The Question

Stefanus Malherbe had difficulty in getting access to the president, to put to him the question of which we were all anxious to learn the answer.

It was at Waterval Onder and President Kruger was making preparations to leave for Europe to enlist the help of foreign countries in the Transvaal’s struggle against England. General Louis Botha had just been defeated at Dalmanutha. Accordingly, we who were the last of the Boer commandos in the field found ourselves hemmed in against the Portuguese border by the British forces, the few miles of railway-line from Nelspruit to Komati­poort being all that still remained to us of Transvaal soil. The Boer War had hardly begun, and it already looked like the end.

But when we had occasion to watch, from a considerable distance, a column of British dragoons advancing through a half-mile stretch of bush country, there were those of us who realised that the Boer War might, after all, not be over yet. It took the column two hours to get through that bush.

Although we who served under Veldkornet Stefanus Malherbe were appointed to the duty of guarding President Kruger during those last days, we had neither the opportunity nor the temerity to talk to him in that house at Waterval Onder. For one thing, there were those men with big stomachs and heavy gold watch-chains all crowding around the president with papers they wanted him to sign. Nevertheless, when the news came that the English had broken through at Dalmanutha, we overheard some of those men say, not raising their voices unduly, that something or other was no longer worth the paper it was written on. Next morning, when President Kruger again came on the front stoep of the house, alone this time, we were for the first time able to see him clearly, instead of through the thick screen of grey smoke being blown into his face from imported cigars.

“Well,” Thys Haasbroek said, “I hope the president when he gets to Europe enlists the right kind of foreigners to come and fight for the Republic. It would be too bad if he came back with another crowd of uitlanders with big stomachs and watch-chains, waving papers for concessions.”

I mention this remark made by one of the burghers then at Waterval Onder with the president to show you that there was not a uniform spirit of bitter-end loyalty animating the three thousand men who saw day by day the net of the enemy getting more tightly drawn around them. Indeed, speaking for myself, I must confess that the enthusiasm of those of our leaders who at intervals addressed us, exhorting us to courage, had but a restricted influence on my mind.

Especially when the orders came for the rolling stock to be dynamited.

For we had brought with us, in our retreat from Magers­fon­tein, practically all the carriages and engines and trucks of the Transvaal and Orange Free State railways. At first we were much saddened by the necessity for destroying the property of our coun­try. But afterwards something got into our blood which made it all seem like a good joke.

I know that our own little group that was under the leadership of Veldkornet Stefanus Malherbe really derived a considerable amount of enjoyment, towards the end, out of blowing railway engines and whole trains into the air. A couple of former shunters who were on commando with us would say things like, “There goes the Cape mail via Fourteen Streams.” And we would fling ourselves into a ditch to escape the flying fragments of wood and steel. One of them also used to shout, “All seats for Bloem­fon­tein,” or “First stop Elandsfontein,” after the fuse was lit and he would blow his whistle and wave a green flag. For several days it seemed that between Nelspruit and Hectorspruit you couldn’t look up at any part of the sky without seeing wheels in it.

And during all this time we treated the whole affair as fun, and the former shunters had got to calling out, “There goes the 9.20 to De Aar against the signals” and, “There’s a girl with fair hair travelling by herself in the end compartment.” Being railwaymen, they couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Because the war of the big commandos, and of men like Generals Joubert and Cronje, was over, it seemed to us that all the fighting was just about done. We did not know that the Boer War of General de Wet and Ben Viljoen and General Muller was then only about to begin.

The next order that our veldkornet, Stefanus Malherbe, brought us from the kommandant was for the destruction of our stores and field guns and ammunition dumps as well. All we had to retain were our Mausers and horses, the order said. That did not give us much cause for hope. At the same time the first of General Louis Botha’s burghers from the Dalmanutha fight began to arrive in our camp. They were worn out from their long retreat and many of them had acquired the singular habit of looking round over their shoulders very quickly, every so often, right in the middle of a conversation. Their presence did not help to inspire us with military ardour. One of these burghers was very upset at our having blown up all the trains. He had been born and bred in the gramadoelas and had been looking forward to his first journey by rail.

“I just wanted to feel how the thing rides,” he said in disappointed tones, in between trying to wipe off stray patches of yellow lyddite stains he had got at Dalmanutha. “But even if there was still another train left, I suppose it would be too late, now.”

“Yes, I am sure it would be too late,” I said, also looking quickly over my shoulder. There was something infectious about this habit that Louis Botha’s burghers had brought with them.

Actually, of course, it was not yet too late, for there was still a train, with the engine and carriages intact, waiting to take the president out of the Transvaal into Portuguese territory. There were also in the Boer ranks men whose loyalty to the Republic never wavered even in the darkest times. It had been a very long retreat from the northern Cape Province through the Orange Free State and the Transvaal to where we were now shut in near the Komati River. And it had all happened so quickly.

The Boer withdrawal, when once it got under way, had been very fast and very complete. I found it not a little disconcerting to think that on one day I had seen the president seated in a spider just outside Paardeberg drinking buttermilk and then on another day, only a few months later, I had seen him sitting on the front stoep of a house at Waterval Onder a thousand miles away, drinking brandy. Moreover, he was getting ready to move again.

“If it is only to Europe that he is going, then it is not too bad,” said an old farmer with a long beard who was an ignorant man in many ways, but whose faith had not faltered throughout the retreat. “I would not have liked our beloved president to have to travel all that way back to the northern Cape where we started from. He hasn’t the strength for so long a journey. I am glad that it is only to Russia that he is going.”

Because he was not demoralised by defeat, as so many of us were, we who listened to this old farmer’s words were touched by his simple loyalty. Indeed, the example set by men of his sort had a far greater influence on the course of the war during the difficult period ahead than the speeches that our leaders came round and made to us from time to time.

Certainly we did not feel that the veldkornet, Stefanus Malherbe, was a tower of strength. We did not dislike him nor did we distrust him. We only felt, after a peculiar fashion, that he was too much the same kind of man that we ourselves were. So we did not have overmuch respect for him.

I have said that we ordinary burghers did not have the teme­r­ity to approach the president and to talk to him as man to man of the matter that we wanted to know about. And so we hung back a little while Stefanus Malherbe, an officer on whom many weighty responsibilities reposed, put out his chest and strode toward the house to interview the president. “Put out your stomach,” one of the burghers called out. He was of course thinking of those men who until lately had surrounded the president with their papers and watch-chains and cigars.

And then, when Stefanus Malherbe was moving in the direction of the voorkamer, where he knew the president to be, and when the rest of the members of our veldkornetskap had drawn ourselves together in a little knot that stood nervously waiting just off the stoep for the president’s reply – I suppose it had to happen that just then a newly appointed general should have decided to treat us to a patriotic talk. Under other circumstances we would have been impressed, perhaps, but at that point in time, when we had already blown up our trains and stores and ammunition dumps, and had sunk the pieces that remained of the Staat’s Artillerie in the Komati River – along with some papers we had captured in earlier battle – we were not an ideal audience.

We stood still, out of politeness, and listened. But all the time we were wondering if the veldkornet would perhaps be able to slip away at the end of the speech and manage to get in a few words with President Kruger after all. Anyway, I am sure that we took in very little of what the newly appointed general had to say.

In the end the general realised the position too. We gathered that he had known he was going to get the appointment that day, and that he had prepared a speech for the occasion, to deliver before the president and the State Council, but that he had been unable to have his say in the house because of the bustle attendant upon the president’s impending departure. Consequently, the general delivered his set speech to us, the first group of burg­h­ers he encountered on his way out. After he had got us to sing Psalm 83 and had adjured each one of us to humble himself before the Lord, the general explained at great length that if we could perhaps not hope for victory, since victory might be beyond our capacity, we could still hope for a more worthy kind of defeat.

We made no response to his eloquence. We did not sweep our hats upward in a cheer. We did not call out, “Ou perd!” We were only concerned with the veldkornet’s chances of getting in a word with the president before it was too late. The general understood, eventually, that our hearts were not in his address and so he concluded his speech rather abruptly. “Some defeats are greater than victories,” he said, and he paused for a little while to survey us before adding, “but not this one, I don’t think.”

The meeting having ended suddenly like that, Veldkornet Ste­fanus Malherbe did, after all, manage to get into the voorkamer to speak to President Kruger alone. That much we knew. But when he came out of the house, the veldkornet was silent about his conversation with the president. He did not tell us what the president had said in answer to his question. And in the next advance of the English, which was made within that same week, and which took them right into Komatipoort, Veldkornet Stefanus Malherbe was killed. So he never told us what the president had said in answer to his question about the Kruger millions.