ‘had a lot of trouble to overcome’; however, she was soon ‘established there and although I still had to ignore a lot of things, the ward and the manner of nursing took on a Dutch flavour, and [the sisters] parted as best friends’. From then on, Boer patients had an attitude of ‘Holland boven! ’ (Holland above all!).8
While the hospital’s main purpose was to care for the wounded, it soon had to accommodate typhoid patients as well, because the ward in the Town Hall had become too full. To make matters worse, the sisters had to wash the linen themselves, as appliances for boiling water were nonexistent; also, the kitchen was far away in a different building, the nights were cold, and Lies often had to do night duty while heavy thunderstorms raged. At first the nurses had a lamp, but when the fuel dried up they could no longer use it, and so they had to settle for candles. But despite all this, they enjoyed pleasant times together with evenings of piano playing and singing at the hotel where they were staying.
When doctors Koster and Pino established a field hospital further away, at Potgieter’s Farm near Smith’s Crossing, to assist the Boer commandos on the Upper Tugela, Lies and Sister Charbon left Harrismith to join them. When they arrived on 23 February, they found the hospital well set up and spic and span, and though the hospital staff had to stay in tents, they did at least have most of the essentials, and life had a pleasant rhythm:
Our lifestyle was regular in the beginning, we get up at 5 or 6 o’clock, do what our hands find to do, go and have breakfast at 8 o’clock; then it is mostly the turn of the patients and the ‘polikliniek’ starts; at 1 o’clock we have lunch and in the evening supper at 7 o’clock. In between we drink coffee or cocoa and in the evening sister Ch[arbon] and I usually go back to our tent early. From time to time we visited the Potgieter family … Now and then we went with doctor K[oster] to a nearby farm to visit some sick person. Such an outing was handy to learn to know the country and its people.9
One such outing occurred during the Siege of Ladysmith, when Lies and her colleagues visited one of the Boer laagers around the town. She was shocked at the scarcity of tents and the general poverty, and the lack of adequate clothing, with many Boers being forced to walk barefoot in the veld. The reputation of the Second Dutch Ambulance soon spread, and Boer families began to visit the field hospital for assistance with whatever ailments plagued them. They paid little attention to official visiting hours, however, and simply walked in whenever it suited them.
On 27 February 1900, General Piet Cronjé surrendered at Paardeberg with an army of more than 4 000 men. On the same day, General Buller broke through the Boer positions on the Tugela River, causing the Boers to retreat hastily towards Biggarsberg. ‘The long procession trekked past us, as if there was no end to it,’ Lies wrote. ‘Boers on horseback tell us that some other laagers are also retreating, it seems a mystery to us, what can it mean, as far as the eye can see up to Spionskop [Spioenkop], from east and west we still saw troops of Boers with cannons and wagons, it could not possibly be from one laager.’ Then a storm broke, the worst Lies had ever experienced; the wind howled, rain poured down, large hailstones hammered the veld, thunder pealed and lightning struck from all corners of the heavens. The ambulance staff had a terrible time trying to keep the tents standing and prevent them from being flooded – and still the Boers came trudging past.
When the rain ceased, any sick and wounded who wanted to join the fleeing Boers to escape capture by the British, were loaded onto the wagons trundling by. But the ambulance itself received no transport assistance at all from the Boers, and so they were stuck at Potgieter’s Farm. The railway line to Harrismith had been destroyed, telegraphic communication had been lost, and, on top of everything, retreating Boer commandos dumped patients who were not fit to travel at the hospital, so that the ambulance’s workload kept on increasing.
The dark cloud of advancing British troops now hung over Potgieter’s Farm, and Lies described her terrible fear of being captured by the Khakis:
We feared for being overwhelmed by the English troops and therefore we all went to bed in our clothes, ready to show ourselves at the alarm. I also followed this instruction; with my suitcase at the foot end of the bed, my drink noggin tied to my waist and hat and coat at the head end, and the big boots on my feet, I lay listening with a thumping heart and from time to time looked across at the empty place of sister Ch[arbon]. What will the future hold for me? Oh, brave I will of course pretend to be, I feel strong, but I am afraid of the ravenous troops from Ladysmith. All kinds of terrible images cross my mind.10
Fortunately, nothing evil befell Lies or her companions that night. The first British patrols reached Potgieter’s Farm on 2 March, and Dr Koster went to Ladysmith to negotiate their position and future movements. But he came back with news that the ambulance had been declared prisoner and would be transferred to Ladysmith, where they were to look after eighteen wounded Boer patients. Shortly afterwards, a British officer arrived to confirm General Buller’s orders that they had indeed been taken prisoner and that their tents were to be taken down. They watched helplessly as the camp, which had been set up with such effort and good intentions, was broken down after a mere four weeks.
The ambulance staff and six remaining Boer and black patients were escorted to Ladysmith by Khaki guards. The trek, consisting of eleven ox-wagons and four transport carts, made slow progress, as the ambulance had to tend to patients along the way; some stages were bumpy, causing the patients great agony. Lies believed that General Buller would not be forgiven for the pain he caused her charges because of his order to move to Ladysmith. As her cart passed through the English camp at Ladysmith, it was surrounded by soldiers who shouted remarks that she did not understand, but suspected were obscenities, until an officer chased them off. The late summer heat was unbearable, and they found the town itself covered in clouds of dust, with everything dilapidated or destroyed.
On the night of their arrival, the patients slept in the wagons, Dr Koster in the open veld and Lies in a small, hastily improvised ‘tent’ consisting of sheets tied to the wheels of a wagon. She woke terrified during the night to the sound of heavy breathing and sighing close to her head, and, lifting the blanket, discovered the massive head of an ox looming over her. ‘We both got a fright, the beast and I, it turned around quickly and went out the other side to graze,’ she recalled.11 The next morning, she discovered that the ox had managed to get loose during the night, and had been roaming the outspan in the dark.
The site the ambulance had been allocated at Intombi, a camp just outside of the town, was unsanitary and smelly, with a high typhoid contamination risk. Lies noted that the stench was carried on the wind from Platrand, and that the unbearable heat added to the unpleasant atmosphere of the place. She also discovered ticks in her blanket, and wrote:
All kinds of crawling and flying beasts visit our camp. Especially the flies were a terrible plague and it was really an art to have a bite or something to drink without swallowing a fly as well. In the evening, when the sun was down, the ceiling of my tent was quite populated. In all sorts of colours, all kinds of insects were resting. Hottentotten [praying mantises] (quite innocent light green beasts, the size of a beetle), grasshoppers, beetles, spiders and different kinds of flies … snakes visited our tents twice.12
Another form of pestilence was the British soldiers who ostensibly came to help but disappeared with whatever they could pilfer from the ambulance. As prisoners, the ambulance staff were not allowed to prepare meals from their own supply of food, and so were forced to eat food from the canteen, which was far below the standard they were used to. The German section of the Belgian–German Ambulance was also under arrest at Intombi; they had no provisions for their six patients, who had to be taken over by the Second Dutch Ambulance. The situation was chaotic, even more so because the eighteen wounded Boers they had been sent to look after were nowhere to be found.
Three weeks after their arrest, the Hollanders were granted permission to move to the Boer lines at Glencoe; for the next week, however, they had to stay put, and were not permitted much activity while the British evacuated and demolished Intombi. Lies spent most of this time telling her Boer patients about the history of the Netherlands, about which they were very ignorant, or mending or altering clothes for them. On Sundays there were sports activities, though the Boers passed the time by reading their Bibles or playing dominoes or draughts. By this time, most of the remaining patients had been taken over by the British, and in preparation for the ambulance’s move to the Boer lines, their wagons and possessions were returned.
One morning, while watching a small procession carrying four British soldiers to their graves, Lies felt deeply moved by what she saw:
We had heard rumours that daily fifteen to twenty patients died, but I regarded that as exaggeration. Perhaps the empty stretchers with the bearers were going to fetch some more dead. The cold, machine-like way, the four dead all at once, the sympathy with those left behind by the deceased, it all filled me with dread. I suddenly became aware of the frightful danger of contamination, to which we were all unnecessarily exposed, and the words of Genestet13 sounded in my ears, ‘Today me, tomorrow you’.14
Lies later filed a claim against the British government because she had fallen ill at the filthy Intombi camp, where she was kept against her will. She held the British responsible for her illness, and, in a letter to Het Vaderland in 1938, she wrote that she had suffered from this illness for fourteen years.15 Her claim was rejected.
Four weeks after the arrival of the Second Dutch Ambulance in Ladysmith, they were sent to Glencoe, again under guard; with them were two patients, a sick young Boer named Botha and the Hollander Haerko Dijksterhuijs, who had been seriously wounded at the Battle of Elandslaagte in October 1899. They approached the Boer lines under a white flag at the Zondags River near Biggarsberg. Once there, they offloaded the wagons and travelled the rest of the way with the Bourke Ambulance, who were, however, too familiar with the British for the Hollanders’ liking. The Second Dutch Ambulance eventually arrived at the Soutpansberg laager, close to Glencoe Junction, where young Botha was reunited with his family. Having been exposed to a fierce late summer sun, the travellers were exhausted, thirsty and famished.
During their stay there, Boers continually came for treatment, many returning three or four times. Some wanted a certificate ‘to go home’, but the ambulance refused such requests unless absolutely necessary. After three days, they received letters from home, which put them in good spirits. But once again, they were hit by a tremendous storm, with the rain pelting down and the wind howling. Lies’s tent was flattened, and she watched helplessly as water flooded through it while patients sat around perplexed.
Because the Russian and Bourke ambulances were coping with the medical demand in the region, the Second Dutch Ambulance was instructed to go to Pretoria. They arrived on 7 April and patient Dijksterhuijs was reunited with his brother. When they moved into the Staatsmeisjesschool, they were a sorry sight. It had been a long journey with few washing opportunities and therefore no fresh clothing – Lies had not expected to be away from Harrismith for long, and so had taken very little baggage with her. Two days after their arrival in Pretoria, Lies fell ill, and was nursed by her colleague and friend, Sister Charbon.
The Transvaal government asked Dr Pino to establish a hospital at Fourteen Streams, where the Boer retreat along the Vaal River had created the need for hospitals to cope with the wounded. But he also fell ill, and the departure had to be delayed until 24 April. Lies had been instructed to remain behind, but on 2 May she received a telegram announcing Dr Pino’s arrival at Christiana, and requesting urgent help. She and Sister Van Sevenhoven left on a train transporting the last commandos to Klerksdorp, from where they travelled by wagon to Christiana. After a four-day journey, sleeping in the wagons on the open veld during the cold nights, they eventually reached their destination. ‘The journey is boring,’ is how Lies described their trek. ‘Along the Vaal one finds nice places, but the landscape itself is shallow and dry and littered with anthills … We encountered many fleeing Boer families in oxwagons, mostly Griqualanders, British subjects, who had taken up arms for the Boers.’16
Owing to delays, Dr Pino had only been able to join the Boers by the time they had retreated to Christiana; there, he and his staff took over the hospital that had been established earlier in the local hotel by Dr Dunlop and the Lichtenburg Section. Lies learnt from Pino that he’d had to reorganise the hospital completely when he arrived; as an example, sick and wounded patients lay in the billiard room, where people blithely continued to play while puffing away on their cigarettes.
Lies joined the surgical section, but all too soon the Boers’ retreat to Klerksdorp began, and once again the Second Dutch Ambulance was left behind. The first British troops arrived two days after the last Boer commando had left, but because of their eagerness to pursue the Boers, the occupation didn’t last long. The ambulance stayed as long as possible so as to allow their patients to improve before leaving Christiana.
The days passed peacefully, and were even quite boring; though the patients improved, we lost one of them. Just 16 years old, the poor young man had to die in a foreign land, his family and place of abode unknown to us. The doctors paid him their last respects. The tent wagon carried him to his last resting place; a grave had been dug next to the victims of Warrenton and Fourteen Streams. A pile of stones covered the grave, doctor P[ino] made a white cross and painted the young man’s name on it. Carrying the cross on his shoulder, doctor P walked to the graveyard with sister W[esterbeek] and me. Silently we walked along next to each other, the evening approached, behind the group of trees in front of us the sun was setting, and the whole landscape was one of rest and of peace.17
The Second Dutch Ambulance departed from Christiana on 2 June 1900 for Pretoria; the patients’ wagon was looked after by a male nurse, Meuleman, while Sister Westerbeek saw to a serious typhoid case that was isolated in a tent wagon. Lies and two Boer nurses travelled in a third forage wagon. With them was a young teacher from the Netherlands, Wijtske Sijbrandi, who had arrived at Fourteen Streams a few months earlier, on 14 February, to assist Dr Dunlop (see Chapter 9). Doctors Pino and Van Houten took turns driving the wagons; following the British occupation of the town, their black helpers had vanished, leaving them to do everything themselves. The sixteen mules pulling the largest wagon were obstinate, and on one occasion Dr Pino had to take off his jacket and run up and down the team, spurring them on with the whip.
Three days after leaving Christiana, they reached Wolmaransstad, but when they saw its filthy camp site they decided to move on, continuing westwards to Klerksdorp where they encountered the sorry sight of the raising of the Union Jack and Boers laying down their arms.18 On arrival in Potchefstroom, they were invited to stay at the cosy home of Mr Rocher, whom they had met months before on the Herzog; there, at last, they enjoyed decent meals at a table set with white table linen and porcelain. But they had to move on, and, before their departure, the Hollanders in town handed them letters to take home with them, as the postal service had broken down.
All along the route to Pretoria they encountered ruined farmhouses. ‘It was sad to see these desolate, empty houses,’ Lies wrote. ‘Earlier we had seen only a few and they were not so noticeable, but here on the road from Potchefstroom to Pretoria, especially near Johannesburg, we find many of these devastated houses. The frames and doors are missing, the balconies ripped apart, and the gardens, shrubs and vegetable gardens destroyed.’19 On the outskirts of Johan nesburg, they encountered a large British camp of some 15 000 troops, and, after their long day’s journey, they decided to camp in the open, just outside the city.
They packed up again early the next morning and arrived in a cold and misty Pretoria on 23 June. The trip from Christiana to Pretoria had lasted a total of nineteen days, through cold, wind and rain, and all the while there were patients to care for. Once in Pretoria, they joined the First Dutch Ambulance of Dr Bierens de Haan at the Staatsmeisjesschool. The doctors then obtained permission for the Second Dutch Ambulance to travel to Middelburg, though they were told to travel via Johannesburg and Heidelberg. A week later, the party left Pretoria to rejoin the Boer commandos, but their journey was short-lived.
Travelling in four transport wagons, they passed an English patrol outside Pretoria; at the first outspan, two detectives arrived and announced that they had instructions to seize all letters being carried by the ambulance – letters that were, of course, mostly destined for the Netherlands. The ambulance then continued their journey, reaching Irene station at sunset. There, an English officer instructed them to wait so that the ambulance could be searched the next day, and while there they enjoyed a convivial evening in the company of the officers. After being searched the next morning, they continued the onward journey towards the Boer lines, but at Kaalfontein station a British officer surprised them with the news that the ambulance was to be sent back to Pretoria. Armed guards immediately surrounded them, and the next morning, accompanied by these guards, the ambulance headed back to Pretoria, feeling dejected at the turn of events. This was the second time the Second Dutch Ambulance had been arrested by the British.
In Pretoria, they were taken to the provost marshal’s office, where they were informed that they had been declared prisoners as a consequence of carrying ‘compromising letters’. The three doctors (Van Houten, Pino and Koster), the administrator (D.D. Ihle), the male nurse (E. Meuleman) and the cook (C.J. van Oosten) were to be sent away as prisoners of war, while Lies and the other female nurses (W. Sijbrandi, H.E. Stoffers, G. van Sevenhoven, S.C. Charbon, A.M.D. Lee, H.G.C.W. van Eerten and J.L.H. Slot) would be given free passage to the Netherlands. The men were all marched off to the jail, and the nurses’ request to join the First Dutch Ambulance was flatly refused. The women stayed over at the Staatsmeisjesschool until their departure by rail to East London, whence they would sail for Europe. The incident was controversial, and among the questions asked was why the Dutch consul was not allowed to contact the group, and why they were never given an opportunity to state their case.
When the time came for Lies and her two travelling companions to board the train in Pretoria, they were horrified to find that the families of officials of the NZASM, who were being deported from the ZAR, had to travel in filthy open cattle trucks. The doctors and female members of the Second Dutch Ambulance had been given the privilege of travelling in closed carriages. However, at Vereeniging the nursing sisters had to make room for four ‘sick’ British officers who were in a very jocular mood – and who were all smoking cigarettes. It was most unpleasant and uncomfortable, as the coupé with its four bunks now accommodated the ambulance as well as some civilians. To add to their woes, Wijtske Sijbrandi was seized by a bout of malaria, and the Dutch doctors were ordered into an open truck. They travelled throughout the bitterly cold night, only reaching Bloemfontein the next afternoon, by which time Wijtske’s condition had worsened. They were forced to spend another freezing night on the train before arriving at a misty Springfontein in the middle of a very dark night, where the passengers bound for East London had to disembark. They huddled together in the isolated station as they waited three long hours for the train to take them east, to the port.
Lies had held hopes of being rescued by the Boers, but the journey through the Cape Colony soon dispelled any such expectations. ‘Our miserable mood cannot be described,’ she wrote. Not even the changing landscape lifted her spirits:
Where we earlier only saw graves of fallen English soldiers, destroyed bridges and a few English camps, we were now going up and down hills in fine countryside … This diversion was welcome, because the terrible consternation of the last few days could not be wiped from our minds.20
They arrived in East London the following afternoon, where a British health officer declared Wijtske Sijbrandi seriously ill, so that she remained under treatment for the duration of their nine-day stay, after which they boarded the Hawarden Castle for the long journey home. The voyage back to the Netherlands would last six weeks, on a poorly equipped and overcrowded ship where the quality of food left much to be desired. In Simon’s Town, the ship docked to take on a load of coal to fuel the engine; it lay in the bay for six days, but none of the passengers were allowed to get off. After a day or two, consuls of the Netherlands, Germany and Austria were permitted to board and give them the news that the male members of the Second Dutch Ambulance would be going to Ceylon as prisoners of war.
The Hawarden Castle left the Cape on 5 August 1900, reaching St Vincent in the Cape Verde Islands five days later, and departing again the next day. It passed Madeira four days later, and, on 22 August, docked in Vlissingen, where Lies’s father and the Middelburg Red Cross were waiting to welcome her. Her African journey had lasted nine months; the adventure and hardship that she experienced along the way had made a great impression on her, and would stand her in good stead in the years to come.
Back in the Netherlands, Lies became nursing director at the Kliniek en Polikliniek in Rotterdam, where she had worked before the war. Later, she was put in charge of paediatric nursing (moedercursussen) at Het Groene Kruis in Groningen, a post she resigned from in September 1916.21 The organisation had been established in 1900 as a regional society for nursing in the Netherlands, and eventually evolved into the Nationale Kruisvereniging in 1978.
Lies’s experiences in South Africa during the Anglo-Boer War led to her establishing the Koloniale School, a progressive institution that provided a unique education at the time. It aimed to assist young women, who wished to live and work in the Dutch East Indies, to adapt to the new and unfamiliar environment. It also addressed the problems faced by women who had been born and brought up in the Indies but who were now living in the Netherlands. In addition to the main course on mothering and childcare, there were courses on Dutch and Indonesian cooking, a Malay language course, and a course on the geography and ethnology of the East Indies.
The Koloniale School voor Meisjes en Vrouwen opened its doors on 24 September 1921 in The Hague, occupying a house at 46 West-einde. Lies was appointed director in residence, a position she held until 1928, when ill luck befell her. The sewerage system under the house sagged and cracked, emitting gas that poisoned her to the extent that she was obliged to resign. She retained her ties with the school for many years afterwards, and remained a member of the school’s committee until 1934, by which time she was living in Wassenaar, a village ten kilometres north of The Hague.
Almost forty years after the war, Lies had a chance meeting in Scotland with someone from her Anglo-Boer War past, which dramatically demonstrated the madness of war. During a ceremony at the Castle in Edinburgh in July 1938, while in the city to attend a congress of the International Council of Women, Lies happened to come across General Ian Hamilton.
‘Do you remember me, Sir?’ she asked. ‘You were at Potgieter’s Farm the day after the relief of Ladysmith. You did take my portrait. You were with General Warren.’
Hamilton laughed, slapped her on the shoulder twice and said, ‘Comrade, Comrade!’ Shaking her hand, he added, ‘You look still very well.’
‘Oh! Yes,’ she said, ‘but I was fourteen years ill after the imprisonment at Ladysmith, in Intombi camp.’
He slapped her on the shoulder again, and with a ‘Goodbye, Comrade’, went on his way.
‘The moment, so gripping from the past, is gone,’ she wrote. ‘But in me at that moment was the conviction: “What madness war is.”’22
Like so many women who gave their all to the causes they believed in, Lies Hellemans never married. She spent the last decades of her life in Wassenaar, where she died on 19 March 1956 at the age of eighty-three – fully deserving of her reputation as one of her country’s most remarkable women.