Alternate Generals (24 page)

Amazing that they still come to hear me, he thought, taking his place with difficulty behind the podium and staring into a sea of close to half a million mostly white faces. Did they understand the irony of unveiling the Voortrekker Monument on Dingaan's Day, he wondered, or were they too entrenched in the Nationalist credos, in their talk of
Die swart gevaar
, the black danger, and
Die kaffer op sy plek
, the nigger in his place, to remember the freedoms that the Voortrekkers sought as they crossed the land?

He had said many times that he considered apartheid to be "a crazy concept, born of prejudice and fear." He would say it today, if he thought for a second that it could make a difference.

He did not say it. Instead, bracing his shoulders and straightening his spine, he drew from Walt Whitman's
Study in the Evolution of Personality
.

"We must look to the future," he began, his expression carefully benign, his voice gentle, his hands quietly at his sides to avoid his long habit of placing one or both of them at the back of his hip, thus putting his body under further strain. Later, he thought, he would rest.

Later.

But he did not rest, not until many months had passed and his body insistently rendered him mostly supine with a heart problem that he could not ignore. Only then did he return again to the Rain-Queen's warning. Bored, determined that he would not write his memoirs in the way of other used-up old men rendered incapable of making new memories, he allowed his family to think that he had fallen into a coma.

Contrary to what Mary Shelley might have believed, it was not merely poets who indulged in waking dreams, he thought, with a rare touch of humor. Then, without further ado, he used the now-well-practiced techniques he had learned from the Rain-Queen. First, he concentrated on becoming conscious of his breathing. When he could feel its movement inside his body, he focused on producing a circle of white light which he moved slowly toward his heart. Feeling its heat, he rode its beam systematically, chronologically, toward his past.

He began with Adam—

"Nee, Master Jannie. No. You are wrong."

The ten-year-old bristled, then smiled down at the wrinkled little Hottentot. He could never stay angry at Adam; the old man told too many good stories. "I still think the English are the best at everything." He stood at attention, executed a clumsy salute, and shouted, "Long live the King."

"The Scots," Adam said. "They are most courageous people."

"Because the men wear skirts?"

Adam laughed. "
Nee, Kleinbaas
," he said.

Jannie's body relaxed when he heard the pet name. Once Adam called him Little Master, he was assured of forgiveness. "Why, then, Adam?"

"Because they are truly God's chosen people. One day, when you are old like me, you will look back on your life and see how much the Scots have influenced you."

"Your name?"

"Winston Spencer Churchill . . . sir."

Smuts examined the young man who had been brought before him. He looked like a ruffian, disheveled and defiant.

"Commandant Botha informs me that you were captured on a British train."

The young man nodded. Smuts let it pass.

"I am told that you call yourself a journalist, in which case you are correct to be claiming immunity as a non-combatant."

Churchill looked as if he were about to speak. Smuts held up his hand. "I have also been told that you were wearing a pistol, in which case this detention is the least of what you deserve." He paused for a moment. "Tell me Mr.—um—Churchill, for what purpose would a journalist be carrying a pistol?"

"I acquired it for a journey I hope to make to the Drakensberg, sir."

"The Drakensberg?" Smuts raised an eyebrow. "What draws you there?"

"You have read H. Rider Haggard, have you not, sir?" Churchill asked.

This time it was Smuts who nodded.

"Then you are doubtless familiar with his tales of the Zulu warrior, Umslopogaas, and with the Lovedu tribe about which Haggard wrote."

"Of course, but—"

Smuts stopped and watched as Churchill took from his pocket a rolled sheaf of papers. "Here," he said. "If you would be so good as to read this, sir, you will see that I have researched the supposed death of Umslopogaas, the Zulu, as Mr. Haggard described it. As the result of my studies, I have come to believe that it did not happen that way. In fact, I believe that Umslopogaas remains alive. I do not think that even you, sir, would venture into the territory of the Mines of King Solomon without protection."

"You may or may not be a journalist, but you do spin an interesting tale. I will read this," Smuts said. "Take him away."

Upon reading the notes, Smuts persuaded General Joubert to release Winston Spencer Churchill, only to find that the young Englishman had already managed to make good his escape.

"And what do you think of us now, Dr. Smuts?" the Dean of St. Andrew's University asked, balancing a cup of tea in one hand and moving a square of shortbread toward his mouth.

"I would hardly have made my address on freedom here had I not admired your . . . mettle," Smuts replied.

In fact, though he had never let go of his admiration for the British, it consistently amazed and amused Smuts how right Adam had been about the Scots. How daunting, someday, to historians and students of his life and philosophies when they discovered that the two singlemost influential people in his life had been a wizened Hottentot, who taught him that color had naught to do with humanity, and the Modjadji, a Lovedu Rain-Queen . . . descendent of the very same Ayesha immortalized by his friend Churchill's beloved Rider Haggard—

Seated in the garden, his loving family attentive to his needs, Smuts longed for the next opportunity to continue the unusual journey which was fast becoming his obsession. In order to wait more patiently, he exchanged pleasantries with his wife.

"What have we learned in this life, do you think?" she asked.

He thought for a moment. He would like to have said that, if he had learned nothing else in what was approaching eight decades of life, he had learned that greatness was to be found in strange small places, in the mouths of farmhands and rainmakers, the deeds of footsoldiers, the written word of philosophers and poets. Instead he answered in the form of a question.

"What might our lives have been without Walt Whitman?" he asked. "Without Shakespeare and Shelley?"

Isie reached for his hand and held it fast.

Who was it, Smuts asked himself, who wrote that the poet ". . . must write as an interpreter of nature, and the legislator of mankind, and consider himself as presiding over the thoughts and manners of future generations; as a being superior to time and place?" When he could not remember, he cursed old age. Surely a man who had learned Greek in six days could remember the source of a quote that had so largely influenced his life.

He quoted Shelley: "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," he said. Hearing the words out loud, he remembered that they were stolen from Walter Savage Landor, and he felt better.

That night, Smuts appeared to sink into another of his comas—

Smuts saw himself astride a horse, passing a soldier who had collapsed with an attack of malaria, and he knew he was fighting against General von Lettow-Vorbeck and battling malaria with an endless stream of quinine. He was heading a reconnaissance force, in its first march to M'Buyuni. Outside of wondering by what miraculous means blacks and coloreds avoided malaria, he had not complained, but knowing the discomfort of the disease he jumped from his horse, placed the soldier on his saddle, and walked and talked the enlisted man the rest of the way back to camp.

Behind him his men straightened their shoulders. Softly, they began to sing, chanting to
John Peel
:

 
"D'ye ken Jan Smuts when he's after the Hun?
D'ye ken Jan Smuts when he's got them on the run?
D'ye ken Jan Smuts when he's out with his gun?
And his horse and his men in the morning?"
 

Surrounded by the enemy, outfoxed and outnumbered, still they sang his praises.

Depositing the soldier with the medics, Smuts isolated himself and invited the council of Adam, who said, "I do not care much for the Zulus, Kleinbaas. They are too free with the
sjambok
. Neither the rhino nor the hippo were created to be made into whips which damage the human beast's body and spirit. As for you, Kleinbaas, you could do worse than use T'Chaka's bull as your weapon."

T'Chaka's bull. Of course! The concept of the horns of a bull, enveloping the enemy by an outflanking movement.

Smuts rallied his forces for a thrust at Moshi, the end of the Tanganyika-Kili railway. There they attacked the enemy with rifle butt and bayonet and emerged victorious.

The next morning, he began his lessons in loathing the Germans. Dawn brought a view of mounds of Askari troops, the dead mixed with the wounded. Upon their bodies lay water bottles which had been filled with raw spirits—and not a sign of the German leaders who had left their wounded, sick and dead for the enemy to take care of.

"
Bwana unkubwa
," the wounded moaned as he bent to speak with them. "Great Master."

"Tell me, sir, did you ever read my notes about Umslopogaas the Zulu?" Churchill asked.

"I did indeed," Smuts answered. "In fact, they so fascinated me that I hastened to advise General Joubert to secure your release . . . only to find that you had already done so yourself."

Churchill guffawed with such delight that he almost fell off his chair. "Then it appears I foiled your government twice," he said. "I did prove my theory, you know?"

Smuts stopped and watched as Churchill pulled from his desk a second rolled sheaf of papers. "Here," he said. "If you would be so good as to read this, sir, you will learn 'The True Tale of the Final Battle of Umslopogaas the Zulu.'"

"Stop here," Smuts ordered his driver. "I need to walk."

Without hesitation, the driver stopped at the Place de la Concorde, causing havoc to the traffic.

The General hardly noticed. Entering the Champs Élysées on foot, he marched on the city's concrete in an effort to still his body's restlessness and his mind's anguish.

"I should not be here," he said. "I am a man of the veld, a specialist in grasses—"

He was en route to Versailles and the signing of the Peace Treaty and should have felt at ease, but all that he saw in his mind's eye was the image of dead and dying soldiers, left behind by the Germans, and the sound of the
sjambok
being used to whip prisoners for the joy of causing pain.

"South Africa must fight the German folly," he said to the Paris sky. "We can do no less."

Smuts rose to address the fifty-four representatives of the League of Nations, whose formation was in largest part due to his own efforts.

". . . I want the disputes of mankind in the future, the troubles that arise and lead to war, to be treated in the family spirit," he said. "Consider that we are at the family table. . . ."

He was, he declared, in favor of a Jewish home in Palestine, as must anyone who, like he, was a lover of all humanity.

On board ship, returning to South Africa and lulled into believing that he had done something real for the world, he learned of the Quota Bill being supported in his absence by his own United Party. The bill, it seemed, named the Jews as undesirable immigrants.

Raging, he returned to devote himself to changing his party's support of what he considered to be an outrageous bill. His opponents mocked him and called him Smutskowitz; a settlement near Haifa, Ramat Jochanan, was named after him in recognition of his support. Unmindful of the former and proud of the latter, he continued to rage. So great was his fury, so inspired his oratory, that in the final vote his party stood unanimously against the bill. He was ". . . supporting a legalistic principle, not a people," he said. "It was a case of justice—"

In early September, Smuts gathered his strength and rallied. He talked about horseback riding again and asked to be driven to the bushveld farm so that he could enjoy the sight of the wheatfields while they were greenest. He was almost done with revisiting his past and knew that he was dying, but he had not yet found that task of which the Modjadji had spoken. Somehow, he must hasten the process.

Hoping that being in the outdoors at this time of the year he loved so much would provide inspiration, he asked to be taken into the garden and left alone. "Do this for me,
Ouma
," he said, using the Afrikaans word for grandmother because that was what she was called by the many who loved her.

Since he seemed to be feeling better, Isie happily did as he had asked. "Rest," she said. "Later our grandchildren will come to visit and we will take photographs. They grow so fast, those young ones."

His wife was hardly out of sight when Smuts again summoned his past. It came to him this time in a whirl of color and sound. As if he were inside a kaleidoscope, he viewed the remaining highlights of his life—

Dining with Roosevelt in Cairo, he says, "We are both Dutchmen. Small surprise we get on splendidly."

Churchill is handing him two oil paintings of the pyramids, done by his own hand. "One will hang in Libertas in Pretoria," Smuts tells his old friend, "the other in my family home."

His seventy-fifth birthday. He is handed a kist made of an old pear tree, found dying in a hamlet of Malmesbury.

Seventy-seven now. As a personal tribute to his longtime friendship with King George V and Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth and her family visit South Africa. They speak of the food parcels he sent to the palace during the First World War, and of the fact that Queen Victoria addressed Isie as "Dear Ouma." He tells them proudly that von Lettow-Vorbeck, now living in South Africa on a pension he personally had secured for their sometime enemy, addressed her in the same way. Then he shows them the view from the top of Table Mountain and takes an ostrich feather from the Queen's hat to place it jauntily in the band of his best panama. They spend a few days together at the Mont-aux-Source in the Drakensberg—