The Covenant Part 76

So Jefferson took his cousin home, where his aunt Mpela was always prepared for such an event. She washed the wounds, borrowing from a neighbor a vial of concentrated iodine, which caused Moses to faint, and when she satisfied herself that no arteries had been cut, she went to bed and advised her son to do the same.

In the days of his recuperation, Moses had an opportunity to evaluate the experiences which had been cascading down upon him. He saw the farm at Vrymeer as a system whereby white employers were able to control black peasants with wages preposterously low. Essentially good-hearted men like General de Groot had never in their lives considered that what they were enforcing was Old Testament slavery, and had they been advised of this, they would not have understood what was wrong. He saw Detleef van Doorn as doing practically the same thing but from sanctimonious motivations, and he found that he had little regard for his father's employer. He realized that Van Doorn's a.s.sociates might force him at any time to return to the gentle slavery at Vrymeer.

He was impressed by the generosity of the Saltwoods and hoped that he might be able to continue working for them, but he had little faith that they would stand by him when the confrontations that Miss Mbeke foresaw came to pa.s.s. The English were excellent people, but too concerned with pleasing others.

Sophiatown was no worse in his eyes than Vrededorp: in both places he found strong, honest men fighting to uplift their people and give them hope. Again and again he was struck by this parallel between poor Afrikaners and poor blacks: both groups grappling for roots in an alien city, both sharing poverty and dispossession. He constantly hoped, like old Micah, that blacks and Afrikaners alike would escape their wretchedness. But even as he perceived these relations.h.i.+ps he had a terrible fear that what Miss Mbeke said was right: 'The victory of the poor Afrikaner will be at the expense of the blacks.'

Of the young black intellectuals he had listened to, he found to his surprise that he valued most not Miss Mbeke, who was so fluent in both speech and idea, but the young Swazi who had been to London and who had studied economics. He talked sense. Again and again he laid out the limits of a problem and indicated how it could be solved. It was he who uttered the sentences that influenced Moses most deeply: 'In South Africa last year thousands of black men and women were arrested because they moved about with improper doc.u.mentation in a country which they own as much as the white man.' And 'Sometimes it seems that we have more black children in jail than in school.'

It was not long after he recovered from his stab wounds that the permanent wounding of Moses Nxumalo began. One morning he was stopped by police on Eloff Street, Johannesburg's glittering shopping avenue, and his doc.u.ments were demanded: 'I see you haven't paid your annual tax of one pound. You must come with me.'

With sixteen more black tax-dodgers he was hustled into a police van, but he never got to jail. He was taken instead to a vacant lot, where a different policeman snarled, 'Now, you d.a.m.ned Kaffirs, you listen. Tomorrow you go before the magistrate, he'll give you jail, three months. You know what it's like in there.'

'Yes, Baas.'

'But I'm willing to give you a chance.'

'Yes, Baas.'

'That truck you see over there belongs to a farmer from Hemelsdorp. He needs strong men who can work well. You sign a two-month contract with him, I'll forget about the magistrate, you can forget about jail.'

Moses and most of the others chose Hemelsdorp, Village of Heaven, but the farm to which they were headed lay not in heaven. For twelve hours a day they toiled in the fields; at night they were thrown into a stinking cattle shed, where they lay awake listening to two of their crew who had pneumonia. One morning the older of the pair was dead.

At the end of one fearful month Moses tried to run away, but was captured in the hills beyond Hemelsdorp and dragged back to the farm.

'Miserable Kaffir b.a.s.t.a.r.d!' the farmer screamed. 'Time you learned a lesson.'

The punishment was administered by two of the black overseers, who stripped Moses and bound him about a forty-four-gallon drum. With the rest of the workers forced to watch, he was thrashed with sjamboks till he fainted.

Two days later he was sent back to the fields, but on the first night, when others were asleep, he made another dash for freedom. A black overseer spotted him, but before the man could raise an alarm, Moses knocked him to the ground. When the overseer tried to rise, Moses smashed him in the temple with a large rock, then fled.

For six months he hid in lands along the Limpopo River, then crossed over into Rhodesia, following an ancient route which took him to the Zimbabwe ruins, but he did not tarry there. For two years he worked as kitchen 'boy' in a Bulawayo hotel, and he was at his job one day when a man from Vrymeer found him: 'Your father died last Christmas.'

Moses waited till the end of the month, took his pay and journeyed south, for he was now head of the Nxumalos, and his place was with his people. He slipped in quietly, said nothing to the Van Doorns, who hadn't even noticed his absence, but his family saw the scars on his back. Within a few weeks he was the acknowledged boss boy, and any dream of a more meaningful life vanished.

He said little as he went about his work, but sometimes when he was alone he would look across the veld and swear: 'If I have a son, he will go to college at Fort Hare, and get started right.' This hope compensated for the pain he felt at his own failure.

The Saltwoods made efforts to trace Moses, but when he stayed away for months they supposed that he had merely gone back to his kraal. 'You can never trust a native,' a neighbor said. 'You do everything in the world for a boy like your Moses, and when your back's turned, he steals you blind. How much did he take?'

'I rather think something terrible happened to him,' Laura said. 'He was so willing, so keen to please.'

'No doubt the tsotsis got him.'

'Could be,' Mrs. Saltwood said, but for a long time she continued to wonder about Moses Nxumalo.

In the heady atmosphere of Johannesburg, when the grand strategies of the Broederbond showed their initial signs of succeeding, Piet Krause was thinking one day about the opportunities that would present themselves for a patriotic outburst in 1938, the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Blood River, the culminating event of the Great Trek.

'We must think of something,' he told Johanna as they came home from a meeting of schoolteachers, 'that will stir up the nation and remind the Afrikaners of their heritage.' They discussed a master rally at the site of Blood River, but that location was so far removed from major centers of population that only a devoted few would be able to attend. They thought of a celebration at Blauuwkrantz, but since that lay in Natal, which was notoriously pro-English, they quickly dropped it.

In fact, they could think of nothing original, and then one morning Johanna read that a committee of Afrikaners was considering the erection of a ma.s.sive monument on a hilltop outside Pretoria, a memorial to Blood River and the covenant that was entered into on that sacred day. This excited Piet, and the couple talked of inviting huge numbers of people, even from Cape Town, to the dedication of this proposed monument, and when they saw a sketch of how the building might looka splendid, blunt affair reminiscent of the structures at Great Zimbabwethey became positively dedicated to the task of making this a historic affair.

Johanna said, 'We must see that all parts of the nation cooperate, all the Afrikaner parts, that is,' and she began to construct patterns for the celebration. As a woman, she was of course not allowed to partic.i.p.ate in the Broederbond, but since her husband talked everything over with her and respected her opinions, it was easy for her to feed her ideas through him. She suggested a convocation of religious leaders from all over the world, but discarded this when Piet pointed out that she would have to invite the Pope and certain rabbis. 'What we could do,' she countered, 'is ask the leaders of the Dutch and German churches to join with us.'

On and on went the planning, and then one day Piet suggested the best thing of all: 'What might be a splendid ideawe could see if any of the old ox wagons still existed. There'll be plenty of oxen. Why not build replicas of the old wagons, we have their dimensions, and have two or three of them travel from Graaff-Reinet to the monument. People could dress in the old stylemen could let their beards grow like Piet Retief and Gert Maritz . . .'

For two days the Krauses imagined this cavalcade winding north over the old route, and then Johanna proposed a brilliant concept: 'Piet! Not a cavalcade. Five or six separate wagons. Each starting from a major point.

Detouring slowly to every small town en route. And all converging on Pretoria on December 16. Every Afrikaner in the nation would have to be there.'

It was this plan which Piet Krause presented to the Broederbond leaders.h.i.+p, and he was astonished to find that several prominent members of the railway cultural society had proposed an identical program, except that they visualized only two ox wagons starting from Cape Town. The advantages of Piet's scheme of five or six were recognized and he was a.s.signed the task of organizing the 1938 trek.

'It can be,' Reverend Brongersma predicted to an English newspaper, 'a great outpouring of the Afrikaner spirit. It can at once both unite and ignite.' To a reporter he said, 'It will rejuvenate Afrikaner politics as nothing else could do. I expect wonders from this trek.' In private he added that if sufficient spirit were generated, the Afrikaners might at last succeed in taking South Africa out of its present Union status, making it republican. To any Afrikaner who asked, he said, 'That is the goal we seek,' and if they asked further whether this would mean an exodus or expulsion from the British Empire, he replied, 'Not necessarily. England might like us better as completely equal partners.'

There was, however, one question which he never answered frankly. One night Piet Krause, flushed with his success in launching the wagons, asked, 'Dominee, this time will we join Germany when war comes?' Brongersma did not like to discuss this ticklish situation, for he saw much in contemporary Germany which bothered him. In 1914, like many intelligent Afrikaners, he had felt strongly that his country's future lay with Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany; the latter had good leaders.h.i.+p, power, intellectual force and a strong Lutheran tradition. In retrospect he still believed that it would have been better for the world had Imperial Germany won and imposed her version of peace on troubled areas, but he certainly did not believe that about Adolf Hitler's Germany. He saw too much that disturbed, for if in his great series of lectures at Stellenbosch he had educated the young leaders of his nation, he had also educated himself. He believed every word he spoke in those four carefully reasoned discourses, and believed it even more now. South Africa was a Christian country. It endeavored to combine the best of the Old Testament and the New. It believed in justice for all peoples, and if it insisted upon the separation of races, that was only because G.o.d had done the same, and he believed that his country managed its separation with firmness and justice. He did not like what Hitler was doing and felt that he would have to oppose an intrusion of his concepts into South Africa.

'Will we join Germany this time, Dominee?' Piet repeated. 'I pray the whole world can avoid war,' he replied.

In early 1938 Detleef astounded the committee supervising the trek by announcing that he had found on his farm the only surviving ox wagon that had been used by one of the important leaders of the 1838 period, and when it was dragged forth, the wagon he had slept in during the weeks following the end of the Boer War, carpenters said that whereas it was obviously in ruins, it could easily be restored, and they set about doing so. For weeks various newspapers printed photographs showing the progress of rehabilitation, and when the rubric tc tc-43 was uncovered, correspondents in Grahamstown were able to state what it signified, and recalled the generosity of the English settlers of that period toward a man they trusted. Because of where the wagon had originated, it was proposed that it start its journey to Pretoria from Grahamstown, but Detleef would not permit this; he wanted his wagon to have no contact with Englishmen, so it started from Graaff-Reinet.

The journey north, in those winter days of August 1938, began on a high emotional pitch, with the central square of Graaff-Reinet looking much as it had during the historic Nachtmaals: tents pitched, women in sunbonnets, children playing, men in beards and suspenders. As the wagon moved slowly forward, a tremendous visual remembrance of heroic days, people came from fifty miles to see it pa.s.s, its sixteen st.u.r.dy oxen walking slowly, as their ancestors had done a century ago.

The Tjaart van Doorn Tjaart van Doorn did not go to Bloemfontein, for another wagon was starting from there, but it did move east through the historic sites: Thaba Nchu, Vegkop, the site on the Vaal where the De Groot family was a.s.sa.s.sinated, then east through the concentration-camp towns of Stander-ton and Chrissie Meer. In early December it headed west to Carolina, where the members of Christoffel Steyn's family paid it honor, and then on to Venloo, where descendants of the commando of Paulus de Groot formed an honor guard. When it reached Waterval-Boven, from which Oom Paul Kruger had left for his exile, the emotional strain was intense, and thousands prayed along the roadside as it pa.s.sed. This was a wagon in which women and men of stature had risked their lives and fortunes in the building of a nation, and to see it move so slowly, with such strain and with so cramped a s.p.a.ce for survival, brought tears. did not go to Bloemfontein, for another wagon was starting from there, but it did move east through the historic sites: Thaba Nchu, Vegkop, the site on the Vaal where the De Groot family was a.s.sa.s.sinated, then east through the concentration-camp towns of Stander-ton and Chrissie Meer. In early December it headed west to Carolina, where the members of Christoffel Steyn's family paid it honor, and then on to Venloo, where descendants of the commando of Paulus de Groot formed an honor guard. When it reached Waterval-Boven, from which Oom Paul Kruger had left for his exile, the emotional strain was intense, and thousands prayed along the roadside as it pa.s.sed. This was a wagon in which women and men of stature had risked their lives and fortunes in the building of a nation, and to see it move so slowly, with such strain and with so cramped a s.p.a.ce for survival, brought tears.

On December 13 the Tjaart van Doorn Tjaart van Doorn slowly approached the vast field at the foot of the mound on which the future monument was to stand, and when Detleef and Maria, in their 1838 costumes, saw the throng that awaited them, they stopped the wagon and bowed their heads. What had started as a topic of conversation had expanded to a mighty outpouring of the Voortrekker spirit. Two days before the event, more than eighty thousand Afrikaners camped at the site, and that night Detleef led his wagon into a simulated laager with six others. The oxen were turned loose to graze, as in the old days, and children brought thorn bushes to weave among the wheels to keep away the Zulu. When the moon rose late, and the silhouettes of the wagons stood against the dark horizon, men wakened their families to witness the sight, and improvised choirs chanted the Psalms in Afrikaans. slowly approached the vast field at the foot of the mound on which the future monument was to stand, and when Detleef and Maria, in their 1838 costumes, saw the throng that awaited them, they stopped the wagon and bowed their heads. What had started as a topic of conversation had expanded to a mighty outpouring of the Voortrekker spirit. Two days before the event, more than eighty thousand Afrikaners camped at the site, and that night Detleef led his wagon into a simulated laager with six others. The oxen were turned loose to graze, as in the old days, and children brought thorn bushes to weave among the wheels to keep away the Zulu. When the moon rose late, and the silhouettes of the wagons stood against the dark horizon, men wakened their families to witness the sight, and improvised choirs chanted the Psalms in Afrikaans.

On December 17 Piet Krause rode among the wagons already in position, a.s.suring the men that all was in order; the two major wagons from Pretoria and Cape Town would arrive next morning. By now the crowd approached a hundred thousandfamilies camping on the slopes, as in the old daysand friends.h.i.+ps that had languished for years were renewed with pledges to maintain them.

On this day rumors began to circulate: 'The mayor of Benoni will not be allowed to partic.i.p.ate. He's Jewish. They've told the general not to appear. He's English. Best news of all, Jan Christian s.m.u.ts will not be coming. They want nothing of him in this celebration. He's more English than he is Afrikaner. No speeches in English will be allowed tomorrow.' Piet Krause, the originator of most of these rumors, had personally decreed that what would be the major monument in South Africa must be a purely Afrikaner affair.

On December 18 some two hundred thousand people gathered on the hill south of Pretoria to consecrate the spot on which their monument would rise. If, despite everything they had heard, General s.m.u.ts and other Afrikaner supporters of the government did appear, the occasion would become an affair of state, and 'G.o.d Save the King' would have to be played, but Piet Krause openly avowed that if the band played one note of that anthem, he and a gang of toughs would smash every instrument. Aware of the bitterness of the issue, s.m.u.ts prudently stayed away, and to the joy of the Afrikaners only 'Die Stem van Suid-Afrika' (The Call of South Africa) was played, and many swore that it would soon be the official anthem of the Afrikaner republic when the new nation came into being.

The orations in Afrikaans, one delivered by Reverend Brongersma, were dignified but charged with heavy implications. Hardly any words of historic evocation could be spoken without producing cheers from the ma.s.sed throng, and when symbol-words like Slagter's Nek, Black Circuit and Christoffel Steyn were uttered, the crowd cheered automatically. When heroes were recalledPretorius, Retief, De Grootthe crowd yelled till it was hoa.r.s.e, and as the day waned and the leaders realized how far beyond their expectations their success had been, it began to penetrate to all involved that something more than a celebration had occurred here this day. 'This is the opening gun of our campaign to break away from England altogether,' Piet Krause cried in an ecstasy of patriotism.

He became so mesmerized by that a.s.sembly of two hundred thousand Afrikaners that it was not long before he began to have visions of a vast national uprising, and to discover how this could be orchestrated, he slipped down to Cape Town, boarded a s.h.i.+p for England and quietly crossed to Germany, where he quickly made contact with n.a.z.i leaders.

He was overwhelmed by what he saw. At a tremendous rally in the stadium used by the 1936 Olympics he realized how amateurish the Voor-trekker thing had really been. 'We had all those people in one place,' he told his n.a.z.i guide, 'and did nothing with them. They went away with the same thoughts they had when they came. Next time it must be different.'

He was so intelligent, and appeared to be so highly placed in South African politics, that the men about to launch a total war in Europe were captivated by the possibilities he offered: 'Could you arrange an uprising against the English governmentif war happened to come to Europe?'

'Look at what we did in 1914, without help or guidance from you,' he reminded them. When they admitted that they were ignorant of that affair, he told them of the courageous effort made by men like Paulus de Groot and Jakob van Doorn, who devoted their lives to the struggle for freedom. 'Van Doorn was my father-in-law. De Groot you've heard of, naturally.' They hadn't, so he dropped that subject.

'But what can you do this time?' they asked.

'I give you my solemn promise that Jan Christian s.m.u.ts will not dare call for mobilization. No one would report.'

'The police?'

'They'll fight for Germany.' Recklessly he promised everything, implying that he spoke for all segments of the population. If he did not convince them of his interpretations of South African politics, he did persuade them to invest a modest amount in a potential subversion of that government. They granted the funds on the sensible basis of disrupting the English power at all points, provided the cost proved not too high; they never expected the southern tip of Africa to become a German enclave, but they could reasonably hope for enough disruption to impede the war effort.

With these a.s.surances, Piet Krause, who spoke miserable German, went to Nuremberg for one of the frenzied rallies of mid-1939, when the leaders.h.i.+p knew that war was inevitable, though the people did not. The stadium was filled with ecstatic young men who would shortly die in Greece and Italy and Russia and the North Atlantic and in the skies above England. He heard eleven preliminary speeches, pounding into him the need to exterminate Jews and cleanse the bloodstream. He appreciated the enormous appeal of the word Volk and decided to increase its use in South Africa. But when the lesser orators were finished, Herr Goebbels appeared, and after him, Adolf Hitler, the man who would save the world.

Piet Krause stood enthralled as. .h.i.tler unfolded his plan for regeneration, and each word he said applied to conditions in South Africa, so far as Piet was concerned. He was hypnotized by Hitler's force, his clear logic; and when the wild cheering died, he still stood there, trying to determine how best he could a.s.sist this man in bringing the same kind of order and enthusiasm to South Africa.

That night, in his Nuremberg room, he drafted the blood oath which he would administer to all who later joined him in his enterprise: In the presence of Almighty G.o.d and on the sacred blood of the Volk, I swear that my higher authority will find me obediently faithful and eager to obey in secret any command given me. I shall fight constantly for the victory of National Socialism, because I know that democracy has become like an old shoe which must be thrown away.

If I advance, follow me!

If I retreat, shoot me!

If I die, avenge me!

So help me G.o.d!

When he reached home in midsummer, 1939, his wife could see that he had undergone some thunderclap experience, for he was not the man she had known before. When he confided the responsibilities that had been placed upon him, she knew that she must a.s.sume responsibility for the family, since he would be preoccupied with a score of duties. He started with the police, talking quietly against the local custom of conscripting the whole force into the armed services: 'Don't let them make you go to war. If Jan Christian s.m.u.ts wants you to fight his battles in England, don't permit it. This time England must lose, and when that happens, you and men like you will be in command.'

He was also active with young Afrikaners: 'Do not allow the government to force you into uniform. And for the love of G.o.d, don't volunteer. When the Germans recapture South-West Africa, there'll be a place for you in a real army.'

He asked certain trusted clergymen to preach against partic.i.p.ation in this impending war, and he did effective work among the unions. He talked with schoolteachers, advising them what to say to their pupils, and when war did come, in September of that year, s.m.u.ts found himself unable to order conscription, or to move policemen bodily into the armed forces, or to argue young men into volunteering. In fact, when s.m.u.ts sought to take his country into the conflict on the side of England, he was strongly opposed by those who insisted that it remain neutral. At the final moment South Africa joined the Allies by a vote of only 80-67.

'He is taking us onto the wrong side,' the princ.i.p.al members of the Broederbond cried in dismay, and some of the future leaders of the nation went into detention camps rather than fight against Germany. Piet Krause, escaping police attention, swung into violent action, organizing disruptive squads, which secretly attacked military installations, power lines and even military training camps. Men loyal to the Allies, especially young Afrikaners seen as traitors to the Volk, were a.s.saulted and some were killed.

The government was in pitiful shape to fight a war. It dared not call for nationwide conscription, and those soldiers and policemen who volunteered to serve outside the country were required to wear orange swatches, which distinguished them from others who announced that they would not fight abroad; this presumably divided the men into heroes and cowards. But there was a disadvantage in such a system; Piet Krause's young hoodlums who were against the war could easily spot the men with swatches who were willing to fight for the Allies, and it became fas.h.i.+onable to beat such soldiers up, killing them on occasion.

Piet and his wife did whatever they could to exacerbate such situations, and in the heady days of n.a.z.i victories on all fronts, they received a cryptic message from Berlin: 'Meet Wyk Slotemaker Mafeking.' He was a minor South African actor who had appeared in several German films, absorbing propaganda as he worked, and when Piet encountered him at a ramshackle hotel he whispered, 'I have weapons, fifteen thousand American dollars, and plans to a.s.sa.s.sinate s.m.u.ts.'

'The hour is at hand!' Piet exulted.

It was a sorely divided South Africa that tried to prosecute this war. Johanna van Doorn and her sister-in-law Maria prayed daily for a German victory and hoped that it would be of such magnitude that England would be crushed forever. Detleef agreed with them in principle, but had reservations about Adolf Hitler and real doubts as to whether South Africa would gain much from a German victory in Africa.

The Saltwoods of New Sarum, led by Maud Turner Saltwood, now a feisty sixty-nine, were totally supportive of the Allied cause and were overjoyed when the United States joined in. Her daughter-in-law, Laura Saltwood, Noel's wife, organized canteens to help England and was distraught when some of them were vandalized by Piet Krause's storm troopers.

The Saltwoods of De Kraal and the Van Doorns of Trianon faced difficulties in determining their allegiances, for Timothy Saltwood, V.C., was married to Clara van Doorn, a stalwart Afrikaner. Like many similar families, they prayed quietly that the war would end and did not parade their emotions.

The Nxumalos were perplexed. As a family that had always been loyal to General de Groot, they at first favored a German victory, but when the African National Congress pointed out that Herr Hitler thought even less of blacks than he did of Jews, they realized that in his moment of victory they were going to be in trouble, so gradually they transferred their moral support to the English. They were astounded as they watched contending elements within the white population fight each other, and slowly they realized that the Afrikaners would win, here in South Africa if not in Europe, and that when they did, they were going to be very harsh with the blacks. Old Micah, at the end of a long, wild life of fighting great battles without weaponsMajuba, Spion Kop, the raid into the Capehad sadly a.s.sured his family: 'Whoever wins, we lose.'

The heaviest burden of moral decision fell upon Reverend Brongersma; as the son of a family that had provided five commandos in the Boer War, he was staunchly pro-Afrikaner and his whole sympathy had to be with their nationalist and republican aspirations. His lectures at Stellenbosch had not dealt with this aspect of South African life; he had avoided the issue lest he give offense to the English half of his community. But on balance, and looking at the entire world as he was permitted to understand it, he could not see that England had ever exhibited any great moral superiority. Their record in India and South Africa did not impress him, and he suspected that most of what was commendable in the United States stemmed from its non-English immigrants. So he would be quite content to see a German victoryexcept for the fact that no Christian could remain blind to the awful excesses of Hitlerism. The n.a.z.is had perpetrated crimes against the family, the church, the youth of the nation, and certainly against the Jews. Sitting alone in his study, his tall body hunched over at times, at other times thrown far back as he propped his legs on his desk, he wrestled with this problem: n.a.z.ism, using the most exalted impulses of the human race, seems to release the lowest urges of the human animal. Leave Germany out of it. There must be millions of people in America who would gladly staff a n.a.z.i prison. G.o.d knows we could find them here in South Africa. And one of the ugliest, I am afraid, is my good friend Piet Krause. Like a dog, he grabs hold of one idea, gnaws at it, worries it, and allows it to obsess him.

He felt that in common decency, but also for the good name of the Broederbond, which did not sponsor such behavior, he must talk with Piet, but when he tried to reason with him, he found the former schoolteacher gla.s.sy-eyed with dreams, and in the end he dismissed him as hopeless. But after the disappointing session he did consult with Frykenius, who was still Piet's superior in the brotherhood, and implored him to summon Krause back to Venloo, where together they might knock some sense into him. This Frykenius agreed to do, because he, too, was worried by the excesses Piet was engineering.

Krause, as an obedient member of the Broederbond, came down from Johannesburg, but as soon as he saw that Reverend Brongersma was with Frykenius he bristled: 'Dominee, we do not seek your counsel.'

'Piet,' Frykenius said, 'sit down.'

But even after the two older men had spread before him their a.n.a.lysis of the harm he was doing, he refused to accept their rebuke: 'Have you two any idea of the great forces set in motion by the ox wagons? This country is seething with patriotism.'

'Don't use anything as precious as patriotism for a wrong purpose,' Brongersma cautioned.

'Dominee, there's to be a great uprising!'

When he heard these words the predikant sat back, his hands folded in his lap. He knew that what Piet had just said was true: there was going to be a tremendous uprising of the Afrikaner spirit, so vast that it would sweep Jan Christian s.m.u.ts and his English ways right out of office and keep them out forever, so vast that every aspect of life in the country would be modified. Because of the spirit generated by the ox wagons, the Afrikaner was on the verge of victories which only the idealist had dreamed of. South Africa would quit the empire. No more would bands play 'G.o.d Save the King,' no more would Englishmen sit in the cabinet. The Afrikaner nation would be free to solve its racial difficulties in its own just way. And strife would end.

'Piet,' the predikant said softly, 'you've won your victory. Don't contaminate it with violence.'

'Dominee, the real victory is just beginning! Herr Hitler is about to sweep the English from the seas. America can do nothing, he'll sink their s.h.i.+ps. His principles will rule this land.'

When Frykenius tried to soften this tirade, Piet cried, 'You men have a choice you must make in a hurry. Are you for the revolution that's breaking, or against it?'

'Piet,' Frykenius reasoned, 'you know what the aims of the Broederbond have always been. Of course we're for an Afrikaner triumph. But not on your violent terms. The rioting in the streets, that's got to stop.'

Piet drew back as if dissociating himself from the timid approach of the Bond. 'You men in the Broederbond. I see your kind in Pretoria and Johannesburg all the time. You're like a pretty girl who gives a boy a kiss, three kisses, a dozen, then runs away when he wants to get down to business. Well, I'm getting down to business. I have work to do, and I doubt that we'll be meeting any more.'

In a frenzy he dashed out and went to Vrymeer, burst into the kitchen and presented Detleef with an ultimatum: 'Either you join us this night or you miss your chance to lead the nation when we triumph.' When Detleef asked for details, Piet thrust a typed card into his hand, crying excitedly, 'Take this oath. Now. And tonight you ride with us... if we get instructions from Berlin.' Before Detleef could respond to such a commitment, Piet said with urgency, 'I must use your radio,' and through the shortwave screeching he listened to Radio Zeesen: 'Good evening, dear and loyal friends in South Africa. This is your favorite program, By Kampfuur en Ketel [By Campfire and Kettle]. Today our glorious Fiihrer has enjoyed victories on all fronts. The decadent democracies cringe and crumble. [Here came a series of coded instructions, at which Piet Krause leaped with excitement.] Trusted friends in South Africa . . .'

Neither he nor Detleef heard the final words, for Piet snapped off the radio and asked bluntly, 'Well, Brother, do you join our revolution?' and faced with that moment of decision, Detleef finally concluded that he distrusted Adolf Hitler and doubted his ultimate victory.

'I can't accept such an oath,' he said.

'Heroes can,' Piet said, and he was off.

He drove recklessly from Venloo to Waterval-Boven, where he picked up two conspirators who had taken the oath, then west to Pretoria, where Wyk Slotemaker, the one-time actor eager to a.s.sa.s.sinate s.m.u.ts, joined them, then down to an army base south of Johannesburg, where they were scheduled to blow up a major ammunition dump. When the actor saw the intricacy of the barbed wire, he drew back, and this also deterred the other two, but Piet, inflamed with memories of Nuremberg and Berlin, and visualizing the same kind of glory breaking over South Africa, crept forward alone, dynamite strapped to his back.

His careless use of wire clippers activated a warning bell in the guardrooms, and seven sharpshooters streamed out as huge searchlights flashed on. An Afrikaner from Carolina who had volunteered for s.m.u.ts' army drew a bead on the dark figure creeping toward the ammunition, and fired. His bullet struck the package on Piet's back, detonating it and blowing him to shreds, but even so, Krause gained a limited victory, for he had reached a spot so close to the dump that his explosion ignited combustiblesand through the long night shattering concussions threw flames far into the sky.

In 1946, when Detleef and Maria van Doorn were once more peaceful farmers at Vrymeer, they were visited by his sister Johanna, a widow with a minor job in Johannesburg. She came with a proposal from a group of persons much interested in the welfare of the nation, and although Detleef was suspicious of almost anything she did these days, he had to listen, for whenever he met with her his first impression was of that evening in the camp at Chrissiesmeer when she apportioned the food delivered to the dead Tant Sybilla, and weighed it in her pale hands, giving him the larger share. He was alive today because of her courage and generosity.

'Detleef, and this concerns you too, Maria. In business the English are proving much more clever than we suspected. We've made almost no headway in penetrating their offices of power. We just don't have enough trained young men. d.a.m.nit all, our best people go down to Stellenbosch, and what do they study? Religion, of which we have far too much. Philosophy, which is of use to no one. Some history. Some literature. A little science. What we need is accountants and bankers and managers.'

'I certainly have no capacity in those fields,' Detleef protested.

'Of course you don't. Because you wasted your time at Stellenbosch. Playing rugby.'

'Wait a minute! Don't you say anything against rugby.' When she had railed against religion a few moments before, he had remained silent, but he could not do so if she spoke against rugby.

'Forget that. We've decided that what we must do is place men like you who can speak good English . . . Well, what I mean is . . . you must take one of the permanent secretarys.h.i.+ps with the committees in Parliament.'

'That pays nothing!'

'Of course it doesn't. That's the point. We slip you in there. n.o.body notices because no Englishman would want the job. And you serve there twenty-five or thirty years . . .'

'I'm already fifty-one.'

'So you serve twenty years. In time you make enormous inroads. It's you who will be drafting the laws. And we will gain by indirection what we can't win head-on.'

She had with her a list of some forty inconspicuous vacancies, not one of which would be mentioned in the newspapers when it was filled: a series of jobs which might have tempted a boy out of high school, but not Detleef. They were mostly in agencies of the government dealing with financial or business affairs, in which he felt no competence, but as he was returning the paper to her, his eye fell upon one line, off to itself, relating to an office so small it provided only one vacancy: Commission on Racial Affairs. Idly he said, 'Now, if a man had to accept an a.s.signment . . .'

'Which?' she pounced.

'That one.'