The Covenant (104 page)

They were standing thus when someone informed Tjaart that his granddaughter was alive. “Sybilla!” he shouted, but when he dashed back to lift her in his arms, crying, “Thank God, thank God!” she merely looked at him. Her father had warned her not to speak, and it would be some days before she did.

As soon as Jakoba and the Nels were buried, Tjaart headed for the far end of the wagon line to ascertain what had happened to the Ryk Naudés, and as he walked, dozens of Voortrekkers halted him to ask, “What news of Retief?” and he was afraid to tell them of Paulus’ conviction that the entire party had been slain.

When he found the Naudé wagon, the people of that group were engaged in burying thirteen of their dead. Among them was Ryk; that feckless youth had refused to put his wagons into laager, had been out sporting with some new girl, and had rushed back in time to face a circle of Zulu, who hacked him to pieces.

At the end of the common grave Tjaart found Aletta, her arm in a sling, her face scarred by a long gash; as always, she stood there betraying no emotion, and even when Tjaart signaled to her across the fallen bodies, she merely nodded. Since the Voortrekkers were still without a clergyman, a layman was needed to read from the
Bible, and Balthazar Bronk volunteered: he offered a fine prayer and the mass grave was closed.

Then, as if a mighty hand were pushing him from the back, Tjaart stepped around the grave, walked solemnly to where Aletta stood, and addressed her before some other womanless man might lay claim: “You can’t live alone, Aletta.”

“It would be impossible,” she said.

Her husband was dead. Her wagon was burned. She had no place to sleep, no clothes other than those she wore. She had no money, no food, no relatives. She was alone on unprotected land which the Zulu might overrun at any moment, so with a last tearless look at the grave, she held out her good hand, encouraging Tjaart to take it and guide her down the long line of wagons till they reached his.

With dismay she saw that he, too, had nothing: no bed, no box of Jakoba’s clothes, no wagon ready for the road—nothing but a brown-gold pot and a Bible. There was no Dutch minister to marry them, but this widow and this widower were wed of their own determination; and as they started retrieving the possessions scattered about, messengers came crying: “Retief and all his men are slain.”

It was obvious that God had struck His chosen people with a series of punishing blows. For their arrogance and their sins he had chastised them, and as they huddled in their depleted laagers, awaiting the next assault of the Zulu, they tried to unravel the mystery of their wrongdoing.

Every man who died at Dingane’s Kraal had loved God and had endeavored to live according to His laws, yet all had perished. Every woman and child murdered at Blaauwkrantz had been faithful to the Bible, but they had been slaughtered. If ever an assembly of people had just cause to rebel against their deity, it was the Voortrekkers that summer of 1838, but they reacted quite differently.

Spiritually they sought within themselves the reasons for their reverses, and decided that they had been lax in their attention to worship and in the keeping of the commandments. For example, Tjaart van Doorn knew in his heart that the adulteries in his family had been the cause of the savage retribution he had suffered, and yet—why had he been saved and faultless Jakoba punished?

Aletta continued to perplex him. In the days following the massacre, her principal concern had been with the cut across her cheek:
“Will it leave a scar?” Wives showed her how to sterilize the wound in cow’s urine and salve it with butter, and when she was assured that it would heal without a major blemish, she was satisfied. In her relations with Tjaart she continued as she had always been—completely passive, interested in nothing, absorbed only in herself. Once when he returned to their tent exhausted from digging trenches, he wanted to discuss the problem of finding someone who might lead them against the Zulu, but she had no opinions on any of the men. In some exasperation he asked, “How about Balthazar Bronk?” and she put her hand to her chin, studied the matter, and said, “He might be the one,” even though she knew he had run away at Veg Kop.

In the hard task of erecting some sort of defense he noticed this peculiarity: that the boy Paulus toiled like a man while the woman Aletta behaved like a child. He could not help comparing her with Jakoba, who would have been at his side as the new barricades were being built, and he began to understand why Ryk Naudé, married to this extremely beautiful girl, had nevertheless preferred Minna.

When, thanks to Tjaart’s stubborn work, these Voortrekkers felt moderately safe from Zulu attack, they returned to the Book of Joshua to review the steps by which he had triumphed at Jericho over his Canaanite enemies, and now the loss of Theunis Nel was felt, for he would have been eager to explicate such matters. In his absence, Tjaart had to serve as principal guide, bending over the charred cover of his Bible to read the relevant verses:

Then he swore grimly: “That’s what we’ll do to Dingane’s Kraal. Total destruction.” By what specific steps this would be accomplished he did not know, for he considered himself inadequate to lead. What he could do was reflect the stubborn Boer determination to see this job finished, and if any man wavered, he laid forth the damning statistics: “At the kraal, one hundred and two of our men killed. Here at Blaauwkrantz, two hundred and eighty-two. Out in the countryside, at least seventy more slain in their sleep. We demand retribution.”

“How can we attain it,” Balthazar Bronk asked, “when we are so few and they so many?”

“I don’t know,” Tjaart said, “but I’m sure God will show us a way.”

And then into camp rode the man who would achieve miracles. He was Andries Pretorius, clean-shaven, younger than the other leaders, a person of substance in Graaff-Reinet. He was extremely tall and bulky, slow to reach decisions but resolute when he had done so. Like most of the leaders, he had been married more than once, with eight children by his first wife, three by his second. A grave, thoughtful man, he had hurried north in response to a summons from the beleaguered Voortrekkers. With his gun, his pistols and a thick-bladed cutlass, he strode into camp on 22 November 1838 and said simply, “I have come to help you. Within the week we shall ride forth to destroy Dingane.”

The first thing he did was follow the cautious precept of Joshua: “I want two men to spy out the enemy,” and he designated a curious pair—Tjaart van Doorn, whom he trusted because of his determined commandos against the Xhosa, and Balthazar Bronk, who had behaved so badly in previous battles. He wanted Tjaart because he knew how to fight, Bronk because he was a clever, wily man.

Together the two men left Blaauwkrantz, eased themselves cautiously northward, and returned to camp with the somber news that Dingane had begun to assemble his regiments for a massive strike: “He will have twelve thousand men to throw against us. How many will we have?”

Pretorius, like Joshua, had gathered all available soldiers, and he told them, “The odds against us will be thirty-to-one. But we will carry the fight to them. We will select the place of battle.”

Only five days after the arrival of this dynamic man, the commando was in motion. It consisted of four hundred and sixty-four men, with the usual complement of Coloureds and blacks. About half had fought against the Zulu in one capacity or another; half had never opposed any black regiment. With them they had sixty-four wagons, absolutely essential in the plan Pretorius had devised. In the forefront was the rebuilt
TC
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By this swift movement General Pretorius appropriated tactical advantage; the battle would be fought where he decided, and on terrain favorable to his design. With brilliance he selected a steeply
banked corner where a deep gully joined a small river; and in this fortunate area he placed his laager beside a deep pool which recently had been used by hippopotamuses for their bathing (Seekoei Gat, the Boers called it, Sea-cow Hole). He was thus protected on the south by the deep gully, on the east by the hippo pool, and to the north and west by the chain of sixty-four wagons, which he lashed together with enormous thongs, trek chains and great accumulations of thorn bush. At points along the perimeter, and positioned so they would face the maximum number of Zulu rushing to attack the laager, he placed four small cannon capable of firing an immense load of pellets, iron bits, chain links and rocks.

“We are ready,” he said at dusk on Saturday, 15 December 1838, and that night was the longest that these embattled Boers would ever know. They were few, and on the hills surrounding them on all sides gathered the Zulu regiments, men who had fought across the face of Africa, sweeping all before them. Inside the laager the nine hundred trek oxen lowed, hundreds of horses fretted, disturbed by the fires the Zulu maintained, worried by the sounds that encroached on all sides. Pretorius, moving among his troops, told them, “We must station our men along the entire perimeter, for if we fire only from one direction, the animals, especially our horses, will swarm away from the noise, and they might escape through upset wagons. Without horses, tomorrow we would be lost.”

When all the details were perfected, the time was ripe for the crucial moment in Boer history. With the death of Theunis Nel, the Voortrekkers had no one who even presumed to be a predikant, but they had numerous men who knew the Old Testament almost by heart, and one of these was Sarel Cilliers, an educated farmer of deep religious conviction, and upon him fell the responsibility of reminding his fellow Voortrekkers of the sacred mission upon which they were engaged, and he recited those passages from the thundering Book of Joshua which presaged the forthcoming battle:

Then Cilliers climbed upon the carriage on which a beloved cannon named Ou Grietjie (Old Gertie) rested, and repeated for the last time the covenant upon which the Voortrekkers had agreed:

In the darkness the Voortrekkers whispered their Amens; they were now a nation established by God, in pursuit of His objectives, and those who were able to sleep the few hours before dawn did so with easy consciences, for they knew that God Himself had brought them to this river to face odds that would have terrified ordinary men.

The Battle of Blood River, as it came understandably to be called, had no parallel in recent world history. Twelve thousand, five hundred highly trained and capable Zulu threw themselves over a period of two hours at a cleverly entrenched foe, and without modern weapons of any kind, attempted to overwhelm a group of tough, resolute men armed with rifles, pistols and cannon. It was a hideous affair. The Zulu warriors stamped their feet, shouted their war cries, and drove straight at the laager. The men inside stood firm, waited for the enemy to come within six feet of the wagons, then fired into their chests. Those warriors fell, but others replaced them, expecting their cowhide shields to protect them, and they, too, marched right into the muzzles of the guns, and they, too, fell.

A thousand Zulu died in this way, then two thousand, but still they came on. Within the first hour the Zulu generals, supposing that the white men inside the laager must be depleted, decided to throw at them their two finest regiments, those entitled to wear all-white shields, white armlets and knee decorations, and it was awesome to see these excellent men, all of an age and a height, march unswervingly over the bodies of their fallen comrades, straight at the laager.

Inside, General Pretorius told his men, “This may be the flood tide. Hold your fire.” So the riflemen waited while the gunners loaded
Ou Grietjie with a murderous load of scrap and leaden slugs; and when these crack regiments had marched directly to the muzzles of these creaking guns, Pretorius gave the signal. Ou Grietjie and her three ugly sisters spewed out their lethal dose right into the faces of the Zulu, while riflemen from the flanks poured hot fire at them.

Not even the White Shields could absorb punishment like this, but they did not falter or run. They simply came on, and died.

Now Pretorius made an astounding decision: “Mount your horses. We shall drive them from the field.” So about a hundred Voortrekkers leaped upon their steeds, waited till riflemen opened a gateway through the laager, and galloped out in a firing, slashing foray that startled the Zulu. Down one front the Voortrekkers rode, killing at a fantastic rate; then along another, cutting and firing; then deep into the heart of the enemy concentration, galloping like wild avengers; then back and forth three times, as if they were immortal.

After slaying hundreds of the enemy, they galloped back inside the laager; the only rider in this amazing sortie to suffer a wound was General Pretorius. He had his hand cut by an assegai.

Now Ou Grietjie was moved from her position along the wagon arc and dragged by hand to one of the corners, from which she could fire straight down the gully into which four hundred Zulu had crept, hoping in this way to cut in behind the wagons. Then the cannon was loaded with an assortment of nails and scrap, and pointed directly into the gully and discharged. It was loaded again, and fired. And before the hidden Zulu could clamber out, a third salvo hit, killing the remnants.