Old Master The Life Of Jan Christian Smuts

OLD MASTER

Thereof
Jan Christian Smuts

RENE KRAUS

1944

E. P. DUTTON & CO., Inc.

New Tork

To

Audrey,

the inspiration,

in gratitude.

CONTENTS
Part One-STORM AND STRESS

CHAPTER PAGE

1. PROBLEM CHILD 11

2. TRANSVAAL INTERLUDE 18

3. SPRINGTIME IN STELLENBOSCH 29

4. ENGLAND YES AND NO 38

5. TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION 46

6. MISTER STATE ATTORNEY 59

7. UNTIL THE RAINS FALL 77

8. PRETORIA PRIDE AND FALL 91

9. COMMANDO 104

Part Two-POWER

10. "VEREENICTNG" STANDS FOR UNION 111

11. THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH 121

12. RECONCILIATION 133

13. EARLY TRIUMPH 143

14. GANDHI 153

15. UNION 164

16. THE RISE AND FALL OF GENERAL HERTZOG 177

7

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

17. PRELUDE TO CIVIL WAR 188

18. THfi-DKMH OF GENERAL DE LA REY 206

19. THE FIVE SHILLING REVOLUTION 219

20. TWO-FRONT WAR 240

21. ON THE ROOF OF THE WORLD 259

22. GENERAL SMUTS* DILEMMA 267

Part Three-PHOENIX

23. UPS AND DOWNS 285

24. DOWNFALL 293

25. THE LEAN YEARS 307
"26. THE SHADOW OF THE SWASTIKA 321

27. PRELUDE TO WAR 331

28. "ELL GAMELAYO WAAH" 347

29. TWO-FRONT WAR AGAIN 356

SO. BLITZ OVER ENGLAND THUNDER IN SOUTH AFRICA 371

31. "OSSEWA ERANDWAG" 389

32. AS THE TIDE FLOWS 403

33. THE FALL OF TOBRUK 416

34. SOUTH AFRICA FIGHTS 425

35. AT THE HELM 443

36. VISION OF THE FUTURE 452
BIBLIOGRAPHY 461

INDEX 463

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OLD MASTER

NOTE

Field Marshal Smuts was christened Jan Christiaan. During his
development which has made him an ardent Briton, while remain-
ing a proud Boer, he dropped the second "a" from his second
Christian name. The correct spelling 7 is now Christian. The Old
Master, however, signs his name merely J. C. Smuts.

During the period this book covers the Afrikander dropped the
**d." Today he prefers to be called Afrikaner.

Defense is spelled with "c" when the word forms part of a name
or title: Defence Force, or Minister for Defence. This is in South
Africa the official spelling.

Part One
STORM AND STRESS

Chapter 1 PROBLEM CHILD

THE OLD MASTER IS A SON OF SOLITUDE. DESCENDED FROM THE

early Boers who were so enamoured of loneliness that they sel-
dom saw smoke rising from a neighbor's chimney, a delicate
infant at the beginning, raised on a cattle and sheep ranch close
to the Cape of Good Hope, he grew during the first seventy-four
years of his life into that patriarchal loftiness that makes his
people compare him to Table Mountain, the crest towering
above the confluence of the Atlantic and the Indian oceans.

No other man in our times has devoted his life so entirely
to bringing people and nations together, to making a whole out
of parts, to co-operation, union, fusion, to the brotherhood of
mankind. But his brothers leave him alone. Except for a model
marriage, the effect of which has deeply influenced the fate of
South Africa, and for his strong feeling for his family, another
predominant trait of the Boers, his innermost self has remained
solitary. He became the chief architect of a new country, the
Union of South Africa, and of a new people, the South Africans.
He suffered the birth pangs, yet seemed indifferent to the pain
he endured. For half a century he steered his people through
every storm. But the waves never succeeded in engulfing him.
The Old Master remained untouched, secluded, very much
himself.

The twenty-fourth of May, 1870, was joyously celebrated in

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OLD MASTER

the old Cape Colony. So, of course, was every twenty-fourth
of May, the birthday of the gracious Queen. The sturdy Dutch,
the majority of the white people in tie colony, were eager to
prove their loyalty to their exalted sovereign. It was, to quote
an old French proverb, a little love and a little faithfulness, and
just a grain of falsehood admixed. Loudly proclaimed allegiance
to the Queen was, first, an expression of a genuine personal
feeling, and, secondly, a perfect excuse for the Dutch people's
own national self-assertion, which, at about this time, began to
show itself.

For a few years the Cape Colony, particularly the Western
Province, the richer and more civilized part of it, had been
in the throes of a religious revival. People prayed all night in
the churches. Small wonder that they spent the night before
the eventful birthday on their knees, praying God to save the
Queen. In this general excitement local news lost much of its
importance. Otherwise, the birth of the Father of the Father-
land, on the very birthday of Her Majesty, would not have
passed all but unnoticed.

The newcomer at Bovenplaats, the farm outside the dorp
Ribeek West, had certainly the right to claim local attention.
Not only in the dorp, but even in die center of the district, the
town of Malmesbury, nine miles to the south and some thirty
miles north of Cape Towneveryone knew and respected the
Honorable Jacobus Abraham Smuts, for a time the representa-
tive of Malmesbury in the Legislative Assembly in Cape Town.
He was a prosperous yeoman who worked his large Zwartland
black earth farm wisely and profitably. Working is perhaps a
slight overstatement. The dirty business of work was done ex-
clusively by Kafirs. The Dutch farmers of this fertile soil, the
land of the vine, the land of golden grain, alternately drenched
with glorious sunshine and ample rainfall, were mere planta-
tion owners. There had been no poverty among them. Jacobus
Abraham Smuts, related to all the fanners in the neighborhood,
was one of those fortunate people. His picture shows a massive,
solid man, rather paunchy the indispensable sign of pros-

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OLD MASTER

perity with well-trimmed whiskers and a short beard surround-
ing a shrewd but jovial face. He was famous for his sober judg-
ment, his wise counsel, his instinct for the right word and the
right thing. Steeped in his puritanical creed, which by no means
entirely excluded a taste for the good things of life, deeply
attached to his somber Calvinistic church, intelligent in a quiet
way, traditionalist in much but believing in real progress, frugal,
thrifty, patient and sometimes petty, a born man of law and a
theologian, he was the typical, peaceful, cautious Dutch fanner
of the colony. Men of his ilk never lost their greatest asset:
their equanimity. When some of the more radical Boers fol-
lowed flie Voortrekkers to the harsh, poor, and inhospitable
North, to live undisturbed by British magistrates and mission-
aries, neither of whom condoned slavery and the shameful
abuse of the black man, men like Smuts pere only shook their
heads. They did not wish to be mixed up in other people's busi-
ness, but they simply could not understand why anyone should
prefer the wild, barren expanses north of the River Vaal, where
man must lead a hard, semi-nomadic life and could at best only
raise rickety cattle, to the rich, fecund soil of home.

Jacobus Abraham Smuts got along well with his English
neighbors in the small towns. In his own house only Tad, today
called Afrikaans, a sort of seventeenth-century Dutch, was
spoken, but the English language, English customs and man-
ners that slowly penetrated the colony did not in the least dis-
turb him. Yet, the times were changing. In 1869, a year before
the birth of his second son, the Suez Canal was opened, threat-
ening to drain the commerce from the shipping lanes around
the Cape of Good Hope. The new short cut might well replace
Cape Town and its hinterland as the halfway house between
England and India. The growing of wine was no longer as prof-
itable. Now a ligger or leaguer, a pipe containing a hundred
and twenty-six gallons sold for no more than three pounds,
whereas a few years earlier it had netted the wine grower five
to six pounds. South African vintages did not really get a fair
chance in the motherland. London was completely unaware of

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OLD MASTER

the fact that the colonial Great Drukenstein compared favor-
ably with better-known foreign wines.

But Jacobus Abraham Smuts took such reverses quietly, and
was resigned to the will of God. One could always turn one's
grapes into brandy, for which there were better chances of
export and, above all, an insatiable market in Cape Town. "It's
a beastly place," admitted an inhabitant of the colonial capital
to an English visitor by the name of Anthony Trollope. "But
we have enough to eat and drink, and manage to make out life
very well. The girls are as pretty as they are anywhere else,
and as kind and brandy is plentiful."

The peace of the Western Province was not disturbed either
by the constant Kafir scare disrupting the poorer and less pro-
gressive Eastern Province. In Bovenplaats, in particular, the
relations between the white master and his family on one side
and the colored labor on the other was patriarchal and idyllic.
The Smuts children grew up with the native boys and girls, and
listened to the tales of the black oldsters, all veterans of the
innumerable Kafir and Zulu wars. While in the Eastern Prov-
ince the maxim was generally accepted that the Kafir must be
ruled with a rod of iron, since he was by nature a thief and
obsessed by the sole idea of stealing cattle, the yeomanry of the
Western Province, largely under the mellowing English influ-
ence, was much more liberal and tolerant. Although the Mo-
hammedan Malays made the best laborers, the increasing Kafir
element, with an ever thinning admixture of the vanishing
Hottentot, was, if idle by instinct, neither as apathetic as sav-
ages, nor quite so indifferent as the Orientals. The Kafir, it was
the general conviction, was not a bad fellow. He was not con-
stitutionally cruel, he learned to work readily, and soon saved
a little property for himself. The conditions under which his
race lived had infinitely improved with the coming of the white
man. But on the other hand the colonials did not doubt for an
instant that if the Kafirs could choose whether the white man
should be driven into the sea or allowed to remain in the coun-
try, the entire race would certainly decide for the white man's
extermination.

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OLD MASTER

The fear that the blacks, forming about four-fifths of the
total population and increasing rapidly in numbers since the
British administration had put a stop to their perennial fratri-
cidal strife, and to their deeply ingrained habit of "eating each
other up" killing one anotherwould one day outvote or out-
fight the white man was the dark cloud overhanging the blue
skies of the Cape Colony. Even now the cloud has not yet dis-
appeared. The constant fear of losing his supremacy is the white
man's nightmare in South Africa. This constant living in terror
explains many anomalies which would otherwise appear inex-
plicable. It is a silent terror. Polite society does not speak of it.
Society was much more polite in mid-Victorian times, in the
Cape Colony as elsewhere. Mother Smuts, ne Catherina Petro-
nella de Vries, would certainly not have tolerated the slightest
allusion to unmentionable topics of conversation in her well-
established farmhouse.

Mrs. Smuts, by all accounts an energetic, strong-willed lady,
was the grande dame of her rural society. Descended from an
old French Huguenot family, many of whom have infused the
blood of the old Boers with their pride and puritanism, she was
strongly religious and traditionalist, but by the same token more
resilient and worldly than the average Boer vrou of her day.
She had received her education in Cape Town, which city had
a famous public library, and a handsome museum, more noted
for its precious collections of South African birds and butterflies,
than for its two stuffed lions and its long-deceased elephant,
not to mention an extremely shaky giraffe. Cape Town was the
city of two beautiful cathedrals most people found the Roman
Catholic cathedral more impressive than the newer Anglican
one, over which Bishop Jones at that time presided. Cape Town
was also renowned for its botanical gardens where all the rich
flora of South Africa flourished; for its castle, close to the sea;
for its observatory, its hospitals and sailors' homes, and last but
not least, for its latest institution: the lunatic asylum at Robben
Island. But above all, Cape Town was a city of artistic and
intellectual endeavour. Music and the French language were
cultivated. Mademoiselle Catherina Petronella de Vries studied

15

OLD MASTER

both. However, when she accepted Jacobus Abraham Smuts 9
proposal of marriage, she resolved to become a good Boer house-
wife. She brought her children up to fear God and no one else.
Her second son, baptized Jan Christiaan, was her problem child.
He had delicate health, and after his birth, seventy-four years
ago, no one, not even his mother, thought he would live long.

Looking back into history, it seems to be more than a mere
coincidence that little Jannie's natal year gave birth to the new
South Africa as well. Two incidents ushered in the new times:
the diamond rush had just started, and on September 1, in
Durban, Natal, a tall, thin, sickly lad, fresh from England, dis-
embarked to join his elder brother, a cotton grower, and to get
rid under the southern sun of a bothersome cough, which might
perhaps be tuberculosis. His name was Cecil John Rhodes.

These two events appeared quite unconnected. But they grew
together. The discovery of diamonds tore South Africa from its
century-long sleep. Fortune hunters from all over the world
transformed the faraway land, literally overnight, into a more
hectic than happy hunting ground. The luckiest of them, and
certainly the most gifted, towering alike above competitors,
foes, and friends, was the coughing lad, an English parson's
son, who at sixteen came to South Africa to work as a farm
hand, and died at forty-eight, the world's diamond and gold
king; yet a scorner of money, which was to him only the shabby,
if necessary, means of realizing his dream which he called the
establishment of a power so strong as to make war impossible
hereafter. The flag that should wave over this tremendous
dream-building was, of course, the Union Jack.

The Boers did not care for the diamond-and-gold rush that
set in. To their Old Testament rigidity which, incidentally,
never prevented them from being shrewd and pennywise bar-
gainersit was the dance around the golden calf; a nauseating
spectacle in which they wished to have no part. They had much
more important things on their minds. In 1872, the Imperial
government granted the Cape Colony full self-government. For
almost twenty years the elected lawmakers had learned the

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OLD MASTER

craft of politics in a sort of shadow parliament that had only
advisory functions. Now they themselves were the law. Under
the gentle guidance of Mr. Molteno, the Prime Minister of the
Cape Colony, who since he had occupied his seat from the
creation of the first House of Assembly in 1854, handled power
as to the manner born, the budding legislators took their first
steps along the stony path of independence. One of their earli-
est acts was to forbid the extermination of the locust, since the
plague was sent by God. Simultaneously, the right to use the
Dutch language in the Cape Parliament was conceded. Mr.
J. G. Luttig, the newly elected member for Beaufort West,
made the first Dutch speech, and all the Boer members of the
House felt better. Jacobus Abraham Smuts was now often ab-
sent from his farm. His new importance called him frequently
to Cape Town. At home, his wife took little Jannie by the hand
and taught him to walk. It was a difficult task. The child, list-
less and pale, showed no real inclination to put one small foot
before the other. Nothing indicated the famous mountain
climber in the making.

Jannie was not yet seven years old when an event, crashing
like thunder, tore South Africa asunder. The Transvaal col-
lapsed.

Chapter 2 TRANSVAAL INTERLUDE

TWENTY MILES NORTH OF NEWCASTLE, NATAL, THE WORLD OF

civilization ended, and the realm of wilderness began. The few
travelers who cared to cross the border noticed immediately
that they had entered the territory of the x South African Repub-

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OLD MASTER

lie, generally called the Transvaal, although no barriers indi-
cated the frontier. But from this point on the roads were almost
impassable. The inns, exclusively run by straggling English-
men or Germans, were primitive. The storekeepers along the
dirt roads charged eighteen pence for a bundle of fodder for
a horse, which they themselves had purchased for threepence
from the farmer. A horse required six bundles per day. A trip to
the Transvaal was an expensive pleasure for the visitor from
Natal. When Sir Theophilus Shepstone undertook the trip, it
became an expensive burden for the English taxpayer, and
there was no pleasure in it at all.

Far from one another stood the Boers' farmhouses, very mod-
est abodes. They usually contained two main rooms with a
small lean-to: the sleeping place. The fireplace was in the living
room. Outside the house, at some thirty or forty yards distance,
a huge oven was built. Considering that most of the houses
perched on uneven ground, and that none was floored, the
huts, which in fact they were, appeared sufficiently solid and
moderately clean. Two massive tables, not infrequently with a
locker under them, made up the chief furniture. There were
one or two chairs, never more. The objects in the house were
rather dirty, and most of all the little Boerlings, who swarmed
about in droves. The Boers are a prolific race. They marry early,
lead wholesome, moral lives, and when they lose their mates,
the widow or widower speedily finds another spouse. Thus it
often happened that three or four families occupied the same
two rooms. Yet when a foreigner arrived to stay the night, the
bedroom, the sanctum even in a very poor house usually
equipped with a comfortable feather bed was immediately
cleared for him. These rough and ready Boers of the North did
not forget their traditional kindly virtue: hospitality. More often
than not they refused to accept any recompense offered for
supper and bed, whereas the correct English settlers rarely for-
got to present a modest bill. The Boers, it appears, were the
more curious toward strangers. Every new face was welcome
in their self-imposed isolation. But the welcome was seldom
extended beyond a single night. At nine or ten in the morning,

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OLD MASTER

the hour at which the Transvaal Boer got up (the farmers in
the Colony started their day at dawn), a hearty handshake
indicated unmistakably that the moment of parting had come.

Only the Peruvians were allowed to remain a little longer.
Peruvian was the courtesy name applied to the many Polish and
Russian Jews who peddled their wares up and down the coun-
try. From them the Boer purchased the only thing on which he
permitted himself to spend money, and very little money at
that: his outfit. The process of haggling over the price of the
accepted woolen clothing, the fabric mixed with calico, took
the whole day. One could not dismiss the Peruvian before dusk,
nor did one care to do so, since the Jewish peddlers were alto-
gether popular. Were they not the descendants of the chosen
people? To the Transvaal Boer, whose only reading matter was
the Old Testament, they were, indeed. At least, as long as they
came on foot, humbly, their backs bent under the weight of
their packs, a docile smile on their sweating faces. Some years
later, it is true, the Peruvians took to Cape Carts with well-fed
horses, sleek and evidently well nourished themselves, and with
smiles a little benign and a little insolent. It became also in-
creasingly difficult to barter with them. And so that ferocious
anti-Semitism sprang up in the country which still spurs the
irreconcilables among the Boers.

The average Transvaal Boer of those times wore the same
clothes every day. Still, this habit marked a considerable ad-
vance over the fashions of the previous generation. The chil-
dren of the Voortrekkers, the generation of about the middle
of the nineteenth century, were clad in hides. They lived upon
the carcasses of the beasts they hunted, and what was a matter
of necessity with them became a tradition with their grand-
children; to them it was a comfortable way of saving the ex-
penses of food. Extreme penury was their predominant char-
acteristic. They preferred to leave their large farms unfilled and
their pastures empty rather than pay the infinitesimally low
wages for colored labor. The average Transvaal farm was the
size of an English county. A man possessing less than six thou-
sand acres of land was said to own only "half or "a quarter" of

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OLD MASTER

a farm. But only the few acres surrounding the house were
ploughed to provide the family with the bare necessities of life.
This laziness was by no means inborn in the Boer, although, in
the Transvaal it soon became second nature. It was due to des-
perate circumstances. What could he have done with his crop?
There were no roads to transport it; the few dirt roads were
unusable, a quagmire, since the contractors were never paid by
the government. There was no market for one's products. In-
side the Transvaal there were only two small towns, Pretoria
and Heidelberg, both amply supplied by their surrounding
neighborhood. Prohibitive duties obstructed any trade or traffic
with the three other states of South Africa, the Orange Free
State, a republic, and the two British colonies, the Cape and
Natal. Above all, there was no money in the country. Only
direct taxation was known, and the sturdy Transvaal Boer stub-
bornly refused to pay. For his neighbor, whom more often than
not he loathed, did not pay either. Descendants of the fiercest
fighting race, they even refused the call to arms when the sav-
age tribes around them raided and ravaged the borderlands of
the Transvaal.

Sullen, secluded, opposed to change and progress, the Trans-
vaal Boer of 1870 lived a dreary life. His boorishness was the con-
sequence of his isolation. He was excluded from all the ameni-
ties of social intercourse. The churches were too far away, as
were the schools for his children. The small-town dances were
reserved mostly for the English-speaking population. His days
were drab. Only once in a lifetime there were a few days of
lightness and brightness: when he went vrying. Looking for a
wife, which came in early youth, the Boer lad employed an old
established scheme. He began by riding around the country to
see what young girls within his circle were available. When he
had made his choice he put on his Sunday trousers, polished
his saddle or borrowed a new one, stuck a feather in his cap,
and went forth to conquer. He was further equipped with a
bottle of sugarplums with which to propitiate his prospective
mother-in-law, and a candle. As soon as he entered the house
his purpose was known; it was fully explained by his clean

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OLD MASTER

trousers, and the candle. If any doubt remained in the mind of
the mother of a marriageable daughter, the gift of the sugar-
plums removed it the instant she received it. Without a word
the candle was offered to the girl. If she refused it, the suitor
left with no hard feelings. He simply rode on to the house of
the next lady on his list. But if she accepted it, the candle was
lighted. The mother stuck a pin into it and retired to leave the
young people alone until the flame burned down as far as the
pin. Tender mothers poured a little salt on to the flame so that
it might flicker a little longer. The marriage took place the fol-
lowing day. And after a week the old dreariness of life began
again.

President Burgers set out to conquer dreariness, the Trans-
vaal disease. He was not one of the northern Boers himself and
he had no tie with the Voortrekkers. He came from the Cape
Colony, imbued with its liberal spirit. Originally a clergyman
of the Dutch Reformed Church, he parted company with this
intolerant sect devoted to the Old Testament God of wrath,
gave up holy orders, left his country, and was, an eloquent and
enthusiastic man, heartily welcomed in the Transvaal. Soon he
was elected President, thus shouldering a burden that almost
crushed him.

The country into which he came was bankrupt, its treasury
empty, a paper currency, set afloat in 1865, greatly depreciated.
Taxes could not be collected and quarrels with the far from
subdued natives were incessant and perilous. Yet Mr. Burgers
plunged into his task in high spirits. He succeeded in raising a
loan, borrowing 60,000. He established a national flag, and
had a gold coinage struck from the then budding gold output
of the Transvaal: three hundred gold pieces, bearing his own
likeness, and worth twenty shillings each. In order to build a
railway from Pretoria, his capital, through the gold fields of the
Transvaal down to Delagoa Bay in the Portuguese colony
indeed a prime necessity for the economic expansion of the
country he betook himself to Holland where he raised another
loan, saddling his republic with a further debt of 100,000 for

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OLD MASTER

railway properties. To all this he added the boast that he would
"liberate" aU South Africa and become the George Washington
south of the equator.

His interests, it must be admitted, were above all economic
and cultural. He attempted to have the long neglected and
entirely uncultivated public lands surveyed. But no one knew
in the least what public lands there were, or how their bound-
aries ran. He issued a code of laws before he had either courts
or judges to sit in them. His favorite plan was a high-flown
scheme of education. However, he could only get five children
all told to attend the one high school that was actually estab-
lished. The parents paid 15 each for ten months' schooling.
Hence the total income of the high school amounted to 75,
whereas Mr. Burgers' budget allowed for a fixed salary of 400
a year for the headmaster. The district schools in the small
towns and the rural ward schools failed equally miserably, as
they were too expensive and pretentious. In the final year of
the independent First South African Republic, two hundred
and thirty-six pupils went to the district schools and sixty-five
to the ward schools. Since the government was penniless for
many months every year, the salaries were not paid and the
schools sank into ruin.

They were as little popular among the Transvaal Boers as
any of the apparently extravagant measures of reform progres-
sive Mr. Burgers wished to introduce. The general welcome
with which he had been received was wearing rapidly thinner.
The obstruction of the state schools by the Boer people was a
test case. Out of a total white population of 45,000 at least
10 per cent were of school age. But only three hundred pupils
were sent to school. The average Boer found it enough educa-
tion for his child if he could be made to read the Bible'aiid learn
sufficient of the ritual of the Dutch Reformed Church to pass
the confirmation examination. Itinerant schoolmasters who had
previously contributed a little to a primitive education could
no longer continue in the exercise of their profession, since
President Burgers stopped their meager allowances.

President Burgers, a well-meaning, if vain, man, was cursed

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OLD MASTER

with the Midas touch in reverse. He floated loans which were
astronomic in the depressed circumstances of his country, yet
his administration constantly verged on the brink of bankruptcy.
He introduced reforms, only to arouse and stiffen the bigoted
prejudices of his people. He could not even guarantee the secu-
rity and independence of the Republic, the only possession
which the grossly materialistic Transvaal Boers prized more
than life. The black man was lurking around the corner.

At the end of 1876, the natives from across the border invaded
and ravaged forty square miles of the Transvaal, burning every
house in the area. The Boers, indifferent in their seclusion, did
not "saddle up" as was their proud tradition. There was no fight
left in them. The natives got away. When the rainy season
ended, Cetewayo, the great black chief, massed his forces in
three groups on the borders of the Republic. According to a
memorandum written by Colonel A. W. Durnford, "he would
have undoubtedly swept the Transvaal, at least up to the Vaal
River, if not to Pretoria itself " Twelve years after the South
African Republic had begun its existence as an independent
state, it had reached a condition of complete insolvency and
defenselessness, with no way out of the perils of total ruin and
chaos. The house was on fire and it seemed certain that the fire
would spread all over South Africa.

It was under these circumstances that Sir Theophilus Shep-
stone arrived in Pretoria on January 22, 1877, accompanied by
six other gentlemen from Natal, and a guard of twenty-five
mounted policemen. Sir Theophilus, already an old man, had
for many years been Minister for Native Affairs in Natal; he
knew more about the colored problem than any other white
man in South Africa. Moreover, he was held in especial respect
by Cetewayo, the King of the Zulus, who was the torch if
South Africa should, as British and Boer equally dreaded, ever
be set on fire by the blacks. One of Sir Theophflus' first actions
was to address a message to his friend Cetewayo, and to the
Chiefs lieutenant, Secocoeni, saying that the Transvaal, if
attacked, would be defended by British troops. He received
a reply in the quaint style of the natives which read: "I thank

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OLD MASTER

my father Somtseu (Shepstone) for his message. I am gkd he
has sent it, because the Dutch have tired me out, and I intended
to fight them once, only once, and to drive them over the Vaal.
Kabana, you see my impis (tribal chiefs) are gathered. It was
to fight the Dutch I called them together. Now I will send
them back to their houses."

Sir Theophilus settled down in Pretoria to wait quietly. He
received hundreds of Transvaal petty politicians, listened to
their suggestions and grievances, but did not disclose any ulte-
rior motives of his own. He had come merely as a friend and
an advisor, he emphasized, to see whether and how the Republic
could be saved.

It was impossible to save the Republic from its own politi-
cians. The English party had little reason to sympathize with
President Burgers, who had made education in the English
language almost impossible, and constantly proclaimed it his
ambition to drive the "paramount power" out of South Africa.
But whereas the Transvaal British adopted their inbred atti-
tude of waiting and seeing, the Boer opposition persistently
undermined the shaky system. The Voortrekker party, the radi-
cal wing of the Transvaal Boers, composed entirely of members
of the fierce and fanatic Dopper sect, and led by Johannes
Paulus Kruger, himself one of the last surviving Voortrekkers,
and already a sort of sectarian saint (since as a lad in his teens
he had participated in the extermination of Dingaan, the Zulu
chief), approached the English with a suggestion to co-operate
in bringing about the fall of Burgers. At the same time the
saintly Kruger, ever a past master in the lower levels of politics,
assured the President of his unwavering support. The Volks-
raad, the republican parliament, bragged, swaggered, and blus-
tered, but was unanimous only in opposing any sound measure
of reform. When its last session was adjourned, President Bur-
gers commented: "The Volksraad has gone away having done
nothing but harm."

The mass of the Boer population remained indifferent. Why
should a man fight the accursed natives if his neighbor did not?
Why should he cultivate his land, or more of it than he needed

24

OLD MASTER

to feed himself? Why shear his sheep, if he could not sell his
wool? Why pay taxes for a nonexistent government? The
Transvaal Boer had sunk to this condition of not fighting, not
working, not paying.

After ten weeks of watching and waiting in Pretoria, Sir
Theophilus did the only possible thing. Without instructions
from London, he annexed the Transvaal by a proclamation,
issued at Pretoria on April 12, 1877, to restore peace and order,
and bring the country back to normalcy. His proclamation had
been read and approved by President Burgers, who had only
insisted on two minor changes readily granted by Sir Theoph-
ilus. Contrariwise, the British Commissioner approved Bur-
gers' message of farewell which contained a meek, face-saving
appeal to the burghers never to weaken in their spirit of inde-
pendence, but not to have recourse to acts of violence, at least
not for a fortnight (within which time a sufficiently strong
British garrison would have arrived from Natal). Heartbroken,
Burgers returned to his native Cape Colony. The excitable, un-
stable, visionary, but truly enlightened and patriotic man left
all of twelve shillings and sixpence behind him in the Treasury.
His "bluebacks" pound notes sold for a shilling apiece. Yet
Burgers had not drawn any salary while in office and in addi-
tion had expended all his modest private fortune on the State,
and even incurred a heavy personal liability when money was
urgently needed for the prosecution of the unsuccessful
Secocoeni campaign. This debt hounded him for the rest of his
life. However, unperturbed, Burgers resumed his social posi-
tion in Cape Town, where he joined the ranks of the moderate,
only slightly anti-British undercover opposition.

No one in the Transvaal shed a tear at his departure, no one
grumbled over the annexation. The burghers and fanners had
every reason to be thankful for their salvation. The price of
land, until the annexation practically nil, soared as the British
administration built roads and provided markets. The inflated
currency was replaced by the most solid money in the world.
The restive natives were quelled. No one disturbed the peace.
Even Saint Paulus of the Boers took office under the Crown.

25

OLD MASTER

But he could not stomach his self-imposed subservience. He
found an outlet for his dissatisfaction in repeatedly demanding
an increase in his remuneration. When this was refused, he
plunged headlong into the repeal of the annexation program.
The English in Pretoria never doubted that he would have
remained a loyal British subject, had the inducement he
clamored for been forthcoming. History would have taken
another turn. The South African war would never have claimed
its toll of blood and bitterness.

The restless Transvaal, however, was not destined for secu-
rity and tranquillity. With both hands the Boers grasped at
whatever they could get. The country's debts, incurred by Presi-
dent Burgers, were settled out of the English taxpayers' pockets.
The responsibility in the country rested on broader shoulders
than before.

But with the revival of trade and the removal of burdens the
old Boer habit of intransigence returned. The dangers and diffi-
culties of the past were of small account now that they were
indeed buried in the past. The benefits of annexation had been
reaped. The pressing needs of the Boers had been relieved.
Their debts had been paid; their credit restored; their black
enemies subdued. Repeal would rob them of none of these
advantages. They would, in short, have their cake and eat it
too. The men who had silently, many of them cheerfully, ac-
cepted annexation, became vocal, in fact, noisy and clamorous.
A wave of extreme nationalism ensued. Now that their stomachs
were full and their worries removed, the time had come for
what they called the spiritual things.

The tide of renewed Boer nationalism engulfed most of South
Africa. In fact, not even the conservative and wealthy farmers
of the Cape Colony had been as indifferent to their adventur-
ous kinsmen in the North as prudence had advised them to
appear. The Boers, a scattered handful of people at the utter
extremity of the globe, would never have survived had it not
been for their flamboyant nationalism which at times could
be bridled, but never extinguished.

The repercussions of the rapidly mounting tide of Transvaal

26

OLD MASTER

nationalism were strongest in the Orange Free State. Now the
only Boer republic left, the Free State saw its territory sur-
rounded on all sides by the hated red color on the map. The
Free State Boers had also fled from British rule. While the
Voortrekkers had crossed the River Vaal, they, in turn, had
crossed the Orange River. They were actuated by the same
motives: by their disgust of the philanthropic English treat-
ment of the natives, and the abolition of slavery by Her Maj-
esty's magistrates.

New motives fanned their hatred. As soon as the diamonds
of Kimberley were discovered, the English annexed the terri-
tory which had been in the possession of natives, but which
closely bordered the Free State. Boer farmers who had estates
in the vicinity of the sudden rush for diamonds were glad to
sell their property at what seemed astronomical prices. They
themselves had neither the resilience nor the ingenuity to work
the mines. Nevertheless, they sat on their newly acquired
moneybags and cursed the English, who had what it took to
make millions out of the stones. Perhaps the strongest single
factor arousing the Free State against the British was a German
immigrant by the name of Borckenhagen. History has long for-
gotten this name, but without his incessant anti-British pam-
phleteering in his paper, the Bloemfontein Daily Express, feel-
ings in the Free State would probably never have reached that
white heat that made them side with the Transvaal, although
they were by no means affected by the tragic conflict between
the British Empire and the so-called South African Republic.
Above all, they loathed this intruder Cecil Rhodes.

The "colossus"-in-the-making did not care. He was on the
friendliest terms with the Afrikaner Bond, the organization of
Dutch farmers in the Cape Colony, which mixed a then still
slight and concealed sprinkling of Boer nationalism with a
vivid sense for the protection of their agricultural interests.
With their support, Cecil Rhodes entered the Cape Parliament
in 1881. It was England's only success in the otherwise blackest
year of her South African history. The Transvaal Boers had
risen and defeated an insufficient and badly equipped number

27

OLD MASTER

of English soldiers, storming, at last, their stronghold, Majuba
Hill. It was an ignominious defeat of British arms. Fortunately
Sir Evelyn Wood secured adequate reinforcements and judged
his power sufficient to turn the tables, and to suppress the
revolt. But instead of establishing the Queen's authority, he
first asked for instructions from London. Mr. Gladstone was
Premier, and insisted on an immediate peace, peace at almost
any price. The Boers took Gladstone's pacifism, which was the
price he had to pay for his excessive promises to the voters in
his Midlothian campaign, for English weakness, and exulted
in their victory. The shamelessly abandoned Loyalists gathered
in Pretoria, and in tears they buried their own sacred flag, the
Union Jack.

All these events seemed entirely unconnected with the little
boy growing up on a quiet farm in the tranquil Western Prov-
ince. It was no longer Bovenplaats, a family possession claimed
by an elder brother of Jacobus Abraham Smuts, who had estab-
lished himself on a new farm; now it was Klipfontein (Stone
Fountain), a few miles farther to the north, when Jannie was
eight years of age, three years before the defeat of Majuba. The
black soil of the new farm was the best wheat land in all South
Africa. It demanded redoubled care and multiplied endeavour.
Another change had taken place. A dark cloud, the first, over-
shadowed the boy's life. His mother died. Smuts senior, true to
type, took a new wife, and two more infants arrived. Little
Jannie, by nature a shy and lonesome child, must have been
entirely preoccupied with his own changed life. He could not
know that the turbulent events in the distant outside world
were leading to the chaos which he would one day be called
upon to mould into shape. Was the little boy even aware of the
existence of such people as the English?

Evidently, he was.

After the tragedy of Majuba, beset, it seems, with doubts, he
asked Abraham whether the English were indeed the greatest
people in the world.

Abraham, a shriveled Hottentot of close to a hundred years

28

OLD MASTER

old, hesitated a moment. Then he declared: "The English?
There is one people greater than they. A people coming from
the high North. They call themselves Scots/'

Chapter S SPRINGTIME IN STELLENBOSCH

IN CHILDHOOD ALREADY PERSISTENT, JANNIE WENT ON HIS WAY.

Still a toddler, he became touleier: that is, he learned to hold a
rope ahead of a team of draught animals. This was his appren-
ticeship. Soon he became a "goose girl/' When he knew all
about geese, he spent some time caring for the pigs. Goats suc-
ceeded pigs, to make way in turn for sheep. Finally he was en-
trusted with the stewardship of a small herd of cows and oxen.
Now he had reached the top of the ladder. At the age of twelve
he was an accomplished cattle farmer, and nothing beyond this
achievement was to be expected of him. The fact that Jannie
could neither read nor write did not unduly bother his father.
The eldest Smuts boy received a careful education since he was
slated to become a predikant. It was not necessary to have a
second bookish son in the family.

But when Jannie was twelve his elder brother died of ty-
phoid. Therefore it became his duty to prepare himself for the
pulpit of the Dutch Reformed Church. He was, in consequence,
sent to school in the village Ribeek West, where he lodged in
the boarding house De Ark, run by the headmaster, Mr. T. C.
Stoffberg.

The boy certainly did not relish the change in his circum-
stances. Described as an easily frightened child who used to
run away, panic-stricken, when he saw people approaching,
even those with whom he was well acquainted, he feared the

29

OLD MASTER

big world of the hamlet of Ribeek West. On the veld the child
had been independent and self-contained. Jannie had even
done his own cooking. Now all that was left behind: the rolling
hills of the Black Land, with its rich green grass and wild-
flowers of every description; his favorite slope on whose sum-
mit he used to light his primitive stove; the few head of cattle
which his father had given him as wages for his child labor.

Mr. Stoffberg had a difficult time in moulding into shape the
high-strung, stubborn and self-centered country boy, to whom
a tyranny prescribing proper clothes and regular hours was
unbearable. "He behaves like a wild bird," the headmaster re-
ported. The teacher-pupil conflict lasted throughout Jannie's
first term, and far into the second.

Then, suddenly, a new passion overtook the boy, a passion
which proved incurable, and which still possesses the Old Mas-
ter: the passion for books. Mr. Stoffberg's library, in which
Jannie was allowed to browse to his heart's content, opened to
the lad the gates to a new world. His memory at this time was
so unspoiled that he could, it was said, learn an entire book by
heart in simply reading it over once. His mind was flooded by
the onrush of ideas. Gradually, the youngster adjusted himself
to his surroundings, which meant in the case of Jan Christian
Smuts that he excelled all others. The belated tyro rapidly sur-
passed all the children of the neighboring farmers in his class, a
success that, perhaps, did not make him over-popular with
them. It is entirely possible that little Daniel Frai^ois Malan,
another small boy from Ribeek West, four years Jannie's junior,
was already in his childhood imbued with that implacable
hatred, born out of impotent jealousy, with which the present
leader of the opposition in the South African House of Assem-
bly persecutes and baits General Smuts to this very day.

But Jannie, it appears, still in elementary school, was as indif-
ferent to hostility then as now. He did not play with the other
boys, preferring to keep rigidly to himself. He devoured books
throughout the night, even on his holidays at his father's farm.
He took his first successes moving up several classes in one
term, and finishing the school with high marks in the head-

30

OLD MASTER

master's special scholarship class with the same detachment
which, for instance, he displayed when he was created a field
marshal in the British Army on his seventy-first birthday. When
he passed his final examination, he had certainly taught his
headmaster an impressive lesson. Unfortunately, teachers sel-
dom care to learn from their pupils. Almost thirty years later,
in 1915, when South Africa shook in the convulsive aftermath
of a revolution which General Smuts with difficulty suppressed,
Mr. Stoffberg contested the parliamentary seat of Rustenberg
against his former disciple, llie teacher was once more bested.

Smuts' way to the pulpit was prescribed. The first step was
Victoria College in Stellenbosch, an academic institution en-
dowed with a famous theological seminary which within twenty-
five years had won a country-wide reputation. The budding
freshman laid his plans methodically. From his father's farm he
wrote a letter to Professor Murray, informing him of his inten-
tion of coming to the college in a few weeks, and asking for
the professor's kindly advice. A characteristic excerpt from this
remarkable letter reads: "Such a place where a large puerile
element exists, affords fair scope for moral, and, what is more
important, religious temptation. ... Of what use will a mind,
enlarged and refined in all possible ways, be to me, if my religion
be a deserted pilot, and morality a wreck? To avoid temptation
and to make the proper use of my precious time, I purposely
refuse entering a public boarding department, as that of Mr.
de Kock, but I shall board privately (most likely at Mr. W.
Ackermann's) which will, in addition, accord with my retired
and reserved nature." This highly moral letter concludes with
a few very practical questions as to tuition fees, school books,
and examinations. Professor Murray preserved the innocent
epistle as the early confession of a star-gazing realist.

The way to Stellenbosch was difficult. There was, once more,
the dread of the great world, this time a charming old town
with, at that period, a population of 2,000 souls. There was the
necessity of providing for the tuition fees. Young Smuts solved
this problem by selling the cattle he had earned as his father's

31

OLD MASTER

farm hand. Last but not least, a knowledge of Greek was r
quired. Creek had not been included in the curriculum of tt
village school. Moreover, no Greek tutor was available whe
the last moment for matriculation approached. Once more seek
sion helped. Jannie retired to a farm, exactly one week befor
the beginning of the term, and stuffed the contents of a Gree
grammar so completely into his head that he passed the exam
ination first on the list. For relaxation during this week of gruel
ing study he had equipped himself with a volume of Shelley
Another door was flung open to him. He had discovered poetry
A new sense for beauty awoke. It led him from Shelley to Keat:
and Milton, thence to Shakespeare (whose lack of religion he
deplored), and finally to a young lady by the nickname of Isie.
Sometimes, on his solitary Sunday walks he recited Shelley tc
the grass on the meadows. Yet it is questionable whether it was
indeed the harmony of the rhymes that agitated him so deeply,
or the lesson he learned from the poet's messages. Shelley's
views on the rights of man influenced him profoundly. It was
a little later that he fell helpless prey to another poet: Walt
Whitman.

Still, he lived in complete solitude, engaged in hard study
and the ascetic pleasures of loneliness. Except for joining the
volunteers, where he acquired some military training, and for
teaching a Bible class in a colored Sunday school, he remained
by himself. He was an outsider in patrician Stellenbosch, then
as today the most intensely Dutch town in the Cape, whose
inhabitants disliked the loop line to the main railway because
the train connected them with the vulgarity abroad. The town,
one of the oldest in the country, had been founded in 1684, and
a year later settled by Huguenot refugees, whose Puritan spirit
still lingered. During the time of Smuts' study, Stellenbosch
was markedly under the influence of Hofmeyr, the leader of
the Afrikander Bond, whose new nationalist creed was mingled
with the spirit of the old faith. The church service was the most
important event in everyday life. The Scottish professors, who
at that time almost monopolized Victoria College, encouraged
regular church attendance and hard work, and not much else.

32

OLD MASTER

They were, however, not averse to co-education. Engagements
between students were frequent, for people in South Africa
marry early. Society, "much affected by widows/' as contem-
porary gossip in near-by Cape Town put it, celebrated such
events. It was quite an affair when a senior, though to tell the
truth, a rather backward student by the name of James Barry
Munnik Hertzog, became engaged to Mademoiselle Jacoba Wil-
helmina Neethling, a young lady greatly interested in church
matters. Nevertheless young Hertzog refused to continue his
preparation for the pulpit, taking to the law instead.

The history of the Union of South Africa was, until Hertzog's
death, in November 1942, the history of the running feud be-
tween the two schoolmates, Smuts and Hertzog. They resem-
bled one another in but one respect. Jannie, too, during his
years at Stellenbosch was beset with doubts whether he was
meant to follow the theological calling. He certainly did not
abandon his religious convictions. A perpetual student of the
Bible, particularly of the Old Testament, the Boers' own Book
of Books, he is the more deeply a convinced Christian for not
loudly proclaiming faith. But he must have felt a premonition
that worldly matters would demand his service, indeed, that
one day the whole world would be his province. He abandoned
the thought of theology; he read literature and science.

At home only Tool, the Boer language, had been spoken.
Now, under the guidance of Professor Mansvelt, Smuts acquired
a superb High Dutch, both in speaking and writing. One of his
essays in the Dutch language bore the cumbersome title The
Commerce and Prosperity of the Netherlands during the Eighty-
Years' War. Professor Mansvelt was so deeply impressed with
the opus that he showed it to Dr. Leyds, then the State Attor-
ney of the Transvaal Republic, who also recognized promising
talent, and noted the young author's name.

Throughout his time in Stellenbosch Smuts read and wrote.
He did not stop with the English poets. He dove into Goethe
and Schiller and the classic German lyricists. He was proud, he
asserted in an article, of his Teutonic race. Some observers be-
lieved that he was simply going through a period of high-brow

33

OLD MASTER

inclination toward the German spirit, not uncommon among
intellectuals in English-speaking countries. But the fervor with
which Smuts sided with Germany at the Versailles Conference
and for many years after, permits at least some doubt whether
his predilection was, indeed, only a passing phase.

In his nineteenth year a treatise of his, published in Het
Zuid-Afrikaanisch Tydschrift, (The South African Magazine),
caused considerable attention. The piece was entitled Homo
Sum, and discussed the thorny problem of slavery, South
Africa's major problem. The young author considered slavery
as an ethical question that could not be, as was the custom,
considered merely from the economic viewpoint. He did not
refuse slavery entirely, but he contrasted the shining example
of the Hebrews, who gave the slave an opportunity to regain his
freedom after seven years, with the practice of "those nations,"
including his own, "whose slaves had to bid good-bye to all
hope of freedom, and were thus bound to descend to the lowest
depths of degradation and despair, sinking further and further
in the scale of humanity. Moral elevation, the highest form of
religion, is based on enthusiasm."

These few lines reveal three important elements in Smuts'
make-up: the English influence, bent on giving the African
natives freedom and equality within the scope of their civiliza-
tion, admiration for the old Jews, whom he felt akin to his own
old Boers, and whose county, Palestine, alone among all coun-
tries, he rates as beautiful as South Africa, and finally his con-
fession of enthusiasm, a driving power he has never lost, although
it froze, as it were, during the busy years.

Enthusiasm, indeed, truth, and other moral values were the
leitmotiv of all his youthful writing. Even his articles on history
and economics ever searched for moral causes. "If South Africa
is to be great indeed, and not to be merely inflated with the
wind of Johannesburg (then a boom city of gold diggers), its
greatness will have to depend on its moral civilization, 9 " he
wrote, early revealing the true aim of his life.

The citizens of Stellenbosch probably did not take the still
painfully shy and nervous youth as seriously as he took him-

34

OLD MASTER

self. Their idle conversation, their social life with its well-
tempered amusements, even their occasional evenings of danc-
ing, at which he never assisted, seemed to him a waste of time.
He retired deeper into his shell. He could be abrupt, anti-social,
awkward. His colleagues took him for a prig.

He found but one colleague who, though only seven months
his junior, understood his pathetic solitude: a co-ed, the above-
mentioned Isie: Miss Sibylla Margareta Krige. By descent the
two were not well met. Whereas Smuts had been imbued by
his father with the spirit of inter-racial tolerance in South Africa,
the Kriges were an old and politically influential family of un-
reconstructed Boers and Britain-haters, who had left Cape
Town to live in more congenial, and entirely Dutch, surround-
ings. Intellectually, however and more than intellectually they
were destined for one another.

By all accounts Miss Krige was the most brilliant woman stu-
dent of her day. She taught school in her spare time, and in
addition, she, too, wrote articles for magazines, and even for
the Cape Town newspapers. After a short acquaintance they
both wrote poems, anxiously disguised under pen names or
signed only with initials, lest the author of one should discover
the confessions of the other. An early picture shows Miss Krige,
now Mrs. Smuts and the much beloved Ouma grandmother
of her country, as a young girl of medium stature. Her face is
beautifully proportioned, unlined and untouched, at eighteen
still a child's face, were it not for her enormous, searching dark
eyes, arched by strong, almost masculine, brows. Her hair is
trimmed in a boyish fashion. It is cut short and neither parted
in the middle nor severely brushed back in the fashion of the
pious Boer ladies. She wears a high-necked black dress with the
merest and most innocent touch of coquetry, a white lace collar
about her neck, and over her dress the white apron appropriate
to a future housewife. The only jewel she displays is a double
chain of semi-precious stones. But no one can overlook the heap
of books piled up in front of the charming young girl who is
gazing so seriously into the camera.

Young Smuts courted her in his own way. He translated

35

OLD MASTER

Schiller's Das Ideal und das Leben, and she took down the
Dutch manuscript. He taught her Creek. When they occasion-
ally "walked out" into the veld where she admired the flowers,
which are, indeed, one of the particular beauties of the South
African landscape, he told her the Latin name and the class of
each plant and proved his knowledge of the various grasses,
which has made Smuts one of the greatest of living botanists.

Of course there was more to their meeting than Schiller and
Greek and the species of Andropogon, Panicum, and Digitaria,
growing in the Themedra Triandria to ordinary people the
South African red grass. It was hero worship on her side, and
on his a feeling of bliss. Perhaps life need not be spent on
austere solitude. But it is doubtful whether many words were
exchanged. The future of an incipient Bachelor of Arts seemed
rather uncertain.

In fact, the future, at least the immediate future, of Jan
Christiaan Smuts was pretty well assured after his eighteenth
year. In this eventful year of 1888, Cecil Rhodes visited Victoria
College. The "colossus" was at the peak of his success. A year
before he had formed his gigantic Goldfields Company on the
Rand, with the clear understanding that a large portion of the
profits should be used for purposes entirely outside the com-
mercial sphere indeed, for furthering his imperial plans. In
the very year he came to Victoria College he had further suc-
ceeded in combining all the diamond mines in Kimberley, prac-
tically the entire diamond output of South Africa, then the larg-
est in the world. Had it not been for his premonition of an early
death, due to his incurable heart disease, which prompted him
to write one will after the other he had just drafted his third
testament he would have come as the god in the clouds. In
fact he came as the trusted ally of his friends in the Afrikander
Bond, to inspect the model institution of Dutch education in the
Cape Colony, whose Prime Minister he was about to become.

Cecil Rhodes addressed the students. Smuts was only one of
the college juniors. Yet the principal had asked him to reply on
behalf of the student body as academic custom demanded.
Smuts spoke of the predestined greatness of South Africa, which,

36

OLD MASTER

in her present stage, was comparable with Elizabethan Eng-
land. He fell in completely with Cecil Rhodes' great and bold
plan of a federated partnership of self-governing states tinder
the British Crown. Mr. Merriman, an English-language politi-
cian who made his career on the Dutch side, a man feared for
his biting wit, patted Jacobus Abraham Smuts' shoulder. The
whole audience could hear him whisper to the proud father:
"Your lad has done it!"

On the rostrum, the "colossus" shook hands with the lad. Jan
Christiaan Smuts saw Cecil Rhodes only twice afterward. But
on these occasions they did not exchange a single word. Both
men were always in a hurry. Yet their meeting at Victoria Col-
lege had important consequences. Cecil Rhodes marked down
the young man as a future collaborator in his campaign for the
brotherhood of English and Dutch. Smuts, conversely, was now
ingrained with a conception of Rhodes as the maker of a greater
British Empire, with South Africa having her due share of the
glory.

A confirmed Rhodes man, his future path was now clearly
marked out. He took his degree in literature and science with
honors. He closed his Sunday school, presenting each of his
colored pupils with a Bible. He wrote a poem Love and Life
(a Fragment), which subsequently appeared in the Stellenbosch
Students 9 Annual, from which the following quatrain shall be
quoted:

Long are the coming years,
Counted by lovers' tears,
When, having lived together,
Their parted days begin.

Now, having cleared the decks, his resolve was taken: he
would read law in order to prepare for statesmanship, and no-
where else but at Cambridge.

37

OLD MASTER

Chapter 4 ENGLAND-YES AND NO

IN 1891, SMUTS TOOK SHIP FOR ENGLAND. THIS SOUNDS EASY

enough, but, as in everything he undertook in his youth, a
tremendous effort underlay it. The perpetual obstacle had to be
overcome: money worries. Fortunately Smuts received an Ebden
Scholarship, named for a wealthy philanthropist in the Eastern
Province, but unfortunately the sum was, due to a bank failure,
reduced to 100 a year, all that the Ebden Trust had guaran-
teed, but only half the amount actually disbursed in previous
years. To implement his meager assets he had to take out a life
insurance policy which his friend and teacher, the Reverend
Professor Marais, was willing to accept as security for a small
loan. When the professor, five years later, sent a final account,
he charged 5 per cent interest. Smuts replied: "Acknowledg-
ment to Professor Marais of loan to be repaid at 6 per cent
from September 1." His friends insist that the Old Master, at
the summit of his wisdom, is still as little money-wise as he
was as a Cambridge student.

At the time Smuts set sail for England, sensitive ears could
discern the first distant thunder clap of the coming tempest in
South Africa. Cecil Rhodes, who could handle almost anyone,
did not succeed in coming to terms with President Kruger.
Abortive negotiations over conditions in Johannesburg, the
golden city that had sprung out of the reef five years before,
now teemed with uttlanders foreigners predominantly Eng-
lishmen, ended with Oom Paul shaking his head: 'This young
man is getting dangerous." Rhodes stormed: "I meant to work
with him, but not on my knees."

The noise was too far away. Smuts did not hear it. Confi-
dently, and curiously, he embarked upon his studies at Christ's
College, Cambridge. Again, he did not easily become a part of
his surroundings. He was somewhat older in years, and defi-
nitely more mature in mind, than most of his new comrades. He

38

OLD MASTER

spoke with that nasal twang that every South African instantly
and joyfully recognizes as Malmesbury patois, but which sounds
distinctly different from Cambridge English. He showed no
interest in the college sports and games. When the other under-
graduates were exercising, Smuts sat in the library "pale-faced
and white-haired," as he was inaccurately described, since his
hair was fair, so fair indeed that it was easily mistaken for
white, particularly as it topped an ageless, unsmiling face. He
no longer demonstratively retired into seclusion, yet he did not
fit into the mould. The straightforward manners of the South
African farms and villages in which he had been brought up
were unlike the misleadingly easygoing appearance with which
English people seek to disguise the sweat of their labor. No one
would have reproached Smuts for his hard work. It was only
the fact that he worked so openly and so unashamedly that
seemed strange. Probably he had also to overcome a constant
feeling of poverty. The lack of money "crippled" him, he wrote
home. But it did not clip his wings.

Devouring law, Roman, British, and Colonial, he still found
time to write his first book. It was a seventy thousand word
essay, far away from paragraph and codex. Its title was Walt
Whitman: A Study in Evolution. The book was by no means a
biography. The American poet was in a way the test case for
Smuts' philosophy of personality. Only a few people have ever
read the manuscript. Some have maintained that the work con-
tained the first seeds of psychoanalysis, the new science that, a
few years later, at the turn of the century, carried Professor
Sigmund Freud with his Traumdeutung to world fame. But in
the late nineties London publishers were not interested in what
appeared to be primarily a study of Whitman, who at that time
was little known in England. One publisher wrote that had it
been Goethe the manuscript would have been immediately ac-
cepted. Perhaps Walt Whitman's time will come, another ven-
tured to prophesy. But at that moment his name did not mean
much to the general public. The one magazine to which Smuts
offered his opus also returned it regretfully. Miss Krige in far-
away Stellenbosch had copied the seventy thousand words in

39

OLD MASTER

vain. In later years, when the author's name alone could have
attracted international attention, Smuts stubbornly forbade the
publication of what he termed his **boyish book."

He early learned to accept reverses as well as successes. He
consoled himself with the thought that he had not been for-
gotten at home. In July, 1892, the Zuid Afrikaan, of Cape Town,
mentioned ". . . Mr. Smuts who, having gained the Ebden
Scholarship, thanks to his double B.A., passed first in Law at
Cambridge/' Yet it took two years and a half longer before the
Council of Legal Education awarded to Smuts, J. C., Middle
Temple, a special prize of 50 for the best examination in Con-
stitutional Law and Legal History. A year before he had caused
some stir by publishing a piece, Law A Liberal Study, in the
Christ's College magazine. On June 22, 1894, the Cape Times
published a London contribution: "Smuts' success is unprece-
dented in Cambridge annals. He took both Farts I and II of the
Law Tripos at the same time, was placed first in the first class
of each, and has been awarded the George Long Prize in
Roman Law and Jurisprudence; a prize only awarded in cases
of especial merit. On referring to the Cambridge Calendar you
will find that this is quite unparalleled." Years later the En-
cyclopaedia Britannica confirmed this opinion, stating that "his
success was unprecedented."

For a short time Smuts read in chambers in London. He was
oflFered a fellowship at Christ's College, Cambridge, but he de-
clined it. Cambridge, the ancient seat of learning, had rather
stimulated than entirely satisfied Smuts' intellectual hunger.
He had not altogether cut himself off from the life of his fellow
students, although he had not formed any close or lasting
friendships with the undemonstrative young Englishmen he
had met. England was more than ever a bright promise. But
South Africa was the only country worth living in and living
for. In the summer of 1895, he returned home.

The Cape Town newspapers welcomed the returned son in a
friendly, if not enthusiastic manner. Advocate Smuts was ad-
mitted to the Cape bar. He went into chambers and began

40

OLD MASTER

practicing at the supreme court. But in a very short time the
moderate excitement over the brilliant Cambridge student of
local origin abated considerably. Those who had predicted for
him a brilliant future as a barrister were patently wrong. Every-
one had heard that the young advocate was the best man for
the most involved lawsuits, and that he took enormous pains
in digging out hundred-and-fifty-year-old precedents to back
up his cases. But he was not seen in the clubs and coffeehouses.
He did not play whist. He did not slap backs, and would cer-
tainly have shuddered had anyone attempted to approach him
in that fashion. He did not even use the tricks of the trade to
soften the hearts of a jury. No briefs came.

The young man with die assured brilliant future had to look
for minor jobs to keep himself afloat. His superb High Dutch
came in handy. For a modest fee he examined in the Dutch
language, a knowledge of which was required of those young
men among the Cape Boers who sought positions in the Trans-
vaal Republic. This occupation was nothing more than a stop
gap. Journalism offered slightly better opportunities. Smuts
began to write for both English and Dutch papers; soon he
found a niche in the Cape Times. He reported the House of
Assembly from the press gallery, he reviewed books, produced
editorials on his favorite questions of moral and principle.
Occasionally he earned as much as a pound apiece, but mostly
it was considerably less. Probably his literary output in this
autumn of 1895 was not worth much more. Today his yellowed
pieces sound a little over-emphatic, and it seems as if the writer
had occasionally lost his direction in the maze of metaphors.
Yet some distinct traces of the man he was to become were
already apparent in these months the last before he found his
ultimate vocation.

Discussing in the Cape Times the question why so many
nations were anti-British, Smuts wrote: "The true explanation
is not British Pharisaism, but British success. It is the success
with which Great Britain is pursuing the policy of colonial ex-
pansion, and it is the comparative failure of the attempts of

41

OLD MASTER

other peoples in the same direction which lies at the root of
this international dislike of Great Britain."

Very soon afterward, however, Smuts traveled through the
Transvaal, where the conflict between Johannesburg the Eng-
lish residents and Pretoria, the capital and stronghold of Paul
Kruger, ever increased in sharpness. This time he wrote for a
Dutch-language paper, De Volksbode. While he reported glow-
ingly on Pretoria "I was agreeably surprised by the aristocratic
quiet pervading this handsome little town" he scorned Johan-
nesburg's "colossal materialism." And as to the conflict between
Oom Paul and the uitlanders, he stated: "We can sympathize
with the ideals of a farmer-president," although, already a be-
liever in the Union of South Africa, he made no bones about
his dislike of Kruger's high-tariff policy, intended to shut off his
country from the neighboring British colonies. The contradic-
tion of a eulogy on Great Britain and sympathy with her arch-
enemy was by no means conditioned by his writing for two
papers in different languages. It was undiluted Smuts, Smuts
pure and simple: British by conviction, Boer by blood.

Altogether this autumn proved to be an unsatisfactory time.
To be a briefless barrister and a prolific journalist, not much
concerned with his own mediocre work was not undiluted
Smuts. The call from Hofmeyr voiced his vocation: not the law,
not the press politics.

Hofmeyr was the Afrikaner Bond incarnate. Although he was
called "the mole" on account of his notorious preference for
burdening others with the show of leadership, it was he who,
for thirty years, laid down the law. His support gave Cecil
Rhodes his majority in the Cape Parliament. It was a marriage
of convenience. Whereas Hofmeyr visualized a Dutch South
Africa, Cecil Rhodes dreamed of a united South Africa, nay,
Pan-Africa, under the British flag. But both were agreed that
the union of the two colonies and the two republics was the
prime necessity, and that South Africa, within or without the
British Empire, must be self-governing. Their racial ambitions
were diametrically opposed, but neither was a narrow-minded

42

OLD MASTER

racialist. Personally, the great Imperialist liked the Dutch, and
conversely the Dutch liked him.

Rhodes, a fisher of souls, was constantly on the lookout for
young Afrikanders, as the Boers preferred to call themselves at
that time. He had not forgotten the unusual youth from Vic-
toria College. He had kept track of Smuts' extraordinary suc-
cess at Cambridge, and when he was told that this chap was
hanging about in Cape Town, marking time and becoming pre-
maturely bitter, the "colossus" had a few words with Hofmeyr,
perhaps during one of their habitual morning rides when South
African history was made.

Kindly disposed himself toward the son of his old supporter
Jacobus Abraham Smuts, Hofmeyr sent for Advocate Smuts,
primed him thoroughly, and sent him, as his political debut, to
the hottest spot along the firing line: Cecil Rhodes' own Kim-
berley.

In fact, Kimberley, where Rhodes had made his first handful
of millions, was no longer quite his own. The diamond rush was
over. Dr. Jameson, "Dr. Jim" to everyone, the most highly
esteemed doctor in South Africa, the most popular character in
town, and Rhodes' fanatically devoted right-hand man, had
moved to Bechuanaland, where he served, without pay, as
administrator of the Chartered Company's newly acquired terri-
tories. Instead, Olive Schreiner had moved in, a noted novelist,
asthmatic and hence in need of the crisp air of lofty Kimberley,
a German by descent, and once a most vocal admirer of Rhodes',
but now his embittered foe. She and her insignificant husband
formed a writing team under the pen name of Cronwright
Schreiners. Under this trade-mark they published a furious
attack on Rhodes in the Diamond Fields Adventurer. Rhodes
wished this nuisance stopped. Hofmeyr obliged. Smuts was
sent to recover Kimberley.

With the mayor of the town in the chair, young Advocate
Smuts addressed a large audience in Kimberley Town Hall.
The De Beers 9 Political and Debating Society sponsored the
event. The day was Tuesday, the twenty-ninth of October,
1895. It was an eventful day for the youthful advocate. He sold

43

OLD MASTER

himself to the devil. He pledged his allegiance to Rhodes. Untir-
ingly, for hours, he defended his idol and all that the "colossus"
stood for: from his conduct of affairs in the Cape Colony to his
private annexation of Matabeleland; and, from his native pol-
icy, expressed in the catch phrase: "equal rights for all civi-
lized men south of the Zambezi" to his determination to dose
the ranks between the two white peoples. Certainly, Cecil
Rhodes was a great Imperialist. But sotacitly understood,
though plain to every listener was he, Advocate Smuts. One
could very well be an Imperialist and a passionate South Afri-
can at one and the same time. Rhodes was both.

Rhodes was all in all to Smuts. He became obsessed with
Rhodes. He lived Rhodes. He made Rhodes his hero and leader.
A future under Rhodes was a great future. All this was not a
youthful Rhodes-fixation. Smuts had opened his shy and
secluded inwardness to the man whom he felt, although greater
than himself, fundamentally akin. The very bigness of Rhodes'
aims was the essence of Smuts' lifelong philosophy, which in
later years he called "Holism," derived from: "Whole." What
Rhodes used to call simply his "thoughts," became Smuts' men-
tal life. And he did not care to live any life but one in the
spiritual realm. He did not yet share Cecil Rhodes' deeply
rooted devotion to the Union Jack. To Smuts it was a good flag,
because it was Rhodes' flag.

He returned from his first oratorical triumph, which Ons
Land, Cape Town's leading Dutch newspaper, ardently eulo-
gized, filled with enthusiasm. He mellowed. He even resolved
to visit his father's farm for Christmas. The family and the
neighbors teased him a little for being unable to speak or think
of anything but Rhodes. They were themselves loyal supporters
of their Prime Minister, but primarily because the Afrikander
Bond insisted on it. The Bond saw to their economic interests,
it was their true protective power; they owed to their organiza-
tion, and therefore to its chosen chief of government, their
loyalty and allegiance. For the rest, they were not as excitable
as Jannie, who had always been different from the rest. Well,
it was good to have him at home again.

44

OLD MASTER

Jannie was lounging on the stoep of his father s farmhouse
when the news came. To him, it was a scare rumor, one of the
many poisonous stories that circulated as the tension between
Kruger and the uitlanders increased. Smuts was sick of this
rumor-mongering. It revolted his straightforward nature.
Rhodes would never have allowed itl

An hour or two later the story was confirmed. Rhodes had
not only allowed it; Rhodes had been behind it behind the
Jameson Raid, the blundering and abortive effort to unseat
Kruger by an armed riot, or preferably by bluff. Old man Kru-
ger had said long before: "111 wait until the tortoise stretches
forth her head. Then 111 cut it off/' So now he cut it off. At
Dornkoop, the handful of Jameson raiders were overpowered,
and ignominiously arrested. To the Afrikander Bond it was an,
perhaps not quite unwelcome, opportunity of getting rid of the
English Prime Minister. Rhodes lost his parliamentary majority
overnight. He was unseated.

But to Smuts it was the greatest betrayal since Judas* kiss.
His idol was smashed. With his idol went his idea. The Cam-
bridge man disappeared. In his place surged the male whose
tribe had been injured. Smuts was no longer a dreamer of a
South Africa; he felt a Boer of the Boers, and it is likely that his
only spiritual companion, Miss Krige, at that time a pragmatic
nationalist herself, encouraged this change. Smarting under the
lash, Smuts condemned in print what he had praised at Kim-
berley. It was Crucifige! no longer Hosanna! He called Rhodes
"the great racial stumbling block in South Africa." For a full
year he did not dare to speak in public. He brooded endlessly
over the matter. Was it Rhodes? Gould it have been Rhodes?
Rhodes alone? Did not people say that Joe Chamberlain had
been involved in the conspiracy? And even the Prince of
Wales?

Mr. Chamberlain and the Prince were none of Smuts' con-
cern. To him it was Rhodes, the Englishman. 'The English
have set the veld on fire," he wrote. "We lift our voices in warn-
ing to England. If England sends Rhodes back to us, the re-
sponsibility will be hers. The blood be on England's own head!"

45

OLD MASTER

plomacy in Low German which sounds very much like Dutch,
replied to a compliment in reference to the gluttonous dinner,
that, together, they would devour much more. Compared with
this playing with fire, the Jameson Raid was just the bursting of
a soap bubble.

The other cause that finally led to the South African war was
the impossible position in which Kruger kept the uitlanders.
These foreigners, mostly Englishmen, but with a large admixture
of Americans, Jews, and even Germans, were disfranchised and
politically without rights, exposed to a hostile, corrupt, and
backward administration, which worked perfectly among the
antediluvian farmers on the veld, but built, as it were, a dam
against the onrush of modern civilization. The foreigners con-
tributed more than nine-tenths of the Transvaal Republic's
revenues. On the funds extracted from them frequently by
brutal compulsion the state thrived, and plunged into an arma-
ment race with England. Oom Paul himself, the son of a shep-
herd, acquired a formidable fortune. The uitlanders found
themselves, as Sir Alfred, later Viscount, Milner rightly put it,
in the position of helots. Yet they only wanted to reform the
Transvaal, and merely asked for a fair share in its legislation.
They had to endure the calculated ignominies and chicaneries
imposed upon them, for long years, until their movement
merged with Britain's decision not to be ousted from her para-
mount position in Africa.

A far greater nation than the uitlanders in the boom town of
Johannesburg were once disgusted with taxation without repre-
sentation. The explosion in South Africa, whose repercussions
made Smuts the man he is, was a repeat performance on a
smaller and less important, but just as thunderous scene.

After the Boers' triumph at Majuba Hill, made possible by
Mr. Gladstone's hasty retreat, the new wave of Boer national-
ism surged powerfully in the Transvaal. True to their Old Tes-
tament vision, the Transvaal farmers and burghers saw them-
selves as the chosen people. The Boers in the Orange Free State
began asking whether their brethren in the North were not,

48

OLD MASTER

after all, right. Their conservatism matched very closely Oom
Paul's patriarchal system. Reluctantly, the Free Staters allowed
the newfangled idea of postage stamps inside the country.
When the first telegraph line was installed, it had but one cus-
tomer: The Friend, the progressive newspaper. The radically
anti-British Express, supported by unanimous public opinion,
scorned the invention. Railways were considered detrimental to
the breeding and trading of horses. The Transvaal breeders,
incidentally, displayed a similar attitude. President Kruger
could only obtain their consent to build his strategical railway
to Portuguese Delagoa Bay by assuring a delegation that their
horses and donkeys would, in fact, find new employment: they
would be needed to pull the trains. This argument impressed
the Free Staters, too. Ever more keenly they took their cue
from the heroes of the Transvaal. To prove that they them-
selves were made of the same stern stuff, they forbade the speak-
ing of English in markets and meetings; some members of the
Volksraad diet even wished to ban the English language alto-
gether from the streets. President Brand had to threaten his res-
ignation before he was permitted to accept a British knight-
hood. But as Sir John Brand he immediately lost his until then
firm hold on his people and died heartbroken, yielding his
place to a more severe Afrikander.

Even the Cape Colony was shaken by the first stirrings of the
Afrikander movement. True, the Afrikander Bond soon exer-
cised some soothing influence. Onze JanOur Jan, meaning
Hofmeyr decreed: "The present time is a time of transition.
Signs of fusion of the two white races are on every hand/'
Most of the older Cape Dutchmen fell into line. But the
younger generation gazed spellbound at the heroes of the
North, where the conflict between Kruger and the uitlanders,
as well as the duel between the President and Rhodes two de-
velopments still independent of one another grew more and
more perilous.

The uitlanders complained bitterly about what they believed
to be London's callous indifference toward the fate of British

49

OLD MASTER

subjects as well as the future of South Africa. These complaints
were only partly justified. The British Empire, indeed, was
not built up by an irresistible expansion of an insular nation,
but, as in the case of India, and South Africa, too, by the
fanatic zeal of some great men far ahead of their times, among
them Cecil Rhodes, who had to drag a reluctant Downing
Street and Parliament behind them. After the self-imposed re-
treat following Majuba, Downing Street, conscious of having
exercised supreme self-restraint and magnanimity, could well
expect that some reciprocal justice would be shown. A man by
the name of Andrew Marvell did not expect it. "The fault of
the Dutch/' he rhymed, "is giving too little and asking too
much."

The Boers were not satisfied with the Convention of 1881.
They claimed the removal of British suzerainty, the withdrawal
of the clauses protecting the natives, and, above all, the restora-
tion of the title South African Republic, which sounded more
impressive than Transvaal State, the name to which their coun-
try had been reduced. Moreover, they demanded, although
they hardly expected to receive it, complete freedom in regard
to their international relations, and expansion of almost all
their boundaries, which meant cancellation of the clause for-
bidding them to annex native territories. This last prohibition
in particular made Kruger, then the Vice-President in the rul-
ing triumvirate, see red. He bitterly complained that his coun-
try was being kraal-walled, and found a sly method of circum-
venting the text and spirit of the Convention. He embarked
upon his time-honored method of expansion by trekking. It
began with small hunting excursions into adjacent native terri-
tories. There the Boers grazed their own cattle, and thus estab-
lished, according to old tradition, the right to consider the pas-
tures as their possession. Frequently this "dry expansion" was
promoted by fostering rivalries between the various native
tribes. First one black ckn extinguished another with the sup-
port of the Transvaal Boers. Then the conquerors were made
to feel that they had acted on Kruger's behalf, but not really
with his support. They themselves were exterminated.

50

OLD MASTER

This method was not only cruel, but the more superfluous as
the Transvaal itself contained immense stretches of unculti-
vated land, which the inhabitants were entirely unable to con-
trol, utilize, or administer. Their "land hunger*' was insatiable.
The individual Boer, who did not cultivate more than twenty
acres, wanted to own 20,000. He coveted Swaziland, Zululand,
Bechuanaland, Matabeleland, Mashonaland, and Tongaland.
This greed involved a double threat: the natives were menaced
with extinction, and the British highways into the interior of
Africa were in danger of being cut off.

Kruger's expansionism was only moderately successful. After
his invasion of Zululand the English forced him to give back to
the natives two-thirds of his conquest, including the coastal re-
gion. Once more Kruger saw himself prevented from reaching
his anxiously desired goal: access to the sea. Cunningly, he in-
filtrated Swaziland, until he held the country firmly in his grip.
But it was a short-lived success. The Swazis shook off the yoke
of their sjambok (rhinoceros whip) lashing administrators from
the Transvaal during the Boer War. In Matabeleland Kruger's
raiders arrived too late. Alone and unarmed, Dr. Jameson,
Cecil Rhodes' right-hand man, met the Boer troops at Rhodes
drift, the border, and told them with truly English sang-froid
that they might loll him, but that this would mean the end of
the Transvaal. General Joubert's raiders returned. Matabele-
land was soon a part of Rhodesia.

Kruger was kindled by the flame of fury. What did these
accursed English see wrong in the extermination of the natives?
Had not the blacks been a cruel and vicious enemy when the
Voortrekkers came to drive them away? Had he, Johannes Pau-
lus Kruger, as a lad in his teens, not fought in the sanguinary
battle that crushed Dingaan, the great Zulu chief? And did the
Boers not cany out the Lord's word in exterminating the black
vermin? As surely as Kruger knew that the earth was flat, he
was convinced that there could be no harm in maltreating these
pagans, the Hottentots, whose women evidently carried the
mark which God had set upon Cain.

Times had changed, the English insisted. Elsewhere, maybe,

51

OLD MASTER

Kruger replied. But in South Africa, and not alone in his Trans-
vaal, the mighty baas was determined to make time stand still.
Was it 1894? He still lived in the year of the Lord 1855, the
blessed year when he had participated in the destruction of
Makapan's people in righteous revenge for their massacre of
twelve Boer men and women.

But the shrewd old man knew that he was still too weak to
provoke English power. He proceeded to London. With him
went General Smit, the victor of Majuba, embodying the "or
else/' if Kruger's own stiff-necked persuasion should fail.

It did not fail. London was sick and tired of haggling and
struggling over South Africa. Lord Derby was extremely an-
noyed. He granted Kruger a revision of the Convention. The
new patchwork, the Treaty of 1894, failed even to mention
British suzerainty. It was anybody's guess whether this privi-
lege was abandoned, or considered self-evident. The baas of
the Transvaal State returned as President of the Transvaal Re-
public. Instantly he interpreted this return to the high-sounding
name of his country as a silent recognition of his claim to the
whole of South Africa.

There was but one fly in the ointment: during the Boer nego-
tiators' stay at the Albemarle Hotel their money gave out. They
found themselves in the uncomfortable position of not being
able to meet their hotel bill for the last few weeks. Finally the
bill was paid by an un-named benefactor. Baron Grant, the
well-known stock exchange speculator, received two conces-
sions in return: the gold concession for the Lydenburg district,
and His Honor's public assurance of good will, protection, and
encouragement to British settlers in the Transvaal. Kruger, on
behalf of the Republic, indeed, published in the London press
a cordial invitation and welcome; he promised full rights and
protection to all who would come.

This was how Kruger's promises were carried out: favoritism
pure and simple decided the grant of concessions. Those will-
ing to expend capital and energies in legitimate work could not
compete. A test case was the dynamite concession, introduced

52

OLD MASTER

under the guise of keeping the control of explosives and muni-
tions in the hands of the state. The monopoly in dynamite cost
the mining industry six hundred thousand pounds a year more
than they would have had to pay for the better, imported ar-
ticle. Save for the administration's large share in the take, the
beneficiary was Mr. Lippert, the concessionaire. He had a hard
fight before the Volksraad agreed to his concession. One anti-
British member in particular opposed stubbornly all trade and
traffic with the English. Even Kruger was not able to bridle
this adversary. But at the decisive division, this same man cast
his vote in favor of the bill. He explained to the astonished
House: The voice of the Lord came to me in the night and
told me to vote for Lippert/'

The members of the Johannesburg Chamber of Mines strongly
suspected that this voice might have borne some resemblance
to Mr. Lippert's own. Indeed, some time later Lippert admitted
that he had shouted Cod's message through the open window
of his otherwise irreconcilable opponent.

It was not always as easy as that. The Hatherley Distillery
turned out execrable spirits, labeled after well-known brands.
The firm had the government's monopoly of liquor. Drinking
became a scourge in the gigantic mining camp of Johannes-
burg. Particularly the natives were cursed with the habit. A
third of them were constantly drunk. Their excesses made it
impossible for the inhabitants to leave their houses after dark,
or on Sundays. The police offered them no protection. On the
contrary, the Z0rps Zuid Afrikaan Republican Police were
young brutes from the platteland, who relished their privilege
of shoving uitlanders off the pavement, and gloried in their own
brutality. The government did nothing to check the drinking
plague. A dozen officials and Boer politicians were large share-
holders in Hatherley's.

The Volksraad, it is true, frequently passed resolutions con-
demning the principle of monopolies. The oligarchy of Boer
lawmakers, sable-clad, and exercising their parliamentary func-
tions with the grave dignity of high priests, were bigoted but
righteous minded. Only when it came to sharing the spoils they

53

OLD MASTER

were not averse to taking. Twenty-one of the ruling body of
twenty-five men were, in the case of the Selati Railway Com-
pany, publicly and circumstantially accused of accepting
bribes, with full details of the bribes received; none of them
sought to deny the accusation. According to a prominent Trans-
vaal judge, himself a Boer of the old stamp, only one member
of the Volksraad measured up to European standards of educa-
tion. The handful of defiant opponents in the House, led by
General Joubert, and inspired by a young, very successful cat-
tle breeder and land speculator by the name of Louis Botha,
did not exercise the slightest influence. Kruger, lording it over
his herd, tolerated no criticism. His heavy, red fists thundered
on the speaker's table, and the whole House was immediately
cowed.

Kruger's high protective tariffs, introduced to emphasize his
country's self-seclusion, deteriorated into mere burlesque.
Smuggling was carried on openly. Mostly the customs officials
"stood in" with the smugglers. It was easier than enforcing the
law properly and relying on the share of the spoils the govern-
ment would allot the watchdogs. The government, in fact, did
not pay bonuses any more regularly than salaries. Hence, goods
subject to heavy duties could be bought at any store at a price
much lower than the original costs plus transport and duty.
The customers loved it. The officials rubbed their hands. The
administration, whose leading functionaries themselves did not
receive their salaries for six months out of the year, looked the
other way.

More profitable even than the trade of the customs officials
was the business of the veld-cornets. In times of war the veld-
cornet was the subaltern officer in the commando. In peacetime
he acted as a district official, who collected taxes, was the petty
justice, and was, above all, the authority with which each new-
comer had to register. Since most of the veld-cornets were illit-
erate, they made a complete mess of the registration. Notwith-
standing the bribes they habitually exacted, registrations were
never correct, and never at hand, when, after a number of

54

OLD MASTER

years, the uitlander needed his registration to daixn his citizen-
ship rights.

This was some of the pettifoggery that ruled Kruger's oli-
garchy. The big schemes were carried out by the President
himself, who had come under the nefarious influence of a group
of imported Hollanders. He came to rely more and more on
them as the better elements of the Boer youth threatened to
become impatient with the prevailing corruption. On April 16,
1884, Oom Paul, egged on by his Hollander advisors, granted
to a group of Netherland and German capitalists a concession
for all railways in the state. Immediately afterward Dr. Leyds
arrived in the Transvaal. President Kruger had hired him as a
State Attorney (Attorney General) on the recommendation of
the Faculty of Law of the University of Utrecht. Dr. Leyds was
a good-looking, well-bred young chap, endowed with pleasant
manners, and obviously enthusiastic over his chance to lay
down the law in the backwoods. His enthusiasm was well
founded on solid facts: he represented the interests of the capi-
talists who had obtained the railway concession. Their repre-
sentative, by the same token the State Attorney, had to super-
vise the complicated connection on behalf of the Republic to
which he gladly swore allegiance. He quickly climbed the
career ladder, and was soon entrusted by Kruger with secret
negotiations in Berlin. But while in his new home, Pretoria, he
saw to it that the Hollander promoters of the railways did not
come to grief in their dealings with the Republic.

Dr. Leyds found his double position most amusing. In high
good spirits he described, in a letter to a friend in Utrecht, his
life among the savages, calling Kruger a "hairy old ape," and
poking fun at General Joubert and other Boer dignitaries. Hie
assiduous friend sent the letter back to a third friend in Pre-
toria, who, for his part, revealed it to the authorities. Joubert
raised hell. But Kruger cut him short, defended Leyds as
merely an irresponsible youngster, clung the closer to him, and
forgave him even the personal insult. There is but one expla-
nation for this unparalleled mildness in the old man's bearing:

55

OLD MASTER

he felt ever more isolated, even among his own people, and he
desperately needed some younger man to rely on. During the
two years State Attorney Leyds controlled the company's
operations, the concessionaires failed to get their capital sub-
scribed, they overcharged the government of the Republic,
they asked excessive fares on the short routes they had, indeed,
built, they violated vital conditions of the concession. The
Volksraad was aroused. But the President stoutly defended his
Hollanders. By his personal influence and the solid vote of his
ignorant Dopper Party he completely blocked all legislation to
control the company. He was dead set on getting his railway
to Delagoa Bay, even at the expense of killing the goose that
laid the golden eggs. Business in Johannesburg would not be
able to function normally if the new railway, as was planned,
should obtain a transport monopoly. What of it, if the uitlanders
were crushed? Paul Kruger, himself drawing a salary of 7,000
plus large sums for entertainment into the bargain, owner of a
number of prosperous farms, did not care for gold. All he cared
about was the opportunity to make impotent the foreigners,
who, by the sheer weight of their numbers alone they were
already twice as numerous as his own farmers and burghers-
would wrest the power in the state from him, if they obtained
the franchise.

He loathed these "dirty vultures" with a zealot's passion. To
him they were the incarnation of the arch-evil: progress. They
grew fat on the soil that belonged to his Boers. Did they want
his state, too? "They can have it," Kruger grumbled. "But only
over my dead body."

At a meeting on the Witwatersrand, to which a few uitland-
ers had come by courtesy, he addressed the audience with the
words: "My friends, my people, and you uitlanders, murderers
and thieves. . . ."

In vain the uitlanders petitioned him time and again. He re-
fused to receive their delegations until one day he consented.
Respectfully, the spokesman pointed out the inequities of the
law: while every Boer lad of sixteen had the franchise, uitland-
ers were so restricted by law that they obtained the franchise

56

OLD MASTER

only at the age of forty, provided they could prove fourteen
years residence in the country which due to the inefficient reg-
istration was next to impossible. Furthermore, their franchise
was practically prevented by having a petition endorsed by
the mostly hostile Boer neighborhood. Even then the President
or the Volksraad could exercise the right of veto, which, in-
deed, they used to do with a vengeance.

There were other grievances as well: the uttlanders had no
voice in the choice of officials. Entirely incapable functionaries
controlled valuable interests in the most selfish manner. Once
a Minister of Mines, on learning officially of some flaw in a
mine's tide, expropriated the mine and attempted to exploit it
himself. They had no control over education. The Johannes-
burg Educational Council allotted one shilling and tenpence
per head and year for the education of uitlander children, but
eight pounds six shillings per head for Boer children the uit-
landers, as always, paying nine-tenths of the total amount.
Municipal government in the English-speaking town was the
privilege of the Boers. It was as corrupt and negligent as the ad-
ministration of the Republic. Uitlanders could not even serve as
members of a .jury. Their press was throttled by censorship.
Freedom of meeting was restricted by dictatorial laws.

Patiently, old man Kruger listened. Then he dismissed the
delegation with the words: "This is my country. These are my
laws. Anyone who does not like my laws is free to leave my
country/'

From London came no help.

So the uitlanders established a "Reform Committee," distrib-
uted all of 350 rifles, and decided to march to Pretoria, to force
their demands upon the administration. They by no means in-
tended a revolution. They wished to hoist the legitimate Trans-
vaal flag on the government buildings but upside down, to in-
dicate the change.

They had but one ally: Cecil Rhodes, who had sent his
trusted friend Dr. Jameson with two hundred and fifty of the
Chartered Company's Bechuanaland Police and an equal num-
ber of hotheaded volunteers to Pitsani, allegedly to protect the

OLD MASTER

construction of the railway line to Bechuanaland, in fact to
join their slender force with the uitlanders.

Rhodes' heart was not in the venture. He knew that he was
doing something he had never done: he took a short cut, the
very method of proceeding against which he had always
warned his friends. But he could not miss the opportunity of
getting rid of the one great and immovable stumbling block on
his way to Pan-Africa: Kruger, the mighty old gorilla. Kruger's
influence was waning; Rhodes knew it. In a year or two he
would be replaced by the Progressive Party in the Transvaal,
people with whom one could deal fairly. But Cecil Rhodes
feared that he no longer had a year or two to wait. He was
growing stout, his face dark-red; he was shaken by intermi-
nable heart attacks. Death was upon him. Still he hesitated to
flash the green light.

Dr. Jameson, nervous, overworked, restless, did not wait for
the signal. On the twenty-ninth of December he crossed the
frontier of the Transvaal. General Cronje, lying in wait for
them, surrounded Jameson's soldiery, five hundred poorly
armed men, and took them prisoner. Then Cronje marched to
Johannesburg, where he rounded up the leaders of the Reform-
ers. They were ill-treated in jail by their cruel warden, Du
Plessis. One of the unfortunate men cut his throat while in
prison. Their leaders were condemned to death. But soon they
could buy their freedom by paying the astronomic sum of
25,000 each.

The German Club in Pretoria exulted. On January 27, 1895,
the club had given a banquet in honor of the German Emper-
or's birthday, at which President Kruger had eulogized both
the old and the present Emperor of Germany, as well as the
loyalty of the Germans in the Transvaal. Kruger concluded
with the words: The latter I experienced once again at the
time of the Kafir War. One day three or four Germans came to
me and said: *We are indeed not naturalized, we are still sub-
jects of our Emperor in Germany, but we enjoy the advantages
of this country, and are ready to defend it in accordance with
its laws. If Your Excellency requires our services, we are will-

58

OLD MASTER

ing to march out/ And they marched. That is the spirit I ad-
mire. They were under the kws, they worked under the laws,
they obeyed the kws, and they fell in battle under the laws.
All my subjects are not so minded. The English, for instance,
although they behave themselves properly and are loyal to the
state, always fall back upon England when it suits their pur-
pose. Therefore, I shall ever promote the interests of Germany,
though it be with the resources of a child, such as my land is
considered. This child is now being trodden upon by a great
power, and the natural consequence is that it seeks protection
from another. The time has come to knit ties of the closest
friendship between Germany and the South African Republic
ties such as are natural between father and child."

The young Emperor was perfectly willing to play father to
the patriarchal child. After the Jameson Raid, Wilhelm II dis-
patched the historic Kruger telegram, congratulating the Pres-
ident on having repulsed foreign aggression without appealing
for the help of friendly powers.

The earth trembled. But in the Transvaal, Kruger's shaken
rule was perpetuated.

Chapter 6 MISTER STATE ATTORNEY

AT ANOTHER BANQUET, IN LONDON, ANOTHER GUEST OF HONOR

ended his speech with the prophetic words: "In a cause in which
one absolutely believes, even failure personal failure, I mean,
for the cause itself is not going to fail would be preferable to
an easy life of comfortable prosperity in another sphere." With
these words Sir Alfred Milner bade farewell to his friends. He
was about to embark upon a fatal mission. Appointed Governor

59

OLD MASTER

of the Cape Colony and High Commissioner for South Africa,
he was being sent to restore order in the fever-shaken country.
Smuts did not wait for the new man's arrival. He was out of
politics, indeed, he had been ousted. His people did not accept
his violent recantation of his association with Rhodes. To the
suspicious Dutch it sounded too good to be true. To them it
was English cant, acquired at Cambridge. Smuts was isolated,
boycotted, excluded. His speech at Kimberley appeared in-
explicable. Indeed, he could not himself give a satisfactory ex-
planation. He had been cheated, betrayed by his idol. Yet he
felt lost and lonely .without Cecil Rhodes. Although his Boer
nationalism burst into flames, he appeared to be helplessly com-
promised. He was still shy at that time, thin-skinned and easily
hurt. He had fallen between two stools. He was disgusted by
everything English. The rousing welcome the English majority
in Cape Town gave Cecil Rhodes upon his return from Eng-
land, where he had successfully defended himself against the
"unctuous rectitude" of his critics, made Smuts sick. On the
other hand there was no place for him in the Afrikaner Bond,
which now methodically sought to obtain complete control of the
Cape legislation with the aim of severing a united South Africa
from the British "connection." The Bond fell back upon its
original Programme of Principles, laid down at Graaf-Reinet in
1882, and demanded a Union of South Africa under her own
flag. Even the anti-British gospel of the German Carl Brocken-
hagen, one of the founders of the Bond, was salvaged from the
dustbin. The English became usurpers to be expelled. Their
language was banned from school and home. Intermarriage
with them was considered unpatriotic. English trade was boy-
cotted, whereas Holland and Germany became the "domestic
base" of overseas business. Every Afrikander was expected to
provide himself with the best weapons available, and to prac-
tice marksmanship. Two compelling reasons for the "total ex-
cision" of the "British ulcer" were given: first, the English High
Church was hardly distinguishable from the satanic Roman
Catholic Church. Secondly, the English policy toward colored
races was repugnant and dangerous. Both appeals to the Dutch

60

OLD MASTER

bigotry and racial master-complex were well calculated to arouse
the masses. In Pretoria, Dr. Leyds rubbed his hands. Now the
influential Cape Colony would no longer remain indifferent to
what happened in the Transvaal.

Smuts was left out in the cold. He found but one consolation:
Miss Krige believed in him. She comforted him when he sought
refuge in Stellenbosch. She helped him regain his strength and
healed his spirit. He was wounded where youth is most vulner-
able: in his pride. Her soothing influence gave him back his
confidence.

In March, 1896, a few weeks before the Norman Castle, with
Sir Alfred Milner aboard, anchored off Cape Town, Smuts
went to Johannesburg, not because he loved the center of
"gross materialism," but because the thriving town, which had
already relegated Cape Town to second place, offered the best
opportunities for a struggling young barrister. Spying out the
land, he found the opportunities satisfactory, went back to
Cape Town, closed his law office, dropped the British national-
ity with which he had been born, and returned to Johannes-
burg. In September, Ons Land announced that Advocate Smuts
would seek admission to the Transvaal Bar, and commented:
"it would be a cause for regret if the Cape were to lose one of
its cleverest, most promising sons. No doubt Afrikaners would
appreciate his sacrifice if he decided to remain in the Colony
after all." Smuts had good reason to doubt the accuracy of this
friendly prophecy. He was admitted to practice in Johannes-
burg. Ironically, Boer of the Boers, as he then felt himself, he
was only a second-class burgher in the fatherland of his choice,
an uitlander, coming from a British colony, and thus a man
without franchise.

Nevertheless, he immediately proved a good Transvaal pa-
triot. Within a few weeks of his arrival in Johannesburg he
wrote some articles for the Cape Town press, urging strongly
a more cordial Understanding between the Colony and the Re-
publics. Besides dabbling a little longer in journalism, he re-
sumed his evening classes in law, and thus made sure that
Johannesburg would provide an adequate living for two.

61

OLD MASTER

With his customary unyouthf ul caution, he did not return to
the Colony before January, 1897. Mr. Gideon Krige met him at
the train, and asked him to speak a few words not in Stellen-
bosch itself, but, as a trial, in a political meeting to be held at
Kuils River, near Stellenbosch. Smuts acquitted himself of his
task by describing Cecil Rhodes as a permanent barrier be-
tween English and Dutch. Only a few listeners understood that
their speaker was already, following his innermost and unshak-
able conviction, on the way to reconciliation and co-operation.
He interpreted the difference between the two races as a con-
flict over an individual. All he demanded was the exclusion of
a single man, the only man, it is true, whom he could not forget.

Once more he made a cautious effort to mend his fences.
Toward the middle of January, he publicly uttered a warning,
not in Cape Town itself, but at Philadelphia, a small town
north of the colonial capital, that "if the same course were pur-
sued (by the English), matters would become still more serious
in the next years." Again it was a threat against England, but
with an alternative: if the English would change their course,
all would be right again. Mr. Merriman, the professional medi-
ator in South African politics, referred to "Mr. Smuts' eloquent
speech." But the Kaffrarian Watchman was not so easily ap-
peased. The newspaper called Smuts a fire-eater and a political
madman. This tactful insinuation accompanied him throughout
his life.

At a Malmesbury meeting, with his father in the chair, he
took his last shot at Cecil Rhodes. Accused by Mr. Louw, one
of the few Dutchmen in politics who had remained faithful to
the "colossus," of unfairness to an absent man, Smuts replied:
"Mr. Rhodes had ample opportunity to account for his action in
public without availing himself of it ... I am no longer going
to have anything to do with him." Smuts was twenty-seven
years old when he thus buried his relation with his shattered
idol. At the age of sixty he went to Oxford to deliver the Rhodes
Memorial lecture, a grand address, and a confession of intel-
lectual faith in the beloved enemy long in his grave.

There was one more thing to be done, one thing more im-

62

OLD MASTER

portant than anything else. On Friday the thirtieth of April,
1897, in the early morning, Smuts was back in Stellenbosch. No
one was astonished to see him in formal black, since as a young
man he rarely wore less ceremonial attire. He went to the
Kriges' house where Isie was already waiting, perhaps a little
impatiently, for she had, indeed, been waiting for twelve years.
They were married by the Reverend Dr. Marais, the benefactor
who had once lent undergraduate Smuts a little money on his
life insurance. The hour for the ceremony was carefully chosen
so that Miss Krige's younger brothers and sisters were safely in
school. Only the bride's parents had been let into the secret. On
the next morning the couple went off to conquer Johannesburg.

Johannesburg in 1897, eleven years after its foundation, was
a town of excitement, energy and activity. Men and money
from Kimberley had moved in. The old-timers brought, as it
were, their accustomed surroundings with them. The Market
Square in Johannesburg was an exact copy of the original in
jolly, crazy, sweating Kimberley. The town was overcrowded.
Although hotels were mushrooming, most newcomers had to
sleep on floors. The streets were rutted tracks. Crossing Com-
missioner Streetthe main street one sank into the mud. Filthy
buckets served for drains. Water had to be carted a couple of
miles from the hills to the north, since the municipal adminis-
tration, a body in which the uitlanders were not represented,
refused to lay pipes. In times of drought this scarcity of water
caused real hardship. But it was always a good excuse for re-
placing water with other liquids. However, in spite of orgies
of drinking, in spite of hastily swallowed and irregular meals,
in spite of dirt and discomfort, of the horrible sanitary condi-
tions perpetuated by the unclean and unkempt Transvaal ad-
ministrators, who turned Johannesburg, six thousand feet above
sea level, a natural health resort, into the town with the most
frightful child mortality in spite of all these drawbacks, hope
and enthusiasm ran riot.

The hope was noisy, the enthusiasm clamorous, the manners
rough and ready. Yet the predominantly English settlement

63

OLD MASTER

although having a strong admixture of Russian and German
Jews, oily Portuguese, Hollander speculators, and even Turks
and Armenians craved the respectability of an English town.
Soon Johannesburg was laid out in broad thoroughfares. Gum
trees were planted in the residential districts where they grew
with incredible speed. Houses were more the object of specula-
tion in real estate than gems of architectural taste. Everyone
was constantly moving; the city itself rapidly changed its face.
The suburb of Doornfontein, where the young Smuts settled
down, was at that time a respectable district. Later the natives
swarmed over it.

The newcomers did not belong to the gay set of Johannes-
burg. They kept to their kin: to the other Dutch people who,
also, after the Jameson Raid, had left the Cape Colony disillu-
sioned. Most of them did not find their promised land in their
chosen republic, either. When it came to appointments in the
civil service, President Kruger preferred imported Hollanders,
crafty and slick fellows, to his own young Boers. It was another
aspect of his signal inability to come to terms with the new gen-
eration. Probably he felt the gulf himself, and did not relish it.
But Oom Paul was now seventy-four years old, his painful and
incurable eye disease his eyelashes were growing inward, and
constant medical attention could not relieve his terrible suffer-
ingkept him in a state of permanent irritation. Besides, he be-
came ever harder of hearing. Yet this wreck of a patriarch had,
due to the Jameson Raid, become a saint and a symbol to most
Boers over all South Africa. His greedy, possessive instinct was
not sapped by his physical decay. He grew always more stub-
born, autocratic, intractable, and lonesome. Sternly, he reserved
all important decisions for himself. But his Hollander advisers
were left to carry out the routine business. They were headed
by Dr. Leyds, the Secretary of State, who, according to Milner,
had won the confidence of Kruger by acting as a protagonist
against England, and who was "largely the cause of recent
troubles in South Africa by fomenting differences between
Great Britain and the Transvaal."

Smuts' own attitude toward the Hollanders had been in his

64

OLD MASTER

best manner, conciliatory. While still in Cape Town he had
written: "I am not pro-Hollander. But when the Transvaal
struggled with poverty, when it was in sackcloth and ashes, our
educated Cape men were not very eager to run after Cinder-
ella. It was only from Holland that civil servants were to be
obtained. It is but natural that those who stood by the country
in those dark days should enjoy their share of the fat of the
land, now prosperity has come. . . . Only in one way can the
so-called Hollander question be solved. And that is by exem-
plary behavior on the part of the Colonial Afrikanders in the
Transvaal. They are destined to bring about a slow, quiet revo-
lution in this country."

What had been a program when he wrote those lines, be-
came his practice now that he himself was a Colonial Afrikan-
der in the Transvaal. His behavior was, indeed, exemplary, and
he was bent on bringing about a very slow and quiet, almost
inaudible revolution in the country.

His exemplary behavior, it is true, differed from the accepted
standards in high-strung, hectic, convivial Johannesburg. Still
a tight-lipped, square-chinned, lean young man, he was shad*
owed by personal tragedy. His twin daughters died in infancy,
and the son who came in the second year of his marriage was
also a weak child; he, too, was to die early, actually while his
father was in the field. Yet personal tragedy did not break him.
Perhaps he knew that his life would never be entirely his own.
In his own words he was hard, confident, and successful as a
young man. Friends were impressed by his "hungry, angry"
eyes. "Well do I remember the Advocate Smuts of those days,"
a contemporary reminisced. "He was a familiar figure in Com-
missioner Street, and he did not resemble the later General
Smuts at all. Imagine a pale-faced, tremendously serious young
man, who appeared much taller than he really was, owing to
his thinness; given to conversing with the pavement, absorbed
in thoughts, and seemingly taking no notice of what went on
around him; with high cheekbones, and the hungry look that
betokens the man whose mind is grappling with many prob-

65

OLD MASTER

lems, prominent among which, no doubt, was the question why
his energy could not find an adequate outlet."

Once more, but for the last time, Smuts was the lone wolf.
None of the many causes c61ebre among the quarrelsome popu-
lace of Johannesburg came his way. Yet he did fairly well.
After a few months he could give up his law courses; he did
not need the income on the side line any longer. The event was
celebrated by a formal dinner in his honor. His hosts, a group
of prominent lawyers, had tactfully ordered Pudding Diplomat
by way of dessert.

The air was thick with rumors. President Kruger was about
to reshuffle his cabinet. Dr. Leyds could perhaps better employ
his outstanding qualities, amiability, civilized manners, the
good looks of a blond young giant, in mobilizing the powers of
continental Europe against the British menace. In addition to
the Secretaryship of State, the office of State Attorney was also
vacant. The Young Afrikander Movement, a clique of youthful
Boers opposing the British as well as their Hollander counter-
parts in the Transvaal administration, would perhaps get a
chance. The movement's uncontested leader was Advocate
Smuts.

But a storm in a teacup outroared all political combinations
and conspiracies. After many years of haggling with the admin-
istration the courts of justice were definitely fed up with
Kruger's dictatorial habit of overriding their decisions simply
by passing a besluit resolution which canceled judicial sen-
tences in the docile Volksraad. The grondwet constitution-
had guaranteed judicial independence. Chief Justice Kotz6, an
old antagonist of Kruger's, who had once been defeated by
Oom Paul in a presidential election, decided a mining case
against the government, compelling it to repay a sum of a few
hundred thousand pounds. Conceivably, the already long punc-
tured and abused constitution was not worth another 350,000
to Kruger. Moreover, he was aroused at another man's daring
to be as pigheaded as he was himself. He passed a further
resolution in the Volksraad, not only forbidding the courts to
contest legislation, but threatening any judge who attempted

66

OLD MASTEE

to do so with instant dismissal. The High Court, in response,
went on strike, demanding the re-establishment of their rights
before legal business could be renewed in the Transvaal. The
state of lawlessness in the Republic, already prevailing to a
large degree, would thus have been openly advertised. This
Kruger could not risk at a time when his emissary was appeal-
ing to European civilization for help against the threatening
British "transgression of law." Kruger proved his cunning by
promising that he would pass a suitable measure during the
VolksraacFs session.

The entire Transvaal debated whether the special or the
regular session was meant. The High Court, backed by the
whole of the legal profession, demanded its protective besluit
from the special session, which was then in progress, whereas
Kruger, evasive as ever, insisted that he had spoken of the forth-
coming, ordinary session.

Advocate Smuts had his great opportunity. For the first time
a cause celebre came his way: He was briefed in a sensational
murder case. But without batting an eye he forsook his chance.
He perceived a greater one. Provoking the entire bar of the
Transvaal, he came forth with a legal opinion, supporting the
President. His paper was long and involved, based on a highly
scientific interpretation of Roman-Dutch law in which no man
was his peer, but it boiled down to the simple fact that the
question which session Kruger had had in mind was open.
Hence the President could make his own choice.

Undoubtedly, Smuts believed in what he said. He has never
uttered a false word. But he disliked Chief Justice Kotz6's med-
dling in politics. A judge should keep out of it. Finally, he had
made up his mind to throw in his lot with Kruger and the anti-
English, perhaps in the hope that he could tame them and
bring about that "silent and slow revolution" in the Transvaal
whose necessity he had predicted.

His judgment, based on the authority of the generally recog-
nized greatest expert in jurisprudence in the Republic who,
by a queer fate, happened to be a rather briefless barrister-
struck like a thunderbolt.

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OLD MASTER

The Pretoria Volkstem, President Kruger's own mouthpiece,
suggested Mr. Smuts as a suitable candidate for the post of
State Attorney, enthusiastically enumerating his qualities. A
week later, the Rand Post, a conservative English-language
paper, announced that Smuts, indeed, had been offered the
post. "He is able and conscientious/' the paper commented,
"but though he may have all the precociousness of a Pitt, we
still consider that twenty-eight years is rather too young an
age for the State Attorney of the South African Republic." In
his place, the newspaper suggested Mr. Krause, the Public
Prosecutor in Johannesburg. Tactfully, the Rand Post had
omitted Smuts' other evident disqualification: although siding
with the ruling Boer oligarchy, the young advocate was tech-
nically an uitlander without franchise.

This fact, coupled with the drawback of his youth he was
two years too young to become a member of the executive
indeed prevented Kruger from making Smuts Secretary of
State, as had been his strong desire. He was enamoured of
Smuts, the very man for whom he had been looking: a young
Boer who would be faithful to him. "Our relations were like
those of father and son," Smuts expressed it later. But Kruger's
uncanny knowledge of his farmers' and burghers' mood, pre-
vented him from eliciting a showdown. Mr. Reitz, once Presi-
dent of the Free State, was appointed Secretary of State. Smuts
had to content himself with the second job. It was still an ab-
surd appointment. But there was only slight grumbling among
the oligarchy. The old shepherds felt that a fresh wind was now
sweeping over the green pastures of the Transvaal. Some sus-
picious members of the Volksraad comforted themselves with
the thought that the intruder would only play second fiddle.
Little did they realize that this was his innermost inclination.
Smuts' creative urge was always greater than his personal am-
bition. The shy youngster developed into a modest man. Until
he reached the fifties, he always contented himself with wield-
ing the power "in close harmony" with a resplendent front man.

In June, 1898, Smuts arrived in Pretoria, and he had come to

OLD MASTER

stay. The mellow capital of the Transvaal was already the Boers'
holy town, although it had only been built some forty years
before and sheltered an important English minority. The at-
mosphere was different from that of Johannesburg, not alone
due to the fact that the altitude was some one thousand feet
lower. Still, Pretoria lies on a high plateau, and is surrounded
by gently sloping hills from which the town appears like a great
park of tall, dark-green poplars showing glimpses of red roofs,
the towers of public buildings shining above them.

From near by, however, Pretoria, toward the turn of the cen-
tury, looked less ideal. City and suburb were strangely inter-
mixed. Corrugated-iron shacks stood next to dignified bank
buildings; the State Museum bordered the meat market. But
everywhere trees and flowers grew, and the town was irrigated
by the innumerable rivulets that flowed through the ditches.
Among one-storied houses the spacious government buildings
and the edifices belonging to banking and business interests
stood out incongruously. Trolley lines ran through the princi-
pal streets, but the trams had frequently to stop: the farmers'
oxcarts and trek wagons had the right of way.

Pretoria did not belong to its inhabitants, but to the Presi-
dent's own people. They outspanned on the public square
when they came to town to partake of the nagmaal, holy com-
munion, or to see Oom Paul. Kruger's house, a small white-
washed cottage, stood opposite the Dopper church, the sanctu-
ary of the fiercest and most bigoted sect of the Dutch Reformed
Church, where the President sometimes preached, intermin-
gling his sermon with curses and loud outcries.

The President spent most of his day on the stoep, the veran-
dah, of his house, ready to receive any of his burghers, smoking
his pipe incessantly, using the pavement as a spittoon, and
drinking, with his callers, innumerable cups of coffee through-
out the day: the state allowed him 300 a year "coffee money"
as part of his expenses for entertaining. On the stoep all busi-
ness of state was negotiated. No records, no files were kept.
Among all his new impressions, Smuts, punctiliously careful by
inclination and habit, must have wondered at this form of gov-

OLD MASTER

eminent by word of mouth. But he rapidly accustomed himself
to his surrounding. Here he was not in Cape Town, not in Cam-
bridge, not in Johannesburg. Here he was where he wanted to
belong.

Before six months had passed, the new State Attorney had
clamped down on corruption wherever he could stamp out the
evil without hurting the President's feelings. He was anxious
not to trespass on Oom Paul's own bailiwick, but he could
purge some of the evil in Johannesburg. An abstainer himself,
he was disgusted by the illicit liquor traffic. Instead of hunting
the small fry, he attacked the evil at its root. He dismissed the
chief of the corrupt detective service on the Rand. Philosophi-
cally, this worthy by the name of Bob Ferguson shrugged.
"Smuts says that I do not get at the big men," was his own
explanation. On the following day The Standard and Diggers
News, a Johannesburg paper, announced that the new State
Attorney would take over personally the whole detective serv-
ice. "No one doubts the integrity and ability of Mr. Smuts," the
English paper commented. "He has it in him to make the law
respected."

A series of stern edicts ensued. They were promulgated by
the six oligarchs of the Executive Council of which Smuts, due
to his absurd legal status, was not a member and passed by
the Volksraad. But they had been drawn up by the State Attor-
ney, some of the sterner ones undoubtedly at Kruger's behest.
Smuts was eager to serve his paternal friend. He saw in
Kruger the embodiment of the Boer, character in all its higher
and larger aspects. He admired Oom Paul's iron will and tenac-
ity, and his mystic faith in another world. To him, Johannes
Paulus Kruger was the greatest man, both morally and intel-
lectually, that the Boer race had produced. The existence of
such a personality was to him the safest guarantee that the
scattered, isolated, small tribe of the Boers, his own tribe,
would never go down. And that was all that mattered.

That they were opposite poles, Kruger and Smuts, the one
learned and scientific, a believer in pure intellect, an austere
thinker yet an enthusiastic idealist ever in search of a better

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OLD MASTER

world; the other an illiterate, instinct-driven, pigheaded oldster,
yet imbued with a glowing, if bigoted, creed, an intense feeling
of pride and dignity, the last pillar of an obsolete microcosmic
world . . . that they were opposite poles made no difference.
North and South poles are a globe apart, and yet indistinguish-
able from one another.

Smuts, himself painfully correct, could not bring himself to
stomach the corruption permeating the President's surround-
ing. Admitting Kruger's nepotism, he told Sir Percy Fitzpat-
rick, the head of the Johannesburg Reformers: "The President
wants to do his best. But you have to remember that there are
a number of hangers-on, people who have personal interests of
which he knows nothing, and there are times when they make
it difficult to carry out what we all know ought to be done."
That old man Kruger should not have known anything of the
personal interests of his own son-in-law, whom he had effec-
tively helped to become a millionaire, was a charitable view.
But Smuts followed his leader blindly. It was a repetition of the
Rhodes-complex, this time within his own family circle.

In the very month of November, 1898, in which the detective
force was put under Smuts' personal control, Kruger waged an-
other of his favorite two-front wars: against a native tribe as
well as against his despised uitlanders. He made the Volksraad
decree that all white men living in the Transvaal were liable
to military service in the commandos. His cause was righteous,
nay, religious. The Lord had ordained his chosen people to en-
slave the Amorites and Canaanites. These strange names, of
course, stood for the Zulus and the Matabele. But the uitland-
ers refused to fight for Kruger's Old-Testamentarian craze,
which they rightly explained by his desire to have slave labor
for his fanners.

Smuts, not representing a constituency, spoke in the Volks-
raad only when it was necessary to explain a legal matter. Now
he spoke. He suggested a law compelling the uitlanders subject
to foreign sovereignties to fight or pay.

Something in his instinct or his intellect, however it is diffi-
cult to tell die difference, because Smuts is the rare case of a

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OLD MASTER

man in whom intellect and instinct are as closely wedded as is
humanly possible must have, at least occasionally, revolted
against the uncompromising course to which he was now com-
mitted. On March 3, 1899, the British agent in Pretoria, a dip-
lomat by the name of Sir Conyngham Greene, sent Milner an
amazing report. He had been told by Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, the
leader of the uitlanders, that Messieurs Leyds, who served a
short term as Foreign Secretary before embarking on his mis-
sion to Europe, Reitz, the State Secretary, and Smuts, the State
Attorney, had come forward with a conciliatory proposal, to
which, they insisted, they were able to obtain Kruger's consent.
The Transvaal Government would offer peace to the whole uit-
lander population. It would impose no new taxes without ap-
proval, appoint a European financier as auditor, and grant full
citizenship rights to everyone after a residence of five years
from the day die agreement was signed. The government would
also offer to settle the vexed question of the dynamite conces-
sion by mutual consent. In return, the government demanded
the support of the industry in the Chinese coolie question
which was to become a major headache to Smuts in later years
as well as in floating a loan; furthermore they insisted on the
liquidation of the South African League, the foremost British
patriotic organization in South Africa, and the ceasing of the
press agitation both in the English papers in the Transvaal and
in England.

However, Sir Conyngham added, Fitzpatrick had smelled a
rat. Even if the offer were bona fide, the shrewd businessman
believed, the Volksraad would not ratify any such agreement,
whereas Kruger would have secured his dynamite and prob-
ably not alone for industrial purposes. Smuts, according to Fitz-
patrick, was the main agent. "He knows all about everything."
Smuts insists he and Leyds had proposed and discussed the
matter with Kruger, who for his part promised to suggest the
compromise to the Volksraad and felt sure it would pass there.
During the course of the negotiations Smuts offered further
concessions. The coolie question should not be included pub-
licly, and as to the franchise, the uitlanders waiting time could

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OLD MASTER

be restricted. "So altogether it looks genuine as far as Smuts is
involved/' Fitzpatrick concluded. "But who can believe that
Kruger and Leyds have no ulterior aims? Smuts implored me
as a fellow South African to try to get the proposal well re-
ceived. It would be the real settlement of all our troubles, and
the removal of the war cloud forever. The reason for hurry, he
says, is that Kruger can't keep anything secret for any length
of time. So Smuts wants to act now. While I believe that he
means it, although he aims at a Republic of South Africa, I still
mistrust the others."

A few days later Sir Conyngham Greene endorsed Fitzpat-
rick's confidence in Smuts, though he was beset by similar
scruples concerning the others. "It is perfectly clear that Smuts
and Reitz are genuine. But it is equally clear that the President
and Dr. Leyds aim solely at safeguarding their dynamite and
estranging the Dutch from the Imperial government."

Milner himself received the same impression, when, toward
the end of March, Dr. Leyds called upon him for a farewell
visit before leaving for Europe. Without mincing words, Milner
warned him not to repeat his manoeuvre of two years before. If
he again made fair promises to the government in London and
to the English press, of which nothing more would be heard
when the crisis was over, he would do irretrievable damage to
the cause of peace. Dr. Leyds laughed off the warning, and did
exactly as Milner had expected. He remained the stormy petrel
of South African politics. His Dutch stubbornness wrecked
Smuts' well meant peace plan.

Kruger went ahead with his proposed extension of the dyna-
mite concession in clear violation of the London Convention.
The High Commissioner protested. His objection was answered
by State Attorney Smuts, who, in the shortest possible form,
answered that the Transvaal Government would uphold its de-
cision. Obviously he did not wish to stick his neck out again.
Or perhaps he was embittered by the failure of his first peace
effort. In his youth he was easily embittered. A telegram Sir
Conyngham Greene sent Milner on May 15 testifies to Smuts'
recurrent stubbornness: "The President is being urged, I am

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OLD MASTER

told, by influential old burghers to give way, and to recognize
the legitimate rights of the uitlanders before pressure is brought
to bear from outside. But Smuts and others from the Young
Afrikander Movement, backed by the Hollander clique, are
openly defiant. They believe the Imperial Government may
threaten, but will not act."

On the same day, another signal fire flared up. The police in
Johannesburg arrested eight persons on charges of high treason.
Five were alleged to be British ex-officers, one of them the spy
master for the War Office in London. The three others, it soon
appeared, were stool pigeons, arrested on their own faked con-
fessions, and planted in the cells to spy on their fellow pris-
oners.

The Johannesburg police was under Smuts' personal direc-
tion. The British agent rushed into the State Attorney's office,
indignantly protesting against what was evidently a plot to
poison the Transvaal's relations with England. Smuts washed
his hands of the matter. The responsibility, he insisted, lay with
the Public Prosecutor, Dr. Krause. Yet he assured Greene that
any alleged intention to compromise Her Majesty's government
would be suppressed. It is, indeed, unbelievable that, even in
the heat of those explosive days, Smuts himself could have been
involved in a scheme of that low order. However, the affair was
the business of his department. Milner, rejecting Smuts' assur-
ances, demanded a full and speedy investigation. The disgrace-
ful conspiracy was finally exposed in court, and furnished one
more proof of the methods used by the Zarps and by the agents
provocateurs in the service of the Transvaal Government. No
apology was extended to the Imperial government, nor did the
innocent victims of the plot receive any form of compensation.

The dice were loaded. The situation became impossible for
England, and was fraught with peril for the Transvaal. On May
13, Dr. Leyds cabled from London: "England has now every-
where a free hand. I doubt if anybody will do anything for us,"
and a fortnight later from Berlin: "Minister for Foreign Affairs
says Germany still friendly to South African Republic, but can-
not assist in war because England is master of the seas. Hopes

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OLD MASTER

government of SAR will concede as much as is consistent with
independence. England has not asked Germany."

Milner, the new opponent of Kruger, was not an elementary
force as Cecil Rhodes had been. If Rhodes and Kruger were
both fighting demons, Sir Alfred Milner resembled Smuts very
much more closely. Both were shy, reserved, and apparently
haughty and unyielding, but both were warm-hearted idealists.
They took, it is true, another twenty years before they discov-
ered this similarity.

Milner had arrived in the middle of the extreme tension fol-
lowing the Jameson Raid. Under his soothing influence a de-
gree of calm was achieved, at least in the Cape Colony. He
made the leaders of the Bond understand that as British citi-
zens they could not, without committing high treason, adopt
the same extreme anti-British attitude that went unchecked in
the Republics. Perhaps his argument was also made more in-
telligible to the Dutch master politicians by the dispatch of a
small number of English troops to Durban, and by a minor
naval demonstration; a few British vessels showed themselves
off the coast of Natal. The Bond leaders understood. They were
impressed by Milner's intensity, whereas he for his part im-
mediately understood the fundamental unity of South Africa.
The Cape Colony quieted down. Now Milner went at his next
task: patching up the relations with the Transvaal. Joseph
Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary in London, had urged him
to adopt a policy of patience. Milner was entirely agreed as to
the wisdom of this course.

But one more incident occurred that again shook South
Africa to its foundations. An uitlander in Johannesburg, an Eng-
lishman by the name of Edgar, involved in a street brawl, had
been pursued by four of those brute Boer policemen into his
house, and there shot down by one of them. The murderer was
arrested, but charged only with manslaughter and released on
bail of 200. Smuts immediately interfered. He ordered the
rearrest of the policeman, and a renewed trial. The judge, a
peasant's son from the platteland, and a fiery nationalist aged

75

OLD MASTER

twenty-four, approved the verdict of the jury, entirely com-
posed of Boers. The murderer was acquitted for the second
time.

The uitlanders were in despair. They petitioned Queen Vic-
toria to come to the assistance of subjects in the Transvaal "in
which conditions had become well-nigh intolerable/' Kruger
regarded this petition signed by twenty-odd thousand British
citizens to their own sovereign as treason toward the Transvaal.
Smuts told Sir Percy Fitzpatrick with whom he had been nego-
tiating on the most amicable terms: "I am morally certain that
you are at the bottom of everything, and when I get proof of
it, I will put it into you for all you are worth. . . ." All South
Africa was in a state of unbearable suspense. To continue the
endless and fruitless negotiations in which he had been in-
volved ever since his arrival was useless, Milner understood.
The question of the uitlanders had to be settled once and for
all. Only one man could guarantee a settlement, President
Kruger.

Milner availed himself of a standing offer by the government
of the Free State, to bring him and Kruger together. He arrived
in Bloemfontein, the capital of the Free State, on May 30, 1899,
and was on the following day introduced to the President.
Kruger had brought Smuts as his legal adviser.

Milner greeted the young man, whom he had long wished to
meet personally, in the most courteous manner.

Smuts, who had so far only experienced the tempestuous
"colossus," Cecil Rhodes, a man who did not fit into any frame,
was now for the first time confronted with the power of the
British Empire incarnate.

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OLD MASTER

Chapter 7 UNTIL THE RAINS FALL

THE SCENE WAS SET. AN OFFICE IN THE RAILWAY DEPARTMENT,

the newest building in Bloemf ontein, had been freshly cleaned
and got in order as a special sign of the neutral host's good will.
The Free State had good reason to stress its neutral character.
President Steyn had, half a year before the conference, on No-
vember 22, 1899, addressed a meeting of the Free State com-
mandants from eighteen districts on the Caledon River with
the words: "We must make necessary regulations against con-
fusion in the event of a sudden call to arms." Among other
measures it was resolved that at least 10,000 cartridges should
be stocked in each magazine, and that each burgher should be
provided with 100 cartridges.

Since Kruger's English was none too good, Mr. Abraham
Fischer, Prime Minister of the Free State, acted as translator.
Mr. Fischer took great pains to stress his impartiality. The fact
was not revealed that he had just refused the Secretaryship of
State in the Transvaal, and for a very sound reason: he could
be of more help to Kruger in steering the allied Free State into
the latter's camp if and when matters came to a showdown.

On one side of the conference table sat Sir Alfred Milner
with his staff: Colonel Hanbury-Williams, his aide-de-camp,
Lord Belgrave, his secretary, and three clerical assistants. On
the other side Kruger was surrounded by his crew: Schalk-
Burger, a member of the Executive Council with a certain
liberal reputation, Wolmarans, another Transvaal politician,
and the experts, among whom one lanky young man, more
neatly clad than his companions, his face clean-shaven, lips
tightly pressed together, steel-blue eyes fixed on his president,
as if he wanted to imbue him with his own energy, caused some
attention, primarily because he could not sit still. Repeatedly
he jumped up to be nearer to Oom Paul, and to press scraps of
paper into the old man's hand, although the invalid's red eyes

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OLD MASTER

could not decipher the scribbled words. However, the youthful
State Attorney's restlessness was only a minor diversion. The
general attention was concentrated on the two protagonists.
They represented not only two countries, but two worlds.

Oom Paul in his tightly buttoned, stained frock coat, sat hud-
dled in an armchair, a fringe of thick, unkempt hair surrounded
his broad chin and his heavy animal face, marked by bushy
brows and a cunning, stubborn expression. A strong will, it ap-
peared, was once more pulling together his enormous mass of
flesh. He obviously did not fear the duel in which he was now
about to engage. It was not a new experience to him. Nothing
was new to the patriarch. Why, had he not, three years earlier,
triumphantly tricked Sir Hercules Robinson, another British
High Commissioner? Moreover, the victory at Majuba Hill was
still in his blood. He himself had not participated in the battle.
But since that glorious day he was doubly sure that God in
heaven and the Liberal Party in England would never desert
him. Both blessed his determination to prevent foreigners from
having a voice in his country. He breathed heavily. It sounded
as if he were drawing his strength from the nation of shepherds
for whom he stood; one of them, and yet their exalted leader.
The recent elections had shown that not only the burghers but
also the spokesmen of the Young Afrikander Movement were
no less zealous and fanatic than he was himself. On the very
eve of the conference the Volksraad had vetoed the franchise
to some uitlanders who had acquired their right to citizenship
by fourteen years of residence. This provocative gesture was
clearly intended to stiffen their President for the forthcoming
negotiations. The Volksraad would agree to no concessions,
even if such were imposed on their President. While Kruger sat
slumped in his armchair, shivering even in the warm South
African autumn, his men on the veld were drilling; rifles were
being distributed among them; veld-cornets galloped from farm
to farm, instructing the burghers not to leave their homes, and
to hold themselves ready. Paul Kruger grinned. It would please
the Lord to let His most faithful believer see another, the
crowning victory, either at this conference table or on the bat-

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OLD MASTER

tlefield, before he closed his burning eyes. Whether by nego-
tiation, or by the might of arms, the hated rooineks rednecks
would be driven into the sea.

Opposite the prophet sat Milner, tall, thin, with a strong face,
calm, immaculately attired, the prototype of clean, intelligent
efficiency. Equipped with all the learning of the schools, he was
wont to keep his strong emotions in leash to his reason. He was
reserved to the point of shyness. In manners and looks he ap-
peared austere. Throughout all the trials that beset him he kept
his unshakable nerve, and his resolution of steel. Yet he was
far from nursing prejudices, or even rigid opinions. He had
come to Bloemf ontein with his mind open to new suggestions
and ideas. But it was impossible to shake his ardent belief in
the civilizing influence of the British Empire. It was to this
cause that he devoted all his energies. He was not as cunning
as Kruger, but very much wiser. And he met the old fanatic's
pitchfork with the cold steel of his intellect.

The first meeting of the conference lasted but two hours. Al-
ready at half -past four in the afternoon, Kruger was becoming
tired. He had been rambling along all the time, his tone con-
ciliatory, skilfully avoiding any concrete statement. He put in
a brief appearance at the evening reception given by President
Steyn of the Free State, and was just as evasive when the con-
ference was resumed the following morning.

Kruger was biding his time. Time was all that counted. Time
for further armament. But, above all, time until the rains would
pour down. In the dry sub-tropical winter, with the veld a
desert, the Boer commandos were immobilized. Their horses
could find no forage. The men could not move. A man without
a horse was only half a man.

But he could not distract Milner. At the second session, Sir
Alfred decided to confine the proceedings to one clear issue:
would the President grant reasonable and immediate measures
of enfranchisement to the uitlanders? If such a measure was
promised, promised without ambiguity, the High Commissioner
was prepared to enter into consideration of other causes of
friction, but they must not obscure the main issue. Enfranchise-

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OLD MASTER

merit was the vital question, and the acid test of Kruger's sin-
cerity and good will.

Kruger fell back on obstinate, repetitious assertions that he
could not sacrifice the independence of his country, a sacrifice
which had never been suggested or asked of him. He grew visi-
bly weary, hesitated in answering, his words lost in cumber-
some, involved sentences. Whether he feigned fatigue, or es-
caped into it, was not clear.

It was then that Smuts jumped into the breach. Long before
Fischer had finished translating Milner's replies, Smuts had
already scribbled the answers on loose slips, pressing them into
Kruger's hand, or, since the President could not make out the
writing, handing them over to his fellow-delegates sitting next
to Kruger. Smuts was as much a legalist as Milner. Moreover,
he knew from his years at Cambridge how the English mind
worked. Intuitively, he had the answer to every question, and
his counter-demands were speedily prepared. Mr. Fischer, sens-
ing that the position of the Transvaal delegation was improving
slightly, dropped the last vestige of impartiality. Unabashed,
he now aided Kruger's dilatory tactics, and did his best to
soften Milner's slashing rapier thrusts.

Thus Kruger was able to offer plausible-sounding, but decep-
tive alternatives to Milner's franchise proposal. But soon he
deviated from the central theme, throwing more monkey
wrenches into the discussion. Now it was his turn to make de-
mands: renunciation of British suzerainty, acceptance of "neu-
tral arbitration" by the Imperial government, British cession of
the whole of Swaziland in order to provide the Transvaal with
the long desired access to the sea. These demands were so
firmly entrenched in his mind that he could repeat them mo-
notonously without visible signs of fatigue. He simply rumi-
nated his stock-in-trade phrases. But to any question of a mod-
erate and temporary reform he was more than hard of hearing.
He was suddenly deaf. Full and honest franchise meant to him
the inevitable subjection of his rule to the voting power of the
inhabitants. It spelled the end of the system of fattening con-
cessions and monopolies, of his dictatorial control of the judi-

OLD MASTER

ciary, the end of corruption in the police, and of the cruel
treatment of the natives; the end, above all, of his dream of
Afrikanderdom's supremacy over all South Africa. "It is our
country that you want/' he burst out, bowing his head between
his big, red hands, hot tears streaming down his bearded cheeks.
In a way he was justified. To him his system of corruption
was, indeed, his country. But the English had no desire to wrest
from the Boers the hard-won independence to which they
clung so tenaciously. The conflict was greater. It was a clash
between two civilizations. The stream of the new life, indus-
trial, democratic, self-governing, surged against the barrier of
a primitive oligarchy, corrupt by tradition, and still further de-
teriorated by wealth acquired overnight.

Milner tried to explain that His Honor was entirely wrong.
Not only had Her Majesty's government not the slightest desire
to infringe the independence of the South African republic, but
actually less than full democracy was asked. The uitlanders,
although outnumbering the burghers by two to one or better,
would content themselves with eight seats in the Volksraad,
thus acquiring a platform to vent their grievances, but only a
small minority in the House of Assembly.

With flying fingers, Smuts wrote and wrote.

Embarrassed, Kruger stammered counter-proposals: he in-
sisted on seven years of residence before enfranchisement, thus
cutting down the old period by half. Milner listened attentively.
He waited for the escape clauses. They came in abundance.
The limitations and restrictions attached, rendered Kruger's
compromise proposal a sham.

Patiently, Milner explained why he had to insist on five years
before enfranchisement not to gain two years but for the
". . . principle of legal continuity . . ." Smuts murmured with
a faint smile, as if he were a mind reader.

Milner seemed to pay no attention to the interruption. But
he was impressed by the "brilliant" State Attorney, as he called
Smuts after the conference.

The principle of legal continuity, Milner argued untiringly,
was established on those terms of enfranchisement in the Trans-

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OLD MASTER

vaal which had been offered by the South African Republic
itself in the "great deal" following Majuba. But more impor-
tant, he added, were clear, simple formulas of admission, avail-
able to every duly qualified claimant.

Kruger tolerated no further interference on the part of his
legal adviser. Precisely these conditions he rejected. With
strong accents in his already broken voice he upheld the pro-
visos enabling his government to elect potential electors, ad-
mitting supporters, excluding opponents.

The last three days of the conference were a cumbersome re-
peat performance. Kruger reiterated his parrot-cry of "my inde-
pendence!" time and again. He adhered obstinately to his point.
Yet he must have felt that, at last, he had to deal with an Eng-
lishman whose will was as strong as his own, and whose brains
and power of argument were infinitely superior. His dogged-
ness in the end made him look foolish and insincere.

This became painfully evident to Smuts. He was aware that
the two republics had not a chance in the world against the
might and power of Great Britain. If he felt a Boer of the old
stamp, he had certainly inherited their predominant trait. He
was a born negotiator. Something new, he understood, must be
produced to save the conference; some alternative plan must
be found.

One more afternoon was spent on a discussion of the scandal
of the dynamite concession. Kruger gave a confused account,
but he explained that he was considering a new agreement with
the company. When asked to give a written statement about
this new agreement, he disdainfully refused to comply. He was
accustomed to government by word of mouth. Every deviation
from this rule would endanger the independence of the Trans-
vaal.

On the following day, the day before the last, Kruger in-
sisted that concessions acceptable to the uitlanders would
be "worse than annexation," and would "put an end to my
indep . . ."

At this moment a telegram was delivered to Lord Belgrave.
He read it, nodded, smiled, and passed it over to his chief.

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OLD MASTER

Even the austere Milner smiled in turn, and handed the 'tele-
gram around to his staff. Everyone seemed pleased. Finally the
message was returned to Lord Belgrave, who folded it and put
it into his pocket.

Milner apologized for the short interruption, and asked His
Honor to proceed.

But Kruger was much too intrigued by what were evidently
new and important instructions to the English delegation. He
had lost his thread and repeated the precious words "my inde-
pendence" several times before he dropped heavily back into
his armchair.

Everyone awaited an important announcement from Milner.
Instead, the High Commissioner merely suggested an adjourn-
ment. Now it was quite clear that some great event was in the
making. Bloemfontein buzzed with rumors. The Intelligence
Service of the South African Republic, a most efficient organi-
zation directed by the State Attorney, was set to trace various
clues.

After a few days the full truth about the telegram filtered
out. It read: "Flying Fox has won the Derby, Westminster."
Flying Fox belonged to the Duke of Westminster, Lord Bel-
grave's father.

But this was the single ray of light illuminating a somber
scene. Kruger sprang a few more conjurer's tricks, all of which
miscarried. On the last day of the conference, Monday June 5,
Kruger declared: "I am not ready to hand over my country to
strangers ... I understand from His Excellency's arguments
that if I do not really give the whole management of my land
and government to the strangers, there is nothing to be done/'

Jumping up, Milner protested that he had proposed nothing
that would have any such effect.

The final meeting was in the afternoon. Kruger stated for-
mally in a grave voice, having recovered his patriarchal dig-
nity, that his own franchise proposal went as far as it was pos-
sible to go. He would submit it to the Volksraad, as a step in the
right direction, even if His Excellency did not fully agree with

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OLD MASTER

it, provided that His Excellency would recommend arbitration
on future differences.

To Milner it was a clumsy trap. He saw both loopholes. The
Volksraad could just as well disagree, and arbitration could
only mean indefinite prolongation of the quarrel without fur-
ther progress. The High Commissioner summed up: "Since the
parties have found themselves unable to agree on the principal
topic of discussion, the status quo ante is restored. I am not
authorized to discuss the question of arbitration. But any defi-
nite proposal which His Honor might make at any time will be
submitted to the consideration of Her Majesty's government."

After an elaborate exchange of compliments the conference
broke up. Kruger said: "Milner is a hard man to tackle." He
felt himself misunderstood. In a way the High Commissioner
had, indeed, misunderstood him. Kruger had not the slightest
wish to prolong the quarrel indefinitely. He only wanted to
keep negotiations alive until the rains came. With a sigh of
resigned righteousness he looked up to his Lord. He could not
discern even the tiniest cloud in the sky. He sighed once more.
Then he looked at Smuts, at this nice boy at his side, this con-
firmed pacifist. His Honor smiled.

Oom Paul had good reason to smile. He was as sure of his
case as he felt justified in his cause. Imperial Germany stood
behind him. Already, Sir Edward Malet, British ambassador in
Berlin, had protested against Germany's encouragement of the
Boers in their hostile attitude toward England. Sir Edward had
pointed out that this might lead to serious complications. But
Baron Marschall Biberstein refused the warning. It was, he in-
sisted, based on unfounded rumors. Joseph Chamberlain him-
self felt the necessity to substantiate the English complaint. "It
appears from information in the possession of the Intelligence
Department," he told the House of Commons, "that during the
last nine months the Boers have already imported 50 field guns,
26 maxims, 45,000 rifles, more than 20,000 rounds of large and
30,000,000 pounds of rifle ammunition from a foreign power.

84

OLD MASTER

There is no reason to believe that such purchases are not go-
ing on/'

Backed up by his young emperor, Baron Marschall replied
from Berlin that Germany insisted on her right to support
President Kruger. Any retreat from this position would spread
a storm of indignation throughout the Reich. Wilhelm II, for
his part, scribbled one of his famous marginal notes to Mar-
schalFs report on the Transvaal affair: "We must vigorously
make capital out of this affair for eventual naval increases to
protect our growing trade/'

When Baron Marschall's diary was published, Wilhelm II's
final folly was disclosed. The diary contains the following entry:

January 3 At ten o'clock conference with His Majesty, at which
Hollmann, Knorr, and Senden also present. His Majesty developed
rather amazing plans. He proposed the establishment of a German
Protectorate over the Transvaal, an idea from which I dissuaded
him right away. Then the young master demanded mobilization of
the Marine, and dispatch of German troops to the Transvaal. On my
objection that this would be war with England, His Majesty said:
"Yes, but only on land."

In the end the Emperor contented himself with sending
Fuerst Hatzfeld, his ambassador in London, with an insolent
oral ultimatum to Downing Street. Shrewdly, the aged diplo-
mat presented himself at an hour when he knew Lord Salisbury
would be absent. Thus he was unable to carry out his mission.

Kruger was perfectly informed about events in Berlin and
London. Dr. Leyds constantly commuted between the two cap-
itals. He had been received in audience by Wilhelm II an hour
before the latter had despatched the Kruger telegram which
turned the "All Highest" into the Dr. Jameson of the world.

Moreover, the German Consul General in Pretoria, Herr von
Herff, sat daily on Kruger's stoep. He obtained the President's
permission to send 5,000 German settlers of military age into
the Transvaal. But when he alluded to the possibility of a Ger-
man Protectorate, Oom Paul insisted that arms came first and

85

OLD MASTER

diplomatic niceties later. So the stream of German arms floating
in through Delagoa Bay flowed ever broader.

According to Portuguese harbor statistics, the turnover of
war material in the port of Louren9o Marques had more than
quadrupled in the year 1897. It had jumped in value from
61,903 to 256,291. Over a million and a half pounds were
expended on the fortifications around Johannesburg. In Febru-
ary, 1898, they were equipped with heavy Krupp guns. Ger-
man artillery officers, still in the Emperor's uniform, were
placed in command. In the same month Kruger reported to his
executive council that he had just acquired a very large con-
signment of rifles, field guns, and ammunition. However, he
did not even entrust his six colleagues in the government with
exact figures. The loquacious President well knew that garru-
lousness was the Boers' cardinal sin. The other was a complete
lack of discipline. But that the autocrat did not learn for a year
longer.

He had enrolled ten thousand volunteers. Seventy thousand
pounds a year was allotted to the Secret Service, operating pri-
marily in the British colonies, more money than the British In-
telligence Service had ever seen. A naturalized British citizen
of German descent furnished Milner a list of nineteen promi-
nent journalists, officials, and civil servants in the Cape Colony
who were bribed by the Transvaal Government. An Irish jour-
nalist, back from Pretoria, reported: "A member of the Volks-
raad asked me whether the Queen would send down all her
army to be 'eaten up' "the Kafir expression "or whether she
would content herself with sending the boys."

In fact, the great white Queen across the seas sent no sol-
diers at all. Joseph Chamberlain, backed by almost the entire
government of his day, particularly by Lord Salisbury, the
Prime Minister, exercised all his remote influence to save the
peace. A war, he insisted, would be most unpopular among
the English people. South Africa was too far away.

Milner was on the spot. After Bloemfontein he knew that
either a show of power or Britain's ignominious retreat from all
South Africa was inevitable. He was depressed by the indiffer-

OLD MASTER

ence he encountered at home, and aroused by the defeatist at-
titude of Sir William Butler, his commander in chief, who re-
fused to take any precautionary measures, or indeed to budge,
as long as he had not received orders from the War Office. But-
ler even refused to recruit volunteers, for which, Milner in-
sisted, "the material was plentiful and excellent/' Butler would
make no strategic preparations. "The General's heart," Milner
wrote to Chamberlain, "is on the other side."

There was no half-heartedness whatsoever on the side of the
Boers. For five years the Transvaal had spent more than half
its revenues for armament. After Bloemfontein, money was no
longer a consideration. Why, the English in Johannesburg were
paying all. Pretoria was now as well fortified as Johannesburg.
A ring of forts was built on the hills surrounding the capital.
Large consignments of arms of all sorts in cases marked "Agri-
cultural Implements" and "Mining Machinery" were smuggled
into the Transvaal through the British ports of Cape Town and
Durban. Soldiers of fortune congregated from all over the
world. The soldiers' pay in the smallest republic was the high-
est in 'the world. But only the foreign condottieri, French and
German instructors, penniless Russian aristocrats, Balkan komir
tatschi, and last but not least a group of Irishmen from Chi-
cago, disguised as an ambulance corps and abusing the Red
Cross, drew money. The burghers were prepared to fight for
love, and for their hatred of the British.

Pretoria was an armed camp. Commandos from the platte-
land marched through the streets on their way to the border of
British Natal. Batteries of artillery paraded before Kruger.
Thousands of men exercised in all night rifle practice. Indeed,
the President had to hold back his people who were spoiling
for a fight. It was still too early. The veld was still bone dry. Yet
a mere week after the breakup of the conference at Bloemfon-
tein, Kruger introduced a draft law in the Volksraad, ha-
ranguing his lawmakers: "I don't want war, but I will not give
anything further away."

Cables from Leyds, who covered Europe at top speed, en-
couraged the President and his advisers to stand firm. To yield

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OLD MASTER

would endanger the independence of the Republic and lower
its prestige in the eyes of friendly nations, Dr. Leyds advised.

On July 2, he cabled from Paris a summing up of his London
experience. "According to Labouchere" the leftist Radical
"neither the Prime Minister nor his colleagues are desirous of
war. The cabinet is against Chamberlain. The House of Com-
mons is only waiting for the next step of SAR government to
bring an honorable solution. Scott (Manchester Guardian) pro-
poses President Kruger should take an extraordinary census in
order to determine the number of uitlanders, and how many of
them desire franchise. This would cause delay. Scott says that
gaining time is gaining everything."

That was exactly what Kruger thought. He no longer lis-
tened to his foreign emissary. Indeed, he heeded no one's ad-
vice. Retired amid the turmoil around him, he gazed at the sky.
Sometimes he shook his head. Even from Johannesburg, which
was deluged by rain in and out of season, came no report of the
slightest drizzle. How he hated Johannesburg!

Was there no peace party among the Boers? Louis Botha,
one of the youngest members of the Road, was against any ad-
venture. He loved his fatherland, above all its green pastures,
which a war, a senseless war at that, an impossible war, would
seriously damage. But the opinion of the junior member did not
count. General Joubert, the expert and presumptive comman-
der in chief, was against the war. But since he had once unsuc-
cessfully contested Kruger's presidency, his advice would only
drive the stubborn old man further into his madness. General
De la Rey, the most Christian soldier, a quiet, retired patriot
without any worldly ambition, raised his voice in warning. He
was laughed down in the Volksraad, and shrugged: "All right.
Go ahead. I will be with you. And I will still be in the fight,
when all of you are fugitives!" He was resigned to the will of
God.

Smuts was the only one who was not resigned, never re-
signed. To all outward appearance he was one of the most
fiery leaders of the war party. The English-language press

OLD MASTER

warned of him. Indeed, he backed Kruger in every way. As
State Attorney he was responsible for maintaining internal or-
der in case of war. He introduced a new franchise law that
looked harmless enough, but was so full of traps and snares
that it virtually strangled every possible move of the foreigners.
He worked out a great plan for infesting Ireland, India, and
the British possessions and colonies with a network of seditious
agitators to undermine the Empire from within. The plan
aroused general amusement when some of its details filtered
out. India, of course, was the country whence these disagree-
able brown competitors had moved into Natal. But where,
for God's sake, was Ireland? How long would it take to trek
there by oxcart? Smuts, though lacking any military experience,
even submitted to Kruger a plan of grand strategy, suggesting
a double-pronged attack on English territory. He kept Kruger
busy, while he was busying himself.

On July 12, he visited the British agent in Pretoria at the lat-
ter's house. A long conversation ensued. Sir Conyngham Greene
used the opportunity once more to press for a guarantee con-
cerning the franchise law. Smuts, in grave earnest, replied that
the Republic could not admit the right of Her Majesty's gov-
ernment to any guarantee unless Great Britain agreed to some
reasonable scheme of arbitration. He did not wish to drive a
Kafir bargain an expression Milner had used at Bloemfontein
but something in return would be expected.

The personal negotiations between the two men dragged on
until the end of August. Greene was all the time under the im-
pression that the State Attorney was bargaining on behalf of
his government. In fact, Smuts had embarked upon a one-man
crusade to prevent war. This fact was clearly revealed when
Secretary of State Reitz became involved. His was a different
tune. He wrote a note, dated August 19, which was entirely un-
satisfactory. Greene remonstrated. But Smuts' peace plan had
obviously been upset by the Transvaal Executive Council.
Stiffly, its disillusioned author had to answer: "The terms of a
settlement as embodied in a formal note of this government
dated August 19 were very carefully considered. I do not be-

89

OLD MASTER

lieve there is the slightest chance that those terms would be
altered or amplified. Your decision will therefore have to be
arrived at on those terms as they stand/'

Imperturbably, Sir Conyngham Greene replied: "I take it
that the negotiations are meant to be off."

Smuts had gained a few precious weeks for Kruger. Unwit-
tingly, his single-handed peace crusade had played into the
bellicose President's hands.

Now only did the government in London understand that
war was upon them. Reinforcements from India, those rein-
forcements Milner had been urging and pressing for in vain,
were finally sent. Although they had a smooth voyage under
the brilliant September sun, they arrived too late.

In the first days of October the rains fell. Violent downpours,
accompanied by hailstorms, thunder and lightning, caused
much damage. The earth trembled. But the grass burst forth.
Overnight the desert was Jehovah's green garden. The horses
in their ramshackle stables stamped their hooves impatiently.
They did not fear the tempest. Neighing, they trotted out of
the suddenly opened doors. Few of diem ever returned to their
stables.

Praising the Lord who sent the rains, every October anew, to
make the land of his chosen people fertile, to feed man and
beast, on October 9, Kruger dispatched an insolent ultimatum
to the English. It demanded the instant withdrawal of all
troops from the borders of the Transvaal and from British soil,
and the re-embarkation of all units which had landed in South
Africa during the last years.

The ultimatum expired within forty-eight hours. To the wild
melody of the downpour a hesitating man, General Joubert, on
October 12, 1899, crossed the border of Natal, invading British
territory.

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OLD MASTER

Chapter 8 PRETORIA-PRIDE AND FALL

THE FIRST VOLLEY IN THE THREE YEARS* WAR, AS WELL AS THE

last shot, were fired by the same man: the amazing Mr. Smuts.
The first volley was in the nature of a propaganda barrage.
During the three days that elapsed between Kruger's ultima-
tum and the actual aggression against British territory by the
commandos under General Piet Joubert, the Review of Re-
views, a leftist London magazine, edited by Mr. Stead, then the
official spokesman of the pro-Boer party, published a pamphlet
A Century of Wrong. The co-ordination between Pretoria and
the praetorians in London, it appears, was not entirely fault-
less. A Century of Wrong had been released rather hastily. The
Dutch original Een Eeuw van Onrecht, a Transvaal Govern-
ment publication, limped a few days behind. The authorship of
the hymn of hatred was attributed to Mr. F. W. Reitz, the Sec-
retary of State of the South African Republic, who had studied
at the University of Edinburgh, and practised as a banister at
the Inner Temple, London, before returning to his native kraal.
Conceivably, a man with so thorough an English background
could know where his attacks would hurt most. To him the
English were a nation of pharisees: "Under the cloak of reli-
gion the British administration continued to display its hatred
against our people and nationality, and to conceal its self-
seeking aims under cover of the most exalted principles. The
aid of religion was invoked to reinforce the policy of oppres-
sion. Emissaries of the London Missionary Societies slandered
Boers. It seems there is no place for the God of Righteousness
in English policy." More than half the pamphlet was given to
the discussion of the English "capitalistic jingoism." A particu-
larly virulent paragraph began: "The development of British
policy in South Africa had hitherto been influenced at different
times by the spirit of jingoism, and by the zeal for annexation
which is so characteristic of the trading instinct of that race."

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OLD MASTER

While this torrent of abuse went entirely unchecked among
the English pharisees and jingoists, a good number of Dutch-
men in the Cape Colony shook their heads. Who would have
expected such unbridled language from the Honorable Mr.
Reitz? It was the climax of the pamphlet itself that provided
the answer to this question. It read: "The spirit of capitalism
found its incarnation in Mr. Cecil Rhodes. Although he prob-
ably had no exceptional aptitude for politics, he was irresistibly
drawn towards them by the stress of his interests. By means of
his financial influence together with a double allowance of elas-
ticity of conscience, he succeeded. . . ."

And now it was clear to everyone who the real author was.
Only one man was capable of such vilification of Cecil Rhodes,
who at that time, as the leader of the Progressive Party, played
again a formidable role in Cape politics: Mr. Smuts. He had in-
deed written the pamphlet, or most of it, in his superb High
Dutch. Mrs. Smuts, his partner in politics too, was responsible
for the brilliant English translation.

The piece was written in the white heat of injured righteous-
nesscharacteristic, however, of the confusion of a young en-
thusiast's feelings, during the very days when the author was
conducting most amiable negotiations with the British agent in
Pretoria, and it left behind no trace in Smuts. Undoubtedly, he
was soon willing to forget it. But his enemies never forgot it.
Right now, while this war is on, the Zeesen transmitter, Dr.
Goebbel's lie-factory, broadcasts the dusty, yellowed pamphlet
regularly in its Afrikaans hour.

The din of the battle soon outroared the propaganda volley.
Against 27,000 English soldiers south of the Limpopo, the river
at South Africa's northern border, only 11,000 of whom were
stationed in the Cape Colony, the Boers had mustered an over-
whelming force. They numbered 90,000, and were equipped
with 110 guns, mostly of German make. The Boer commandos
were made up of men born on horseback, unexcelled in marks-
manship, confident that the Lord of battles was protecting
them. They were well-equipped, and excellently fed. In the

92

OLD MASTER

State contingent, which rushed to the help of the Trans-
/aal and provided some of the toughest fighters, each burgher
lad brought along his riding horse, saddle and bridle, the
ichterlaaier rifle thirty cartridges, and half a pound of pow-
ier. He had to provision himself for eight days. His saddlebag
Dulged with meat, cut in strips, salted, peppered, or dried, with
sausages and "Boer biscuits" (small loaves twice baked, with
"ermented raisins instead of yeast). The Boers had learned
3nough from their German friends to know the Prussian dic-
:um: the fuller the belly, the better the army. They were sure
Jiat English soldiers, drawing nothing but their nauseating
iaily ration of blikkiescos, as the Boers contemptuously called
.he hallowed bully-beef, would prove easy prey.

According to General De Wet, the trouble that immediately
started was over the distribution of meat, when the private sup-
Dlies had given out. Now the vleiskorporaalmeat corporal
landed out portions of raw meat to the burghers. They dif-
: ered in size and quality, and since the impartiality of many a
deiskorporaal was not above suspicion, the rule was made that
le had while performing this duty to stand with his back to-
vard the commando, pick out the nearest piece and, without
ooking around, give it to the next man in line. Those burghers
vho were not favored by fortune showed their dissatisfaction.
Quarrels according to the Generalwere frequent.

The burghers roasted their meat on a spit cut from the
Dranches of trees. A skilful warrior was able to produce a bomt-
*pana team of oxen not of the same color by alternating
Dieces of fat and lean meat on his spit. To provide ample por-
ions the commandos were forced to kill all the oxen and sheep
n their terrain of operations, but they boasted of never wast-
ng a bit. Sometimes the meat was sandwiched between bis-
cuits of flour cooked in boiling fat and called stormjaegers,
^torm hunters, since they were so rapidly cooked, or maag-
jomme, stomach bombs, on account of their digestive effect.

Well-fed and God-fearing, the Free State Army began the
var in grim earnest by attacking and capturing an English ar-
nored train at Kraaipan. General de la Rey was their victori-

93

OLD MASTER

While this torrent of abuse went entirely unchecked among
the English pharisees and jingoists, a good number of Dutch-
men in the Cape Colony shook their heads. Who would have
expected such unbridled language from the Honorable Mr.
Reitz? It was the climax of the pamphlet itself that provided
the answer to this question. It read: "The spirit of capitalism
found its incarnation in Mr. Cecil Rhodes. Although he prob-
ably had no exceptional aptitude for politics, he was irresistibly
drawn towards them by the stress of his interests. By means of
his financial influence together with a double allowance of elas-
ticity of conscience, he succeeded. . . ."

And now it was clear to everyone who the real author was.
Only one man was capable of such vilification of Cecil Rhodes,
who at that time, as the leader of the Progressive Party, played
again a formidable role in Cape politics: Mr. Smuts. He had in-
deed written the pamphlet, or most of it, in his superb High
Dutch. Mrs. Smuts, his partner in politics too, was responsible
for the brilliant English translation.

The piece was written in the white heat of injured righteous-
nesscharacteristic, however, of the confusion of a young en-
thusiast's feelings, during the very days when the author was
conducting most amiable negotiations with the British agent in
Pretoria, and it left behind no trace in Smuts. Undoubtedly, he
was soon willing to forget it. But his enemies never forgot it.
Right now, while this war is on, the Zeesen transmitter, Dr.
GoebbeFs lie-factory, broadcasts the dusty, yellowed pamphlet
regularly in its Afrikaans hour.

The din of the battle soon outroared the propaganda volley.
Against 27,000 English soldiers south of the Limpopo, the river
at South Africa's northern border, only 11,000 of whom were
stationed in the Cape Colony, the Boers had mustered an over-
whelming force. They numbered 90,000, and were equipped
with 110 guns, mostly of German make. The Boer commandos
were made up of men born on horseback, unexcelled in marks-
manship, confident that the Lord of battles was protecting
them. They were well-equipped, and excellently fed. In the

92

OLD MASTER

Free State contingent, which rushed to the help of the Trans-
vaal and provided some of the toughest fighters, each burgher
had brought along his riding horse, saddle and bridle, the
achterlaaier rifle thirty cartridges, and half a pound of pow-
der. He had to provision himself for eight days. His saddlebag
bulged with meat, cut in strips, salted, peppered, or dried, with
sausages and "Boer biscuits" (small loaves twice baked, with
fermented raisins instead of yeast). The Boers had learned
enough from their German friends to know the Prussian dic-
tum: the fuller the belly, the better the army. They were sure
that English soldiers, drawing nothing but their nauseating
daily ration of blikkiescos, as the Boers contemptuously called
the hallowed bully-beef, would prove easy prey.

According to General De Wet, the trouble that immediately
started was over the distribution of meat, when the private sup-
plies had given out. Now the vleiskorporaalmeat corporal-
handed out portions of raw meat to the burghers. They dif-
fered in size and quality, and since the impartiality of many a
vleiskorporaal was not above suspicion, the rule was made that
he had while performing this duty to stand with his back to-
ward the commando, pick out the nearest piece and, without
looking around, give it to the next man in line. Those burghers
who were not favored by fortune showed their dissatisfaction.
Quarrels according to the General were frequent.

The burghers roasted their meat on a spit cut from the
branches of trees. A skilful warrior was able to produce a bomt-
spanB. team of oxen not of the same color by alternating
pieces of fat and lean meat on his spit. To provide ample por-
tions the commandos were forced to kill all the oxen and sheep
in their terrain of operations, but they boasted of never wast-
ing a bit. Sometimes the meat was sandwiched between bis-
cuits of flour cooked in boiling fat and called stormjaegers,
storm hunters, since they were so rapidly cooked, or maag-
bomme, stomach bombs, on account of their digestive effect.

Well-fed and God-fearing, the Free State Army began the
war in grim earnest by attacking and capturing an English ar-
mored train at Kraaipan. General de la Rey was their victori-

93

OLD MASTER

ous veggeneraal fighting general. His legal adviser, not really
involved in the thick of the fight, was the newly appointed
judge, James Barry Munnik Hertzog, son of a pub-owner in
Kimberley, grandson of a German immigrant, whose picture
the faithful young man carried in his breast pocket throughout
the campaign and, who was within a few weeks, President
Steyn's right-hand man. Judge Hertzog was thirty-three years
of age when the Boer War broke out. He was a careful dresser.
With his well-trimmed black hair and short-cropped mus-
tache, and his gold-rimmed spectacles he looked like a stranger
among the Boers from the veld. He won military fame by be-
ing the first to quit Bloemfontein when Lord Roberts was be-
sieging the capital of the Free State. Under cover of night he
took his men across a bridge. The whole commando sang:
"Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do!" It was taken for a
British detachment and got away, unmolested. For this feat of
arms the Judge was promoted to general, and, for all practical
purposes, soon dropped out of the actual fighting.

Smuts, although spoiling for the fight, had serious duties that
kept him for the first months of the war in Pretoria. His was the
main task of organizing both the home front and the army in
the field. As often as he could, he visited the battle fronts to
render strategic assistance. Except for a short time in Stellen-
bosch, where he had been a member of the volunteers, he had
not the slightest military training or experience. Yet his plans
were respectfully listened to. The State Attorney's authority in
strategic affairs went unchallenged. Smuts had his own expla-
nation for it. To him everything, botany or statecraft, general-
ship or philosophy, is simply a matter of straight thinking.

He expended much of his energy on demanding aggressive
prosecution of the war. The Boers should not content them-
selves with their initial successes. Time was against them. He
knew better than any other man the power of the Imperial
army, once it was fully mobilized. He implored General Jou-
bert not to idle around besieging Ladysmith, but to bypass this
English stronghold, and thrust forward. The aged Commander

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OLD MASTER

in Chief, however, was reluctant. He quoted the Biblical virtue
of patience, a strong argument among Boers. Louis Botha, still
a veld-cornet from the district of Vryheid, joined in Smuts'
pleading. General Joubert liked Louis Botha. Everyone liked
him. He had, it was generally agreed, a magic personality. But
to the aged Commander in Chief he was, at thirty-nine, still a
youngster. His advice, too, went unheeded. As both Smuts and
Botha had foreseen, Ladysmith gallantly, and at times desper-
ately, defended by General White withstood the siege until the
town was relieved by English reinforcements. Boer strategy
had missed a great opportunity. But the loss was more than
compensated. Out of their unsuccessful joint pleading grew the
comradeship of Botha and Smuts, which entered and made-
history.

Kimberley, too, was encircled. On the last train connecting
the town with the outside world, Cecil Rhodes arrived. Purple-
faced, bloated, gasping for breath, he was still the colossus.
Immediately upon his arrival he set up his autocratic rule. It
was a benevolent autocracy. "What do you want?" became his
famous question. All could have anything from him: money,
food, shelter. He even had a heavy gun manufactured in the
workshop of his company. It was a makeshift cannon, patched
together by a couple of engineers who had seen the design of
a howitzer in a technical magazine. But the monster could be
fired, and it kept the Boers at a respectful distance. Rhodes
opened the mines to the women and children of Kimberley for
protection. The gold mines became the model for the air-raid
shelters of a later day. He was less benign toward the English
officers and generals, whose progress was much too slow for his
own furious speed. After Kimberley had been besieged for two
months, Rhodes addressed a letter to Lord Roberts, advising
him ironically that there was a perfectly good, flat approach to
the town through the Spyfontein Hills. After a further two
months Kimberley was relieved.

Cecil Rhodes was not relieved until two years later when
that "good, clean death," death from heart failure, he had so

95

OLD MASTER

often spoken of, came to him. He died on March 26, 1902, at the
age of forty-eight, two months before the end of the Boer War.
History records his last words: "So much to do. So little done/'
On the tombstone of the lonely reformer of the world in the
Matoppo Hills only these words are inscribed: "Here lie the
remains of Cecil John Rhodes/'

After five months of reverses and retreat, the government
and the people of England suddenly realized that they were
faced with a tremendous military task whose difficulties no one
had foreseen. Overnight the nation pulled itself together.
Great Britain's two great soldiers, Roberts as commander in
chief, and Kitchener as his chief of staff, were dispatched to
South Africa. An unending stream of men and equipment fol-
lowed. Disregarding the secondary theatres of war, the new
English leaders thrust right into the enemy's heart. They made
for Johannesburg and Pretoria.

Some of the Boers tried to put up a stiff resistance. But it
was always the same thirty or forty men in a commando aver-
aging three or four hundred, who threw themselves at the
enemy, harassed the British advance platoons, and, indeed, ex-
acted heavy sacrifices. The great majority of the citizen-soldiery
refused to budge when the bugles sounded for action. They
were well within their rights. They could elect and dismiss their
commandants, and if one of the higher-ups showed too com-
bative a spirit, one word from the ranks was enough. The word
was: Loop! It stands for: Scram!

The presence of women in the laagers was another constant
hindrance. The energetic Boer ladies wished to keep even their
fighting husbands under control. The government refused Gen-
eral De Wet's demand to call the womenfolk back. The Presi-
dent insisted, and rightly so, that such an order would cause
open mutiny.

Even retreat with the laagers was a difficult job. The Kafir
drivers alone mastered the complicated art of inspanning. But
in the skirmishes most of the Kafirs were either mowed down,
since their masters had not equipped them with weapons, or

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OLD MASTER

they deserted. Hence the burghers were left to do the dirty
work themselves. Unfortunately, few farmers knew which oxen
were to be placed in front and which behind. Every retreat was
a melee of terrible confusion. The aft-oxen placed in front of
the span and fore-oxen behind, were too bewildered to move.

In the Free State Army an epidemic of heart disease broke
out. An old law provided that a burgher who could produce a
medical certificate pronouncing him unfit for duty should im-
mediately be exempted from service. The military doctors were
swamped with cases of sudden and severe heart attacks. One
of them on a single morning pronounced nineteen patients un-
fit. But when the twentieth approached him, his hand pressed
to the left side of his breast, die doctor lost his patience and
barked: "No more heart attacks today!" Then he softened:
"Come again tomorrow!"

General De Wet found a way to check the disease. He ob-
tained a government order forbidding the doctors to write cer-
tificates. Only those burghers to whose poor health three old
women were willing to testify would from now on be released.
The percentage of old women in the districts of Fauresmith
and Jacobsdahl must have been high. All the burghers from
these two districts returned home. Commandant Weilbach, en-
trusted with the defense of Bloemfontein, deserted without in-
commoding the old ladies of his town as soon as Roberts' troops
approached. When even the mighty General Piet Cronje sur-
rendered, most of the burghers lost heart. Panic set in. "The
hands-uppers are our undoing!" De Wet said gloomily.

Personally, he was not undone. Nor were Botha, De la Rey,
Beyers, and a few other Boer commanders in the field. When
all seemed lost, they formed that tightly knit brotherhood of
generals that carried on the hopeless war, already lost within
seven months, for another two years. Smuts even went them a
couple of months better.

Unable to delegate even a part of his crushing burden to
others an inability which has marked General Smuts through-
out his life, and explains why he always holds three or four

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posts at a time the State Attorney, indeed, ran the government
in wartime Pretoria. The duties of his own office required
enough attention. Questions of internal rule and international
law, the activities of the police and the secret service, the treat-
ment of English subjects, supervision of the mines, problems
like the legal position of the inhabitants in parts of the country
that rapidly changed from hand to hand, "annexed" by Boer
raiders, and again occupied by the English all these and in-
numerable similar tasks were a full-time occupation.

It was, incidentally, in his capacity as State Attorney that
Smuts met Winston Churchill for the first time, although it was
not a personal meeting. South Africa, today, still teems with
old-timers boasting that they captured Churchill when the
armored train in which the young newspaper correspondent
rode was held up near Chieveley. Every Boer general who vis-
ited London after the war let it drop that he had been the hero
of the day, and Mr. Churchill pleasantly acknowledged every
individual feat. Thus the legend arose that Smuts had taken
him prisoner.

The facts, however, are these: after the first month of the
war, to be exact, on November 14, 1899, Winston was captured
between Chieveley and Frere, when the Boers trapped an
armored train which the correspondent of the Morning Post
was accompanying. Having left his revolver behind in the train
when he ventured into the veld, he threw up his hands when he
saw himself held up by a group of bearded Boers. It was the
only thing to do. The fate of the world might otherwise have
taken a different turn, and not for the better.

The prisoner was dispatched to Pretoria. On his way he was
constantly surrounded by Boers curious to see "the greatest and
the latest correspondent of the day," to quote a contemporary
ditty. They displayed no hard feelings. Cordially they repeated
time and again: "You know it's those damned capitalists and
Jews who have caused the war . . . God is on our side . . .
Every man has a stake in the fight for liberty." This last asser-
tion was well founded: one had paid no taxes for four years,
another was a friend of the veld-cornet. The ticket collector

OLD MASTER

drew absurdly high wages: "No British government for me!" he
said determinedly. "Is it right," they asked their prisoner in a
most friendly manner, "that a dirty Kafir should walk on the
pavement without a pass, either? That's what they do in your
British colonies/'

In Pretoria he was taken to the prison for British officers, in-
stalled in the State Model School in the fashionable suburb of
Sunnyside. It was a long, low red-brick building, standing on a
sandy avenue, lined with detached white houses. The prisoners
had ample opportunity to watch the gay boulevard of suburban
Pretoria from their windows. Winston found the spectacle petty
and contemptible. He disliked the ugly women with their
bright parasols, the fat burghers, the arrogant, white-helmeted
policemen, the slimy, sleek officials of every nationality prome-
nading during office hours. Most of all he detested the red-
faced, snub-nosed Hollanders, and the oily Portuguese half-
castes, prevalent among the bureaucrats.

One of these oily Portuguese was M. de Souza, who occupied
the lucrative position of Secretary of War. Landrost Opperman,
a "Peruvian," was in charge of the prison since, although he
was a commandant, he was too fat to fight. Both these officials
refused to listen to Churchill's well-founded complaints. As a
noncombatant war correspondent his detention in a military
prison was so much the less justified as the Boers had made it a
rule to release all British civilians. The upkeep of the many fire-
men, telegraphists, and railway workers, who had been cap-
tured was too expensive. Winston had not fired a shot; indeed
he had been captured unarmed. He tried to get in touch with
Mr. Macrum, the American consul in Pretoria, representing the
"protective power." But this gentleman was so fanatically pro-
Boer that he refused to interfere; in fact he found it difficult to
discharge his diplomatic duties, and was soon replaced by Mr.
Adelbert S. Hay, a young and resourceful diplomat who did
much good during the fall of Pretoria.

A batch of other civilians, railway men, were just about to be
sent home. Winston wrote two letters, addressing them to the
Secretary of War and to the Commander in Chief, General Piet

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OLD MASTER

Joubert. He explained his legal position, and demanded to be
released with his fellow English civilians. Receiving no answer
within a few days, he lost his patience and made good his es-
cape. On the next day, incidentally, a young lady of the best
Pretoria society and the Pretorians prided themselves that
their best society was very goodwas arrested for having
aided and abetted the escape of a noted English war corre-
spondent. Winston Churchill has always been too tactful to
acknowledge such help, if, indeed, he did receive it. He left
the prison one day before the State Attorney's answer was de-
livered. . . . The generals had referred Winston's letter to him.
The gist of Smuts' reply was: "Winston Churchill a noncom-
batant? Impossible!"

Winston Churchill's flamboyant reports on the war were, of
course, known to Smuts who acted as his own press chief, and
as a most resourceful one. For the first time the Transvaal saw a
propaganda campaign on a world-wide scale, not the least im-
portant part of which was the planting of misleading rumors in
the South African and English press. By the same token Smuts
was also "chief of information" spy master Kruger's handy
man, steering the old man between the rocks of spelling and
grammar as the author of Presidential decrees and messages,
and finally in charge of supplying the fighting forces. He him-
self supervised the dispatch of the guns from the Pretoria forts
to the battle lines. The German officers in command of the Boer
artillery made this job a little difficult. But Smuts overrode the
"technical difficulties" which they pleaded.

He worked incessantly as was his habit, but quietly as ever.
His sovereign calm affected the capital. As the British columns
approached Johannesburg, Pretoria was already awaiting its
doom, but in quiet dignity. Kruger still spent his days on the
stoep of his cottage, smoking, spitting, gulping down innumer-
able cups of coffee. His burghers copied the example of Kruger
and Smuts. They were completely shut off from the world, both
by Smuts' rigid censorship and by the fighting armies around
them, but this isolation was exactly what they had always

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OLD MASTER

longed for. A few turbulent sessions in the Volksraad evoked
local interest. The fact that an enemy army of some 150,000
men was slowly but steadily approaching left them undis-
turbed.

The men in command racked their brains to find a way out of
the perilous situation. Should they blow up the gold mines in
Johannesburg? The mine owners, after all, the Jews and capi-
talists, were guilty of all the trouble. If they saw their millions
vanishing, they would be quick to bring pressure on the British
government to conclude peace, peace at any price, in order to
rebuild the mines and resume business as usual.

Botha was against it, and Smuts, after some hesitation, agreed
with him. The Boers, after all, still held the Rand. If they
caused wanton damage they would compromise their moral po-
sition in the world. Nevertheless, in Johannesburg, Judge Kock,
the same who had presided over the Edgar trial, tried a little
dynamiting of his own. Botha, who meanwhile had advanced to
the rank of military commander in chief, ordered the mischief-
maker arrested.

After the capture of Johannesburg by the English the situa-
tion changed. Now Smuts himself, in an attack of fury, sent a
force of dynamiters to the Rand. He did not reckon with the
local commandant, Dr. Krause. Twice in their running feud the
State Attorney had bested the Public Prosecutor. First, when
Smuts got the government job for which Dr. Krause had been
the preferred candidate, secondly, when Smuts left his antago-
nist holding the bag after the abortive attempt to construct a
sensational spy case. Now Dr. Krause's time for revenge had
come. He arrested Smuts' dynamiters. Since the Pretoria gov-
ernment no longer exercised any authority in occupied Johan-
'nesburg, Dr. Krause, later to become a reputed K.C., was in a
position to save the Rand.

The fate of Pretoria was decided by the fall of Johannes-
burg. Kruger fled to Machadodorp, a village on a hill near the
Portuguese border, and set up government in a few railway
cars on a siding. Botha decided to defend every step of the
way to Portuguese East Africa, the last unoccupied part of the

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OLD MASTER

Transvaal Smuts remained in town. His was the hardest job:
the definite liquidation.

With a handful of adherents, he tried a few abortive sorties
against the enrolling British Army. But this was more of a fool-
hardy gesture than grand strategy. He had to comfort his con-
science. When this was done, he went at his real task. He had
to extract the government's treasure from the National Bank.
The directors of the bank politely but determinedly refused to
hand over the government funds to the State Attorney, who
had no official legitimation for receiving them. To test their at-
titude, Smuts had originally only asked for the 400 in cash
which formed a very small part of the entire hoard. When he
did not get it, he called in his entire detective corps, and
forced the directors at the point of fifty revolvers, to hand over
to him everything: the 400 in cash, half a million in gold
bullion, and 25,000 war funds, at the disposal of his friend
Botha.

The gold hoard was immediately stowed away in the next
train, which was the last one to the Portuguese border and
which did, in fact, escape the shells from Lord Roberts' how-
itzers already pounding the railway line in an attempt to
destroy it.

By that time Pretoria was in a state of chaos. Whatever au-
thority remained was divided between the absent government's
last representative, Smuts, and the self-constituted Committee
for Peace and Order. But neither peace nor order could be
maintained. Pretoria had lost its poise. While every burgher
who could trekked out of town, men and women loaded like
pack animals with their most precious belongings, some with
household furniture, others with immense quantities of food-
stuff, the great building near the railway station, the govern-
ment storehouse, where food for the fighting forces was being
kept, was looted. The State Attorney did nothing to prevent the
looting. Indeed, Smuts had thrown open the doors of the store-
house. Rather than see his supplies fall into the hands of the
British, he preferred to see his burghers helping themselves to
the provisions. For hours the people of Pretoria, women and

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OLD MASTER

children, Kafirs, burghers, shopkeepers, and ladies and gentle-
men who were certainly not in need of food, mobbed the build-
ing, ripping apart the zinc walls, fighting for their loot, and
staggering away, loaded with everything they could carry. The
police looked on passively. The only restriction that was rigidly
enforced was the forbidding of snapshots. Such photographs
would not have made good propaganda. As the days went on,
the Jewish shops, unfortunately also located in the neighbor-
hood of the railroad station, were broken into and emptied by
the crowd.

But Pretoria lost no time in tidying itself to receive the con-
querors. The Pretoria Club, the center of the Boer notables,
was empty, whereas the English Club was the scene of a jubi-
lant banquet. Shopkeepers suddenly displayed pictures of the
Queen, the Prince of Wales, Lord Roberts, and Joe Chamber-
lain. Mr. Hay, the new American consul, betook himself to the
prison for captured English officers, who, after Churchill's es-
cape, had been removed from their comfortable abode in the
State Model School to a depressing quarter outside the town,
where they were now kept in fenced dark dungeons. Mr. Hay
besought the twenty imprisoned officers to accompany him to
Waterval, a camp where 5,000 British soldiers, prisoners, were
herded under atrocious conditions. The officers should keep
their men under control lest they get out of hand now that the
hour of liberation was rapidly approaching. The English pris-
oners behaved themselves perfectly. They cheered, when, on
June 4, the advance guard of Lord Roberts' forces entered
Pretoria: A hatless young civilian with that speed with which a
born journalist pursues a scoop, raced through the streets to
greet his old prisonmates. He was accompanied by his cousin,
the Duke of Marlborough.

Smuts escaped into the hills of Magaliesberg in the Western
Transvaal to join the remnants of De la Rey's forces. To him,
the fall of Pretoria was a blessing in disguise. The war was
practically over. But his fight was just beginning.

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Chapter 9 COMMANDO

THE TRANSVAAL WAS ANNEXED BY LORD ROBERTS' PROCLAMATION

in the month of September, 1900, after less than eleven months
of war. Kruger, a fugitive on the Portuguese border, countered
the annexation with a manifesto of protest. With this last,
empty gesture of stubbornness the old man left South Africa.
He took a six months' vacation to promote the Boer cause in
Europe. After his departure on a Dutch vessel, the engine of
the government train got up steam, and the rolling refugee
government moved a few miles farther in the direction of the
Portuguese border.

Fuimus Troes: the Boers had been. But the last die-hards,
Steyn, the fugitive President of the Free State; De Wet, his
commander in chief; Botha, who still raided the Eastern Trans-
vaal, and De la Rey with his new right-hand man Smuts, from
the Western Transvaal met at Cypherfontein, and swore they
would not give in. They determined that each should go his
own way. De Wet and Smuts should go into the Cape Colony
to arouse the Cape Dutch. From their revolution alone a re-
vival of the shattered cause was still to be hoped for.

De Wet twice tried to cross the border of the Colony. Both
times the fire-eating martinet was ignominiously beaten back.
As for Smuts, the diary of Lord Milner contains the following
entry: "De Wet made his last incursion into the Cape Colony
in February 1901. Hunted for several weeks, he barely made
his escape. His mantle fell upon the worthy shoulders of Smuts,
who, after riding through the Orange River Colony, pene-
trated within a hundred miles of Cape Town itself. Constantly
hunted, but never caught by British columns, with extraordi-
nary cunning and determination, he maintained himself in the
heart of the Colony until the end of the war."

It reads so easily. . . .

It was a pilgrimage through hell and high water, yet to

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Smuts, as he recalled this tempestuous time in later years, it
was the greatest "boyish" pleasure of his life. While it lasted,
the joy of discovering his own physical fitness, his entire ab-
sence of fear, his resourcefulness in practical matters, above all
the fact that he was a man of action and not only of thought-
all these new sources of strength which he found in himself
gave him a new lease on life. But they were overshadowed by
his separation from his wife. Mrs. Smuts was sent to Maritz-
burg, though not to the detention camp which made the name
of this little town ominous to the Boers, and to a great many
English people as well. She could live with her children an un-
disturbed life in a house of her own, and it was there that she
first met Miss Hobhouse, a middle-aged woman who had come
from London to look after the unfortunate Boer women and
children, and whose public life climaxed when she became a
traitor to England as the First World War broke out.

Early in 1901, Smuts, now the chief of his own commando,
took the Modderfontein Range from the English, and held it
against repeated counterattacks. In fact, this was thus far the
only success on the credit side of the Boer ledger. Everywhere
else the last fighting Boers were harassed by English troops.
Kitchener established his net of blockhouses which finally de-
cided the war.

In May the Boer commandants met to review their perilous
position in a secluded farm in the Transvaal. They decided to
ask Kruger's advice. Chivalrously, the British allowed the out-
law Smuts to get into contact with his absentee President.
The news from Europe was bad. Dr. Leyds had been cold-
shouldered in Berlin. Wilhelm II received him with bad grace.
He was obviously angry that the Transvaal had ordered some
Creuzot guns. "We are the gun merchants of the world!" he
said. What he did not say was that he had already made a
complete volte-face, going so far as to send Lord Roberts a
complete strategic master plan of how to conquer South Africa,
a plan that duly landed in the British war lord's wastepaper
basket. Kruger himself had been informed in his exile at
Utrecht that he would be arrested the moment he tried to cross

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OLD MASTER

the German border. But even this humiliation at the hands of
the Germans did not temper his spiteful hatred of the British.
To the kibitzer, now watching the battle from the safe distance
of 6,000 miles, no gamble was too high. He insisted on the con-
tinuing of the suicidal struggle "until the last means of resist-
ance are exhausted."

On June 20, the spokesmen of the refugee government met
again at Waterval. They discussed Kruger's order. The die-
hards, Steyn and De Wet, won out. Smuts was already back in the
field. But President Steyn was able to produce a letter from
him, stating that if the Boers had to give up at that moment it
would be with the intention of resuming their fight as soon as
England was in difficulties.

The men at Waterval, however, were determined to continue
the struggle. Now the commandos concentrated on guerrilla
warfare. Smuts took to it like a duck to water. It was a game of
thinking and acting at once, truly a game after Smuts' heart.
The guerrilla warfare of the commandos demanded a high de-
gree of mobility, incessant surprise action, the harassing of the
enemy without ever being trapped, destroying his means of
communication, railroad lines, bridges, and telegraph wires,
clamping down on isolated small bodies of English soldiers,
being everywhere and nowhere; in fact, guerrilla warfare de-
pended on ruses rather than on rules. Smuts could play his life-
long favorite game of matching his wits against any comer. But
it was not the English alone that he had to fight against. The
weather and the ground, rains, streams, hills, jungles, deserts,
all were his enemies. He had to fight against starvation, thirst,
tropical days and ice-cold nights, in which two men slept under
one blanket, when indeed there were blankets, to steal a little
warmth from one another's body. More often than not they
fought in rags. Gradually they were reduced to stripping killed or
captured Englishmen of their uniforms. They were forced to re-
lease their prisoners since they could neither feed nor transport
them. Most of them were released naked, and most Boers, when
captured, were found wearing English uniforms. This was a
.dangerous aspect of the game. In accordance with interna-

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OLD MASTER

tional law, Kitchener had decreed the capital penalty for those
captured in English uniforms. Actually, however, the prisoners
always escaped with their lives. The General understood the
necessity; they must be clad in one way or another.

With a force of three hundred and fifty men, Smuts ventured
into the Cape Colony. His main objectives were to detract some
British troops from the North, to see whether a raid on a larger
scale would be possible, and, above all, to arouse the Cape
Dutch. In this supreme aim, however, he failed. He was able
to collect some three thousand rebels who volunteered to join
with his original handful of Transvaalers. Nine-tenths of them
were British subjects, committing high treason. But the big up-
heaval failed completely. Although the Colonial Dutch sympa-
thized with their brothers in the North, they were much too
cautious and too phlegmatic to be lured into adventure, even
by the now most renowned son of their own soil, the son of
Jacobus Abraham Smuts.

Smuts showed his habitual indifference to the failure, al-
though it spelled the complete breakdown of his only reason-
able hope. He did not give in. Now he had three to four thou-
sand men behind him; many of the newcomers had two horses
at their disposal. And how many British and Colonial troops
opposed this formidable body? About fifty thousand, if Smuts'
spies reported the truth. And his intelligence service, relying on
Kafirs, was rarely misinformed. He felt that the odds were even.

In forced marches, ascending steep mountains, crossing
swollen rivers, relying on the horses' instinct when human in-
genuity failed, always harassed by General French's columns,
often by two or three of them in concerted action, constantly
worried by the shortage of clothes and food, Smuts on the war-
path pressed forward.

Early in September he entered the Colony east of Alival
North, but he was already swinging southward when his pur-
suers arrived. Some of his men were ambushed at Dordrecht,
but their leader was seen almost at the same time near James-
town. Colonel Gorringe engaged and defeated him north of

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OLD MASTER

Tarkastad. Smuts escaped and, in his turn, ambushed a detach-
ment of the 17th Lancers. Only a few of the surprised men
survived. Some of them reported that the guerrilla leader had
personally behaved well, as a chivalrous soldier. But he had
been unable to restrain his men from what an English under-
statement calls "unworthy acts."

Probably "Mannie" Maritz was at the head of those who
committed the unworthy acts. A former Johannesburg police-
man, famous for his unbridled cruelty even among the ill-
reputed Zarps, he followed Smuts, the anti-English leader, with
doglike faithfulness. But there must be now and then a little
fun in guerrilla warfare, and Maritz, then as later, had his full
share of it. Smuts had no objections. Toward the end of his
campaign he promoted, on his own authority, the ex-policeman
to the rank of general.

Smuts* chief lieutenant was van de Venter, later General Sir
Jacobus van de Venter, and General Smuts' assistant in the East
African campaign during the First World War. In their days in
common as guerrilla leaders van de Venter was probably the
only man with whom Smuts shared his plans. For the rest he
remained inaccessible, even in this interlude of his life when
for the first time he experienced real comradeship, hardship
and shared danger, and an abiding sense of mutual trust.

He never disclosed his plans to his men. They were never
allowed to know where the commandant would take them next
or why they fought here and escaped there. Strangely, the
Boers, the most stubborn individualists in the world, inbred
scorners of any established authority, roughnecks among whom
each insisted that he was as good as the next man, if not better
strangely, these Boers obeyed Smuts' every word without
question. Probably they were impressed by his complete ab-
sence of fear. The commandant acted frequently as his own
scout. When friendly Kafirs warned him not to venture in a
direction where English patrols might be lying in wait for him,
Smuts halted his men, and spied out the dangerous spot alone.
Once he was poisoned by eating "Hottentot bread/' an other-
wise harmless fruit of the forest which was toxic in spring. The

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OLD MASTER

great botanist had forgotten this detail. He fell gravely ill and
had to be carried or tied on to his horse. But the commandos
marched on.

The refugee government promoted him Commandant Gen-
eral in supreme command of the Boer forces in the Cape. He
took his new dignity in his stride. But when at last he became a
first-class burgher of a non-existent Republic, endowed with
the franchise for the non-existent Volksraad, his measure of
happiness was full.

His last adventure led him through Namaqualand, the desert
country in the far west of the Cape Colony. He was set on
conquering the copper mining village of O'okiep, held by a
small British garrison whose commander, Colonel Shelton, con-
temptuously refused Smuts' appeal to surrender. The defend-
ers beat off two assaults by Smuts, carried out on April 6 and
12. The British, in turn, challenged their besiegers to a football
match. The question whether to accept the invitation was hotly
debated among the men of the commando. It took these loqua-
cious soldiers a full fortnight of argument to arrive at no deci-
sion. On April 26, 1902, the question was suddenly dwarfed.
Smuts received an invitation together with a safe conduct
signed "D. Haig, Colonel" to join peace negotiations which had
begun the very day he had for the last time hurled his men
against O'okiep.

First he hesitated. He took a solitary walk in the veld to
think over the new situation. He still had two thousand six
hundred seasoned men under his command. The other com-
mandos, he guessed, must for their part muster about seven
hundred all told. With this formidable force the war might drag
on indefinitely. His men would hate to hear that all must come
to an end. This was the last boyish thought of Smuts' life.

He packed his saddlebag, not forgetting the Greek Testa-
ment, and a much thumbed volume of Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason, his most faithful companions during the two glorious
years of raids. Off he went to the peace conference. On his way,
he visited the old farm near Malmesbury. His father, it is said,
did not recognize him. The thin, lanky youngster with the hag-

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OLD MASTER

gard cheeks and hungry eyes was gone. So strong was the im-
pact of the war on Smuts, although primarily an intellectual
impact, that it transformed him physically as well, and com-
pletely. Now his chest was broad, his skin reddened; he held
himself erect. A yellow beard covered his chin and he strode
with a firm step. He was ready to shoulder untold responsibili-
ties. He had left his youth behind.

110

Part Two
POWER

Chapter 10 VEREENIGING STANDS FOR UNION

KITCHENER KNEW A GOOD SOLDIER WHEN HE SAW ONE. IN HIS

gorgeous uniform as Commander in Chief in South Africa,
mounted on a black charger, surrounded by his Pathan body-
guard in their oriental splendor, he met Smuts' train at Kron-
staad and continued the journey with him.

Smuts was not impressed by the display of imperial pomp.
Emerging from a bitter campaign which he and his men had
been forced to conduct mostly in the stolen uniforms of the
killed or captured enemy, he found Kitchener's glamour rather
misplaced. Moreover, he was suspicious. Surely, by showering
him with honors, the British wanted to soften him up for the
forthcoming negotiations. Why, otherwise, would they have
dispatched a troopship to Port Nolloth to bring him to Cape
Town with a military escort befitting his rank as Commandant
General, when his army was barely still in existence? Why did
they insist on putting a battleship, lying off Simon's Town, at
his disposal as a residence during his one week stay in Cape
Town? Why in God's name had Lord French, a notoriously
tough customer, comported himself so mildly and so amiably
when he appeared at Matjesfontein station to wish his foe of
the day before bon voyage to Pretoria? Perhaps Smuts should
not have let Lord French get away in his damned armored
train, as he had once foolishly done in the days of battle.

Well, the battle was over. But qot for Smuts. He peppered
Kitchener with reproaches about his harsh conduct of the war

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as the two rode together through the barren land of the Trans-
vaal, the curtains drawn over the windows of the compart-
ment, lest the Commandant General should be disturbed by
the crowds that gathered at every stop. Indeed, the victor had
to defend his victory under the accusing finger of the van-
quished. Only an English general would have taken this absurd
situation with a smile. Kitchener did smile. He was anxious to
get away from South Africa, the grave of so many military
reputations; the war was over for all practical purposes, the
peace must be signed, and that was all that counted. In fact,
Kitchener had for a long time been trying to bring the war to a
rapid and mutually honorable conclusion. At the end of March,
1902, while his army drove on relentlessly, he suggested to the
government in London that it guarantee the Boers full self-
government within two or three years, provided that they be-
haved themselves. He hated the idea of a dictated peace. He
was anxious lest the ultimate reconciliation of the two white
races in South Africa should be definitely precluded. Besides,
he wanted peace before the approaching coronation of King
Edward VII. But Natal, where people had had ample experi-
ence with their Boer fellow citizens, demanded an uncondi-
tional surrender of the foe as a prelude to any concessions, and
other parts of the Empire, primarily Australia, who had made
great sacrifices in the Boer War, backed up Natal.

Kitchener's actual negotiations with the Boers started on
April 12. Smuts was six hundred miles away assaulting O'okiep
on the very day that Schalk-Burger, Kruger's understudy, with
a few other Boer leaders, graciously were received in Kitch-
ener's house in Pretoria, to read the seven peace conditions.
The gist of it was although not expressed in so many words
that the Republics should remain independent, if they prom-
ised to reform. Regretfully, Kitchener saw no basis of negoti-
ation in this proposal, nor could he commit himself to any
particular time when the Boers should receive self-government.
"Is there no means of ending this war without depriving us of
our self-respect?" asked Steyn, who had a marked predilection
for empty, great words. Tactfully, Kitchener assured him that

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OLD MASTER

men who had fought so well could not lose their self-respect
by facing the inevitable. He carried his sympathy so far as not
to use a strong bargaining argument. The day before he had
received the information that General Ian Hamilton had
smashed the bulk of De la Key's forces under General Kemp at
Roodeval. Kitchener felt certain that the Boers, maintaining
excellent communications by heliograph, must already be aware
of their grave setback.

On the next day, a Sunday, Milner arrived in Pretoria. He
took up quarters in the Old Residency. His arrival gave the
negotiations a new direction. He was firmly convinced that
British sovereignty, founded on an acknowledged military con-
quest, could alone be the basis of peace negotiations. Already
he had long-devised plans for resettlement, reconciliation, and
reconstruction. But he required a certain length of time under
a modified Crown Colony government until the political storm
had blown over. He did not agree with the concessions Kitch-
ener planned. He was not ready to sacrifice the British in South
Africa, and still less the Dutch loyalists, in order to save the
faces of the bitter-enders, who were now in a desperate plight.
Each day their numbers diminished, each day their prestige
dwindled. But each day, on the other hand, the strength of the
National Scouts and the Boer volunteers on the English side
increased. That was why Milner disliked Kitchener's vague
promises and unnecessary concessions. The general's tendency
to avoid awkward details would certainly compromise the ac-
complished victory, and render the task of peacemaking im-
measurably more difficult.

On Monday, April 14, Milner occupied his seat at the con-
ference table. He introduced himself by saying that, in spite of
any rumors to the contrary, he was most anxious to see an end
of the bloodshed, and a settlement honorable to all. It was a
duty to humanity to repair the damage.

President Steyn, ever evasive, wanted new British proposals
to submit to the burghers in the field, not to the entire Boer
population. He would present them not as his own suggestion,
but as the terms of the conqueror. However, on the same after-

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OLD MASTER

noon he weakened and decided to ask for an armistice in order
to consult his own people, and for safe conduct for one of their
delegates from Europe; obviously the understudy wanted to
burden Kruger himself with the responsibility for swallowing
defeat. Even conciliatory Kitchener declared that an armis-
tice was premature, and that the safe conduct had already been
refused by the government in London. However, he would in-
vite the British Government to formulate new terms.

Milner had the measure of his opponents. On Wednesday he
sent a "secret, private, and personal" cable to Chamberlain, in-
forming the Colonial Secretary that the result of the negotia-
tions evidently depended more on personal considerations than
on the exact nature of the terms. "Three-quarters of the Boer
representatives," he wrote, "want to give in, but no one wants
to take the lead in doing so. Each is manoeuvring to put some-
one else in front, and if they finally decide to give way they will
try to make it appear that they are acting under pressure from
the burghers in the field. In fact these men will do exactly as
their leaders secretly desire. The Free Staters are much less
friendly than the Transvaalers. Judge Hertzog (whose name
appeared for the first time in an official document) is probably
quite irreconcilable; he is said to have great influence with
President Steyn. . . . But my greatest difficulty is Lord Kitch-
ener," Milner continued. "He is extremely adroit in his man-
agement of negotiations, particularly as to what he gives away.
If he knew as an absolute certainty that His Majesty's govern-
ment would not yield on certain points, no one would be more
skilful in steering the Boers away from these points, and guid-
ing the discussions into directions in which some concessions
are possible. Lord Kitchener even suggests that a definite date
should be fixed for introduction of self-government, exactly
what Schalk-Burger demanded. But Lieutenant-Governor Major
Goold-Adams in the Orange Free State, and Lieutenant-Gover-
nor Fraser of Natal were horror stricken by that idea. They
warned me that Kitchener would wreck the whole result of the
war. Responsible government can only be given when all traces
of racial animosity will have disappeared."

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OLD MASTER

The cleavage between Milner and Kitchener was politely
concealed. But to Smuts it was plainly visible when he entered
the negotiations. He was determined to carry them to a success-
ful conclusion. He went right to the core of the matter. He
brushed aside President Steyn, who was already annoying Mil-
ner with his incessant parrot cry of independence, just as
Kruger had done three years earlier at Bloemfontein. He sim-
ply asked whether the Boers were expected to become Brit-
ish citizens. Milner and Kitchener referred to the terms of
Middleburg, to a peace offer the London government had made
a year before, and which had been rejected by the Boers with-
out explanation. Milner pointed out that the British negotiators
were not authorized to discuss on any other basis. Kitchener
added that, a month previously, President Steyn had under-
taken to consult the Boer people on the definite proposals of
the British Government. If the Boers now refused to discuss
those terms, His Majesty's government should be informed at
once. Chamberlain, indeed, was informed, and he answered
that the Middleburg terms still stood. The Boer delegates re-
tired to consult their electors.

In Vereeniging Union, a little village on the Vaal River where
Kitchener had ordered tents to be erected, the Boer delegations
met: thirty men from the Transvaal, thirty from the Free State.
The Free Staters were in a comparatively easy position. Their
state was essentially Dutch. Whatever happened, it would not
lose its national character. Matters in the Transvaal were differ-
ent. Already the majority of the population, a short time before
still the despised and disfranchised uitlanders, had taken over.
They were assisted by the National Scouts, those Boers who
had sided with the English during the war, and by the peace-
minded part of the Boer people. If matters could not be settled,
it might easily happen that the fighters on the veld, the stanch-
est of the Boers, the protagonists of independence, would be-
come outlaws and be crushed piecemeal. Then, indeed, the
Transvaal would be definitely lost. Hence the delegates from
the Transvaal were not for surrender, but for a compromise.

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OLD MASTER

Generals De la Key, Beyers, and De Wet described condi-
tions in their districts. Their reports were contradictory. De la
Rey was not afraid of starvation, the gravest peril, since, in his
opinion, he could get all the food he wanted from the enemy.
Beyers admitted that in his section the Kafirs were in open
revolt against the Boers. (The Boers invaded the native kraals
and stole the food, since they believed that it was all right for
the blacks to starve, but never for a white man. ) De Wet was
as cantankerous as ever.

Smuts gave a cautious, but on the whole pessimistic account
of the state of affairs in the Cape Colony. The Colony, he as-
serted, would not rise. The ultimate outcome would be decided
in the Republics.

Finally, F. W. Reitz, the Secretary of State in the defunct
Transvaal government, made an appeal to reason. At his be-
hest, three conditions were stipulated and next day proposed
to Milner and Kitchener as peace terms: first, the Republics
were prepared to surrender their independence in foreign rela-
tions. Secondly, they wished to retain internal self-government
under British supervision. Third, they were willing to give up
parts of their territory, meaning Swaziland, whose administra-
tion was costly and unprofitable, as well as accursed Johannes-
burg into the bargain. Moreover, they offered to enter into a
defensive alliance with Great Britain.

The five men entrusted to offer these counter proposals to the
British, the Generals Botha, De Wet, De la Rey, Hertzog, and
Smuts, were perfectly aware that there was not the slightest
chance of their half-baked suggestions being accepted. Ac-
cordingly, Smuts introduced them with the cautious explana-
tion that they represented no definite new proposals, but only
a new basis of discussion.

But even Kitchener, bent on achieving a rapid settlement,
found the counter proposals impossible. "It would be much bet-
ter to write down something practical/' he suggested. Milner
offered to refer the new proposals to his government, but he
distinctly warned that they were likely to hamper, and not
facilitate further negotiations.

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OLD MASTER

Instantly Smuts pointed out part three: the offer to surrender
parts of the Transvaal. Did that hamper negotiations? Milner
coolly asked whether this offer meant that one part of the
Transvaal should be a Crown Colony, the other a protected
Republic. "Impossible," explained Kitchener. "Impossible on
military grounds. We would be at war again in a year/'

After the luncheon interval, the Boer lawyers, Milner re-
corded, fought for a forlorn hope with infinite ingenuity. Smuts
fell back on Kitchener's suggestion: "We must have something
practical to go on." The most practical thing would be his in-
formal meeting with the English plenipotentiaries. Kitchener
had frequently spoken with the Boer delegates outside the con-
ference room, and off the record. Now they held a brief con-
ference of three. No longer hampered by the presence of the
bully De Wet and the snakelike assistant legal adviser, Hert-
zog, Smuts could make his English partners understand that
the Boers did not expect acceptance of their proposals, but
merely wished to find out how far the ultimate British conces-
sions would go.

Milner and Kitchener drew up their final document. It in-
volved unconditional surrender, but it included concessions
partly of a sentimental nature, to soothe the pride of the Boer
leaders, and partly of a financial character. This document was
handed over to the Boer generals when they reappeared at four
o'clock in the afternoon.

Another heated controversy ensued over the responsibility
of the Boer signatories if their burghers should decline the
agreement. De Wet, his face dark red, every unruly hair in his
patriarch's beard trembling with indignation, his fist banging
the table, refused to accept any responsibility whatsoever if he
should not be backed up by his people. Kitchener once more
proved his diplomacy. He suggested that the "military element"
should withdraw from further discussion. Thus he excluded
himself, but he also got De Wet out of the way. The civilians
continued alone. On the side of the Boers were Smuts, a few
weeks before still a fiery guerrilla leader, and his assistant Hert-

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OLD MASTER

zog, who was also a general but had never been regarded as a
military element.

Milner noted: "The next two days were spent in hard con-
flict with the Boer lawyers. They fought stoutly, though they
won few concessions. At last an acceptable formula was f ound."

But before this formula was found, Smuts drove a hard bar-
gain for every penny. Already the abortive Middleburg pro-
posals, he insisted, had committed Great Britain to pay all
debts, including war debts, of the two bankrupt Republics. The
inference was that the amount of these sums to be paid by
the British taxpayer for the war the Boers had conducted
against them, should only be limited by the appetite of the
claimants.

Both Kitchener, who was back in the conference, and Milner
demanded to know the limit.

Smuts was mute.

"A million pounds?" Milner suggested.

Smuts sensed a bargain: "That . . . would . . . not . . . meet
. . . the case."

Kitchener, smiling: "Will two million meet it?"

"It is not possible to gauge the amount," De Wet raged.

Milner showed distinct signs of boredom. The afternoon was
dragging on. It was getting late, perhaps too late.

Kitchener, it seemed, visualized another year in South Africa,
to be spent in mopping-up operations which he disdained. He
whispered to Smuts: "Come out, come out for a while."

The two men paced up and down in front of the house
through the dusk. Finally Kitchener spoke. He had a personal
opinion to convey to Smuts. In two years, he believed, the Eng-
lish Liberals would come to power, and they would certainly
grant South Africa a constitution self-government.

"That is a very important pronouncement," replied Smuts
thoughtfully. "If one could be sure. . . ."

No, Kitchener could give no assurance whatsoever. But he
did honestly believe that this was in the cards.

Gladstone, the great Liberal, had retreated, panic-stricken,
after Majuba. Mr. Campbell-Bannerman, the present Liberal

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OLD MASTER

leader, had publicly protested against the harsh treatment
meted out to the Boers during the war. His lieutenant, young
Mr. Lloyd George, had used still more burning eloquence to
the same purpose. And there was this newcomer among the
Liberals, Winston Churchill, who toured all England and the
United States with a magic lantern illustrating a lecture prais-
ing in truly magic words the splendid resistance of the Boers,
and demanding magnanimity in their treatment.

Kitchener and Smuts returned. Smuts appeared convinced.
Still, he insisted upon three million and not a penny less, which
the victor was to pay to the vanquished in order to repair the
loser's ruined credit. Kitchener, eager to have the last word
without 'Milner's interference, and still more keen to get away
from it all, said: "You demand a large sum." But he nodded.
He concluded that the extra two million could probably be de-
ducted from the sum allowed for re-establishing farms. "But
they did not mind this argument at all," he cabled to Mr.
Broderick, the Secretary for War. "They only wished their re-
ceipts paid/'

Finally, Milner, too, understood that the Boers' credit and
honor depended on their being able to repay the worthless
scraps of paper they called "receipts." An English statesman
does not kick a dead dog. The peace of Vereeniging was drawn
up.

Years later friends congratulated General Smuts on his fore-
sight. It was great statesmanship to bank on Kitchener's neces-
sarily irresponsible prediction, which had finally tipped the
scales.

Had it, indeed, tipped the scales? General Smuts smiled. The
conference had had to reach an agreement, Kitchener or no
Kitchener.

The struggle was over but the battle was just beginning.
Smuts had a terribly difficult time to make the agreement pal-
atable to the sixty delegates, who met for the last time in their
tents at Vereeniging, most of them sulking like Achilles in his
tent. Their independence was gone. The loss was irretrievable.

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OLD MASTER

But they would not omit the funeral orations at the grave of
their Republic. For two days they debated. It was shadow box-
ing. Even the irreconcilables felt it. Yet De Wet repeated for
the hundredth time that he was for continuing the war. The
word peace simply did not fit into his bull head. Hertzog car-
ried water on both shoulders. For the first time he delivered
one of those: on the one hand . . . but on the other . . . perora-
tions on the strength of which, and due to their mystic-sound-
ing quality of unintelligibility, he subsequently rode to power.
De la Rey, curt, intense, with subdued passion in his dark eyes,
hated surrender. But since the end had come, an honorable end
was better than a dishonorable one, the only alternative. He
finished on his habitual Christian note: "Lord, Thy will not
mine be done/' Botha argued soundly and sensibly for accept-
ing the compromise in order to save the nation.

Smuts carried the day. He hesitated to speak since he was
only the legal expert, not a delegate. He would not even sign
the peace he had extracted from the British. But he had to say
this much: from the military point of view the war could be
carried on. "But we represent the blood and tears of the entire
nation. . . . Comrades, we decided to stand to the bitter end.
Let us now, like men, admit that the end has come for us. ...
The result of that struggle we leave in God's hands. It is His
will to lead the people of South Africa through defeat and
humiliation and even the valley of the shadow of death to a
better future and a brighter day." He had already, with all due
deference to the Deity, made up his mind to help Providence
in order to shorten the march through the valley of shadow and
death.

One hour before Milner's ultimatum expired, the peace treaty
was adopted by fifty-four votes to six. The grey beards wept.

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OLD MASTER

Chapter 11 THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH

THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW OF DEATH PROVED THE MOST COM-

fortable, broad and bright road through which the Boers had
ever trekked. The period of reconstruction set in on the very
day the peace of Vereeniging was signed. Milner, now Viscount
Milner, High Commissioner of the Cape Colony, Governor of
the new Crown Colonies, threw himself into the herculean task
of, as he expressed it at a meeting in Johannesburg, "repairing
the ravages of war, and restarting the new Colonies on a higher
plan of civilization."

He began his work in an atmosphere of almost unbearable
tension. The Boers could not believe that their war was lost
and their independence gone. The commandos stubbornly in-
sisted that they were unconquered in the field. Yet they had to
listen to their commandants, who, according to agreement, ex-
plained the situation to the ranks and supervised each man as
he stepped forward and handed over his rifle to a British
officer.

Botha, the ex-commander in chief, discharged this unpleas-
ant task with his habitual nonchalance which concealed the
strong emotions of a highly sensitive man. The bulky, deeply
tanned six-footer, whom his friends called the Maharajah, did
not hesitate to shake hands with the British officer in charge.
He sent Lord Kitchener his compliments. Indeed, he was
strongly impressed by the hard-hitting, yet peace-minded Eng-
lish general. There was that inexplicable feeling between them:
sympathy.

De Wet, the martinet of the Free State, growled the pre-
scribed address to his men. Then he left abruptly. He could
not witness the actual gesture of surrender.

Smuts could not bring himself even to return to his com-
mando in the Cape Colony. It was impossible to tell the men
that the free life, the life of a bird of prey, was over. Neither

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OLD MASTER

Milner nor Kitchener insisted on his complying with the proper
formalities. Both understood that Smuts was very much a man
in his own right.

Besides, the two British leaders had their hands full. Their
gravest handicap was the complete breakdown of the railway
system, caused by the war, and particularly by the guerrillas.
Kitchener demanded military priority to get the troops out of
the country as quickly as possible. Milner needed the few facili-
ties left intact to distribute food and medicine among the deso-
late population. This was their last conflict. It was solved within
three weeks after Vereeniging. In this surprisingly short time,
the transport home of the troops was in full swing; the districts
suffering the worst were relieved, and the surrender of the
commandos was accomplished. A month before Milner had
written to his friend Major Hanbury- Williams: "If Kitchener is
going to make the bed let him lie in it, not me." But on the eve
of the general's hurried departure, the High Commissioner
paid Kitchener due tribute for his great achievement: "A great
task thoroughly completed, a perfect piece of workmanship."
They parted, however, without tears.

Some of the Boer leaders smiled. General Smuts smiled bit-
terly. He had an account to settle with Milner. He could not
bear to see another working miracles while he, once more, was
left out in the cold.

History has long acknowledged the miracle of South Africa's
coming into being. The case of a victor reviving the loser im-
mediately after his conquest, lavishing work, money, and care
on the foe of yesterday, transforming him into an independent
partner, giving him more freedom than he had ever had under
his outworn system, and doing all in the face of sullen resent-
ment, of a constitutional inability on the part of those being
saved to fall into step with the new times, with modern civiliza-
tion, economic development, democratic enlightenment, was
unprecedented in the annals of human progress, and was, on
the same scale and to the same degree, never again repeated.
Lord Milner had chosen the toughest job there was toward,

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OLD MASTER

and after, the turn of the century. As he had predicted with
visionary foresight: he failed personally. But his cause could
not fail. He laid the foundations for the house that in the same
spirit his archenemy, and later his friend, General Smuts, finally
built.

Repatriation of the exiles, return of the refugees, restitution
of the prisoners, transfer from military to civilian government,
renascence of common law, revival of trade and industry, mod-
ernization of agriculture, reparation of the damages and losses
of war, these were the foremost tasks with which Milner found
himself confronted. He directed and supervised them all. In
his superhuman task he was assisted by a group of young Ox-
ford men, generally called his kindergarten, each of whom sub-
sequently made a brilliant career. Among them were his private
secretary, Geoffrey Dawson, later editor of the London Times
for decades; John Buchan, the novelist and historian, who died
as Lord Tweedsmuir, Governor General of Canada; Philip
Kerr, who became the Marquess of Lothian, and ultimately
British wartime ambassador in Washington; Patrick Duncan,
who was to remain for half a generation in the Union govern-
ment as Smuts' lieutenant; and F. B. Smith, the Nobel Prize
winner, and famous professor of Agriculture at Cambridge.

Opposite them stood the Boers of the war and post-war gen-
eration. Their fathers had been excellent colonizers. The Boer
of the old stamp had taken his wife and family and all his be-
longings into die wilderness. He had established his crude
domesticity in the midst of savagery, tilled the land, and within
a decade had become a part of the soil.

The sons were different. True, they preserved some of their
inherited traits. They remained the most dogmatic individual-
ists in the world. Their allegiance to the family, including their
distant relatives, remained untouched, although it deteriorated
into narrow clannishness. They maintained their faith in their
somber version of sixteenth century Protestantism, the Dutch
Reformed Church. But somehow, as John Buchan observed,
they seemed to have missed civilization, and hit upon the vul-
garity of its decline. Many sons of old peasant families left the

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OLD MASTER

distress. It was, however, not an economic proposition. A Cen-
tral Judiciary Commission went to work. After five years the
commission had investigated 63,079 claims, many of diem fan-
tastic, and had distributed a round sum of 9,500,000, more
than thrice the amount for which Smuts had haggled at Vereeni-
ging. British residents were entirely excluded. Only ex-burghers
of the two republics, whichever side they had fought on, were
considered. Even claims by rich farmers and burghers, who
certainly needed no government assistance, were accepted,
provided they could prove war losses. Ultimately, all ex-burgh-
ers, again with the exception of the British residents, were
granted the so-called "rebel-credit" up to 25 each. In addi-
tion to these free grants, loans totaling nearly 3,000,000
were made. The War Office handed over to the civil adminis-
tration 4,500,000 for the settlement of claims against the
army, based on goods requisitioned for receipts and promises
to ex-burghers in return for assistance. Finally, an expenditure
of over 6,500,000 for repatriation was incurred by the colo-
nial government. Thus, at a total cost of some 16,500,000 the
stupendous task of reinstating a whole nation was promptly and
efficiently accomplished.

The Boers, however, were dissatisfied. They took the un-
precedented British generosity as their due; indeed, they re-
garded the sums awarded as insufficient payments. They had,
of course, never dealt in such fabulous sums. But the republican
politicians, now out of a job, and a great number of predikants
fanned the flames of discontent. Since they could not openly
attack the government, they looked for whipping boys among
the defenseless. "Bully the National Scouts until they repent!"
preached the Reverend Bosman. Whereupon Milner, while
refusing a suggestion that all National Scouts should be armed,
decreed that arms should be equally distributed. Those friendly
to the government should not have a smaller number than the
irreconcilables. He also suppressed the resurging anti-Semitic
wave. A number of Boers demanded that the Jews should be-
come second-class citizens, on the pattern of Kruger's uitland-
ers. Very firmly Milner replied that he would not revive the

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OLD MASTER

"bigoted mediaeval tradition of the late Transvaal government.
Whatever the conditions of naturalization," he added, "it is
quite certain that they will not contain any discrimination
against Jews/'

On June 21, 1902, soon after Kitchener's departure and his
replacement by General Lyttleton, Lord Milner moved in state
to Pretoria to receive formally the oath of allegiance from all
chief officials, and to take over the civil administration. He had
luncheon with Botha and De la Rey. It was a pleasant meet-
ing. Botha recognized that the best was being done to repair
the damages of war. He welcomed the revival of legitimate
business in anticipation of a great economic expansion in the
new colonies. Indeed, in town and country land values were
rising rapidly. Land speculations no longer involved much risk.

General De la Rey, himself a big landowner in the aristo-
cratic district of Lichtenburg, was above material considera-
tions. But he also stood ready to throw the great weight of his
uncontested prestige into the scales of co-operation. He could,
Milner suggested, render the cause valuable service. Many Boer
prisoners in Bermuda and India refused to take the oath of
fealty. The internees in Ceylon were the most stubborn group.
Gladly, De la Rey agreed to travel all the way to Ceylon to
soften and soothe his old soldiers. Due to his military fame it
was he who, by capturing Lord Methuen, had won the last im-
portant Boer victoryand to his well-known profound religious-
ness he was particularly well fitted for a mission of reconcilia-
tion. Its success was greater than was expected. The example
of their fellow prisoners in Ceylon, whom De la Rey had won
over, was followed by the group in India and even in the far-
away West Indies. By March, 1903, all the prisoners were re-
patriated. Many of them returned with their families who had
followed them into exile. All were laden with heavy bundles.
The thrifty Boers took with them even the blankets from the
prison camps. From Bermuda not a single family returned with-
out a parrot in a spacious cage all of which added to the ter-
rible congestion of the scanty means of transportation available.

Instead of being grateful for their homecoming and for the

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OLD MASTER

received nothing but the advice to settle their affairs with the
Empire. The journey was unsuccessful except to General De
Wet, who managed to sell the copyright of his war memoirs
for a fabulous sum in London. He retired to Bloemfontein, and
declared: "I am leaving politics severely alone. I am only occu-
pied with looking after my business."
That was exactly what Smuts was unable to do.

His opportunity to return to the fray came with Joseph
Chamberlain's arrival in South Africa. The journey caused a
sensation. Never before had a Colonial Secretary bothered to
visit such a distant outpost of the Empire, and a newly ac-
quired one at that. As Chamberlain disembarked on December
26, 1902, the people of Durban, an English-speaking city, gave
him a jubilant welcome. He was acclaimed all along the way
to Pretoria. The Boers, who a year before had still called the
war "Chamberlain's war/' had in the meantime found ample
reason for recognizing how gravely they had wronged the man,
who, though a great Imperialist, had, after the Jameson Raid,
done his best to put out the fires.

Smuts regretted that Chamberlain had not come five years
earlier. The war, he believed, might have been averted if
Chamberlain had seen for himself. But it was never too late.
He came out of his self-imposed seclusion, and was, indeed,
elected the spokesman of a large deputation representing the
Dutch inhabitants who had obtained a hearing in the assembly
hall of the old Volksrood. The fact that he was chosen was sig-
nificant. In the Republic he had been an important official but
never a political leader. Now he assumed the leadership. The
way was clear for him. Most of the old Boer leaders had
emerged from the war as ruined men. Their reputations and
their fortunes were gone. They were entirely absorbed with
making a new living. Almost alone Smuts and Botha had not
fallen by the wayside. Shrewdly, they agreed to work together.
Botha was cast in the role of charmer for which he was par-
ticularly well fitted, whereas Smuts adopted the part of the
rock.

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OLD MASTER

In his unbending attitude, fundamentally opposed to his con-
ciliatory nature, he went so far as to address Mr. Chamberlain
in Dutch. An interpreter had to translate, and, unfortunately,
did not acquit himself too successfully. Smuts himself would
have done the job much better. After handing to Chamberlain
a petition which listed the Dutch population's wishes, Smuts
spoke. "It is said," he observed, "that we do not wish to co-
operate. That is not so. Our interests are so firmly tied to the
country that we cannot stand aside. We must work together
for the country's good. It is, however, our desire that this co-
operation should rest on a proper basis that of confidence and
respect. Mutual disrespect has been the curse of South Africa."
Referring to the first point on the list of grievances, the treat-
ment of the Cape rebels, he said: "We do not wish to minimize
the crime of these people. But we must admit the crime is
ours." And he concluded: "A profound characteristic of the
Boer is his loyalty to authority not the loyalty that pays, but
the loyalty that is true till death. We now come to our new
government, and offer them that loyalty, but we ask them to
think what we have been that we have been a free people, the
freest people on earth."

Mr. Chamberlain replied politely, but he pointed out that
the Treaty of Vereeniging was the charter of the British na-
tion. "You have every right to call on us to fulfill this in spirit
and letter. But it is a little too early to try to go further than
the terms thus concluded." Yet he welcomed Smuts' declara-
tion, and concluded: "I believe that with consideration on both
sides, with strict observance of agreements on both sides, with
a readiness to give as well as to take, before many years are
over, probably sooner than any of us can now anticipate, we
shall be one free people under one flag."

Lord Milner nodded: "A most excellent and impressive
speech."

As the two British statesmen left the Raadzaal, the Boers
responded to Botha's call for a hearty round of cheers.

For the rest of Chamberlain's stay in South Africa the Boer
leaders showed him much attention and politeness. Affably,

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OLD MASTER

General Botha unbosomed himself to Chamberlain. He had
returned from his journey to England deeply impressed by the
greatness and the excellence of British institutions. There was
no reason to withhold complete co-operation and mutual trust.
Perhaps . . . well probably not . . . but, however . . . possibly
Lord Milner might feel otherwise. . . .

It had worked with Kitchener. It did not work with Joe
Chamberlain. His confidence in his proconsul was unshakable.
Yet when he left he advised Milner to treat the Transvaal as
if the people already had self-government.

Milner followed his suggestion. Barely a month after the
Secretary's departure, on the thirteenth of February, he offered
Generals Botha, Smuts, and De la Rey seats in the Legislative
Council, which was to advise the administration.

The offer was promptly refused. In their opinion the time
had not yet come for popular representation. They preferred
to wait until the peace of the country was fully assured. The
refusal was signed by De la Rey, but so obviously drafted by
Smuts that the then leading newspaper in Johannesburg, the
Rand Daily Matt, commented: "If they had been honest enough
to say that they declined the great honor because they had no
intention of associating their names and persons with British
institutions, we could have believed them. In the circumstances,
however, we must decline to do so, and take it that all their
fair words about loyalty and co-operation are so many barren
expressions. In view of the characteristic Jesuitry of Mr. Smuts
we are at an utter loss to conceive why he had been offered the
honor at all."

Lord Milner accepted the snub with English imperturbabil-
ity. He addressed a letter to De la Rey: "You may have seen
in the papers that an unfavorable interpretation has been put
upon your refusal to accept a seat in the Legislative Council.
I only wish to say that, while I regret your decision, I did not
and do not think that it was due to any wish to embarrass the
government ... I will only ask you to treat me with the same
confidence, and not hesitate to let me know if you have any-
thing which you wish brought to my notice. . . . You can write

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OLD MASTER

to me in Dutch, if that saves you trouble, as, though I speak
and write that language with difficulty, I read it with perfect
ease/'

After this cordial reply, General Smuts, too, eased up a little.
He explained that they had had no reasonable period of time
to consult their people, on whose minds a curious impression
might have been made, had they accepted the offer precipi-
tately.

He was again in close touch with his people. In double har-
ness with Botha he built Het Volk, as a central organization of
those Dutchmen who were willing to co-operate loyally with
Great Britain, but more or less on their own terms. He felt that
his race needed guidance. They had lost their way in the valley
of the shadow of death exactly as he had. But after two years
of depression, he pulled himself together. The shadows were
fading; the sky brightened.

An incident occurred that threw him again into the deepest
despair. It was the fall from which he emerged to his full stat-
ure. But he did not foresee that. He could not know that the
celestials, who suddenly swamped his land, were really heaven-
sent.

Chapter 12 RECONCILIATION

"THE COUNTRY is VERGING ON BANKRUPTCY. YOU KNOW THE CAUSE.
Well, the cure is Chinese. . . ." Smuts wrote, in February 1903,
to Miss Hobhouse. He could not have chosen a more unreliable
recipient for his confession. Miss Hobhouse, who, during the
war, had befriended the Boer women and children in Maritz-
burg, and who after the war had valiantly aided General Smuts

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OLD MASTER

in taking care of destitute farmers, was a kindhearted, aging
spinster. Invariably her kind heart went out to the enemies of
her own country, England. She was the last woman to whom a
man of Smuts' penetrating judgment and imperturbable reason
would have unbosomed himself had not his enforced idleness
during the English administration of his country upset his
otherwise strongest characteristic: his balance. He was now
thirty-four, in the prime of life, filled with the urge for activity,
indispensable, he believed with good reason, to the reconstruc-
tion of his country, and the bigger task of uniting South Africa,
and he was frustrated. He vented his bitterness by indulging
in unmeasured exaggerations.

Thanks to the generous expenditure of Lord Milner's govern-
ment, the Transvaal was saved from the bankruptcy in which
Oom Paul's corrupt oligarchy had left the country. But there
were almost insurmountable obstacles to contend with. Last
winter the rains had not come before the end of December,
the three preceding months of drought had ruined the crops.
The Boers from the backveld attributed the catastrophe not
to the Lord, who had tested them equally severely in many a
previous year, but to the ungodly introduction of scientific agri-
culture by Mr. Smith, Lord Milner's expert.

The gold industry, on whose output the Transvaal virtually
lived, was in bad shape. The cause was the shortage of labor.
The Kafirs refused to work after the inflationary wages of the
war and immediate post-war period had been reduced to rea-
sonable levels. They now received thirty shillings weekly, in-
stead of the twenty shillings their wages had averaged under
the Boer regime. But they had expected the millennium from
the British overlords, and since God's kingdom did not come,
or had not come to stay, they sat out the period of reconstruc-
tion. Gone were the short-lived days in which they had driven
in Cape carts, fattened on the large stores the British Army had
left behind, and corrupted by equal rights which, in South
Africa, were not yet applicable to them. They did not really
care for equal rights, but neither did they care to return to the
mines. They preferred to live on the poisonous berries and the

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OLD MASTER

parched grass of the veld. They devoured the rotten carcasses
of dead animals. Their children were rickety and disease-
ridden. By the scores of thousands the Kafirs sank into hope-
less misery.

Due to the labor shortage, many mines shut down. Others
had to reduce their output. In this crisis Mr. F. H. Creswell, the
manager of the Village Main Reef Mine, came forward to ad-
vocate a world-shaking innovation: the employment of white
manual labor below the surface. Captain Creswell was a well-
meaning man of good English descent. Born on the Rock of
Gibraltar, the son of the British Postmaster General there, edu-
cated in England as a mining engineer, but imbued with pro-
gressive ideas acquired during an apprenticeship in American
silver and lead mines, he dared a proposition which no one had
expected of a distinguished officer of the Imperial Light Horse,
a well-decorated veteran of the Boer War. Milner alone en-
couraged his efforts. Indeed, Mr. Creswell carried out his ex-
periment with white labor in his own mine. Its success was
argued about and contested for twenty years. But the mine
owners protested instantly. They had two good reasons. First,
white labor was too expensive to make gold mining profitable.
Second, the mines could not wait until enough white emigrants
came, and were trained. An immediate solution was vital for
the further existence of the industry.

The few Kafirs willing to work were fully employed on rail-
way and reconstruction projects. Lord Milner sought native
labor outside South Africa. But his search was of no avail. The
English colonial administrations in East and Central Africa
were themselves in need of black hands to open out their ter-
ritories. Only the Imperial government in India had the neces-
sary pool of fifty thousand men to draw upon. But the India
government's consideration for the welfare and prosperity of
their Indian wards was such that the mining industry in Jo-
hannesburg could not meet the demands of the British Raj. As
the situation on the Reef became more acute, indentured Chi-
nese coolie labor was suggested. Milner was hesitant.

Before he had had time to make up his mind a storm of in-

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OLD MASTER

Strangely, this very fact, the safeguarding of the Boer peo-
ple and the natives, aroused the magnanimity, the compassion,
indeed the passions of the English. They were not opposed to
the fact that Chinese coolies were at work in the distant Trans-
vaal. But they would not stand for what the Liberals success-
fully presented as "yellow slave labor within the British Em-
pire."

The echo of aroused English righteousness resounded in the
Transvaal. Smuts kept his ear to the ground. Intuitively he
felt that his hour was coming. On the strength of the English
reaction, misguided as it was by Liberal electioneering, the
Boers, he anticipated, would return to power in their native
land. He himself would be in power once more, directing,
guiding, leading, in the center of things. He highly resolved
that he, for his part, would not abuse the British confidence,
from which he had good reason to expect self-government for
the defunct Republics. He was about to win the Boer War. He,
too, would be a magnanimous victor. His pact with the British,
the foe of yesterday, the idol of the day before that, was con-
cluded before he had spoken a word with the men in London.
For the rest of his life he has abided by this pact.

While he hammered the Boers into shape, preparing them
for independence and self-government, he strongly stressed
that racial distrust was the arch-foe of South Africa. He pleaded
for unity. In Lichtenburg, where General De la Rey was the
local patron saint, Smuts advised the "bitter-enders" to be rec-
onciled with the "hands-uppers." He was by no means unself-
ish, for his people he demanded "the whole egg, not half an
egg." But he resented and rejected those who wanted to make
the country a reservation for "pure Afrikanderdom." "Let us
take the hand of brotherhood," he addressed an audience at
Potchefstroom, a violently Dutch-feeling town. And at Klerks-
dorp, another stronghold of unreconciled Boers, he demanded
that the "union of Boer and Briton should resemble that of
England and Scotland not of England and Ireland." Still, his
innate caution was not quite extinct. "Do not let us either ap-

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OLD MASTER

prove of or refuse anything until we have seen what it is pro-
posed to confer upon us," he warned.

He trespassed upon the enemy's ground. With Botha and
Beyers, he addressed a meeting at the Johannesburg Wanderer's
Hall, speaking on behalf of Het Volk, his own party, to his
opponents in the Progressive (English) Party. He called politi-
cal parties "something of an evil/' and almost excused the exist-
ence of Het Volk by pointing out that the Progressives had
been first in the field. "They make very much of the British
Flag. . . . The position of Het Volk was perfectly clear. They
had signed their names to a document at Vereeniging, and as
long as that document lasted they would keep their word."

The natural conciliator had found his vocation.

The sand in Milner's hourglass was running out. Like Cecil
Rhodes he found that there was so much to do, so little done.
In fact, he had done as much to revive and rebuild South Africa
as any human in his position could possibly have achieved. He
knew that his term would not be extended. He did not ask for
it. But he entered upon the last year of his administration with-
out allowing himself the slightest relaxation from his high-
pressure. Regardless of his vanishing popularity, unmindful of
his overtaxed strength, he accelerated his drive on men and
measures.

Lord Milner was the spiritual father of some of the great
reforms and changes that were accomplished under Smuts.
Their visions were very much alike; their difference was one of
tempo and temperament. Although Milner personally raced
ahead, for the time allotted to him was measured, he believed
in letting development ripen and mature, whereas Smuts, with
the restlessness of youth, wanted quick results, speedy action,
immediate achievement. Their beliefs were similar. Perhaps
their conflict was also caused by the good reason that the one
was in, the other out.

Both men were seriously concerned with the defense of the
country. Milner told Colonel Sir Charles Crewe: "There is a
very big question that of the local armed forces of South

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OLD MASTER

Africa. What I want to do is: first, to work towards their ulti-
mate amalgamation under a federal government, secondly, to
develop some organic connection between them and the Im-
perial forces." Smuts did, indeed, found the Defence Force
under the Federal Government of the Union, and "some organic
connection" between this splendid force and the Imperial forces
was truly established in two world wars, ultimately in the heroic
achievements of the British Eighth Army, in which the South
African contingent has more than once formed the spearhead.

Above all, their common creed in the unity and, finally, the
self-government of South Africa, united the two men. To the
Bloemfontein Town Council, Lord Milner said: "My work has
been constantly directed to a great and distant endthe estab-
lishment in South Africa of a civilized and progressive commu-
nity, one from Cape Town to the Zambezi, independent in the
management of its own affairs, but still remaining by its own
firm desire, a member of the great community of free nations
gathered together under the British flag. That has been the
object of all my efforts. It is my object still." It was Holism pure
and undiluted, expressed twenty years before Smuts incor-
porated the idea of bringing the whole together into a philo-
sophic system.

Milner concluded, in his farewell speech, delivered in Johan-
nesburg, on March 21, 1905, with the words: "British and Dutch
can, without loss of integrity, without any sacrifice of their
individual traditions, united in loyal devotion to an Empire-
State, in which Great Britain and South Africa would be part-
ners, work loyally together for the good of South Africa as a
member of a greater whole. And so, you see, the true Imperialist
is also the best South African."

A flood of farewell letters showered Milner as he left. Per-
haps not the most important, but certainly the most touching
came from the black King of Barotseland. It read: "Dear Lord,
I am sorry to hear that you are leaving to England from hear-
say, but when I hear that I was very, very sorry. When your
letter reached here which said now you leave the country then
another man will take your place, I was very sorry with all my

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OLD MASTER

people. How shall that will suppose is only coming to look
after the white people not to take care for the black people.
I enclose my short letter with respectfully salutations. I beg to
be your little friend Lewanika."

On April second, Milner's no longer unreconciled antagonist,
General Smuts, wrote to the departing Governor:

Will you allow me to wish you bon voyage now that you are
leaving South Africa forever? I am afraid you have not liked us. But
I cherish the hope that, as our memories grow mellower, and the
nobler features of our respective ideas become clearer, we shall
more and more appreciate the contribution of each to the forma-
tion of the happier South Africa which is certainly coming, and
judge more kindly of each other.

At any rate it is a consolation to think what is noble in our work
will grow to larger issues than we foresaw, and that even our mis-
takes will be covered up ultimately, not only in merciful oblivion,
but also in that unconscious forgiveness which seems to me to be an
inherent feature of all historic growth. History writes the word
"reconciliation" over all her quarrels, and will surely write it over
the unhappy differences which have agitated us in the past. What
is good in our work is not disposed of in the present, but can safely
appeal to the ear of the future. Our respective contentions will reach
a friendly settlement which no one foresees today.

Here spoke the philosopher Smuts. He was at peace with
the man who was Great Britain incarnate. The two antagonists
parted, to meet again as friends.

Chapter 13 EARLY TRIUMPH

THE VERY MOMENT LORD MILNER LEFT SOUTH AFRICA, THE LITTLE

man in Bloemfontein put out his head. Now that the imperious
Governor had gone, Hertzog saw his chance. The "General/* as
he stubbornly called himself, was already noted for his anti-

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OLD MASTER

British machinations. Dissatisfied with the magnanimous settle-
ment of grants for ex-burghers, he had demanded more money
for his Free Staters, and the assurance of complete self-govern-
ment at the earliest possible moment. Sir H. Goold-Adams, the
Lieutenant-Governor of the Orange Free State, had invited
Hertzog to discuss matters with him. But the little man refused.
He was possessed by an insurmountable aversion against straight
talk. He hid behind a resolution that no conversation or co-
operation between Britisher and Boer was possible until his de-
mands were satisfied.

Now he stabbed Botha whom he had eulogized three years
before at Vereeniging and Smuts in the back. Hertzog founded
the Oranje Unie, the Free State competitor of Het Volk, with
the avowed purpose of making things difficult for the two
conciliators.

Botha and Smuts remained undeterred. They spent the sec-
ond half of 1905 in crisscrossing the country and campaigning
for a genuine understanding with England. The team was well
matched: Botha supplied the popular appeal, Smuts the driv-
ing force. Smuts was still reserved, and could only unbosom
himself when he stood on a platform, addressing a multitude.
His heart went out to all of them, but he was aloof even from
the few. In public he had the habit of referring to the most
insignificant local grandee as "my old friend John" or "my
trusted friend Piet." But this was clearly a way of working off
his self-seclusion. On the stump throughout the country, he
kept more than ever to himself. Villagers and townspeople who
had come to meet the speakers, had to content themselves with
Botha's company. Smuts stood apart, wrapped in his heavy
coat with upturned collar, his hat low over his forehead so that
only his nose showed. Thus he waited for the horse-drawn bus,
the usual means of conveyance on the platteland. People who
called upon him found a man with a faraway look in his eyes,
seeming still to ponder the book or document he had on his
mind, while he spoke in precise terms straight to the point.

Louis Botha was the very opposite. He was, indeed, heir to
the best and most engaging traditions of the old Boers. He was

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OLD MASTER

at once conservative and progressive. He relished the memory
of Oom Paul, whom he had often attacked in the Volksraad.
He had inherited the President's pipe, his habit of drinking
coffee with all and sundry, he even went Kruger one better by
patting innumerable shoulders. His hand had the magic touch.
People felt that they mattered to him, and returned proud and
satisfied from their interviews, even when the meeting had not
brought forth any result. On the other hand he was a confirmed
modernist: he was among the first to replace whist with bridge,
and he became famous as South Africa's best bridge player
long before he was South Africa's leading man. He was the
only Boer to venture into the mining business. But he lost his
shirt when he tried his hand with a speculation in Premier
Diamond mining grounds. Undaunted, he immediately built a
beautiful house in Sunnyside, Pretoria's fashionable suburb,
near Smuts' cottage. He had borrowed the money from Abe
(later Sir Abe) Bailey, the most spectacular character in South
Africa, a country teeming with queer types.

Before Sir Abe was thirty years old all South Africa already
called him Old Bailey, probably on account of his intimate
acquaintance with police stations, where his unbroken chain of
fisticuffs and brawls made him a frequent guest. The son of a
Yorkshireman from the West Riding, who had made good in
South Africa and even entered the Cape Legislative Assembly,
young Bailey grew up as an all-round sportsman of distinction.
He was amateur heavyweight boxing champion of South Africa,
and a famous lion hunter. At the age of twenty-three he made
and lost a fortune in the gold rush, whereupon, with ten pounds
borrowed from a friend, he took out a broker's license. In front
of the Stock Exchange of Barberton he accosted a rich Dutch-
man by the name of Van Reenen, a big holder of Republic
shares, in the Dutch language. This was a quite unusual method
of procedure since English was the accepted language in busi-
ness. But this deviation from the prescribed way pleased the
Dutch moneybag so much that Abe's future as a stockbroker
was assured. From then on, although a fiery Imperialist at
heart, he preferred speaking Dutch in South Africa.

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OLD MASTER

Only the African World gave him a fair deal. This weekly re-
printed Lord Selborne's flattering characterization of Smuts,
which, it hoped, would "serve to silence ill-bred sneers." Smuts
was indifferent as ever to attacks. When he finally spoke for
publication, he expressed to the Reuters man his "warm appre-
ciation of the cordial reception extended to him in London/'

He made a sentimental trip to Cambridge, a journey into
youth, and then he visited methodically the Liberal leaders:
Morley, Lord Elgin, Lloyd George, Campbell-Bannerman, and
Winston Churchill, who held his first office of profit under the
Crown as Under-Secretary for the Colonies. He had known
none but Churchill personally, and it is questionable whether
the acquaintance of the one-time State Attorney and his pris-
oner, based on nothing more than a letter that had arrived too
late, could pass for a social relation.

Churchill asked Smuts if he had ever known of a conquered
people governing themselves so soon after defeat. No, Smuts
admitted frankly. But he insisted that they would not, and,
indeed, could not govern themselves without England's assist-
ance. This Winston Churchill understood.

Lord Morley, although pro-Boer during the war, proved re-
luctant toward Smuts' demands. Finally, Campbell-Bannerman
listened to his argument with sympathy. He was the first to be
convinced of the righteousness of the Boer cause.

On the next day in a Cabinet meeting, the new Prime Min-
ister moved to grant the Boers responsible self-government.
After a short discussion all his colleagues agreed. Their main
reason, it was said, was their wish to rid themselves of the
whole Transvaal business. They were well aware that the battle
cry: "No Chinese slave labor in the Empire!" had done good
service in the campaign, but that it had misled the people.
They knew perfectly well the merits of the matter. Young
Winston Churchill took the lead in disassociating himself from
his party's slogan. Slave labor in the Empire, he admitted, had
been a "terminological inexactitude."

Smuts left a memorandum in Downing Street, assuring that

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OLD MASTER

the Boers no longer wished to raise the question of the annexa-
tion and of the British flag. Then he returned home.

Within a few weeks a Royal Commission arrived in Pretoria
to work out the framework for responsible government. All that
was left to do was to form governments in the two ex-republican,
now self-governing colonies. In the Free State Mr. Abraham
Fischer formed a cabinet, with Hertzog as Minister of Educa-
tion, and De Wet as Minister for Agriculture. It was a strongly
anti-British administration. In the Transvaal everyone expected
that the Premiership would go to Smuts. But he refused. The
honor should be Botha's. At first the Pretoria Club was aston-
ished. Then, shrugging, they agreed to the latest inexplicable
whim of the inexplicable General Smuts. Botha became Prime
Minister, and proved an excellent choice. Smuts took the offices
of Colonial Secretary (Minister of the Interior), and Minister
of Education.

At the first banquet in Pretoria, given in honor of the first
responsible government under the British flag, in March, 1907,
the whole audience shouted "Smuts! Smuts!" when the minis-
ters made their entry.

Smuts smiled: "Myn tdkhareF (My die-hardsl)

Now he was in his element. Although painfully aware that
he had no parliamentary experience nor, for that matter, had
Botha or any other member of the government served any
parliamentary apprenticeship he wielded power as to the
manner born. From the first day he was the undisputed master
in the House that most Boers called Praatfontein: the talk shop.

Smuts did most of the talking. He led a substantial majority.
Thirty-seven out of a total of sixty-nine seats were occupied by
his followers from Het Volk, whereas the opposition only num-
bered twenty-nine Progressives English , and a handful of
Laborites and Independents. The Het Volk members were in
fact the commanders of the Boer War, feeling a little uncom-
fortable in their new civilian dignity, and grateful for guid-
ance. The speaker was Christiaan Beyers, a minor Boer general,

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OLD MASTER

who had not played any particular role in the war, but was
destined to come into the forefront a few years later.

Botha rarely attended the sessions. Although the great major-
ity of the members were Boers, most of the discussion was in
the English language. Botha, however, hard as he tried, could
not hammer the complicated English language into his head.
On the other hand he spoke excellent High Dutch and a racy
Tool. He was a much admired speaker, and did not care to
expose his linguistic deficiency. Moreover, his practical mind
was set upon more important things than the babble in the
talk shop. He was obsessed with the idea of setting up a land
bank to further agricultural development, and largely to pro-
mote this scheme he went to London, after one month of his
premiership. He attended the Imperial Conference, the meet-
ing of Dominion premiers and the prime ministers of self-
governing Colonies, and was again received with that English
courtesy and hospitality that transforms converted foes into
devoted friends.

Now Smuts had the run of the government bench. His first
measure was an act of reconciliation. While in opposition, he
had violently argued the case of the Christian National Educa-
tion Movement which tried to exclude the English language
from schools for Dutch children. Now a Minister of the Crown,
Smuts set his face against an "education to separatism/' He
declared that the C.N.E.M. would receive no subsidies from
the government, and demanded an end of the movement, while
promising to take the Dutch private schools under State control.

The members of the movement, among them many predicants
of the Dutch Reformed Church, were stunned. In a secret con-
clave they resolved not to yield to Smuts' decision. In fact, they
still wrested a little money from sympathizers. But before many
months had passed the schools were, indeed, taken over by the
government, and the movement faded gradually.

Smuts declared the English language, the language of prog-
ress and business, obligatory in the schools, while Dutch was
optional. He dealt the Dutch Reformed Church another blow
by banning in the schools denominational religious education.

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OLD MASTER

Bible classes taught Christian ethics; that was enough. The
private schools and the churches could look after the rest. An
outcry arose throughout the bigoted platteland. Smuts was de-
nounced as a heathen. To dispel this hate-propaganda he some-
times opened his meetings with a prayer. But he stubbornly
kept the predikants from his own educational system.

He did not care how many enemies he made. Many Trans-
vaal Boers believed that self-government meant the revival of
Oom Paul's golden days of nepotism and offices of profit with-
out work. Although remaining throughout his life a faithful
admirer of President Kruger, whom he called the greatest man
the Boer race had ever produced, Smuts made it perfectly clear
that job-hunters were pursuing a "blind alley." He was fully
aware of, and frequently deplored, the Boers' ingrained lazi-
ness. Himself a "tiger for work," to use Milner's phrase, he saw,
once more in never admitted harmony with Milner, that agri-
culture was his country's future.

At a meeting in the country an old man complained that
something was wrong with the ground in the Transvaal: it was
too low, one had to bend one's back to work. "Baatje uittrekr
take off your coat! Smuts replied. His phrase became a slogan.

Another word he popularized in South Africa, and perhaps
in general use, was: steam roller. It referred to his strong major-
ity in Parliament which, at his signal, rolled over the prostrate
and flattened out opposition.

He was at that time constitutionally unable to bear resist-
ance. He celebrated his thirty-seventh birthday by calling out
two Imperial regiments, the Camerons and the Queen's Bays,
to patrol the Reef against a short-lived miners' strike. Many of
the miners shouted that they had served in the commandos
against the same troops that were now pitted against them. But
Smuts did not listen to this argument. He had learned, at long
last, that, at least for his generation, the country lived on the
output of the mines.

Gradually his relations with the English mine owners im-
proved. Although the English party in the House of Assembly
formed the opposition, which Sir George Farrar valiantly led,

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the industry understood that Smuts was the "necessary man/'
Sir Lionel Phillips, the President of the Chamber of Mines,
took the first step to ease the tension between big business and
the government. Sir Abe Bailey threw all his dynamic power
into the scales. Some magnates looked askance at the effort.
Messieurs Farrar, Chaplin, Fitzpatrick shook their heads. Sir
Lionel, their good friend, was indeed incorrigible. He honestly
believed that one could make Boers parlor-broke. He would not
learn from his own experience. Remember that evening with
Joubert?

Some years before the outbreak of the war, Christian Joubert,
Minister of Mines of the South African Republic, had accepted
Sir Lionel Phillips' invitation to the theater. It was a courageous
gesture on both sides at a time when social intercourse between
Oom Paul's oligarchy and the industry was taboo. Sir Lionel,
however, was always an innovator, and the white-bearded
Joubert, for his part, was rather curious to see a theater from
inside. He had never been to a play. The dinner, preceding the
show, went off swimmingly. His Excellency drank maraschino
by the tumblerful, and was in high good spirits. Later, in the
box, he refused to take off his huge "smasher" silk hat since
this would have been undignified.

The experiment was not repeated for thirteen years. In 1907,
Sir Lionel, in the face of widespread scepticism, gave another
party for members of a Boer cabinet. Botha put in an appear-
ance; he could not do otherwise. His bronzed face, illuminated
by the most engaging smile, contrasted effectively with his im-
maculate, white stiff shirt. Smuts, in his habitual easy conversa-
tional tone, quoted liberally from Aristotle and Kant.

Smuts ventured rarely enough into polite society. He was
entirely absorbed by his work. Work was his second nature.
Since all his cabinet colleagues, with the exception of Botha,
were mediocrities, he was soon recognized not only as an im-
portant member of the cabinet, but as the cabinet itself. In a
series of articles entitled Things They Say in Their Sleep, the
Johannesburg Sunday Times published a cartoon of Smuts,
uttering the words: "To all intents and purposes, I am the

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Ministry, 'the whole team and the little yaller dog under the
wagon/ as I believe they say in the States." And the Johannes-
burg Star concluded a survey of the first session with the words:
"Practically the whole of the Government business has fallen
on Mr. Smuts, who dominates and overshadows his party. He
obviously shares the complete control of the Cabinet with the
Prime Minister, whose comparative effacement in Parliament is
partly linguistic/'

The inevitable cartoonist, Mr. A. W. Lloyd, later of Punch
fame, drew a cabinet meeting of the six ministers, all bearing
Smuts' face.

Chapter 14 GANDHI

THERE WAS BUT ONE MAN WHOM THE STEAM ROLLER COULD BEND

and flatten, but never crush: a frail, emaciated, dwarfish gentle-
man by the name of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. Smuts'
trouble with him started in the month of August, 1907. At that
time Mr. Gandhi already had an almost fifteen years' old repu-
tation as South Africa's nuisance number one.

Early in 1893 Gandhi, then Indian barrister, had arrived at
the port of Durban, representing a big business house in Por-
bander with a branch in Pretoria, to conduct an important law-
suit in which many Indians in the Transvaal were involved.
Mr. Gandhi came fresh from London. He had spent five years
there reading law and learning, on the side, dancing, elocution,
and the violin three accomplishments, he believed, which were
essential to the stock in trade of a gentleman. According to his
own confession he had no ear for western music, yet, with an
early display of perseverance, he continued to fiddle until, it
was said, his neighbors in the Hotel Victoria complained.

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In spite of his persistence, Mr. Gandhi was even at that date
rather touchy by nature. Since the white world of the Hotel
Victoria obviously wanted nothing of him, he retired to a very
simple room in a cheap suburb, bought a stove, his only invest-
ment, he confessed, partly to protect himself against the Lon-
don climate, partly for cooking his own porridge for breakfast
and supper. He dined for sixpence in a vegetarian restaurant,
and felt highly extravagant when, once in a blue moon, he had
a shilling to pay for his bill. It was all by way of sheer virtue.
His uncle, a wealthy merchant in India, footed his bills. Mr.
Gandhi passed his examinations without winning any particu-
lar distinction. In due course he was called to the bar. This act
of generosity, it seems, reconciled him with England. Much
later he admitted that, next to India, he would rather live in
London than any other place in the world.

Fate, that Jester, however, singled him out to spend his early
life in the one country in which colored people were by no
means treated with English tolerance, but with a heartfelt and
unconcealed dislike. The people of South Africa made no fine
difference between black, brown and yellow skins. To them
Kafirs were the sons of Satan and Asiatics simply coolies. True,
the English courts in the Crown Colony of Natal avoided any-
thing like the color bar. When barrister Gandhi, on the second
day of his arrival, appeared in court at Durban, he was received
with the customary courtesy. The judge only discreetly sug-
gested that the gentleman from India should remove his tur-
ban, as it was the custom in English courts to take off one's
headgear. Deeply insulted, Mr. Gandhi left Durban, and betook
himself by the night express to Pretoria. He had taken a first-
class ticket, but in this fashion he only got as far as Pieter-
maritzburg. There a fellow traveler objected to the presence of
a coolie and called a guard, who ordered Mr. Gandhi into the
van. Gandhi preferred to get out. He shivered all night in the
waiting room, but he was, as usual, undeterred. At dawn he
took the coach to Johannesburg, but already in Paardeberg fate
in the person of a conductor, a heavy-set Boer, approached him
with the friendly invitation to vacate his corner seat. The con-

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ductor wished it for himself, in order to smoke his pipe in com-
fort. "Sammy," he said cordially, "you sit on this." Helpfully, he
spread out a piece of cloth. Mr. Gandhi did not care to be
called Sammy. He did not yet know the custom of the country,
whereby Sammy was a friendly way of addressing an Indian or
a Jew. It really only meant pal. "No!" he said. The bulky Boer
immediately boxed his ears, whereupon Gandhi realized that
he was in the independent Transvaal. At the next stop, Stand-
erton, he changed into another coach, and had an uneventful
journey as far as Johannesburg.

The Grand National Hotel, however, had no room free. Mr.
Gandhi disappeared into a washroom, changed into frock coat
and top hat, not to mention a white tie, to look impressive as
he ventured forth, called upon the stationmaster, insisting on a
first-class ticket to Pretoria, as befitted an Anglo-Indian gentle-
man. He arrived in Pretoria after hours nine o'clock was cur-
few for all colored people without a pass and since the police-
man caught him strolling in front of President Kruger's house,
he was kicked off the pavement, and arrested.

This reception did not endear the Transvaal to Mr. Gandhi.
He spent a few months in Pretoria, attending to the law case
with which he had been entrusted, and toward the end of the
year returned to Durban on his way home. A large number of
fellow Indians gave him a farewell party, which lasted until
the morning. The morning paper was already on the streets.
Mr. Gandhi read in the Natal Mercury that the government of
the Colony was about to introduce a bill to disfranchise the
Indians. It was a sheer measure of self -protection, a necessity if
Natal wanted to remain predominantly white. The Colony was
already swamped with Indians. More than forty years before
they had come to work on the sugar plantations. Soon they be-
came gardeners, indeed, they transformed Natal into a garden-
colony. Then they spread out into trade and the professions.
They undercharged and undersold the white middle class. Due
to their fertility they were about to transform the British Crown
Colony into an African dependency of India. A head tax of
three pounds, imposed on them, did not disturb them. Prime

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Minister Sir John Robinson's new government saw clearly that
Natal would be submerged by the wave of Indians. Hence the
disfranchisement bill.

After reading the paper, Mr. Gandhi immediately drew up a
petition against the bill, insisted that his friends at the farewell
party sign it, and entered upon his lifelong struggle. Despite his
protest the bill was passed. But Sir John Robinson attached a
few helpful amendments, and the English press in Natal showed
sympathy for the "persecuted" Indians. Gandhi shrewdly gauged
that his chances were good. He became what he has remained
throughout his lifetime: Propa-Gandhi. He campaigned to
instill into the hitherto apathetic, if rapidly spreading, Indian
community a new self-consciousness. Soon, he formed a new
power in colonial life.

He remained three years in Natal. Within this time he organ-
ized the Natal Indian Congress, the forerunner of the present
Congress Party in India, and the Natal Indian Education Asso-
ciation. He was admitted to practice at the Supreme Court in
Natal. While the administration of the Crown, faithful to the
idea that all subjects of the British Empire had the same rights
in every part of the Empire, allowed him to do as he pleased,
the common people, even the English-speaking, saw their very
livelihood threatened by the sudden Indian upsurge. The
Boers, all over South Africa, expressed their indignation with
their habitual violence. The decision never to accept English
tutelage, with its system that shielded the colored people to the
detriment of the whites, was immeasurably stiffened in the Re-
publics. In fact, the leniency of the British towards Mr. Gandhi
was a very real factor in inciting the great Dutch upheaval that
exploded in Kruger's ultimatum and the subsequent war.

For his part Mr. Gandhi knew how to use the English instru-
ment with great s\d\\ and c\evemess. In India, to which lie re-
turned in 1895 to collect his wife and children and bring them
to South Africa, the land of his adoption, he conducted a veri-
table atrocity campaign, abusing the credulity of Reuters
agency, the official British mouthpiece. In repeated interviews
he told Reuter's that the Indians in Natal were robbed and

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who were by nature not eager to work either, how to make a
living by trouble-making. The Kafirs formed their own illegal
unions. They struck in all the factories and mines as soon as
they had their organizations, mostly under white bosses. First
minor disturbances flared up. Soon over seventy thousand na-
tives were on strike. Bloodshed ensued.

The government remained passive. Had Smuts taken protec-
tive measures for the mines, the cry that he had sold out to the
jingoes and the capitalists would have been vindicated on the
surface. Chaos prevailed. The Nationalists rubbed their hands.
"General Smuts has brought South Africa to the verge of ruin,"
Hertzog said. His lieutenant Tielman Roos expressed himself
more distinctly: "Smuts must break his own neck before he has
the chance to break ours."

"I am like St. Paul," Smuts confessed. "I die daily." This sigh
of resignation was his signal to attack. Early in 1921 he called
the people to a new election. His ear to the ground, he heard
the tide of fanaticism receding. From Russia came atrocity
stories about the Bolshevist regime that frightened many Hert-
zogites away from their leader's unnatural coddling of the
Reds. The threatening words the trade-union bosses used
brought about a healthy reaction, indeed resistance, among the
politically indifferent masses. The nearer Hertzog's threat of
secession seemed to come, the more the calculating Dutchmen
realized that they would cut off their noses to spite their faces.
They would lose their best customer, which, after all, was Eng-
land. Besides, secession from the Empire could not be accom-
plished without revolution, and revolution would entirely wreck
both business and the country.

Smuts conducted a whirlwind campaign, to whose speed
Hertzog, a man of slow brains, was not equal. Instinctively,
however, Hertzog felt that the call for secession would not suf-
ficiently appeal to the country. He made another volte-face.
"Secession," he declared, "is not an issue at this point. It will
come in time. But the time is not yet herel" Instead, he in-
vented a nonexistent Great Empire Banking Trust, whose mys-
terious henchmen squeezed South Africa's economy. He as-

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try was destitute, the Boers mined, the very existence of the
mines menaced, the cattle gone, and the crops annihilated by
the ravages of war. Milner and his staff had their hands full
with the great task of reconstruction. To soothe the feelings of
the Boer population was the first task. Conceivably, they would
not tolerate an influx of the Indians who had already swamped
Natal. How would the English care to be submerged in their
own country by a nation of hundreds of millions which could
export not hundreds of thousands, but millions of its people
without, indeed, feeling the loss in numbers? It was a pertinent
question; Lord Milner understood it. His Peace Preservation
Proclamation closed the borders against any Asiatic immigrant
without an individual permit. This measure alone precluded a
new sanguinary revolt on the part of the Boers.

Gandhi was not a welcome visitor in Pretoria. The officials
were unapproachable. The Assistant Colonial Secretary asked
him to go back to Natal. He did so, but only to lead a deputa-
tion to waylay Joseph Chamberlain when the latter arrived in
Durban. Then his Indian followers, intoxicated by the first taste
of success, insisted that Gandhi should return to the Transvaal,
their next field of expansion.

Upon his return to the capital of the Transvaal, he was gen-
erally considered a pest. Lord Milner, although admitting that
civilized colored people ought to be able to obtain all rights,
irrespective of their color, declared: "But in this case the
Asiatics are strangers forcing themselves upon a community
reluctant to receive them." Reluctant was an understatement.

The Indians were not to be got rid of. Although most of them
who were prewar settlers in the Transvaal had left the country
at the beginning of the war, other Indians, defying the Peace
Preservation Proclamation, filtered in continuously.

Finally, Milner tried a compromise. He was willing to re-
admit prewar Indian residents, providing they would register
in order to establish their right to admission. As a means of
identification they had to have their right thumbs fingerprinted.

Mr. Gandhi was the first to be thumb-printed. Three months
after Pretoria had cold-shouldered him, he enrolled as a duly

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qualified attorney at the Supreme Court in the Transvaal. This
was not a happy ending, but only a new beginning. Many
Indians had large financial interests in the Transvaal. To look
after their business, to win absolute equality for them, relief
from segregation, full citizenship, became Gandhi's next aim.

He could rely on the British Government, which had already
protested on behalf of its Asiatic subjects against the restric-
tions imposed upon them by President Kruger. Now, however,
the government in London was confronted not only by the
opposition of an irreconcilable Boer system, but by a united
colonial feeling. Joseph Chamberlain had rejected all restric-
tions imposed on "Asiatics" including the three pound tax; to
him such measures were practically a continuance of the sys-
tem of the South African Republic. Measures of restriction, he
insisted, could only be justified on sanitary grounds.

In the first months of 1904 torrential rains drenched Johannes-
burg. The Downpour lasted unabated for seventeen days. The
Indian population could not stand it. In March, bubonic plague
broke out among them. As it happened so frequently, the sav-
age climate of South Africa decided a political issue. Chamber-
lain's "sanitary grounds" were fully met. Although British doc-
tors and nurses brought the plague quickly under control, the
plea for the restriction of the Indians was now irresistible.

Advocate Gandhi himself retired from the hot soil of Pre-
toria. He founded an Indian rural colony, named it "Phoenix,"
and started a community life after Tolstoy's pattern. In Phoenix
he started, and edited, the Indian Opinion, a weekly that was
later to become the mouthpiece of his passive resistance move-
ment.

Only two years later, in June 1906, he found a new opportu-
nity to display his usefulness. A minor Zulu war was in prog-
ress. Gandhi volunteered once more. He collected a platoon of
twenty stretcher-bearers, entrusted the military command to a
German sergeant-major, and himself toiled hard, as he declared
later, for more than a month. This time his men did not like
the toil. They were disgusted at having to carry the wounded
Zulus as well. They resented being, in Gandhi's words, volun-

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tary nurses to men not yet emerged from the most degraded
state. Gandhi was disappointed at British humanity.

Yet he embarked upon a mission to London. He was most
courteously received, but informed that the Transvaal would
soon be self-governing. New Asiatic measures, such as Gandhi
asked for, would have to be delayed until the independent con-
stitutional government of the Transvaal could decide them.

Infuriated, Gandhi organized his first movement of passive
resistance. It took practical form in July 1907, when he was
joined by one thousand Chinese under the leadership of Leong
Quinn. Hundreds of Gandhi's followers went to prison. Their
leader emerged as "our true Karma Yogi."

It was here that General Smuts stepped in.

The Colonial Secretary was busy repatriating the Chinese
coolies, who had brought him into power. He went slowly and
cautiously to work, since he no longer wanted to damage the
mines by a suddenly enforced removal of their most valuable
labor. He was all the more impatient with the Indian law-
breakers, constituting a racial danger for white South Africa,
much graver than the indentured labor of the modest celestials.

In August, 1907, Smuts wrote Advocate Gandhi an unmistak-
able letter, announcing that he would carry out the law, "and
if the Indians resisted, they would only have themselves and
their leaders to blame for the consequences."

Gandhi smiled enigmatically. But his smile concealed a ter-
rible fear. He was rightly afraid that his resistance would arouse
the Boer population before exhausting Smuts' already prover-
bial patience. In that case a change of government might come
to pass, and Gandhi understood perfectly well that he would
never again find as fair-minded opponents as the team of Botha-
Smuts. "The East is not wanting to flood South Africa with
Indians," he solemnly declared. "The resident Indians do not
wish an influx of their brethren." He fought, he said, for only
two points: for the repeal of the Asiatic Law Amendment, and
for recognition of the status of educated Indians, of whom six,
only six a year, should be allowed to enter.

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Smuts replied with a counter offer: he would grant tem-
porary permits. But this concession Advocate Gandhi refused
"for reasons of self-respect." Passive resistance continued. To sit
dhurma, he explained, was a right inherent in Indian philosophy.

He had caught Smuts where he was vulnerable. Smuts could
not be out-philosophized by another man. Moreover, he re-
spected Gandhi. To him this was a man who acted in a way
he thought right in defiance of a whole nation's opposition. Yet
Advocate Smuts made a fine difference between respecting and
giving in. Gandhi considered his own people, and Smuts, too,
had to consider his own. He introduced a severe Immigration
Act in the first session of the new Transvaal Parliament, which
passed without debate.

One of the stipulations of the new Act was that every regis-
trant must have his fingerprints taken. In India this custom had
long been established. It was used to guarantee the identity of
the receivers of pensions and grants of every sort. Moreover,
Mr. Gandhi himself, as well as a hundred thousand Indians in
Natal and sixty thousand Chinese coolies, had been finger-
printed without recrimination, when Milner had demanded it.

Not /ingerprints but f/mmfc-prints, Advocate Gandhi insisted,
and at that, only the print of the right thumb. In India crim-
inals were dishonored by having their left thumb printed. Be-
sides, religion about which Mr. Gandhi was otherwise vague
forbade the taking of all ten fingerprints. It was some sort of
Indian religion, one of the eight hundred-odd denominations.

Everyone, including Advocate Gandhi, knew that one could
buy fraudulent certificates, not to be verified by a simple thumb-
print, in any Indian bazaar between Johannesburg and Cal-
cutta. Yet, when November 30 came, the deadline for registra-
tion, he once more refused registration on behalf of his people,
whose numbers in the Transvaal increased by all manners of
means, while the controversy about a mere point d'honneur
as Gandhi slyly put it went on.

The Indian Association picketed the government offices to
prevent unfaithful co-nationals from complying with the regis-
tration order. But five hundred Indians slipped through the

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picket lines. Immediately the Association denounced those
fellow Indians as men who had no right of residence. The others
cheered their leader and were prepared to go to jail for him,
to lose their trading licenses, and, if he so decreed, their homes
and their very existence.

Gandhi marched ahead of his crowd right into the Pretoria
jail. The martyr's crown sat firmly on his head. After his sen-
tence to a one-year term he stated that he was delighted to
have a full year's time for uninterrupted study and contem-
plation.

His contemplations, it is true, were frequently interrupted by
more or less harmless incidents. In January, the hot South
African winter month, a great many Indian prisoners fainted,
which was perfectly within the limits of passive resistance. On
another occasion they refused to eat their rice or corn prepared
with animal fat, the habitual diet of the native prisoners. Their
religion, this time a different one, was strictly vegetarian, for-
bidding the taking of animal fat. In complacent, English-run
Johannesburg jails, the rice and the mealies were consequently
cooked in butter. In stern, Calvinistic Pretoria, rice disappeared
entirely from the prison menu. The Indians had to eat their
corn without any fat whatsoever. Some of them actually fell ill.
Gandhi alone thrived on mortification.

From his cell, he suggested an interview with Smuts. The
prisoner was perfectly willing to give the Colonial Secretary a
hearing. It might, he promised, remove some misunderstandings.

Smuts was not aware of any misunderstanding. He sent word
that no useful purpose would be served by an interview.

Gandhi continued to plead. Even at the peril of losing some
of his treasured self-respect, he wanted to meet the man in
authority for a palaver.

Palaver means indaba in Tool. The Boer has not yet been
born who would miss an indaba. Moreover, revengefulness is a
word unknown in Smuts' vocabulary. He agreed to the meet-
ing. Advocate Gandhi had used his meditations to draw up a
scheme, carefully elaborated and ornamented with a few face-
saving loopholes. The Indians would voluntarily register in a

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body within three months from their release from prison, if,
on the other hand, the act would not be carried out during the
time he needed to persuade his followers. The leaders, how-
ever, would be allowed to sign in writing; no more humiliating
fingerprints for Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

Smuts pointed out that it was not possible to repeal the
Asiatic Act, a legislative measure, while Parliament was not in
session, but he promised he would introduce "the whole mat-
ter" to the House, and would guarantee that until then no
Indian would be prosecuted under the act. He had another
reason in addition to his permanent inclination for compro-
mise. Botha was then in London, angling for a five-million-
pound loan. The chances were good. But the English Govern-
ment was visibly irritated over the harshness of the treatment
meted out in the Transvaal to His Majesty's loyal Indians under
faithful Mr. Gandhi.

Smuts admitted publicly that he had "climbed down/' insist-
ing that only narrow characters would not do so. The Indians
registered "voluntarily." Even Gandhi's famous soul-force
allowed him to give his fingerprints, despite the considerable
loss of face.

At the next session, Smuts passed a law in the House, at once
repealing the Asiatic Act and amending the Immigration Act.
The certificates of all registrants were declared valid, but no
further Asiatics would be permitted to enter the Transvaal.

Gandhi declared this to be a breach of Smuts' promise. Smuts
denied the accusation. Gandhi spoke of a personal promise.
Smuts, not unlike his behavior toward Sir Conyngham Greene
immediately before the outbreak of the war, knew nothing of
personal promises. Parliament was the authority, not he.

The Indian registrants, Gandhi at their head, burned their
certificates. The trouble then made did not abate throughout
the years. Gandhi came forward with a new demand: repeal
of the three pound tax imposed on the permanent Indian set-
tlers in Natal. By this time the Union of South Africa was
already achieved. Smuts, now wielding country-wide authority,
refused to be blackmailed. Provocatively, 3,000 Indians from

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Natal under Gandhi's leadership crossed the provincial border
of the Transvaal. They were promptly arrested, and once more
imprisoned.

Smuts was worn out. Gandhi, too, seemed slightly fatigued
by his exertions. Unhesitatingly, he added Brahmarcharyaihe
vow of chastity to his already practiced santygraha, soul force.
He was detained in the Bloemfontein prison. Now the Indians
in India rose in his support. The English wanted no trouble in
the Empire, as dark clouds were overshadowing the political
horizon. They interfered discreetly with the Union government.
Gandhi's sojourn in jail suddenly ended.

At a triumphal farewell banquet Gandhi and his wife drank
one another's health in two glasses of water. Brahmarcharya, it
appeared, was a rather rigid prescription. Then the couple
slipped out of South Africa two days before World War I
started. Gandhi returned via London to India, where he prac-
ticed what he had learned in South Africa. Ever since he has
paid his debt of gratitude to England in his own inimitable
fashion.

Smuts was reconciled with the Indians when he watched the
splendid performance of their troops during the First World
War. But Indians, like other peoples, are not a nation of splen-
did soldiers alone. Some of them who remained in South Africa,
a fat and increasingly rich lot, right now do their best, or their
worst, to impede the Union's magnificent war-effort.

Chapter 15 UNION

CERTAINLY THE MOST SPECTACULAR, AND PROBABLY THE MOST

consequential incident during the three years of the Botha-
Smuts regime in the Transvaal was the story of the Cuttinan.

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On January 26, 1905, a tremendous diamond was found in the
half-State-owned Premier mine. More than 50 per cent of its
value belonged to the State. But no one could tell how much
that would amount to in money. In fact, the giant gem, weigh-
ing 3,025 carats, was beyond estimate, since there was no mar-
ket for a precious stone of this magnitude. It was insured for
.250,000, but this sum represented only a fraction of its real,
if immobile, worth.

The government of the Crown Colony was rather embar-
rassed by the find. What should be done with the Ctdlinan?
In London, patriots suggested an Empire-wide collection to
buy the miraculous stone as an offering to the King-Emperor.
But before this collection materialized, Smuts had a brain wave.
Why not present on behalf of the Transvaal the unique jewel,
too precious to be worth anything, to King Edward VII? Smuts
had good reasons to believe that the King was not a particular
friend of the Boers. Edward VII still stressed his admiration
for Cecil Rhodes, he treated with great distinction Viscount
Milner, whom the Liberals had sent into the political wilder-
ness, and he only thinly disguised his disapproval of Campbell-
Bannerman's post-war policy in South Africa.

A truly majestic present seemed to General Smuts the best
method of reconciling the King with his new colonies. Perhaps
he also felt, in the exuberance of newly acquired power, a little
flattered by the vision that he, Jan Christian Smuts, would pre-
sent the world's greatest diamond to the King-Emperor, the
world's greatest monarch. Smuts rarely indulged in even the
most innocent vanity. This case may have been an exception.

Botha, both a little sentimental and very practical-minded,
concurred wholeheartedly. He was very ready to oblige his
king in the most grand-seignorial manner. Moreover, he still
had the Transvaal Land Bank on his mind, for the establish-
ment of which he needed a formidable English loan, perhaps
five million pounds.

On August 16, 1907, the government suggested to the House
to offer the Cidlinan to His Majesty. An acrimonious debate
began immediately, and lasted for two days. Strangely, the

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conservative Boers took no part in the discussion. They dis-
trusted the Anglophilia of their ruling team. The couple Botha-
Smuts, they found, had grown a little too big, too broadminded,
and too magnanimous in their generosity toward England. But
suspicious Boers are silent Boers.

The ProgressiveEnglish Party was not silent. Their spokes-
men, Sir George Farrar and Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, opposed the
proposed gift as "inexpedient/* In fact, they saw through the
trick: they knew perfectly well that the Land Bank, breaking
the English banking monopoly, was lurking around the corner,
and they had no reason to wish the King to undergo a change
of heart toward the Boers. The King's attitude, if constitution-
ally of no consequence, was yet the last rampart in the Trans-
vaal, defending the English from being entirely brushed aside
by a wholly Dutch government.

But the Progressive Party was split from top to bottom over
the merits of the matter. Some of them could not swallow
Smuts' biting sarcasm in the debate: "When I see the Knight
Commanders and the D.S.O/s rise and unblushingly oppose the
motion, it shows me that although there may be great financial
power behind them, there is little political insight." Sir Abe
Bailey, a mere dilettante in politics, but a multimillionaire of
his own making, could not tolerate such an insult. He was for
the motion. Mr. Henry Lindsay backed him up. He saw in the
motion for the disposal of the Cullinan diamond the materiali-
zation of the great event for which he had been waiting all his
lifetime: an act that symbolized the junction of two races in
their common allegiance. "The seed of a wider national senti-
ment, sown by Advocate Smuts at Kimberley in 1895, has ger-
minated," he ended his contribution to the debate. His words
were well chosen.What Smuts had considered the gravest
political blunder of his life was vindicated. The wound was
healed. He concluded the discussion by informing the House
that word from London had just come through: By 199 to 62
votes the House of Commons had approved the guarantee of
a loan of five million pounds to the Transvaal, a large slice of
which was earmarked as capital for the Land Bank. Immedi-

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OLD MASTER

ately the Transvaal House of Assembly agreed upon the gift
by 42 to 19 votes. The unanimity of the resolution, Smuts
pointed out, was only thwarted by the professional guardians
of British prestige in South Africa.

The Cullinan as a whole could not be polished. The "cleav-
ing" was undertaken on February 10, 1908. The process suc-
ceeded splendidly. The largest fragment weighed nearly 2,000
carats, the next over 1,000 carats. The remainder consisted of
many small pieces. In November the parcel was delivered in
London, to be dealt with by His Majesty's jewelers. Ultimately,
Cullinan I weighed 516 carats, Cullinan II 309, the next heav-
iest, the Nizam, 277.

Early in January, 1909, Botha and Smuts went to London.
They were summoned to Court to see the gem, and were not
a little surprised to meet, on this occasion, Sir George Farrar
and Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, the leaders of the opposition. There
was a last little difficulty to overcome. The cleaving, polishing,
and setting of the stones had cost 35,000. Since one could
not well let the King pay for a present, the Transvaal Parlia-
ment voted the sum under the heading "unforeseen expendi-
ture/' This time the vote was unanimous. Smuts had made sure
that no questions would be asked. The English opponents
rubbed their hands. They were, after all, very pleased with the
outcome. The unreconciled Boers jammed the counters of the
newly opened Land Bank to grab their share of the credits.

The Cullinan affair had a twofold political consequence. The
Progressive Party remained split, and its influence dwindled.
A great many English voters, now convinced by the proved
loyalty of Botha and Smuts, switched to Het Volk. On the other
hand, Het Volk lost many of its old adherents to the danger-
ously surging Boer nationalist movement which found the do-
nation an act of megalomania on the part of the two leaders,
now clearly on the highroad to England, and which thrived on
the appeal to the traditional Boer thriftiness. It can be assumed
without exaggeration that the renewed and never-since-abated

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OLD MASTER

nationalist Afrikander movement originated in the Cullinan
affair.

Smuts was gambling for high stakes. The Cullinan had re-
moved the last English suspicion. The time had come for the
fulfillment of his supreme idea: the Union of South Africa.
True, the people still needed a little prodding. His approach
had to be careful. South Africans were not high-flying idealists
of his own mould. They must be brought to understand the
problems that, varied as they were, all made Union necessity.

Once more Smuts toured the country. Now he had no ene-
mies, or at least he did not recognize them as such. His inner-
most urge of human brotherhood overcame all barriers. To his
own constituents in Pretoria he explained the advantages of
his Education Act. It was bound to bring people together. In
another ten or fifteen years there would no longer be any racial
differences. A good kick had brought down the wall that had
separated them thus far. After this appeal to the irreconcilable
Boers he welcomed Sir Lionel Phillips on his return from Eng-
land. It was no longer private parlor conversation. It was a
frank, public welcome, unmindful of the fact that the English-
language newspapers of the House of Eckstein, which Sir Lio-
nel represented in Johannesburg, had incessantly attacked Het
Volk. At the Johannesburg Debating Society Smuts mentioned
Paul Kruger and Cecil Rhodes, in the same breath, both as
great personalities.

To the farmers he spoke in their own language. To a Western
Transvaal audience he gave practical advice on mealie corn
growing, potato blight, the production of negro-head tobacco,
the darkest and the richest, on sheepshearing, on the best meth-
ods of marketing.

He was now a prosperous farmer himself. Union was coming,
he felt it in every drop of his blood, and he would have to stay
for many months out of the year in Cape Town. So he bought
the estate Dornkloof (Mimosa Gorge) near Irene, ten miles
south of Pretoria, to give his family a permanent home. Dorn-
kloof has remained General Smuts' favorite private residence,
the abode of his famous library, and South Africa's model farm.

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OLD MASTER

The Transvaal fanners listened patiently to all the good ad-
vice they had received from their exalted fellow husbandman.
But what they wanted was more than advice. They clamored
for protective tariffs to secure the home market against the
competition of the incomparably more fertile Cape Colony.
Internal tariffs, even the low ones then in existence, were the
worst obstacle to Union. Smuts said he would not erect a fence
around the Transvaal to exclude fellow South Africans. Isola-
tionism, protectionism, separatism were the targets of his hard-
hitting speeches. He interspersed them with just the proper
dose of nationalism. Many of the Cape farmers had helped the
Transvaal in the war. Were the Transvaalers now going to bite
the hand that had drawn the sword in their defense? At a meet-
ing at Christiania, where Smuts once more conjured up the
memories of the Boer War, a listener shouted: "General de la
Rey has promised all those fighting under him a good living
afterwards!" "Nonsense!" replied Smuts, "what he promised
you was certain death!"

He demanded intensified work on the veld to make good the
destruction wrought by the war. "What do we need in addition
to land and irrigation?" a heckler asked. "Seed!" said Smuts.
"And then?" continued the stubborn Boer. "A plow!" "And
then?" "A harrow!" "But most of all?" The feUow meant, of
course, protection. Smuts replied: "Sweat!"

His dwelling on the Boer War did not prevent him from
doing justice to the English. He wanted all and sundry in his
fold. In Johannesburg he paid glowing tribute to Colonel
Briggs, who had hounded his own commando through the
Cape Colony. When the Imperial Light Horse, the English
crack regiment, one of his most formidable foes in the war, was
threatened with absorption in the Defence Force, then in the
making, Smuts pushed through a cabinet resolution to retain
the identity of the historic formation, and its name.

Again in Johannesburg he coined a word that became the
battle cry of South African politics, and remained so ever since.
Smuts pointed to Canada as a warning example. There English
and French did not blend. They did not become one people*

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OLD MASTER

They remained almost like two streams, flowing side by side.
He wanted the flow and growth of a South African nation in
one stream.

Unwittingly, he had given his foes their cue. Hertzog picked
it up, and his successors repeated it incessantly to this very day.
They call their policy of racial division and hatred: two-stream-
policy.

Hertzog, thus far generally regarded as a troublesome and
ungrateful Boer agitator of no particular importance, was now
a Minister in the Orange Free State. Lacking any sort of parlia-
mentary or governmental experience, he sought to attract atten-
tion as a violent anti-British racialist. He succeeded particularly
well with the Boer women who exercised strong influence in
the family and in social life. Although he himself spoke English
with hischildren, he warned the mothers to confine their house-
hold speech strictly to Taal. They must never forget their suf-
ferings in the camps during the war, and teach their children
what he called "the truth of the matter." Pretending that he
was only seeking Dutch equality, and that there should be
nothing to suggest one race's superiority to the other, he em-
barked upon the doctrine and practice of violent anti-British
prejudice. In fact, it was not his bias against Britain, but his
insane jealousy of Smuts and Botha that shaped his course.

In the Transvaal the two races were approaching one another
step by step. On the English side Sir Lionel Phillips, the min-
ing magnate, was the protagonist of this rapprochement. His
social relations with Botha and Smuts developed into confi-
dential political intercourse. Sir Lionel made it his business to
keep abreast of government proposals and often to point out in
the most friendly manner defections or possible unforeseen
consequences of impending legislation. Mostly he reached an
agreement, and had dangerous bills amended and modified.
When Smuts introduced his bilingual Education Act with the
support of the English opposition in Parliament, Hertzog could
not bear it any longer. He publicly accused Botha and Smuts
of "weakening under the blandishments of the Empire build-
ers," and was bent on proving that the Boers in the Orange

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OLD MASTER

River Colony, as the Free State was then called, were better
Boers. In his capacity as Minister of Education he introduced
a pointedly anti-Smuts Education Bill of his own, a crude sys-
tem that tended to exclude the English language from the
schools in his colony. Under the pretext that they had not
passed their examination in Dutch, he excluded several hundred
teachers newly imported from England. Furthermore he dis-
missed the three English school inspectors. The Director of
Education in Hertzog's own Free State resigned in protest. The
three inspectors sued for wrongful dismissal, and obtained dam-
ages from the Court. But the Oranje Unie, Hertzog's hench-
men, collected enough money to refund all expenses.

While the Boer chauvinists under ex-President Steyn's nomi-
nal leadership and Hertzog's actual guidance did their best to
poison the relations between the Orange River Colony and the
Transvaal, the English South Africans were foremost in sup-
porting Smuts' idea of a Union of the whole country. In fact it
was Cecil Rhodes' and Lord Milner's legacy, which General
Smuts, mustering all his forceful idealism, was now carrying
out. Dr. Jameson, of all men, the same Dr. Jim who eleven
years before had organized the blundering raid, was now Prime
Minister of the Cape Colony. His "misdeed" was forgotten and
forgiven, particularly by Botha and Smuts. Dr. Jameson now
addressed Lord Selborne, urging the Governor to pay attention
to a series of articles in Ons Land, Smuts' own mouthpiece in
Cape Town, which pointed out that the time had come for
South African unification. Lord Selborne, himself deeply con-
vinced of the necessity of Union, entrusted Messieurs Lionel
Curtis and Philip Kerr (later the Marquess. of Lothian), two
members of Milner's Kindergarten, with a blueprint. This pa-
per, to become famous as the Selborne memorandum, was pub-
lished in January, 1907. The cornerstone of a united South
Africa was laid.

Unceasingly, Smuts drove matters on. He had to overcome
grave obstacles. The Transvaal Boers loved their old comrades
in arms, the Boers from the Orange River Colony, but they
were not willing to pay for the perennial deficiency in the Free

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OLD MASTER

State's budget. Pretoria was the center of the protection move-
ment, the natural antagonist of Union. Racial bias was fanned
in the Free State. Mr. Merriman, by now the patriarch of South
Africa, while eulogizing General Smuts as a great asset in the
coming united South Africa, declared himself as a pas-op, a
cautious, conservative man, unwilling to accelerate the speed
of a natural but necessarily slow development.

Smuts replied to all criticism that he fully understood the
temporary difficulties, but that he was building for the cen-
turies, not for the moment. He was even unwilling to grant
a general election on the subject. The Parliaments in the four
States, he declared, had full powers to act. In June, 1907, the
four Parliaments indeed passed resolutions favoring national
union. Eleven months later an inter-colonial conference in
Pretoria resolved that the permanent prosperity of South Africa
could only be secured by an early Union, under the Crown of
Great Britain, of the four self-governing Colonies. Smuts pre-
pared a constitution, which, he foretold, would be more than a
mere instrument of government. "It ought to be a grand pact
of peace between the white people of South Africa," he de-
manded. "Do not let us have a Union of top-dog and under-dog.
Let us have a union of brothers/'

From the Free State came Hertzog's reply: 'The Afrikander
must be baas of all South Africa."

But Smuts was too busy to listen to criticism. He was entirely
absorbed by the study of existing federal constitutions. The
American Constitution occupied him above all. But he found
its principles of States' rights and rather loose federation not
applicable to young South Africa, where an iron hand was
wanted to bring the divergent interests together. He later said
that the Constitution was not a man's work, but "bore the im-
press of a Higher Hand." Undoubtedly, he had lent the Higher
Hand his own right hand.

On the twelfth of October, 1908, exactly nine years after the
beginning of the Boer War, a National Convention opened its
session in Durban, to proceed later to Cape Town and finally
to Bloemfontein. The debate was conducted with great deco-

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OLD MASTER

rum and in an atmosphere of good will. Not a single word was
uttered about racialism. Fire and water were happily wedded.
The Rand mine owner and the Natal sugar planter, the Cape
wine farmer and the Free State ex-commander discussed mat-
ters as if they never had been at one another's throats. Gen-
eral Botha, the patriarch Merriman, Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, Presi-
dent Steyn and many other arch-foes spoke and acted like a
band of brothers. They were all in General Smuts' grip.

Smuts was accompanied by a staff of nineteen advisers and
experts, a larger staff than the delegations of all the three other
colonies together had brought along. He himself had made an
intensive study of the problem in all its details; there was no
question which he had not explored with all his customary
thoroughness. He surpassed himself both as a thinker and
speaker. He appealed to the convention not to pay too much
attention to material interests. The problems of the day were
not the problems of the future, for which alone they were work-
ing. He reconciled diverging interests and opposing views. He
settled the haggling between Pretoria and Cape Town about
which should be the Union capital by suggesting that Pretoria
should be the seat of the Executive, and Cape Town the seat of
the Legislative. He insisted on one supreme Parliament and
one Government. Yet he believed that the insoluble native
question the problem about which the liberal Cape Colony on
one hand and the intolerant Transvaal and Free State on the
other could never agree should remain a matter of the indi-
vidual States. He promised the interior of the country its due
share of the development to avoid the example of Australia,
where almost the whole population was concentrated at the
coast, and he drew a glowing picture of the prosperity that
would accrue to the ports and the coastal regions by handling
the business of the Rand which would no longer be impaired
by internal customs. The clause concerning unification of the
railway system another piece of Lord Milner's heritage he
called "the Magna Charta of the Interior." But the leitmotiv
was, time and again, the blending of all free people in a com-
mon nation.

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OLD MASTER

Alexander Hamilton was reborn.

Throughout the months of discussion everyone paid tribute
to Smuts' wide and ambitious vision. The logic of his cut and
dried plans, his arguments worked out to the minutest particu-
lar swayed the convention. Only one backbencher dissented.
He did not speak a single word about the great idea of Union.
Instead he harped incessantly on his two hobbies: the predomi-
nant right of the Dutch language, and the native franchise
which should not be extended. The Natal delegation grew rest-
less as Hertzog constantly assailed the use of English, and the
representatives of the Cape were aroused by his attacks on
their traditional liberalism toward the color question. Hertzog
did not mind appearing as a strange and disturbing element.
While the benches emptied rapidly, he produced a long and
involved resolution, which was finally voted down. His insist-
ence had made him the most unpopular member of the conven-
tion. Yet many of the delegates recognized that he was the one
man who felt most strongly on his obsessions and that, in view
of his following among the Dutch, some day they would have
to heed his voice.

Smuts' draft constitution was accepted in Cape Town on
February 9, 1909, and a few months later slightly amended in
Bloemfontein. A large group of South African politicians car-
ried the amended act to England, where it was embodied in an
Imperial Bill, and subsequently ratified by the Parliaments of
Westminster and South Africa.

On the fifteenth of April, 1909, a banquet was held in Johan-
nesburg in honor of Lord Selborne, then on the eve of his
departure from South Africa, since his term had expired. Smuts,
still the Colonial Secretary, substituting for Prime Minister
Botha, eulogized Lord Selborne as the "father of Union, who
had first ventured into the open/' But he left no doubt that the
Union was now very much his own business. However, he had
not the slightest ambition for the formal leadership. He did not
wish to enter the scramble.

May 31, 1910 was the appointed day when the Union of
South Africa should come into existence. It was the eighth

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OLD MASTER

birthday of Vereeniging. On this day a government had to be
ready, strong enough to carry the elections which were to fol-
low in September. There was not much time left to build a
cabinet. Moreover, the battle of the spoils was marked by the
most complicated intrigues. It was, indeed, difficult to find
proper representation for the two white races and the four ex-
colonies. Dr. Jameson suggested a best-men-ministry including
the leaders of all parties and both races. But aged John X. Mer-
riman, widely considered as the great impartial, sided with the
irreconcilables from the Free State, with President Steyn and
his chief adviser Hertzog, in rejecting the plan. B6tha himself
refused to head such a government. He would, he feared, lose
all his influence with his people, if he wished to preside over
an administration which included the English. The English
leaders understood that the plan was premature. They formed a
loyal opposition, but ultimately their exclusion, and the divi-
sion along national lines, revived racialism.

The natural choice for the Premiership seemed to be Mr.
Merriman, who cautiously announced his candidature, and was
supported by Hertzog. However, after fifty years of work in
Parliament and public he was denied the highest honor. Lord
Selborne, shortly before his departure, had expressed his dis-
pleasure with the old man, who, for his part, had prevented the
Governor-General from presiding over the National Conven-
tion. Besides, it was known that King Edward strongly dis-
liked the English-born Boer leader. Ex-President Steyn's health
failed so rapidly that he, too, was out of the race. Smuts pro-
duced Botha. The kingmakers agreed, but on one condition:
Hertzog would have to be included in the Cabinet. Everyone,
with the exception of his own Free Staters, despised him. But
this delegation had seventeen men in the elected chamber, and
to the last man they insisted on their spiritual leader. The bulk
of the English voters was infuriated. Natal threatened to ab-
stain from co-operation, if Hertzog in the Ministry was the
price they would have to pay.

Once more Botha and Smuts had to calm the troubled waters.
Botha, himself Natal-born, sent emissaries to the troublesome

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OLD MASTER

Free State. Smuts suggested that Hertzog should come along
to welcome the new Governor-General, Lord Gladstone, the
son of the Grand Old Man, to whom the Boers owed their tri-
umph after Majuba. Smuts' idea was to reconcile Hertzog with
the British. But it failed completely.

In a new conciliatory effort General Smuts visited Hertzog
on May 10, 1910, in the Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town.
Stubbornly Hertzog insisted that all the trouble around him
was due to political agitation from the Rand. Smuts suggested
that Hertzog should go to the Court of Appeal. Hertzog indig-
nantly replied that he could not do so without playing false to
his people. Was he an inconvenience? he asked, smiling.

Pigheaded, he refused all further advances. Even the threat
that Dr. Jameson would be sent for, if Botha should not succeed
in forming a ministry, did not deter him. He preferred a hated
Englishman in office than a Boer government without himself.
In his diary he entered: "Botha's weakness and lack of prin-
ciple was known to me and my friends before Union. So was
his half-heartedness about the language question. The days
before and during the National Convention gave me and my
friends a fair foretaste of what we had to expect from him as
our future leader. But this convinced me all the more that it is
my necessary duty to take my place beside him in the interest
of our people and country. Three things are now clear to me:
How sensitive 'people' [meaning Botha and Smuts] are to op-
position. How eager 'people' are to satisfy criticism, but how
willing also to offer me up on the altar of another opposition."

Botha was finally convinced that he must accept Hertzog,
behind whom stood the whole Free State and all the irrecon-
cilables throughout South Africa. He chose the lesser evil. Only
one week before the Union Cabinet had to be announced he
asked Hertzog, whom he had thus far personally avoided, to
see him in the Mount Nelson Hotel. Hertzog appeared, but in-
stead of Botha, Smuts received him and notified Hertzog that
he would become Minister of Justice. Then both men went to
Botha's room. The Prime Minister-in-the-making did not utter
a single word in connection with the appointment. Hertzog

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OLD MASTER

entered in his diary: 'There was no mistaking with how much
reluctance he accepted me as a colleague/' But he had wormed
his way into the Cabinet, and was perfectly satisfied.

On account of Hertzog's inclusion, the first Union Cabinet
got a very bad press. The Johannesburg Star, then the most
powerful organ in South Africa, complained that Botha's party
had capitulated to the Orange Free State racialists.

There shone but one ray of hope. Smuts was in the govern-
ment. He was very much in it. He held three portfolios simul-
taneously; the Interior, the Mines, and the Defense. In this lat-
ter capacity, as Minister of Defense, he was to enter history.

Ch. 16 THE RISE AND FALL OF GENERAL HERTZOG

IN THE ELECTORAL CAMPAIGN THAT FOLLOWED THE FORMATION

of the first Union Government, Smuts strongly stressed the fact
that he regarded the Defense Office as the predominant one
among his portfolios. The year was 1910. "In England," Smuts
declared to a Natal audience, "people live in a false sense of
security, and it is difficult to get them to take an interest in
defense. But we in South Africa have known war, and while
the feeling of responsibility is still warm within us, we shall
create a national defense system." While he dwelt on the sub-
ject, he warned against South Africa's building a "tin-can fleet"
of her own. It would be better to increase their contribution to
the Royal Navy guarding the South African shores.

His audience was deeply impressed. But immediately his
cabinet colleague Hertzog raised his ugly head. Any money
that was to be spent on the defense of the country's shores, he
insisted, was to go toward the building of an independent

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OLD MASTER

South African Navy. He entirely opposed an increased naval
contribution to the Imperial Exchequer, about which General
Botha was, in fact, already negotiating with London. The Cabi-
net was split, even before it had won approval from the elec-
torate.

Smuts knew what he was speaking about. Among Cecil
Rhodes' "thoughts" that he had inherited was the colossus' dis-
trust of German penetration of Africa. Although he himself at
that time was still a strong believer in the color bar, Smuts was
aroused by the barbaric cruelty with which the German colo-
nizers, neighbors, at that, treated the natives. When Germany
took South West Africa in 1892 the Hereros owned one hun-
dred and fifty thousand head of cattle, incidentally their only
possession. By the end of 1905 they had not a single head left.
Two years later a German law formally forbade them to own
cattle. The Hereros themselves were annihilated like their
cattle. Shortly after the building of the Union of South Africa
the natives rose in rebellion against their systematic persecu-
tion by the German overlords. In 1877, according to the findings
of a British commission, the Hereros had numbered eighty-five
thousand. A few months after their revolt the Germans took a
census of the population, and announced triumphantly that
only 15,130 "savages" were left,

A few years before the outbreak of the First World War
German colonial aspirations ran riot. Central Africa was con-
sidered an essential part of the Vaterland's living space. One
argument was that at least a million black soldiers could be
trained there. The other was that the country would supply
inestimable raw materials. And last, but not least, German
naval bases, coaling stations, munition dumps, and strongholds
would interrupt, and, if the opportunity arose, sever Great
Britain's vital lines of communication with India, the Pacific,
and the Far East. The race for naval superiority, into which
Wilhelm II plunged, had its immediate bearing on South Africa,
the country situated at the confluence of the Atlantic and the
Indian oceans.

Smuts was far away from the ever-darkening European

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OLD MASTER

scene. But this very distance gave him a broad, world-wide
outlook. He did not see the trees, he saw the woods. His first
promise in the electoral campaign was that he would fortify
the shores of South Africa. This pledge won him the confidence
of many English-speaking voters.

On the other hand, Hertzog was just about to develop his
creed, which, under the name of Hertzogism, was to permeate
and poison South Africa. As it was evolved in 1910, Hertzogism
was not so much anti-English as anti-British. He wished to
leave the English-speaking South Africans in peace, if in an
inferior position. His hatred was concentrated on the Empire.
Viewing world problems from a narrow standpoint, acquired
in the Orange Free State, an almost exclusively Dutch province
in a parochial state of mind, he hated large units, the very goal
of Smuts' life. The Britain-hatred that subsequently marked
him began as bigoted, limited provincialism.

Hertzogism, vocally expounded, antagonized the English
part of the electorate. Botha himself lost his seat in Pretoria
to Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, on account of the Prime Minister's
coalition with Hertzog. As a matter of precaution, the Prime
Minister had also contested the Dutch agrarian constituency of
Losberg which gave him an overwhelming majority. But Botha's
pride was hurt, and he realized perfectly well that he owed his
defeat to his colleague more than to his opponent.

Pretoria- West returned Smuts after a three-cornered con-
test. His rivals were Major Creswell, the leader of the newly
founded Labor Party, once the whip of the British section of
Het Volk, and the man who had introduced white labor under
the surface, and the Unionist, Major Hopley, later to become
Smuts* friend and follower. Smuts won his victory largely by
disassociating himself from Hertzogism. The Unionists, succes-
sors to the Progressives, made much of this curse that found its
particular expression in the educational system prevailing in
the Free State. Smuts admitted that this system was non-ger-
mane to Union. However, he cautiously insisted that the abro-
gation of the educational laws of the Free State would be im-
possible without a revolution.

On the whole. Het Volk did well at the election. The Boer

OLD MASTER

Party won sixty-seven seats, the Unionists, led by Dr. Jameson,
now Sir Starr Jameson, mustered thirty-nine, and the new
Laborites four.

The Duke of Connaught went to South Africa formally to
open the First Union Parliament. In a glowing address his
Royal Highness dwelt on the fact that five self-governing na-
tions were now willing to co-operate in Imperial affairs. Every-
one applauded. Hertzog alone was visibly out of sympathy. He
did not join in the three cheers led by Botha. He eyed the
cheerleader with ill-concealed suspicion.

Botha, indeed, committed sin after sin. Particularly in educa-
tional matters he did not display the "right spirit." Two mining
millionaires, Julius Wernler and Alfred Beit, had bequeathed
half a million pounds to the University of Cape Town. The
Unionist spokesmen, Sir Lionel Phillips and Sir Starr Jameson,
pleaded for a worthy use of this sum. But almost unanimously
the Boer members wanted to use the legacy for fostering the
study of archaic, primitive Taal, not for purposes of educational
excellence. Botha did not side strongly enough with them, they
complained. Smuts' attitude seemed indiscernible, yet his heart
was in Pretoria, not in Cape Town. At the founding of the Pre-
toria University, an Afrikaans language institute, he expressed
the hope that this seat of learning would become the Oxford
of South Africa. In educational matters, however, he stuck to
his principle of compulsory English with Dutch optional, in
the schools.

On November 24, 1910, a fiery debate over the Free State
Education Act incensed the House of Assembly. The Unionists
asserted that this act conflicted with the principles of freedom
and equality. Hertzog riposted with a fighting speech. Botha
finally decided that a select committee should inquire into the
matter. The mere fact that an inquiry in his own domain was
to be held increased Hertzog's hostility against Botha. The re-
port of the Select Committee dealt Hertzog's school system a
crushing blow. Now Botha was forced to act. He could not
disappoint the Unionists too strongly. After all, it was still their

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OLD MASTER

industry that carried, almost alone, the burden of taxation,
whereas the Boer farmers were practically tax-exempt. The
English did not complain about this condition. They knew that
any government that tried to impose even most modest levies
upon agriculture would be swept away by irate backveld fann-
ers. They had to put up with many things. The platteland con-
stituencies were violently opposed to regulations for combating
pests and diseases or for the scientific treatment of the many
scourges of plant life and the eradication of poisonous varieties.
All this would be against God's will. Many bearded repre-
sentatives of the backveld in the House were just as intransi-
gent on the color question. Smuts' new Constitution had made
this problem a state affair, not a Federal one. Thus the men
from the backwoods could still stick to the old Transvaal grand-
wet classifying the population as mannen (men), vrouwen
(women), and schepsels (creatures). Only about the educa-
tional question, on the solution of which the future of their
own children depended, the Unionists were unyielding. At
their insistence, and based upon the findings of the Select Com-
mittee, General Botha asked the provinces to conform to cer-
tain principles in the management of their schools, in order to
attain equality without compulsion. Although he had addressed
his demand to all the four States, the Orange Free State alone
was meant. The Free State complied. Its schools were purged
of Hertzogism. The revolution that Smuts had foreseen did not
break out immediately. But when it eventually came, the
aroused parents of the Free States formed the most violent
mob in the fray.

In April, 1911, Botha visited London once more, again to
attend a conference of colonial prime ministers. This time the
conference was called Imperial Conference, to soothe the sensi-
tive feelings of the peoples in the Dominions. Hertzog, how-
ever, scented the Imperial devil. His suspicions were vindicated
by a number of events in London. Botha was lionized. He was
promoted honorary general in the British Army, an honor
otherwise reserved for royalty. He became a Privy Councillor.
At the King's levee he appeared in the prescribed knee breeches

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and silk stockings. His picture was taken in this attire. Smuts
took good care that it should not be published or otherwise
circulated at home. Yet the news that Botha wore silk stockings
spread like wildfire throughout the platteland. Losberg, his
own constituency, was perturbed. Some called him Engelsman
Englishman a calculated insult.

The worst came to the worst. On the anniversary of Union
Day Botha addressed a London audience, ending with the
words: "No more loyal and wholehearted part of the Empire
exists than the land where Dutch and English brethren live
together in amity the Union of South Africa."

At home, Hertzog replied with poisonous speeches. He com-
plained that too much was said about the Empire and too little
about South Africa. His hostility against his chief was now
completely undisguised.

On May 7, the first census of united South Africa disclosed
that the country, four times as big as Great Britain and Ireland
together, had only 1,255,545 white inhabitants, against a col-
ored majority of 4,621,531. The Unionists used this figure,
which frightened the whole country, and most of all the con-
servative Boers, into demanding the encouragement of white
immigration. Smuts agreed, and campaigned for the idea, with
the proviso, however, that only the right type should be invited
to come; no city loafers, no poor whites. Characteristically, he
extended his welcome even to the persecuted Russian Jews,
"the Maimonideses and Spinozas of the future South Africa."
Botha, for his part, told the Eighty Club in London that his
country was wide open to new English settlers.

Once more Hertzog bristled. The Empire-builders and Im-
perialists were influencing the papbroek weaklings. He did
not need to add that he meant Botha and Smuts. He poured
contempt on the very idea of a new wave of immigration. At
the height of his combative spirit he even ventured into Johan-
nesburg. It was his first visit after thirteen months in office.
Like Oom Paul before him, he loathed the foreign town. Johan-
nesburg was heavily policed when the Minister of Justice ar-
rived. Surrounded by a cavalcade of mounted police, Hertzog

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drove right into the Dutch suburb of Turffontein. There he let
off steam. Referring to Botha's prolonged stay in England, he
declared: "In the ambitions of Europe we da not participate.
In its intrigues we do not share. With its quarrels we have no
concern. State-aided immigration would be a national crime."
Smuts found it high time for Botha to return home. The
Premier complied. Upon his arrival in Cape Town, he moved
into the Prime Minister's official residence, the Groote Schuur,
bequeathed by Cecil Rhodes. His first act was to unveil a memo-
rial to the colossus. He eulogized the instigator of the Jameson
Raid. With Sir Starr Jameson, once the raider, now the leader
of the opposition in Parliament, Hertzog was on amiable terms.
It was characteristic for this man that he retained his courteous
manners and his bonhomie toward everyone, and particularly
toward English acquaintances. But when Botha uttered a few
appreciative words about Rhodes, Hertzog was outraged.

Smuts kept aloof in so far as he could from the domestic
quarrel. He had more important things on his mind, a variety
of things. As Minister of Mines he introduced a bill on an ex-
tremely difficult subject miner's phthisis; his speech displayed
accurate medical knowledge. But the miners objected to his
proposals. Smuts insisted on the principle of contributions by
the miners themselves, in order to make them more careful
while at work. The miners were no longer old Cornishmen, but
mostly young Boers from the platteland, to whom a miner's
wage meant an almost incredible fortune. Yet they declined to
have contributions to a medical fund deducted. They found
strong support among the Boer politicians. Smuts was accused
of listening too carefully to Sir Lionel Phillips, who was now,
indeed, among his advisers. For the first time Smuts was called
"unsocial."

He made a few remarks which seemed to justify this label.
At Barkley-West, the diamond center of a Kimberley already
past its prime, the diggers asked for a Royal Commission to
inquire into their living conditions. Smuts answered that there
was a less expensive and more expeditious way of arriving at a

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OLD MASTER

solution. They could safely leave matters in his hands. He
meant every word. But the diggers only heard the refusal of
their claims. Around the corner, in Kimberley itself, he was
waylaid by Dutch inhabitants who complained about the pov-
erty in the dying town. Perhaps things would be better if one
ousted the English townspeople? "It appears to me that the
rich are getting too rich, and the poor are getting too poor,"
Smuts replied. "But I do not wish to speak, because the older
I get, the more I am convinced that speeches do greater harm
than good." However, he refused the suggestion to oust the
English. Only one policy, he asserted, had a chance of success
the policy of co-operation.

As Minister of Defence he introduced in the House, on
March 1, 1911, his great scheme for building the Defence
Force. Immediately General Beyers rose in opposition. He had
been Speaker in the old Transvaal House of Legislation, but
had lost this dignity in the Union Assembly. He bore Smuts and
Botha a grudge, and displayed it by attacking the Defense Bill.
Smuts did not answer. He had another plan. It was always his
preferred method to reconcile his opponents. Now he offered
the ex-commandant, who had played only an insignificant role
in the Boer War, the post of Commander in Chief of the
Union's Defence Force. Beyers snatched at it with both hands.
Hertzog shook his head, and remained strangely silent. But
Die Week, a young Pretoria newspaper, attacked the Defence
Plan tooth and nail. It was "based on a foreign system," wrote
the editor, Mr. Oost, who was mildly famous as the villain in
many dramas staged by amateur theatrical societies. Only a
few weeks later the fact filtered out that Die Week was owned
by a group of capitalists who had entrusted Hertzog with its
management.

Hertzog had good reason for once to keep out of the strug-
gle. A cabinet reshuffle was under way, and the change might
have involved his enforced retirement. He himself had already
frequently threatened to leave the government. But such a
menace was nothing but blackmail. He craved power, conceal-
ing this desire behind the reiterated statement that he owed it

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OLD MASTER

to the Boer people to remain. He must control the inner work-
ings of the Cabinet.

Now more power came to him. He emerged from the shuffle
as Minister of Native Affairs in addition to his post as Minister
of Justice. The appointment was only made in order to have
the troublesome Free Stater aligned as an associate, rather than
allowing him to run riot as a foe. Smuts dropped his two minor
jobs, and in exchange added the Ministry of Finance to the
Defence.

Hertzog was not placated. The tension in the House grew
when Sir Starr Jameson, who had acquired something of his
friend Cecil Rhodes' desire to co-operate with the Dutch, re-
tired from the leadership of the Unionist Party, to be replaced %
by Sir Thomas Smartt, a more energetic and combative man.
Under Sir Thomas' leadership the Unionists demanded that
South Africa's contribution to the Royal Navy should be in
proportion to the sea-borne trade of the Union, which was
entirely dependent on the British fleet. Sir Thomas pointed out
Canada, which contributed seven million pounds annually to
the Empire's naval defences, and the example of the tiny Straits
Settlements, which had just donated a Dreadnought to Eng-
land. Much to Botha's and Smuts' regret the opposition motion
was defeated.

Hertzog was in his element. On October 5, 1912, in a speech
at Nylstroem, he burst out. He mixed rude personal attacks
against Sir Thomas Smartt and against Colonel Byron, a distin-
guished soldier and member of die Orange Free State Legisla-
tive Council, calling them "foreign adventurers," with a furious
statement that South Africa was sick of being governed by
aliens.

The speech exploded like a bombshell. The Cabinet was
deeply perturbed. Yet Smuts still made excuses for Hertzog.
He tried to explain some unsavory expressions used by his col-
league such as "bastard sheep," and "caked dung adhering to
a kraal wall" as similes in the language used on the veld. Per-
haps Hertzog would apologize for his forceful expressions. But
Hertzog replied: "I make no apologies I have never done so!"

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OLD MASTER

This was what made the essential difference between him and
Smuts.

Social relations between Hertzog and the opposition mem-
bers were instantly interrupted. The English members cold-
shouldered him. Easily hurt, as Hertzog was, despite his own
rudeness, this treatment drove him to a frenzy. On December 7
he produced another burst of eloquence. He addressed the
villagers of De Wildt in the Transvaal district of Rustenburg:
"South Africa should be governed by pure Afrikanders. . . .
Had we chosen to heed certain voices, we would by now have
presented Great Britain with twenty to thirty Dreadnoughts.
. . . Imperialism interests me only as far as it benefits South
'Africa. . . . The main object is to keep the Dutch and the Eng-
lish separated." He was ready, he concluded, to stake his whole
future on this thesis. And so he did.

For at least one of his cabinet colleagues, this was too much.
Colonel Sir George Leuchars, a Minister from Natal, resigned
immediately. He did not wish to serve with a man who wanted
to squeeze the Empire and then throw it away like a sucked
orange.

The Cabinet sustained a further blow. While Hertzog reveled
in his mischief -making, in a faraway dorp, Botha appealed for
conciliation in English-speaking Grahamstown, the center of
the Eastern Province. But Hertzog's challenge disgusted the
English voters. The candidate of the Unionist opposition was
elected by an overwhelming majority. The Cape Colonials did
not care for a government that spoke with two voices. Smuts'
whole conception of racial reconciliation was shattered.

Hertzog rejoiced in Colonel Leuchars' resignation. "One of
my colleagues was too weak to digest that fare," he grinned.

Botha sent him word that the entire Cabinet would appre-
ciate it if Hertzog, too, would resign. Hertzog replied in a
message to the whole Cabinet: "I have merely said what every
good Afrikander is entitled to say." Tenaciously he clung to his
office.

Even Abraham Fischer, his ex-premier and colleague from
the Free State Cabinet, could not persuade him to sign a letter

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OLD MASTER

regretting his utterances at De Wildt and to promise no longer
to speak about controversial matters without his prime minis-
ter's consent. Hertzog read the letter. "Smuts has drafted it/'
he said suspiciously. His suspicion was well founded. "Tell him
to go into a lunatic asylum," was Hertzog's reply.

Saturday, December 14, 1912, at midday, Botha's private
secretary informed ex-Minister Hertzog that the Prime Minister
had resigned on behalf of the whole Cabinet. Silently, Hertzog
closed his desk, and walked home.

A week later Botha announced his new cabinet. Both Leu-
chars and Hertzog were dropped.

In his fall Hertzog had risen to become the hero of the
plotteland. But the bulk of the Boers, shrewd politicians, re-
fused to follow him into the wilderness. If they turned against
the government they would lose pork and patronage. Some of
them were guided by higher motives. Lord de Villiers, South
Africa's most eminent jurist, himself a proud Afrikander, ex-
pressed a low opinion of Hertzog's statesmanlike qualities.
Even Grandfather Abraham Fischer, throughout the past Hert-
zog's nominal leader, disassociated himself from the prodigal
son. "He has made impossible personal demands," the old man
explained to his constituents in Bethlehem. "He lost the sup-
port of the Free State members largely through his want of tact.
He has the faults of his youth. There are members in the gov-
ernment who have done for the country ten times as much as
he did. They don't deserve to be called traitors and men with-
out principles."

The fanners of Bethlehem listened attentively. Then they
resolved by 261 to 152 votes a motion of non-confidence of
non-confidence in their lifelong leader Fischer, who was leav-
ing Hertzog in the lurch. Brokenhearted, the veteran Boer
leader dropped out of politics. A few months later he died.

In the Park of Pretoria a poorly attended meeting was held,
protesting against Hertzog's dismissal. Advocate Tielman Jo-
hannes de Villiers Roos, a promising young barrister, presided.

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OLD MASTER

Around him five members of Parliament five out of a hundred
and twenty-onewere gathered. A few disgruntled professional
politicians joined them. The population of the capital was con-
spicuously absent. The meeting appeared to be a flop. Yet it
marked the beginning of the Afrikander crusade that eventu-
ally burst out in civil war, and repeatedly came close to it. The
unholy crusade split South Africa from top to bottom. To this
very day the split has not yet healed.

Chapter 17 PRELUDE TO CIVIL WAR

AFTER LOSING THE FIRST ROUND IN HIS QUARREL WITH BOTHA,

Hertzog turned his guns against Smuts. This was the man
whom he held responsible for his own abject dismissal. For
once, Hertzog was right. Botha might perhaps have tried to
patch together a new compromise. But Smuts, although himself
a compromiser by natural inclination, knew where to draw a
definite line. His inflexible determination had, indeed, been the
principal factor in the Cabinet's decision of December, 1912, to
resign collectively.

Few people knew the inside story. Parliament was not un-
duly disturbed. Hertzog himself remained in the government
camp, then called the South African Party. But their uncanny
instinct for politics their strongest instinct, and, by the same
token, their most comfortable means of livelihood told the
Boers that something was going wrong behind the scenes. They
did not like the development. In their political perversion they
found fault not with the hysteric troublemaker, but with the
man of right, justice and order, the protagonist of co-operation.

Hertzog had just begun his crusade when Smuts found the

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OLD MASTER

going difficult. A few days after the Cabinet reorganization he
addressed the voters in Paardekraal. Making a virtue of neces-
sity, he thanked Providence for having saved South Africa from
the fate of many a country whose inhabitants led monotonous,
drab lives. Ex Africa semper diquid novi was at that time his
favorite quotation. But it is doubtful whether the bearded
backvelders from Paardekraal were strongly impressed by
Pliny's unintelligible phrase. Smuts' sense of humor was never
infectious. It certainly did not sweep Paardekraal. Hastily he
fell back on his leitmotiv: the banishing of bitterness and re-
crimination, and the necessary unity between Briton and Boer,
lest South African people should become the tools of other na-
tions. He did not mention the increasing German peril, but an
allusion to the Defense Act which would involve sacrifices, was
unmistakable. He felt sure, he concluded, that the Transvaal,
at least, would act as it had always acted, sensibly and cir-
cumspectly.

Here Smuts' lofty patriotism erred. The Transvaal had rarely
acted sensibly and circumspectly. Paardekraal, the typical
Transvaal Dutch dorp, was in an indifferent mood, when Smuts
left. Two weeks later he addressed a meeting at Rustenburg,
the center of the most nationalistic district in the Transvaal,
where he met with open hostility. Before he could begin his
speech, the local predikant, the Reverend Mr. Vorster, jumped
up, and barked at the Minister to refrain from discussing the
crisis; such a discussion would give offense. Shrewdly, Smuts
decided to speak as the veteran Boer general and the famous
guerrilla fighter rather than as the Union Minister. He spoke in
ringing, nationalistic tones, yet he staunchly defended his and
Botha's policy of conciliation, and concluded with a strong as-
sertion that he, at any rate, would stand by it, firm as a rock.
He burned his boats behind him. But he did not convince his
audience, most of whom had listened to Hertzog's venomous
outpourings in neighboring De Wildt, and were completely un-
der the spell of the Fuehrer-in-the-making.

Smuts soon had another proof of what a profound impres-
sion Hertzog's expulsion from the Cabinet had made on the

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OLD MASTER

nation. In May, 1913, the voters of Pretoria West, his own con-
stituents, adopted, in their member's absence, a motion censur-
ing General Smuts for his attitude in the Hertzog dispute.

This motion of censure, an unparalleled act of ingratitude
after all Smuts had done for Pretoria, was the direct result of
the "gospel of Hertzogism," as an open letter, six newspaper
columns long, which Hertzog had published in March, was
called. In his habitual involved and cumbersome style Hertzog
poured out atrocious accusations against Botha and Smuts, re-
viewing his running feud with them, which now entered the
third year. He concluded with an appeal to the Boers, to ap-
prove his "creed."

The entire English-language press called the manifesto the
confessions of a dangerous fanatic. The ruling South African
Party Organization condemned him. In Parliament he still had
only five adherents. Opposition, however, makes strange bed-
fellows. The Parliamentary session during the first half of 1913
witnessed an unmistakable rapprochement between the Britain-
baiter Hertzog and Major Creswell, the leader of the handful
of Labor members, a distinguished English gentleman with a
social Messiah complex, looking and acting very much like a
forerunner of Sir Stafford Cripps.

No couple was, both in spiritual make-up and in physical ap-
pearance, worse matched than the sudden team-mates Creswell
and Hertzog. Major Frederick Hugh Page Creswell was a tall,
tight-lipped, immaculately attired Englishman, imbued with a
silent but profound patriotism, a peace-minded man, although
his bushy eyebrows and his prominent nose indicated that he
could also be a sturdy fighter. But his every movement, as well
as his strong emotions, were rigidly controlled. He was a gen-
tleman, and so he sided with the underdog.

Hertzog, on the other hand, was at that time a spare figure,
with a narrow chest and elevated shoulders, his deep-set black
eyes almost hidden behind his spectacles, gesticulating hysteri-
cally and histrionically, constantly losing the thread of his ram-
bling, hair-splitting, repetitious speeches, a weakling consumed
by die desire to be top dog. German by descent, he was a for-

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eigner to the people. He had to out-Boer the Boers. His mind
was confined to the narrow range of subjects understood by the
platteland. His every thought was bitter, his every word acid.
He thrived on the imaginary wrongs he and "his" people suf-
fered. They had never lost the Boer War; they had been be-
trayed by the criminals of Vereeniging, the pact Hertzog
himself had signed. Now they were a people scattered and op-
pressed, a nation trodden under foot. He could not speak less
than three hours at a time. He was frequently laughed at, par-
ticularly by the Englishmen in the towns. They could not
believe that a single man could succeed in upsetting the demo-
cratic system of the new Union. But Hertzog kindled the slow-
burning veld fire. The flames spread, and in their glowing light
his dark shadow lay heavily across the land.

Creswell disliked Smuts because he suspected him of a lack
of social conscience. This suspicion was so strong that it led him
to find associates wherever he could, to attack the government.
He must have been appalled by Hertzog's parliamentary man-
ners and language. He certainly saw through the hollowness
and emptiness of Hertzog's harping on his old obsession, anti-
Imperialism, and of his loudly proclaimed loyalty to never-
defined principles. Creswell once interrupted a wild Hertzog
oration with the question: "What are these principles?" "The
party exists for its principles, and not the principles for the
party!" was the answer. To Creswell it was the peak of plati-
tude. But the Boer people preferred the thunder to the sub-
stance, and since they were in the majority, Creswell believed,
he could use and direct them in line with his lofty social aims.
From January 24 till June 16, 1913, Creswell and Hertzog were
working together, unostentatiously, careful, united only in op-
position to Smuts.

Hertzog was still a member of the South African Party. He
never gave up a position before being forcibly driven out. He
resolved to undermine the Botha-Smuts regime from the in-
side. He formed his cells; the "Vigilance Committee."

The gang was quickly assembled. Hertzog's right- and left-

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OLD MASTER

hand men were both British citizens by birth, sons of the Cape
Colony. Neither of them had, like Smuts, given up his British
citizenship. They were not honest foes, but insidious traitors
during the Boer War. At the beginning it appeared that Advo-
cate Roos of Pretoria would become Hertzog's number two
man, and, indeed, he held this position for some time. Born in
Cape Town, Roos had followed the nationalistic trek to Preto-
ria, where he emerged into the open as chairman at the protest
meeting against Hertzog's dismissal. Political circles had known
him already as the leader of the "Young Turks," the radical
youngsters, always ready to egg on Botha and Smuts. At the
age of thirty-four, when he came to the forefront, he was al-
ready pale, bald, and bloated; unhealthy to the marrow, but
excelling by his biting tongue and his roaring voice. He became
known as die 'lion of the Transvaal," although his main quali-
ties were more those of the hyena. He regarded politics as a
game, he frankly confessed in Parliament, yet he played the
game seriously, indefatigably traveling up and down the coun-
try to wrest the Transvaal from Botha and Smuts. On the side
he was in charge of his movement's relations with the labor
wing of the British population. The youth of South Africa, even
some English-born, found him great fun. A most useful body of
youthful admirers followed him everywhere. Among them was
Advocate Hans Van Rensburg, already in his budding days re-
garded as South Africa's infant prodigy, who became Advocate
Roos' private secretary as the first step to a remarkable career.
Tielman Roos and his opposite and rival, Dr. Daniel Frangois
Malan, had only one similarity. Each had, already in his early
years, a sagging double chin. Since this was, like the paunch, a
sign of affluence, it did not really matter. Otherwise they were
complete antagonists. To noisy, boisterous, swaggering Roos,
life was a riot. To pious, stern, never-smiling Malan it was a
burden, to be borne with humility and respectability. True, un-
der the cover of humbleness a consuming flame of envy burned.
Its object was Smuts. Both had come from the same village,
Riebeek West. Jannie was only four years older, but he was ad-
vancing in rapid strides, much beloved, much maligned, ever

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in the center of talk and things, while Malan had to struggle as
an underpaid schoolteacher until he was ordained a predikant
in the Dutch Reformed Church. His first parish was the village
of Montagu in the Western Province. He did not endear him-
self to his happy-go-lucky parishioners, all prosperous wine
growers, in preaching temperance and even abstinence. He was
shifted to Graaff-Reinet, the original home of the Afrikander
Bond and the stronghold of Afrikanderdom in the Cape. Here
his somber sermons were listened to by bigoted Calvinists.
Only when he mingled carefully couched, but vitriolic anti-
English remarks with his monotonous litany, faint smiles lighted
the morose, sullen faces of the congregation.

Jannie was a Rhodes-man at that time. Young but unyouth-
ful Dr. Malan felt sure he would catch up with him, and smash
him. He devoted himself to serious social work, with an early
premonition of vote-getting. But the Synod of the Dutch Re-
formed Church did not tolerate social work, suspecting leftish
tendencies. Unmistakably Dr. Malan was told that he could not
obtain the professorship in Stellenbosch he coveted.

Predikant Dr. Malan abandoned holy orders, but he could
never rid himself of the attitude and mask of the divine. His
small, restless eyes hid behind unrimmed glasses. His voice
sounded unctuous, and his every phrase allowed of three dif-
ferent interpretations.

Among the other henchmen of the gang was Beyers, whom
Botha had helped into politics in the old days and who had
subsequently become Speaker of the House and finally Com-
mander in Chief of the Union Defence Force. He was an im-
placable racialist, yet intensely religious in a somber Calvinistic
way, superstitious like many Boer "generals," inordinately vain
of his personal appearance, a true megalomaniac. A similar
"general" was Jan Christoffel Greyling Kemp, the son of a
wealthy farmer, an illiterate until his eighteenth year, who had
during the Boer War become the right-hand man of the most
Christian General De La Rey, "Oom Koos" to the entire coun-
try. A born fighter, a true velds man, he deserted his chief at
Vereeniging, threw in his lot with the "bitter-enders," and

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OLD MASTER

vowed to wrestle with Smuts for the rest of his life. He is still
true to his vow.

Last, but not least, General Christiaan de Wet was one of
the crowd. An irascible, uncouth-looking giant, reactionary to
the core, his wrinkled face hidden behind a jungle of a beard
& la Kruger, an irate foe of those British, who regarded the
Kafirs as human, whereas everyone in the Free State knew that
the natives were less than animals, he had a domineering per-
sonality. Strangely, he was slavishly devoted to one man, thirty
years his junior, a weakling, entirely lacking in all military
virtues. But when friends heckled de Wet about his clamorous
allegiance to Hertzog, he used to answer: "The general is not
a soldier. He is a lawyer." To the illiterate General de Wet,
whose best-selling memoirs of the Boer War had been written
by a staff of ghosts, a lawyer, even a shyster lawyer in the small
town of Bloemfontein, was a higher being. The strong-featured
man with protruding nose and thick eyebrows, always clad in
a conservative, if amply stained frock coat with silk revers, had
been the head of the Hertzog Demonstration Committee at
Pretoria. He proved his allegiance again at the "Dungheap
Demonstration," so-called for the aroma of the speeches, on
December 28, 1912, when he noisily protested against Hertzog's
expulsion. Deceitful even in his angry outburst, he reminded
his audience that a few years after the Boer War he had been
dragged by the hair into the Free State Cabinetas Minister
for Agriculture but soon had left it, recognizing that there
were more educated men who could profitably replace him.
After Hertzog's fall he resigned also from the Defence Council
presided over by Smuts. The martinet became a mere rabble-
rouser.

The gang was assembled, and ready for action, when the at-
tention of the country was diverted by an explosion in a dif-
ferent quarter.

Once again the miners in Johannesburg got out of hand. The
lawabiding citizens were not astonished. They were accustomed
to minor strikes that paralyzed their town for a few hours, or

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for a day or two. They took their habitual precautions. They
filled their bathtubs to the brim, since the water supply would
probably be cut. They had ample stores of candles; there would
be no electric light. All meetings and appointments were sus-
pended. It was not even necessary to call them off. No one
ventured out of his house without a compelling reason.

This strike, they were sure, would be just another nuisance.
The management of the Kleinfontein mine, a lesser one on the
Rand, had extended the working hours for mechanics under-
ground until half -past four in the afternoon, on Saturdays until
one or one-thirty, to fit in with the mining shift. The order con-
cerned only five men. But the Unions, banking on the general
political unrest in the country, and having accumulated large
unused funds, were spoiling for a fight. They called out their
men. Bands of strikers marched through the streets. This hap-
pened on May 26.

Two leaders of the industry, Sir Lionel Phillips and Mr.
Chaplin, asked for government protection. But neither Botha
nor Smuts cared to side with big business against the youth of
the platteland that now formed the large majority of white labor
in the mines. Throughout the month of June the situation de^
teriorated. The strikers, emboldened by the government's atti-
tude of wait and see, dragged out the men who wanted to
remain at work. They felt in a safe strategic position. Only seven
thousand men of the Imperial troops had remained in the coun-
try. The old commando force was disarmed, and Smuts' De-
fence Force was still in a formative stage.

Shivering, Johannesburg recognized that this was not a
flare-up of the usual minor variety. The jobless and the poor
whites, a large group in the town Smuts had frequently called
the Mecca of hooliganism, could not miss their golden oppor-
tunity. The houses of "scabs" were stormed and burned down.
Innocent bystanders, among them women and children, were
killed. On Thursday, July 3, things took a dangerous turn. The
huge Market Square was the scene of a large and unruly strik-
ers' meeting, in which the whole mob of Johannesburg joined
with a vengeance. Only at this moment, after keeping aloof for

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OLD MASTER

almost six uneasy weeks, Smuts, in his capacity as Minister of
Defence, asked the Governor General Lord Gladstone for the
intervention of Imperial troops.

London cabled in reply to Lord Gladstone's inquiry that the
local Defence Forces should be used in preference to Imperial
troops. The Empire had no reason to become involved in a
purely domestic trouble of the self-governing Union. Imperial
troops had only the task of watching the borders of South
Africa against an enemy attack. In the summer of 1913 it was
expected that the Germans might strike at any moment.

The local Police Force proved entirely inadequate. On Fri-
day, the Fourth of July, an open revolt flared up in the center
of Johannesburg. The offices of the Star, the leading English-
language newspaper, were set on fire. The houses of the mine
owners were surrounded by threatening crowds. The three
thousand policemen as well as the entire detective corps were
helpless. In this moment of emergency four thousand British
regulars occupied the Market Square. They were under orders
to use arms only in self-defense. So they confined themselves
to pushing the mob here and there, but made no attempt to
clear the square and establish the full authority of the law.

The law was a sham. The Union government had forbidden
incendiary strike meetings. But no one paid any attention. Con-
tinuous squabbles between the police and the rabble flared up.
General O'Brien, the Imperial officer in command, a fighting
Irishman, wanted to get the situation under control. The High
Commissioner, however, who had personally come to Johannes-
burg, still forbade the use of arms.

Large groups of strikers and sympathizers flooded Commis-
sioner Street, lined with the huge office buildings of the mining
companies. All offices were closed. The good people were hur-
rying home. The mob started upsetting their cars and cabs. At
nightfall the Park Railway Station and the building of the
Argus Printing and Publishing Company were burned down.
Before midnight, the mob attacked Corner House, the seat of
one of the largest corporations. At this moment the police
opened fire. The mob was dispersed.

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OLD MASTER

On the next morning, Saturday, the government became
alarmed. Throughout the forenoon citizens were enrolled as
special constables, and armed. In the meantime the crowd at-
tempted to storm the Rand Club, the gathering place of the
mine owners. A ferocious battle between Imperial troops, the
police, and the rabble ensued. Again blood was spilled. Twenty-
one people were killed, and almost fifty wounded.

But the worst was still to come. The natives in the mines,
two hundred fifty thousand in all, adopted a threatening atti-
tude. They were in no way connected with the strike, purely a
matter between management and white labor. But a later in-
vestigation proved that Russian "syndicalists," as the pre-war
Communists were called, had enticed the Kafirs to take a hand
in the game.

Botha's and Smuts' arrival on Saturday morning prevented
the worst. They drove through the riotous streets right to the
Carlton Hotel, where they received four delegates from the
Trade Unions led by a man called Bain. The Ministers were un-
escorted. They had literally taken their lives in their hands.
They knew they must act. Another night of uproar would not
have been a repetition of carnage and arson alone. The gold
mines were no longer safe. So much dynamite had passed un-
checked into the possession of the miners that they would
easily have been able to blow up the mines.

Botha and Smuts were unarmed as well. The four delegates
had heavy revolvers at their belts. While they presented their
insolent demands, hell broke loose in front of the hotel. Thou-
sands of hooligans were assembled, barely kept under control
by Imperial troops. "The very moment the General commands
fire, I will shoot him/' said one man of the delegation, leaning
out of the window. The other negotiators were satisfied that
they had the two unarmed Ministers "covered." Neither Botha
nor Smuts was aware that their lives were imperiled. But they
knew of a graver peril: unless they were able to restore order,
the mines would be ruined for good, the town would be robbed
and plundered, and the Kafirs let loose on the wives and the
children. Under the impact of this threat, the two generals sur-

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OLD MASTER

rendered unconditionally. They signed an agreement, granting
all the strikers' demands.

In the evening, they visited the Orange Grove Hotel, three
miles outside the city. On their way they were waylaid by an
irate mob, threatening to shoot. "We are unarmed," Botha
cried. "Shoot! But we are here to make peace for you, and if
you kill us, all that is finished."

Smuts did not utter a word.

In this same hotel the Ministers were met by Sir Lionel
Phillips and Sir George Farrar, the leaders of the mine owners.
Botha explained the situation: "The military advisers told us
that they were able to restore order in town, but that they
could not guarantee the protection of the mines and the vil-
lages along the Reef. Besides," he added with a sharp touch,
"I am not prepared to face a large expenditure of blood nei-
ther of the rioters themselves nor of innocent spectators."

Smuts remained silent. Obviously, his complete capitulation
had shaken him to the depths. All South Africa resounded with
criticism. The "Bain Treaty" seemed a proof that the govern-
ment had abdicated to let the gangsters run the country.

Work was resumed on the following Monday. But it was no
longer regular work. The strike leaders were drunk with tri-
umph. Discipline was gone. Many miners, particularly among
the young Boers, were flagrantly indolent. The nationalistic
wave among the Boers was coalescing with their social self-
assertion. The atmosphere was electric. Victory had whetted
fresh appetites. Sinister threats against directors were uttered
at Union meetings. The tension lasted for half a year.

One day in December, as Sir Lionel Phillips was approaching
the Rand Club for luncheon, he was assaulted. A man emerged
from a shop, drew a double-barreled revolver, fired, and missed.
Sir Lionel jumped at his assailant, advancing about eight paces,
when a second bullet got him in the lung. Yet the undaunted
elderly Englishman still applied a well-aimed left to his assail-
ant's chin. The criminal fired three more shots. But in the strug-
gle, he missed. Sir Lionel collapsed on the pavement, but pulled

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OLD MASTER

himself together again and renewed the fight. The fourth shot
entered his neck.

At first the terrified bystanders bolted. Then they steadily
crept up behind the criminal. Just as he fired for the fifth time
they grabbed his gun. The last bullet missed wildly, hit a win-
dow, and landed in a room in the Corner House.

The assailant was later identified as a crank peddler by the
name of Misnum, who had been thrown off the grounds of Sir
Lionel's company. He seriously believed that since the strike
there was open season on mining magnates. He bought a sec-
ond-hand revolver, practiced the whole morning by shooting
at trees, and cheerfully went to wait for his prey. He was sen-
tenced to a term of fifteen years, which he spent in the asylum
for criminal lunatics.

Toward the end of December General Smuts came to visit
the convalescing patient in the hospital. He was glad to see
that Sir Lionel, his old friend, was rapidly recovering. Casually
he remarked that another strike, this time on a somewhat larger
scale, was about to break out. He expected it on New Year's
Day. But this time his government was prepared.

A grave depression throughout the country was the conse-
quence of the miners' strike in Johannesburg and of the six
ensuing months of incertitude on the Rand. Unemployment
increased. Radical agitation set in. Hertzog sensed the decay
on which he thrived. He wooed labor, not only, as before, the
British section, but now primarily the Boer youth working in
factories and mines. Maintaining close relations with some
Dutch financiers and occasionally soliciting contributions for
his cause, it is true, never for himself, he became, by the same
token, the apologist of the poor whites. His dupes were the half-
educated white-collar class who hated the exclusively English-
run world of business; railway employees, petty civil servants,
small shopkeepers who saw their livelihood endangered by the
up-and-coming department stores. Hertzog never appealed to
primitive greed for money. He simply promised the millennium

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OLD MASTER

when the Afrikander, the pure race incidentally a mixture of
Dutch, Huguenot, much German, and some Portuguese blood
would be the baas all over the country. His anti-Imperialism
was tinged with a good admixture of lucrative promises.

The Empire Parliamentary Association came to visit Cape
Town. Smuts received the gentlemen with a superb speech on
the problems of South Africa, not concealing the difficulties of
a young country, but proudly stressing the immense progress
that had been made in the eleven years since the war. Lord
Emmot, in reply, bore eloquent testimony to the "brilliant
speech of General Smuts/' and Lord Sheffield lauded it as "the
most remarkable speech we have heard on our tour/'

Two British lordships praising Smuts was too much for the
suspiciously watching Hertzog. He was resolved to break away
completely. The final split came on November 13 at a Party
meeting. The South African Party was divided between ad-
herents to the government, and followers of Hertzogism. Gen-
eral de Wet, in his highest combative spirit, launched the first
attack. He proposed to elect ex-President Steyn leader of the
party outside the Parliament with the power to nominate a
Prime Minister.

A leader outside Parliament lording over a puppet-govern-
ment was, in 1913, an innovation. It was clearly a ruse to do
away with Botha and Smuts. All eyes were centered on Hert-
zog. "On personal grounds I would give Botha my hand!" he
said amidst general cheers. "But on political grounds," he con-
tradicted himself as usual, "I would be obliged to withdraw the
hand at oncel"

Botha won the division, but only by 131 to 90 votes. Hertzog
and his followers rose silently, and left the hall. Only de Wet
could not keep his mouth shut. "Adieu!" he shouted to those
remaining behind. It was an open declaration of war. Immedi-
ately Hertzog started to organize his Nationalist Party. The
union of brothers was definitely wrecked.

Another appeal for Botha's dismissal hurt Smuts much more
deeply. Again his own constituents of Pretoria West attacked

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OLD MASTER

the government. They asked Smuts to interfere on behalf of
Botha's resignation. Pretoria West was a quarter largely settled
by railway employees. Rumors of impending cuts in their sal-
aries, and mass dismissals had aroused their ire.

In fact, the general manager of the railways announced that
he would have to discharge some hundreds of his men. The
powerful Society of Railway and Harbor Servants took up the
gantlet. Mr. Sauer, then Minister for Railways, tried to bring
about a peaceful solution of the conflict. But the leader of the
railway men refused his offer. This man, by the name of H. J-
Poutsma, was the prototype of the power-drunk labor boss,
who for five or six ensuing years tyrannized the Rand. He was
an adventurous character. He had started upon his career with
anarchistic "propaganda of the deed" in his native Holland,
served a term of a few years, emigrated to South Africa, became
a leader of the Free State contingent in the South African war,
fled after the defeat, founded a short-lived Negro republic in
Basutoland, returned to South Africa after self-government was
introduced, became a Union agitator, and soon the recognized
boss of Afrikaans labor, and ended, after having spent half his
life in "syndicalism" and under the red flag, as a violent ultra-
nationalist Hertzog man. At the time he decreed the railway
strike he was sure that he could establish a proletarian dictator-
ship in the Union simply by choking all traffic in a country of
such tremendous distances.

Precisely as Smuts had foreseen it, the strike began on New
Year's Day 1914, exactly five minutes after Botha had returned
on the last train to Pretoria. The railway men themselves were
divided as to the wisdom of their Union's action. But Poutsma
tolerated no opposition. "Scabs" were violently pulled from
engines, and generally banned from railway premises. The life
line of South African traffic, the route between Johannesburg
and Pretoria, was paralyzed.

At this propitious moment the Rand Federation of Trades
decided to declare a general strike in sympathy with their com-
rades from the railways. Again Johannesburg suffered two days
of mob violence and terror. The Germiston Station at the East

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OLD MASTER

Rand, the center of the railway system and the most important
junction in South Africa, was attacked by strikers and the asso-
ciated hoodlums. The General Strike Committee issued an order
to the Trade Unions to transform their membership into com-
mandos, to strengthen the "forces" behind the strike.

While the whole country was, for the second time within half
a year, in convulsion, idyllic Bloemfontein, the capital of the
Free State, alone maintained its dignified quiet. The danger
was not far away. The natives employed in the diamond mines
near the neighboring small town of Jagersfontein were running
amuck. But the first Congress of the newly founded Nationalistic
Party, in session at Bloemfontein, kept completely aloof from
the disaster that had befallen the country. Hertzog indulged
in vitriolic speeches against the government, and none of his
henchmen uttered a single word about the social revolution,
into which the general strike was rapidly degenerating.

True to the style of Oom Paul, whose memory the faithful
disciple could never forget, General Smuts had waited until the
tortoise had stuck out her head. But now he acted with energy
and precision. He declared martial law along the Reef, and
called out his burgher forces. He had, he later disclosed, got
in touch with London. The Imperial government had uttered
the gravest objections to another show of force. But London
recognized that the Union government was at liberty to make
its own decision.

The country, although torn by the strife engendered by
Hertzog, responded on the whole favorably to the call to arms.
Even in the restive Free State the people rallied round the
government. The Wolmaranstad commando, in its full force
of one thousand men, assembled twenty-four hours after Smuts'
call had reached its commander. This occurred in a large and
thinly populated district, which was generally regarded as
Hertzog territory.

But as the burgher force was moving ahead, it proved that
they were, above all, eager to show the English town of Johan-
nesburg what a Boer commando could do. They were by no
means marching to support Smuts and Botha. On the contrary,

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OLD MASTER

a majority of the men found this emergency an excellent oppor-
tunity to unseat the government, and to proclaim the Republic.
True to their old traditions, the commandos interrupted their
advance as they pleased, held meetings, and became intoxi-
cated on mutinous speeches. In the meantime the rumor spread
in Johannesburg that Hertzog with 2,500 Free Staters was com-
ing to the aid of the strikers. It is possible that this rumor was
deliberately spread; it was in line with Hertzog's wooing of
labor. But it did not sound at all like him. General Hertzog, one
of the first heroes to drop out of the Boer War, kept well away
from any firing line for the rest of his life.

The Free State contingent that actually marched towards
Johannesburg was led by Deneys Reitz. A few miles outside
Johannesburg, General Beyers, Commander in Chief of the
Defence Force, joined the commando. He appeared in full-
dress uniform, and delivered a sanguinary speech, attacking
Botha and Smuts. But he refrained from giving the final order
to revolt. He only invited the Free Staters to follow him for a
promenade through the streets of Johannesburg. The burghers'
appetites were whetted. Cheerfully, with high hopes, they
marched on.

Beyers had just returned from Germany. He had been Wil-
helm II's personal guest at the Imperial manoeuvres, and had
watched a frontal attack of massed German infantry against
strong fortifications. Obviously, he was deeply impressed, al-
though upon his return he gave an account of his experience
according to which he had got the better of the Emperor. "You
have seen a lot of campaigning, General/' the Emperor alleg-
edly said, "now tell me what you think of this." "In real war-
fare," Beyers prided himself to have said, "even against our
small Boer rifles, Your Majesty would be sending those men to
certain destruction." The Kaiser's repartee, as reported by Bey-
ers, sounded genuine. "'Not all of them,' His Majesty said
laughing. 'Some would get through. And we only expect to use
each soldier once/ "

The palaver between Wilhelm II and Beyers was also con-

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OLD MASTER

veyed by other sources. German agents in South Africa were
busy spreading the rumor that the Emperor had made a tre-
mendous impression on the Union's commander in chief. The
German noose was tightening around the braggart's neck.

General Smuts, who had come to Johannesburg with Botha,
ostensibly to visit the headquarters of the semi-military com-
mittee in charge of the Witwatersrand administration, was
fully informed about the real mood of his commandos and their
commander in chief. But he was coolness personified. A jour-
nalist asked him about the conditions of the men and horses he
had conjured up from the veld. "Eerste Idas; spekvetl" (First-
class; sleek and fat), he answered with perfect unconcern. But
instantly he ordered the officer commanding the Rand Light
Infantry to exercise the greatest severity. "Don't hesitate to
shoot on provocation!" Simultaneously General de la Rey,
about whose allegiance to the government of his close friends
Botha and Smuts there was no doubt, trained his guns on the
Trades Hall. He sent an ultimatum. Staring into the muzzles
of the howitzers, the strike leaders surrendered.

All nine of them among whom there was not a single South
African-bornwere immediately sent to jail. They were only
kept in their cells for a few hours. At midnight they were trans-
ported to Durban, and immediately dispatched aboard the S. S.
Umgeni, to be deported to England. On the next day the case
of the nine strike leaders came to the Supreme Court. But
Judge Wessels could only utter a subdued protest from the
bench. The nine culprits had been spirited away by General
Smuts. They were already on the high seas, and the S. S. Umgeni
was under orders not to interrupt her voyage before reaching
the port of London.

The kidnapping of the strike leaders was undoubtedly a high-
handed and unconstitutional act. Smuts had to defend it during
three weeks of debate in Parliament. Accusations were poured
on him from all sides. Mr. Creswell and his Labor Party were
now definitely through with him. Hertzog used his first speech
as leader of the Nationalist opposition to express his tender

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OLD MASTER

concern for the Imperial government that would be embar-
rassed by having to take over the strike leaders. Smuts defended
himself in three masterful speeches. His main argument was
that the strike leaders had, by all manner and means, com-
mitted high treason in their effort to choke the economic life
of the country in time of grave international crisis. But the law,
dating back to the Middle Ages, recognized as high treason
only crimes against the army. Crimes against the national
economy, he insisted, were just as treasonable and dangerous.
Since there was no paragraph to deal with them in a manner
that would guarantee the safety of the country, he had, at least,
to purge the country of the pest.

Parliament agreed. By a majority of 95 to 11 votes the House
expressed its full confidence in Smuts. But the country dis-
agreed. Innumerable agitators, nationalists, socialists, the dis-
satisfied from every camp, called him "the inventor of platskiet
politick" the policy of shooting down people ruthlessly. At the
provincial elections in the Transvaal Labor, for the first time,
gained an absolute majority in the Provincial Council. Fickle
Johannesburg had unanimously voted Labor, perhaps because
the solid citizens wanted to insure themselves against the red
flag waving everywhere, and against the mass choirs singing
the Internationale. But that even conservative, traditionalist
Pretoria had voted red was a terrific blow to Smuts. He knew
that he had gravely impaired, perhaps ruined for good, his
political career. But he was no longer a politician. His only
program was enshrined in a word that gradually became un-
fashionable and began to sound archaic; duty. He would again
do his duty by the country, he insisted.

He was as good as his word. A few weeks after the House
had adjourned, war was declared. In South Africa they at first
called it: the European War. General Smuts said: World War.

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OLD MASTER

Chapter 18 THE DEATH OF GENERAL DE LA REY

AN EPIDEMIC OF GERMAN MEASLES SWEPT SOUTH AFRICA AS THE

Great War broke out. It was a grave affliction. Soon it became
the German plague. The country was swamped with German
agents. Hundreds of them congregated in Pretoria. "In Cape
Town the personnel and activities of the German Consulate
General are out of proportion to those of other German Con-
sulates, or to Germany's actual interest in the Union," Lord
Buxton, the Governor-General during the war, reported to Lon-
don. 'There can be little doubt now that the Germans had,
before the war, been carrying on an assiduous anti-British
propaganda in the Union; and had been engaged in acquiring
political and military information."

Smuts spoke in the same vein. "All this German talk, all this
rumor of German sympathies, has been spread by German
commercial agents and German dealers," he said. "I hope the
people will realize that these Germans are placing a dagger into
the heart of South Africa which they are eager to press home."

His hope betrayed him. The openly pro-German elements
among the Boers probably did not form a majority, but they
were certainly the most vocal part of the nation, which, as a
whole, was not keen to support England, France, or Russia. In
vain Smuts pointed out the fact that German South West Africa
was being used as a base for intrigue against "this part of the
Empire/' In vain he stressed how dangerous it was to have
next door a neighbor such as the German Empire. The con-
stant accumulation of military power in the German African
territories was essentially unwelcome to most of the Boers. But
their overwhelming desire was to keep out of the war. German
money was inundating the platteland. It was received grate-
fully like fertilizing rain. The farmers, accustomed to making
money with politics, smiled, which was rare with them. The
untamable soil of the veld, ageless and immutable, sad, gray,

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OLD MASTER

and barren, not, like the jungle, the natural enemy of man, but
not his slave either, rather a quiet spectator of human effort
this soil of South Africa needed one thing above all: irrigation.
Now the German irrigation flowed in a golden stream, whis-
pering that the verdomde damned British had obtained com-
plete control of the government. They were going to tax the
land, or to take the farms away.

Hertzog fanned the smoldering embers into flames. Now it
proved that his dismissal from the government two years before
had in fact turned him into a revolutionary. His political down-
fall had ruined him financially as well. He possessed no money
of his own. After losing his comfortable salary as Minister of
the Crown 2,500 pounds a year he was broke. He became an
undisguised rabble-rouser. His anti-British attitude was no
longer hidden behind equivocal phrases. He dropped his mask.

The very moment the news of the German invasion of Bel-
gium reached Botha, he sent a message to London assuring
that the Union recognized her Imperial obligation, and, in the
event of an attack, was prepared to defend her territory by her
own strength. The seven thousand British soldiers guarding the
South African border could be released for the European the-
ater of war. Six thousand departed instantly from Potchelstroom
via Cape Town to England.

The British Government, accepting Botha's offer, asked him
to take a further step. He would render a great and urgent
service to the Empire by occupying the two ports of Lue-
deritz Bay and Swakopmund in German South West Africa,
and the wireless station at Windhoek, which was in constant
communication with Berlin, and imperilled the movements of
the British fleet.

Botha replied by pointing out the critical situation in his
country. His people were unwilling to commit an act of aggres-
sion. "The wireless station at Windhoek is a menace that must
be exterminated," London answered.

Three weeks had passed with these negotiations behind
closed doors. All the other Dominions and Colonial Dependen-
cies had already sent their messages of allegiance and their

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OLD MASTER

promises fully to participate in the war effort. Everywhere in
the Empire domestic quarrels had stopped. South Africa alone
was torn asunder. The Union Government, it appeared, had
lost its voice.

The Nationalist Party met in Bloemfontein, and adopted a
violent anti-war resolution. Only one of Hertzog's closest fol-
lowers dissented. He was all out for war, but for a war against
Great Britain. Now was the Boers' golden opportunity. Every-
one understood that the leader had spoken, as was his habit in
critical moments, through a mouthpiece.

Johannesburg, still shaken by its social upheaval, was panic-
stricken. The De Beers, Premier and other mines closed down.
The Labor Party, since the last provincial elections the ruling
power, was split from top to bottom. Its great majority now
consisted of fanatically anti-British young Boers. But Mr. Cres-
well, still the leader, declared stubbornly that he, for one, would
support the war effort to the hilt. He signed up immediately,
and subsequently won distinction in both African campaigns,
from which he returned a Colonel, but still as a radical Leftist
and a violent foe of Smuts. Foreign "syndicalists" did their best
to incite the masses of the townspeople. The Imperial Military
Stores at Roberts Heights, insufficiently guarded after the hur-
ried departure of the British troops, as well as the magazines of
Smuts* Defence Force at Potchefstroom, were stormed by
Dutch crowds, and burned down.

Pretoria, the capital, remained the center of events. The
press, mostly English, did not conceal its dissatisfaction with
the hardly comprehensible hesitation of the Union government.
The solid citizens were aroused at the aspect of the German
agents, who, although well known, were neither arrested nor
even deported, but could still, grinning, go about their busi-
ness. They mingled with the bearded Boer farmers now filling
the town. A coffeehouse in Church Street was soon known as
the headquarters of the German conspiracy. Beyers, commander
in chief, who a short time before had returned from a trip to
Germany, was a habitual visitor to this coffeehouse. Middle-
sized, rather on the paunchy side, his short, trimmed beard

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OLD MASTER

scented with perfume, swaggering in military fashion, his right
hand gripping a dagger of honor, a present from Wilhelm II,
he stood his boon companions innumerable rounds of coffee
and liquor. He disposed of a million Mark with which the Ger-
man treasury had entrusted him to manufacture the revolu-
tion. Besides, a premium of fifty thousand pounds was waiting
for him in the sealed vaults of the now abandoned German
Consulate General in Cape Town. He had simply to conquer
the town.

Yet, during the critical days, General Beyers still went care-
fully about his business. He inspected the Civil Militia in
Johannesburg. During the general strike the men had been
equipped by the government with brand-new rifles. Under the
pretext that the Defense Force wanted them, Beyers collected
all rifles in the possession of English citizens. The burghers
were permitted to retain theirs. The confiscated rifles were sub-
sequently added to the large stores of German Mausers and
machine-guns already distributed throughout the platteland.
From Johannesburg Beyers returned to Pretoria. There he gave
a bibulous farewell party for Lieutenant-Colonel Maritz, Smuts'
lieutenant during the guerrilla raid in the Cape, later an officer
on the Defence Force of Beyers' making. Maritz, a compound
of enormous strength, inordinately vain, and entirely unedu-
cated, was adorned with a gigantic Es ist erreichtit is achieved
mustache after the pattern of the Kaiser's trademark. When
he was drunk, he freely admitted that he was going to start a
revolution for what he could get out of it. One could, after all,
not live on an officer's meager pay if one had a beloved wife
and two children to support, and was, at that, a frequent visitor
in the shebeens. Already in 1913 he had received 100,000 Mark
some 20,000 from an unknown admirer. Now he was about
to march to the border of South West Africa with a Defence
Force of six hundred men and to cross it under the white flag,
to join the Germans.

The Loyalist population of Pretoria was aroused by the shame-
less behavior of the traitors. They staged a huge mass meeting
on Church Square. Their speakers, Mayor Andrew Johnston

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OLD MASTER

and Dean Gordon of the Anglican High Church, voiced their
feelings in determined words. The meeting went off without
the slightest disturbance. The traitors hid in their rat holes. But
as the days passed, and the government still kept silent al-
though Smuts and Botha were feverishly active behind the
scenesan uneasy feeling overcame the Loyalists. Again the
German agents and their Boer associates raised their heads.
Commandant F. G. A. Wolmarans of the district of Lichten-
burg, west of Pretoria, galloped from farm to farm, preaching
sedition to the burghers: "You will soon hoist the Vierkleur
the old Transvaal Republican Flag and march to the German
border to get ammunition!"

General de la Rey was the great old man of the Lichten-
burg district. He had been the last successful Boer general in
the war, and yet had sided at Vereeniging, after some grave
inner conflict, with the peace party under Botha and Smuts.
Smuts, who is sparing with his personal feelings, loved him like
a father. De la Rey was one of the three or four men in his life
of whom Smuts spoke with veneration and emotion. After the
peace, General de la Rey held office continuously. At the out-
break of the Great War he was probably the most highly re-
spected member of the Senate. But he could never reconcile
himself with the loss of the Boer War. Deeply imbued with
religion, he sought comfort in anti-Semitism, mysticism and
superstition. His father confessor was a man named Nicholaas
Van Rensburg, a soothsayer, worshiped in every Boer house.
As General de la Rey's adviser in the Boer War, he had won
fame by his visions. He had dreamed exactly where small or
scattered groups of British soldiers could be surprised and an-
nihilated. In fact, he had organized an excellent Kafir spy or-
ganization.

"Oom Niklaas' " dreams made South African history. His hold
over the credulous burghers, including their generals, was tre-
mendously enhanced when he dreamed the exact date of the
end of the Boer War and of the peace. He had added to his
Kafir spy system a no less remarkable white intelligence serv-
ice. In 1914 he was already an aging gentleman, suffering from

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OLD MASTER

cerebral disturbances which, however, sharpened his faculty of
seeing visions. In the spring of this year he published a book
containing hundreds of his dreams. Since the Boers were not
great book buyers, the tome went almost unnoticed. But on the
second day after Great Britain had declared war on Germany,
Van Rensburg's volume of prophetic dreams was in everybody's
hands.

So far Oom Niklaas' most popular dream had been the vision
of a furious fight between seven bulls. The red, blue, black,
gray, brown, white and orange-colored bulls represented the
different European nations. The gray animal stood for Ger-
many, the red for Britain, the blue for France. After terrific gor-
ing first the black bull, then the red, and finally all save the
gray bull went down. The interpretation was obvious: Germany
was to conquer Britain, France, and the whole world.

Now the visionary dreamed as if on the assembly line. He
fitted two dreams to his patron De la Rey's personal measure.
He dreamed that the Union government was finished. The Eng-
lish were leaving the Transvaal, and trekking to Natal. When
they had gone far away, a vulture left them, and returned to
the Transvaal. The vulture stood for Botha. Smuts, an ugly
sparrow, would fly all the way to England, and never return to
South Africa. In his place, a man "representing the Godhead"
a God-fearing man would appear as a leader. He would not
shed blood, but arrange all peacefully and bring everything
into good order. The prophecy would come to pass when the
Transvaal would see the "sifting" of British on one side and
Dutch on the other. The dream ended in an apotheosis: Gen-
eral de la Rey pulling down the Union Jack and hoisting the
Vierkleur, General de la Rey as God's instrument, delivering
the people from the British, Botha and Smuts.

The outbreak of the war had already crazed the God-fearing
general. His son-in-law ceased to regard him as accountable
for his acts in those disturbed days, and considered it necessary
to have him watched day and night. The young man could,
however, not protect him against Van Rensburg. The prophet
had another dream. He saw the number 15 on a dark cloud

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OLD MASTER

from which blood dripped. In the second version of the dream
De la Rey returned from nowhere with his hat. He was fol-

lowed by a carriage, covered with flowers. Van Rensburg him-
seJf could not interpret his reverie. He could only conclude that
something very splendid for De la Rey was written in the stars.
All the fanners of the Lichtenburg and Rustenburg districts
knew instantly that this number 15 stood for the fifteenth of Au-
gust. Those who were too ignorant to draw their own conclu-
sions were enlightened by the numerous German agents in the
Western Transvaal, stirring up the burghers with fabulous
promises and flagrant lies. De la Rey observed all the commo-
tion with a benign, senile smile.

A Sunday meeting was arranged in Lichtenburg for August
15. The burghers were instructed to upsoddle with rifles, blan-
kets, all the ammunition they possessed, and food for at least a
fortnight. They were told that after the meeting they would
move to Johannesburg, where resistance was expected. But De
la Rey would lead them, and cdlsol reg kom all would be
right. Others would proceed directly to Potchefstroom, the cen-
tral camp of the Imperial troops of South Africa, now held only
by the remaining one thousand men. The commandos of that
district would join the men from the Western Transvaal. The
last British soldiers would be killed. The Republic would be
proclaimed.

Botha and Smuts got wind of the conspiracy. No secret could
be kept in the country riddled with spies, and counter-spies.
They sent an urgent message to De la Rey to meet them in
Pretoria. Smuts was too gravely shocked to speak. He must
have realized that his beloved paternal friend had lost his
senses. Botha attacked his old follower where he was most vul-
nerable: Did the Lord's word teach falsehood and treason? he
asked. It was a God-sent opportunity, De la Rey replied. But
he had no longer the strength to withstand Botha's persuasion.
Faint-hearted and dejected, he left the indaba. The day was
the fourteenth of August. On the next morning, the morning of
the appointed day, De la Rey appeared at the meeting. He was

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OLD MASTER

accompanied by Sammie Marks, of all people, the richest and
toughest Jewish speculator in South Africa. Eight hundred
burghers were gathered to heed the General's call to action. In-
stead, De la Key admonished them to go home and be good. If
the government wanted them in connection with the war in
Europe, they would be called out in the regular way. The
burghers listened in stony silence. Impassively they voted for
De la Key s resolution of confidence in the government. Slowly
they trotted home. Some lashed their horses unmercifully.
Others got drunk. All cursed. They had been fooled. The revo-
lution was off.

On the same day the government issued the first official state-
ment about the war. It was vague and inconclusive. Yet its
meaning was somewhat clarified by a simultaneous call for vol-
unteers to join the Defense Force for active service inside
South Africa. Parliament was convoked. The government as-
sured the country that all measures would be taken to insure,
as far as possible, normal conditions within the Union for the
duration. Subsequently the Second (Pretoria) Regiment was
mobilized, whereas the regiments from Johannesburg and the
Witwatersrand entered the huge new camp at Booysens. In the
cities the "town units" were called out to get infantry training.
The burgher commandos, now grouped into regiments, made a
splendid cavalry.

The country awoke. The English section, to one man, rel-
ished the prospect of having a go at the Germans in South West
Africa. A large portion of the Boers fell in line. They were
aroused by three incidents. The Kaiser had sent a replica of his
Kruger telegram, promising his recognition of the Boer Repub-
lics if the revolution would start immediately. The Germans
had crossed the Union border at Nakob, and had entrenched
themselves on South African territory. Furthermore at the
Schuit Drift on the Orange River, they had attacked a party of
Boer farmers, and forced them to seek refuge on one of the
tiny, unnamed islands in the river.

After this affront even the hotbeds of Boer nationalism, like

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OLD MASTER

Bloemf ontein and Potchef stroom, pretended loyalty and waved
the Union Jack. Yet, secretly, most of their people strongly dis-
approved of the forthcoming attack on the "peaceful" German
neighbor. Johannesburg, despite its cosmopolitan character,
proved to be an intensely English town. The mines could re-
open, and resume production. Nevertheless, gang rule, one of
the most distinct features on the Rand, continued practically
unchecked.

Pretoria was the hottest spot. The English inhabitants were
jubilant. But again streets and coffeehouses were jammed by
bearded men from the veld, who predicted openly that they
would refuse to serve if an attack should be made upon the
Germans beyond the frontier. Indeed, many backvelders muti-
nied when they were called up. They rode off into the veld,
where they strayed without the slightest notion what to do
next.

They got their clue from Hertzog. He chose the days of
gravest unrest to hold a Nationalist congress right in embattled
Pretoria. Significantly, on the door to Town Hall, where the
congress met, a daub was painted representing the burning of
a Boer farmhouse by British soldiers. The police arrested the
painter, and charged him with incitement to disaffection. He
got away with a small fine. Smuts did not want to create
martyrs.

Hertzog blamed Botha and Smuts for the division in the
country. The chairman, a Senator by the name of Wolmarans,
declared: "We will not take part in any invasion for robbery."
General De la Rey, who had come as an onlooker, pleaded for
unity in time of crisis.

A Pretoria English paper attacked the congress for spreading
seditious rumors and talking a lot of pestilential nonsense. "The
Dutchmen are not as a whole responding to the call to join the
colors," the paper stated. "There is in this town an unpleasant
feeling of hostility against the British cause, and an open de-
light expressed at anything that savors of a check or reverse
sustained by British arms. The place is seething with sedi-
tion." The government censor took the newspaper to account.

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OLD MASTER

He did not contest the truth of its statements, but he described
the article as "impolitic." Botha and Smuts still held their pro-
tecting hands over their lost brethren.

In the meantime, the Defence Office under Smuts worked in-
defatigably at getting the burgher force into military shape.
Even General Beyers felt the necessity to prove his loyalty. On
August 29, he appeared at Camp Booysens, which he had thus
far demonstratively shunned, and addressed the troops: 'When-
ever our country is threatened, Boer and British will stand to-
gether, and fight to the last man. Every man, I am convinced,
will do his utmost, perhaps under very trying circumstances.
But let him all the more be patient, loyal and persevering to
the very end. Three cheers for His Majesty, the King!"

Smuts was astonished. He deeply distrusted his commander
in chief. He went himself to Booysens, but Beyers had already
left. Now Smuts spoke: "There are many people in this coun-
try who do not appreciate the tremendous gravity of the crisis
in which South Africa, together with the whole Empire, is
placed today. Although apparently we stand outside, and at
some distance from the actual scene of conflict, yet at any mo-
ment we may be drawn into the vortex."

The soldiers cheered themselves hoarse. But the politicians
were unimpressed. Feelings were running high. Private and so-
cial life was disrupted. Many families were torn apart. Under
such conditions Parliament met on September 4 in a special
session to consider the war situation.

Hertzog leapt up to speak in defense of Germany. It was
simply not true that the Reich had committed an act of aggres-
sion. Moreover, it was quite wrong to provoke a nation as pow-
erful as Germany. If the Emperor lost, South West Africa
would anyway become a part of the Union. If Germany should
win the war, and the Union was in it, South Africa was doomed.

In his reply Smuts called Hertzog a "German advocate." He
insisted that South Africa was threatened by a military autoc-
racy in the worst form. He counseled the Germans not to bank
too heavily on rumors that South Africa was unarmed. The
House understood the allusion. Smuts had, indeed, not distrib-

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OLD MASTER

uted nearly as many rifles as the burghers in the border districts
of the Cape and the Free State had clamored for. He kept them
for his own troops. Subsequently, his foresight was entirely vin-
dicated. Those border districts became the very center of the
revolution.

The parliamentary debate had continued for three days when
rumors sprang up that the Twelfth Regiment had left the
Booysens camp for an unknown destination. A new storm broke
loose. The poor boys were being sent to the slaughterhouse, the
Nationalists shouted. As a matter of fact, the boys, English and
Afrikaans alike, marched merrily along, and were eager for a
scrap with the Germans. But even the government's own South
African Party was appalled at the presence of war. Botha and
Smuts assembled their party in caucus. They had to exercise all
their persuasion, and even to threaten resignation, to induce
their own members to support Botha's resolution expressing the
wholehearted determination of the House to co-operate with
His Majesty's Imperial government in order to maintain the
security and integrity of the Empire. After a week of discussion
the resolution was adopted by an almost unanimous House.
Only Hertzog's followers dissented.

In the meantime Maritz was already in Upington, some
thirty miles from the border of German South West Africa. He
sent an old friend, a man by the name of P. J. Joubert, a Boer
who was a large estate owner in the South West, back to Pre-
toria to inform Commander in Chief Beyers that the negotia-
tions with the Germans were proceeding excellently. Governor
Seitz of German South West Africa was expecting Beyers on
September 15.

On this very day a strong contingent of the Union's Defence
Force was leaving for Luederitz Bay, as the Imperial Govern-
ment had requested. Beyers was not with them. Two days ear-
lier he had published an open letter announcing his resignation,
and protesting against the decision to attack South West Africa
"without provocation/' The letter contained an atrocious attack
against the British Empire, which had, in view of the "barbari-
ties" committed during the Boer War, no right to protest

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OLD MASTER

against alleged German atrocities. At the same time Beyers sent
a letter of encouragement, and of comradely greetings, to the
traitor Maritz.

Smuts, in his capacity as Minister of Defence, replied by re-
buking the insolent vilification of Great Britain, and concluded:
"It may be that our peculiar internal circumstances and our
backward condition will place a limit on what we can do; but
nevertheless I am convinced that the people will support the
government, and fulfill their destiny to South Africa and to the
Empire, and maintain their dearly won honor unblemished for
the future. . . . Your resignation is hereby accepted."

Smuts himself became the Commander in Chief of the De-
fence Force. He moved to headquarters, put on a uniform, and
did not take it off for the next five years.

Governor Seitz of German South West Africa waited in vain
for the visit of Beyers. Instead of keeping the appointment, the
renegade went to Pretoria, to win over General de la Rey to
the cause of the revolution. The two had an all-day palaver, the
contents of which remained a secret. It appears that old De la
Rey was vacillating; certainly he was no longer capable of a
balanced judgment. In the evening he consented to accompany
Beyers to Johannesburg. Beyers' car raced along the roads.
Every corner was heavily policed. The Foster gang was at
large, one of the worst bands that had ever ravaged Johannes-
burg. On the morning of this very fifteenth of September three
gangsters had shot a detective, and escaped in a car. The po-
lice were under orders to inspect every car, particularly those
with three passengers, on the main roads to and from Johannes-
burg. But Beyers had ordered his chauffeur to disregard sig-
nals. He was in a hurry. At four o'clock in the morning he was
expected in a training camp near Johannesburg, where, at his
and De la Rey's appearance, a large group of recruits would
rise in rebellion. They were to march to Pretoria, proclaim the
Republic, and elect, by acclamation, Beyers President and De
la Rey Commander-in-Chief . Whether De la Rey was in on this
plan, or whether Beyers wanted to confront him with a fait

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OLD MASTER

accompli was never established. At any rate, conscious or not,
the saintly, aged General was on a treasonable mission, while
his country was at warwhen it happened.

A constable jumped into the middle of the road, when he saw
Beyers' huge motorcar approach. The car was similar to the one
the Foster gang had stolen. Three men sat inside: the two gen-
erals and Beyers' driver. Moreover, the car did not stop. At full
speed it raced right to the place where the constable stood.
Beyers, not eager to be investigated by the police at that par-
ticular moment, ordered his driver not to stop, and De la Rey,
in his senile sullenness, nodded consent.

The constable leaped aside, aimed at the tire, fired, missed,
hit the road. The bullet ricocheted and entered De la Rey's
head. He was killed instantly.

De la Rey's funeral at Lichtenburg led to a tremendous dem-
onstration. Botha, Smuts, and Beyers stood together at the
grave. It was another proof of that overwhelming feeling of
racial oneness that unites the Boers, even the arch-foes among
them. But the masses jeered at their ministers. Everyone was
persuaded that Smuts and Botha had had De la Rey murdered.
They did not heed any pathetic protestation to the contrary.
They only understood that Van Rensburg, the seer, had been
right. After all, the tragic day was the fifteenth. Behind De la
Rey, who was returning from nowhere, a large carriage laden
with flowers rolled along. Many onlookers even saw red blood
dripping from the dark clouds.

Beyers stole the show. He swore on the dead man's memory
that he himself was not a traitor. On the same evening he met
his fellow conspirators.

Smuts returned to headquarters. He sat at his desk, as if
glued to it. Immediate action was imperative. He fully under-
stood the significance of what had happened.

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OLD MASTER

Chapter 19 THE FIVE SHILLING REVOLUTION

ON THE THIRTIETH OF SEPTEMBER SMUTS ORDERED MARTTZ BY

wire to come to Pretoria. Insolently, Maritz in his answer re-
ferred to a speech he had delivered a few days before, pouring
abuse and contempt on his minister. Smuts, for his part, feigned
astonishment. He made inquiries "whether there was any rea-
son to fear an act of treason in connection with Maritz' move-
ments." It was a ruse to gain time. Colonel Brits had already
been appointed to the command of the Union forces around
Upington, where Maritz lay in wait. The Colonel was under in-
structions to arrest the rebel if he refused to resign and submit
peacefully.

Maritz learned from his Kafir spies that a big Union force
was moving in his direction. Immediately he broke up his camp
in Upington to proceed to an undisclosed destination. One of
his officers smelled a rat. Major Enslin inquired where the
whole force with all its ammunition was supposed to be going.
"I am carrying out secret instructions!" he was told. Thereupon
the Major excused himself, and disappeared. He had no desire
to accompany Maritz into open rebellion.

After a two days' march Maritz' troops, six hundred young-
sters, most of them in their teens, arrived at Van Rooisvlei,
near the German border. After another two days a mysterious
motorcar appeared, and drove Maritz into German territory.
When he returned to his troops on October 7, the secret was
solved. Not the Germans, but the English were the enemy.

Only a few of the men had advance knowledge of the
planned coup. To most of the soldiers it came as a surprise.
Maritz assembled them at a full parade which was so shrewdly
arranged that the gun section, whose loyalty was notorious, was
completely surrounded. At a prearranged signal the plotters at-
tacked the gunners. Maritz himself helped by stabbing a few

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OLD MASTER

of his victims in the back. The Loyalists were made prisoners
of war.

Now the traitor, standing on a soapbox, delivered a grandilo-
quent harangue. Botha and Smuts were in the service of capi-
talistic oppressors. The country was ruled by Englishmen. Now
was the time for the Boers to regain South Africa. It was quite
unnecessary to be killed in German South West Africa, England
had already lost the war. The German wireless reported it every
day. This was the moment to hoist the old republican flag on
Table Mountain. Those who disagreed should step forward.

Lieutenant Bossouw and fifty men stepped out. They were
disarmed, and marched into a German camp in South West
Africa. Finally a sergeant by the name of Engelbrecht, a Ger-
man-born Boer, moved the election of Maritz as commander.
The traitor was elected in the best old commando fashion.

But Colonel Brits was already hard on his heels. Instructed
by Smuts to use persuasion rather than force, he sent Major
Bower with the flag of truce to Maritz' camp. Clad in a pomp-
ous German general's uniform, the traitor received the major,
showed him German howitzers, and a number of German sol-
diers who had joined him. He boasted his abundance of Ger-
man arms, ammunition and money. He even displayed a treaty
he had concluded with the German Imperial Government, and
demanded finally safe conduct for Hertzog, De Wet, Beyers
and "General" Kemp, to come to him to discuss the situation.
Otherwise, he threatened, he would instantly attack.

Smuts, hearing of this ultimatum, issued a brief statement,
accusing Lieutenant-Colonel Solomon Gerhardus Maritz of
having shamefully and traitorously gone over to the enemy, and
declaring: "In view of this state of affairs the government is
taking the most vigorous steps to stamp out the rebellion and
inflict just punishment on all rebels and traitors/'

Colonel Brits advanced. Twice, at Keimoes and at Schuit
Drift, he beat Maritz' soldiery, and took a number of prisoners,
among them German officers. The inglorious rebel retired into
South West African territory. He used a light wound on the
knee, received at Keimoes, as a pretext to drop out of action.

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OLD MASTER

Elsewhere, in the Free State and in the Western Transvaal,
action was just beginning. Nationalistic intellectuals, lawyers
and a great number of predikants, were preaching open sedi-
tion. The country was perturbed. Even the Synod of the Dutch
Reformed Church, an arch-reactionary body which had no love
for Smuts, addressed an open letter to its divines warning them
against an attempt to cause a bloody civil war. At the same
time the Synod adopted a resolution, expressing its profound
indignation at the treacherous conduct of Maritz. It called upon
all the members of the Church to support the government in
every way possible to maintain law and order.

A few reverend gentlemen were deaf in both ears. On Octo-
ber 13 the Reverend Mr. Ferreira opened the dining room of
his parsonage at Keppers to a secret meeting. A group of his
fellow clergymen, under the leadership of the Reverend Van
Broekhuisen, De Wet with a delegation of Free Staters, the
Boer General Liebenberg, Piet Grobler, Kruger's kinsman, and
Pienaar, both lieutenants of Hertzog, were present.

After the host had invoked God's blessing, General De Wet
started the row. He exploded in one of his violent fits that had,
even among friends, earned him the nickname Bobiaan (ba-
boon ) . He had a terrible story to tell. He had been fined five
shillings by a tyrannical magistrate, one of those "pestilential
English," for having assaulted a native servant. (In fact this
tyrannical magistrate was a brother-in-law of ex-President
Steyn, and had received his seat on the bench when Hertzog
was Attorney-General in the Free State.) This insult, De Wet
insisted, was enough to justify immediate revolution. There was
not a moment to be lost. Maritz had already started. He had
plenty of money and arms. "We start here/' De Wet concluded,
"and join him later."

Opposition came from the most unexpected quarter. General
Liebenberg, who had led the campaign of protest against a
march into German South West Africa, was firmly set against
revolution. Hertzog was not with the conspirators, he pointed
out.

"The general is a lawyer!" purple-faced De Wet cried. "I saw

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OLD MASTER

him yesterday. He is a man you can trust in the dark. He fights
for us in the political sphere. There he is in his proper place.
Don't ask where he is. He told me he would not attend our
meeting, since he has already been made the scapegoat. How-
ever, he is to be found when he is wanted."

Stubbornly, General Liebenberg insisted: "Where is Beyers?"

Pienaar, the Hertzog man, found an excuse for Beyers' ab-
sence. While his car was parked in front of the Opera House
the tires had been slashed. He could not drive to the meeting.

The fact was true. But General Liebenberg found it an un-
satisfactory explanation for the commander in chief's absence.
He declined to go into rebellion, and proposed to send a dele-
gation to the government.

De Wet and Kemp, the fire-eaters, shouted against this pro-
posal. It was, however, accepted as the only way of dealing
with Liebenberg. On the same afternoon a deputation, includ-
ing De Wet, left for Pretoria. The delegates met at the Rever-
end Van Broekhuisen's house, who promised them to bring
them in touch with Beyers the next day. On the following day,
however, he had to admit pusillanimously that he could not
keep his word. Beyers was in hiding. Nor could the reverend
gentleman himself accompany the deputies to Botha.

Beyers hiding? It boded ill. The deputation lost heart. But
De Wet drove them on. They called upon the Prime Minister,
and were immediately received. Botha welcomed the rebels
with his accustomed affability. They talked for four hours and
a quarter. In fact, the delegates were playing for time to con-
vince General Liebenberg that they had done their best. They
spoke so evasively that Botha, after their departure, asked:
"What do these people really want?"

De Wet had left the conference while his colleagues were
still hoodwinking Botha with their pretended grievances. He
returned to the Reverend Van Broekhuisen's house, where he
met Beyers. The two chief conspirators made their plans.

On the next day Botha's question was answered. De Wet
wired him from his home in the Free State: "Resign imme-
diately."

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OLD MASTER

Smuts entrenched himself at headquarters. Nothing in his
face, no loud word, no nervous movement betrayed his high
tension. He was not only calm and collected, but he displayed
indefatigable patience. His manner had greatly changed since
the days of his struggle for power. Harshness and stern auster-
ity had faded. Instead he showed solicitude for each of his in-
numerable callers, and that wonderful unembarrassing cour-
tesy that was to mark him for the rest of his time. Some visitors
observed a repeated gesture: "As if he were washing his hands
with invisible soap in imperceptible water." But that was the
only way of working off his emotions that he permitted him-
self.

He was in the throes of a tragic dilemma. He was about to
take stern action against his own brothers in arms. Perhaps he
would have to impose the death penalty upon the same Maritz,
who, some years before, had lain with him under the same
blanket to share what little bodily warmth was left in the ex-
hausted guerrillas. (Incidentally, throughout the decade fol-
lowing the Boer War, self-styled old comrades called upon
Smuts by the hundreds and thousands, reminding him that he
had shared their blanket in those happy days, and asking for a
job for a son-in-law. Smuts could never believe that the entire
South African textile industry could have produced as many
blankets as that.) The tragic death of De la Rey must have
weighed still more heavily on his mind. Mrs. Smuts was just ex-
pecting another baby. The boy would be christened De la Rey.
It was a girl. Nevertheless, she was baptized De la Rey.

Undoubtedly, Smuts himself had once been a rebel against
the British. What difference, he was asked, was there between
his revolt during the Boer War, and De Wet's or Beyers' insur-
rection today? A world of difference, he explained. The English
had attacked the Boers. (At least he saw it this way.) But after
the war the English had acted more magnanimously than any
victor in history. They had returned to the Boers their com-
plete independence; indeed, the nation enjoyed in many ways
more liberty than ever before. Moreover, the English were
trusting the Boers. Trust was a sacred word to Smuts.

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OLD MASTER

Payment was not on a strictly cash basis. The commandos com-
pensated the storekeepers for their purchases with bills, re-
deemable by the nonexistent South African Republic, and fre-
quently written by the customer while he watched his goods
being loaded upon the cart.

Smuts waited until he saw Pretoria threatened on three
sides by rebel commandos. Only then the innermost conflict
between his roots and his garment was definitely decided. The
Minister for Defence ordered the second battalion of the Trans-
vaal Scottish and Irish Regiment from Johannesburg to Pre-
toria. Strong patrols occupied the encircling hills and guarded
the approaches to the capital. Inside Pretoria, the town police,
carrying rifles and full bandoleers of cartridges, paraded the
streets. At night the whole police force was on the alert, as-
sisted by a thoroughly efficient citizen civilian guard.

Still the regular troops were under orders to avoid, if pos-
sible, bloodshed. They were told only to hustle the commandos,
and to take prisoners. Colonel van De Venter, who was later to
become Smuts' chief of staff in the South West campaign, cap-
tured Captain Joubert, Beyers' go-between. Two days later
Colonel-Commander Celliers took prisoner the disloyal Major
Ben Cotzee, a general staff officer of the Defence Force. The
rebel prisoners were disheartened. They cursed Van Rensburg,
the fake seer, who was guilty of all the trouble. Some prisoners
did not even know for whom or against whom they had been
fighting. Their commandant had just said: "Upsaddle!" and
with cattlelike docility they had obeyed.

Not before the beginning of November did the fight start
in earnest. Colonel Alberts, operating in the Lichtenburg dis-
trict, where the whole affair had begun, arrived in Treurfontein.
He surprised, and beat, a strong party of rebels under the self-
styled General Kemp. Loyalist Commander de Villiers met a
strong rebel force under Commander Classens, a German Boer.
The rebels immediately hoisted white flags on their rifles. Ex-
pecting their surrender, de Villiers approached them, where-
upon the rebels attacked and captured de Villiers with one

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hundred ten men. The triumph of treachery, however, was
short-lived. On the next day Colonel Alberts picked up the
whole rebel group, and liberated de Villiers and his men.

Beyers fled to the Free State, where he hoped for sanctuary.
Colonel Lemmer was hot after him. His Lieutenant De la Rey
Swartz attacked the traitor from the rear as he passed near
Bloemhof . Beyers did not stop to fight. He escaped across the
Vaal River.

In the meantime Japie Fourie, the sinister hero of the revolu-
tion, was making trouble. Fourie was a friend of Beyers, and
of the same mind. Personally he used to be a very pleasant
man. But since a bullet in the Boer War had wounded him in
the knee and hampered him by a limp, he had had to give up
his famous athletic activities, and became diseased by Britain-
hatred. Beyers had procured him a commission as Major in the
Defence Force. Fourie followed his friend and leader into the
revolution. Beyers was already on his ignominious escape when
Jopie Fourie collected the broken and scattered remnants of
the rebel forces in the Rustenburg district. Many of them were
weary of their hopeless enterprise. But the Reverend Van
Broekhuisen lifted die cross, and thundered that deserters went
straight to hell. Japie Fourie supported him. The rebels re-
turned to the thick of the fight. They blew up railway lines to
hamper the movement of the government forces, and fought
to the end with the cruelty of cornered beasts.

Only one leader of the revolution got away: Kemp. He had
inherited De la Rey's mantle he had been the general's lieu-
tenant in the Boer Warand with the mantle the prophet Van
Rensburg. Thus protected by Providence, he gathered anew
eight hundred recruits, among them many predikants. On
November 3 he occupied the small town of Schweizer Reneke,
hoisted the Vierkleur, soiled the Union Jack in an unspeakable
manner, and commandeered forage and supplies from the store-
keepers, government-owned wagons and mules, all the horses
of the civilians. He summoned the inhabitants in front of the
courthouse, informed them that the two republics had been

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proclaimed, and that he intefeded to form flying columns of men
with good horses. "When I get Jannie Smuts," he concluded, "I
will make mincemeat of him!"

After this oration he went to the pub, invited all the young
men in the town to have a round of beer on him, paid with
good money, not with requisition scraps, and let the cat out of
the bag: strictly confidentially he announced to all and sundry
that forty thousand German soldiers with three hundred guns
would arrive in the Transvaal within three weeks.

The drunken crowd haggled, in the best Boer fashion,
whether Oom Jannie should be put in front of the muzzle of
a Krupp gun, or executed with the help of an old-fashioned
sjambok. A free-for-all ensued over this difference of opinion.
The next morning, before most of them had slept themselves
sober, eleven hundred excellently mounted men, some with
two or three spare horses, cleared out of the town. Day and
night they rode, six hundred of the best horsemen forming the
main advance body, men so much one with their beasts that
they never fell from their saddles although they were con-
stantly drunk. They left a bloody trail behind them. They pil-
laged every farm and store they passed, plundering horses,
food, and forage.

At Kheis Drift the Natal Light Horse under Colonel Royston
as well as a loyal commando were waiting to intercept them.
At 2:30 P.M. the Colonel, expecting reinforcements, saw a large
body carrying white flags and white armbands, the emblem of
the Defence Force, approaching him. Colonel Royston was
overjoyed. His men trotted to the appointed meeting. When
they arrived within safe firing distance, Kemp's disguised ad-
vance guard dismounted, and fired a murderous barrage into
the trapped ranks of the Natal Light Horse. He tried to rush
their camp. But here he was beaten back. Sniping continued
all night. Kemp, however, was already galloping to the German
South West African border.

God was with him, he afterwards boasted. The Kalahari
Desert he had to cross was miraculously drenched by torren-
tial rains, which happened only once or so in a century. He

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gulped down the rain. It tasted even better than the best beer.
His horses did not starve either. The tropical vegetation of the
desert provided ample forage. The Loyalists traced him in the
sands. They found along the way remnants of his meals, quan-
tities of half-emptied bottles of beer, evidently placed there
earlier by his German accomplices, methodical people who did
not trust in God alone. At the Sand Dune the troops caught up
with him. Kemp made a last stand. He had seventy drunken
followers left. He threw them against the troops. He himself
turned his horse, fled, and slipped across the German border.

The trouble in the Transvaal was subdued. Beyers was on
the run, Kemp in safety with his German friends. But the Free
Staters were now on the point of rising. In order to avoid fur-
ther bloodshed Botha and Smuts asked Hertzog to use his for-
midable influence with his fellow citizens. Hertzog did not
reply. Maritz and the other rebel leaders asked for safe conduct
to receive instructions from Hertzog. Permission was denied.
Hertzog remained mute. Now everyone, friend and foe, be-
lieved that he was privy to the revolt.

Above all, De Wet believed it. One night, crazed by his su-
perstitious obsession and blinded by his red-hot Britain-hatred,
De Wet called his entire family from their beds. They gathered
outside Memel, De Wet's farmhouse. The bearded old man in
a disreputable nightshirt pointed to the dark sky. "See our
Lord Jesus Christ!" he exclaimed. "Hear him calling us to save
his people! Now is the time!"

The next day gang rule broke out in the district. Volunteers
were attacked, trains seized, Loyalist meetings broken up. Mr.
J. A. Joubert, the aged State Attorney, and Mr. Steenkamp
betook themselves to the farm Memel. They pleaded for an
end of the uproar. The irate old martinet challenged them to
go outside and to repeat their counsel of moderation to the
burghers. Both refused. They had come solely to talk to De
Wet. Yet they were dragged on to the stoep, where they meekly
faced an infuriated crowd, and uttered a few words of advice.
Everyone looked at De Wet. He burst out: "Hold them as pris-

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oners, and treat them as spies. If they try to escape, shoot them
dead!"

Joubert and Steenkamp wrote letters in English to their
wives. They were using the language of the hellhounds! De
Wet barked. By way of punishment the two aged men were
forced to accompany his commando on its first sallies, and to
perform Kafir service. He also took them along to a secret meet-
ing with Hertzog, where he learned that Smuts and Botha had
appealed for the lawyer's intervention. De Wet laughed up-
roariously. "A strong government does not deal with traitors!"
he exclaimed. Evidently Botha's and Smuts' was a weak gov-
ernment.

The news came that De Wet's youngest son had been killed
in an encounter. The insane old man went into another par-
oxysm of laughter. "The apple of my eye!" he repeated time and
again. Then he set up headquarters in the town of Reitz, which
remained for six weeks in his possession six weeks of organ-
ized thieving and terrorism. The same martyrdom was imposed
on Kroonstad, Bethlehem, Heilbron and a dozen other purely
Dutch towns in the Free State.

Finally, De Wet with one hundred fifty mounted men en-
tered Vrede. A post-office clerk, watching on the outskirts of
the town to estimate the strength of the onrushing commando,
bicycled to the post office, and managed to shout through
the open window: "One hundred fifty. . . . One hundred
armed. . . ." By a hairbreadth Postmaster Evans could wire
the message to the government in Pretoria. Then the com-
mando caught up with him. He was knocked senseless. The
post office was devastated. All precision instruments which
the rebels could not handle were smashed. One group gal-
loped through the streets, ordering every passer-by to come to
the monument in front of the Dutch Reformed Church, unless
he wanted to be driven there by sjambok.

De Wet, leaning majestically against the monument, called
for the Magistrate. With true English sang-froid Mr. Colin
Fraser refused to shake grinning De Wet's outstretched hand.
He was not going to attend a rebel meeting. Six bodyguards

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assailed the Magistrate, and dragged and kicked him in front
of their boss. Bruised, wounded, and bleeding, Mr. Fraser still
defiantly faced the mad baboon.

De Wet poured out a collection of obscenities which Taal
alone among all languages expresses. He delivered a crazed
speech. "Magistrate, get a shorthand writer to take down every
word I am going to say because whatever I may do in the
future, I can never commit a greater act of rebellion than I
have already committed." Then he babbled incoherent words
about the Vierkleur and German arms and his misfortune in
front of the British Magistrate who had fined him five shillings.
Obviously the King of England had demanded this sinister act
of oppression and so the peace of Vereeniging was void. Botha
and Smuts were serving the "dead dog" England, and he would
choke them with his bare hands. God willed it. Suddenly he
switched into logic and precise language: "I am now going
through the town to take the following six articles: horses, sad-
dles, bridles, halters, arms and ammunition. If anyone should
refuse to hand over these articles, 111 personally give him a
thrashing with the sjambok. I herewith order the storekeepers
to open their shops, and I will select men to go round and to
take whatever I require, apart from the articles I mentioned.
I will open closed shops in my own way. I have got my eight
sons and sons-in-law here," he ended, with the strongest affir-
mation of Boer pride.

Vrede was pillaged. Then the pretty little town of Parys was
systematically looted by the rebels now deteriorating to the
level of common thieves. In Kroonstad, the Town Guard held
out for fourteen anxious days behind a fortification line of sand-
bags, until Colonel Manie Botha came to relieve them. The
bywonersthe poor whites living rent-free on farms joined
with the rebels. But the rest of the Free State was takharen
ashamed of themselves. They even rebuked Botha who had let
Beyers get away at their first encounter at Rustenberg in order
to avoid spilling blood for his exaggerated tolerance. Beyers
was quick to spread the rumor that the government was secretly

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directing the Defence Force to inflict no harm upon the rebels.
In view of Botha's and Smuts' evident disgust of the fratricidal
strife, this rumor found wide credence. Smuts, indeed, sent an
agent by the name of Cecil Meintjes to negotiate with Beyers,
who pretended that he was ready to call off the revolt if the
government agreed to carry out the action against South West
Africa only with volunteers. But Mr. Meintjes was prevented
from delivering this message in time. He was arrested, and
kept under guard, until Beyers with the rest of his commando
was at a safe distance. Instantly Beyers attacked, and sabo-
taged, the Northern Transvaal railroad line.

Appeasement was entirely discredited with the Loyalists.
They chafed under the inactivity of the government. No one
understood Smuts' deepest, almost enigmatic trait: his com-
plete indifference toward hostility. Once more he tried to recon-
cile the traitor. He dispatched the Magistrate of Wolmarans-
stad, unescorted and unarmed, to follow up Beyers. The aged
gentleman took his life in his hands, trailed Beyers, whose
route was easily discernible by a line of burned farmhouses,
blown-up railroad lines, and broken telegraph poles. One night,
in a small town in the Free State, he caught up with the man
he was after. Beyers drew his gun, but the old English Magis-
trate disarmed him with a smile. "You were too, how shall I
say, too impatient, I believe, to wait for the Minister of De-
fence's answer to the message you most kindly sent him by Mr.
Meintjes. Well, here I am with General Smuts' reply." The
reply reaffirmed all previous promises on behalf of the govern-
ment, and added two new enticements: a safe conduct for
Beyers to meet De Wet, and a promise of amnesty for all crimes
committed during the rebellion. Beyers demanded time to com-
municate with De Wet before he would give a definite answer.

De Wet, however, was dead set against compromising. He
dodged President Steyn and his son, who wanted to meet him
as mediators. He insisted that Hertzog was the only authority
he would deal with. In the House of Assembly Hertzog spoke
for the revolutionary cause. He mourned "the poor, down-
trodden burghers who had been murdered, robbed, and

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wronged!" But he stubbornly refused to exercise his influence
with De Wet in order to bring him to the conference table. This
double dealing caused General Tobias Smuts, a distant relative
of the Minister, to make the observation: "Hertzog always
keeps silent when he ought to speak, and speaks when he
ought to keep silent."

De Wet finally announced that he did not wish to see ex-
President Steyn or any other go-between. He had every inten-
tion of going to Maritz across the German border, and return-
ing with him and his German allies to Pretoria, where "if God,
in whom we all trust, so wills" independence would be pro-
claimed. Simultaneously, his gang continued looting, burning
and pillaging with a vengeance.

On November 11, on the last day before the promise of am-
nesty was to expire, Botha placed himself at the head of a large
force in the Free State, attacked De Wet's gang, which by then
had been increased to 3,500 men, routed them, and drove them
toward Koraanberg, where General Lukin was to trap them.
But due to what was later explained as "faulty transmission"
probably an act of insidious sabotage General Lukin got his
orders a few hours too late. Once more De Wet slipped away.
He fled toward the German border.

But his losses were irretrievable. His whole laager was gone,
he had lost two hundred fifty prisoners, the casualties among
his followers were heavy. This was against Botha's intention.
He owed his victory primarily to two machine-guns, new weap-
ons against which the rebels, only familiar with old-fashioned
rifles, were entirely helpless. When Botha observed the enemy's
heavy losses, he immediately silenced his machine-guns. His
was a humanitarian warfare, no mass slaughter. Only a stray
casualty here and there was permitted. Indeed, on Botha's or-
der, the commanding officers had given the machine-gunners
misleading ranges. But the gunners, not to be fooled, aimed
correctly. After victory, which was chiefly due to them, they
were severely taken to task by Botha.

A second encounter, the famous battle at Mushroom Valley,
completely annihilated De Wet's gang. He had only twenty-

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five exhausted followers and dead-tired horses left when he at-
tempted to cross the Vaal River. Nineteen of his men were
beaten back at this attempt. De Wet with six others managed
to negotiate the river late at night.

A new enemy arose: the motorcar. Commandant S. P. Du
Toit with his motor patrol swept the country near the point
where De Wet supposedly had crossed the river. At Karree-
boskuiel he received the information that seven horsemen in
full gallop had been seen racing westward. He soon came upon
the group. But the cars could not follow the horsemen into the
dense pathless jungle. Du Toit's patrol fired a volley at the flee-
ing men. They killed two horses. One horseman, De Wet's son-
in-law, was taken prisoner. The other, H. Oost, until a short
time before the editor of Hertzog's weekly in Pretoria, escaped.

Six men were left out of three thousand five hundred: De
Wet, Brand Wessels, Koos van Coller, Wessels Potgieter, Gert
Muller, and H. Oost. They hid in the woods. De Wet sent
Brand Wessels to Bloemfontein to ex-President Steyn. Now he
was prepared to confer with him about chances of peace.

Steyn urged Smuts strongly to accept. But when Smuts, after
long and painful hesitation, makes up his mind, he sticks to his
decision. In a letter dated Pretoria, November 17, he accused
Steyn and Hertzog of allowing De Wet to claim them as allies.
"We feel," he continued, "that the position has entirely changed
since General Botha's first appeal to you to use your influence
with De Wet and Beyers to avert bloodshed. Now the military
situation is different. Even now we do not know whether this
is not again an attempt to gain time." The letter ended de-
manding the unconditional surrender of the rebels.

Smuts had his "eyes and ears," his informers, throughout the
length and breadth of the country. He knew every move of
the fugitives. He was well aware that De Wet had got across
to the Schweizer Reneke district in the Free State, where the
last flames of the rebellion were still smouldering. In fact, De Wet
had collected a few hundred more Free Staters. He took them
westward, with the object of escaping across the desert to Ger-

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man South West Africa. He had made many forced marches in
his adventurous life, but never one against such heavy odds.
He trekked through a waterless, sandy country, ever changing
his direction, hard pressed to escape his pursuers, and harder
still to find a water hole now and then.

Colonel Brits pursued him with a fleet of motorcars. The
cars, mostly American-made, proceeded in the desert sand with
great difficulty. But Colonel Brits kept tracing the spoor of De
Wet's horsemen. Besides, the few water holes in the desert
were patrolled by Loyalists. At Marokwen Colonel Brits halted.
From here, General Smuts had instructed him that there was
not a single water hole until the farm of Waterbury, right at
the German frontier. De Wet would have to stop either in
Marokwen, or at the farm.

On Sunday the sentries at Marokwen saw a cavalcade of
horsemen slowly passing at a distance. They offered a wretched
sight. Men and horses looked like skeletons. Some decrepit
horses were carrying two men. De Wet and his men had killed
a few of their horses to quench their unbearable thirst by drink-
ing the animals' blood. It would have been easy to annihilate
the forlorn handful of men in a single attack. But that was ex-
actly what Smuts would never have forgiven. He wanted
Colonel Brits to bring De Wet home alive.

The cavalcade crept on. Colonel Brits guessed that they
would take all Sunday as well as the following day to reach the
farm Waterbury. So the night between Monday and Tuesday
would bring the kill. On Monday Colonel Jordaan arrived to
reinforce Brits. Acting as their own scouts, the two colonels ap-
proached the farm. The house was teeming with newcomers.
De Wet, haggard, terribly aged, his beard snow white, grinned
happily. He could not tear himself away from the fountain. He
drank and drank.

On Monday night Colonel Jordaan picked out seventy men.
He spoke to each of them separately, explaining exactly what
each was to do. Before dawn the men crept through the bush,
encircled the farmhouse, attacked De Wet's stable guards. The

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OLD MASTER

bandits were not able to utter a word before they felt the cold
steel of the rifles at their temples. Then Colonel Jordaan called
in ringing tones: "Surrender!"

De Wet and the faithful Oost were the first to come out of
the house. They attempted a run for the stables, but they found
themselves encircled. There was a moment of deadly silence.
Then De Wet threw up his arms. "The race is run!" he grinned.

He and his men were disarmed, brought to Vryburg by mo-
torcar, and then by train to Johannesburg. Throughout the
whole journey De Wet tried to maintain his poise. But his looks
betrayed him. His clothes were rags, his broad-brimmed felt
hat was riddled with bullet holes, his face was deeply lined and
crumpled. Nevertheless, his eyes had kept their shrewd glance,
and the broad gold chain across the shrunken belly recalled
that he had once been a prosperous burgher. He was still brag-
ging. "I will hang higher than any of you!" he told his fellow
prisoners. To the military police he said: "Your motorcars beat
me. I never believed they would get through the sand."

Beyers, too, was a beaten man. He had lost his old equanim-
ity. His moves were marked by a complete lack of resolution.
Here and there he made minor raids with his commando,
shrunk to twenty-five men. On his last day he was seen near the
farm Greyling's Request on the Transvaal side of the Vaal. A
little boy who had waded through the river brought this news
to the farmer Jacobs, who, in turn, informed the Loyalists.
Troops moved up from all sides. Beyers was cornered. But he
told his field-cornet, the Reverend Boshoff : "As long as there is
life in me, I will make a fight for it." These were his last coher-
ent words.

He removed his garters, spurs, revolver, and threw off his
mackintosh. He mounted a stolen horsehis own had been
killedand plunged into the river. His guide, a man by the
name of Jan Pietersee, also mounted, pushed ahead of them
into the swiftly running, swollen stream.

In the meantime the Loyalist forces had occupied both banks
of the river. Captain Uys' men, on the Transvaal side, opened

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OLD MASTER

fire at about fifty or sixty yards. Beyers' horse, frightened,
swung around, and struggled in the water. It refused to go into
the hail of bullets.

Beyers could no longer even manage a horse. He slipped out
of the saddle, and started to swim back to the Free State side,
which was much nearer. Whether his mind was still able to
grasp that he was swimming straight toward capture and the
firing squad, was no longer discernible. Pietersee made good
progress. Spurred by the fanatic loyalty of a typical Boer fol-
lower, however, he turned back to assist Beyers when he saw
his leader in difficulties. A bullet struck the faithful man. The
water around him was red with blood. Still Pietersee struggled
desperately toward Beyers. Suddenly he disappeared.

Beyers, swimming on his back, was heard shouting: "Efc
kaunie meer nie!" (I can't do any more!) The soldiers on the
Transvaal side thrust a big branch from a tree in his direction.
Beyers could not grasp it. One of Captain Uys' men nearest to
him shouted to ask whether he was wounded. Beyers cried
back: *7fc kan nie swem nie; die jas is tussen my loeneT (I can-
not swim, the coat got between my legs! ) Suddenly he threw
up his hands, and dropped like a stone beneath the muddy
waters. It was panic-suicide by drowning.

When Captain Uys saw Beyers going down, he asked for a
volunteer to jump after him into the swollen river. Private
Reneke obliged. But while he was undressing, Beyers' last men,
who had, entirely unmoved, watched their leader's death strug-
gle, opened fire. Reneke was forced to seek cover. The hand-
ful of remaining rebels, under the Reverend Boshoff, were cap-
tured and disarmed.

For an hour and a half the troops tarried along both banks.
The flood receded some eight or ten feet. Many dead fish were
left on the banks. The body of Beyers was only recovered after
three days of torrential rains. He was coatless. He had stripped
off his coat before leaping into the water. It appeared that his
shoelaces had become entangled, and thus his feet had been
tied together. At his last outcry he had mistaken his shoelaces
for his jacket.

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OLD MASTER

Smuts was deeply shocked when the story of Beyers' death
was reported to him. "I must write to his widow/' he said. "She
must hear it from a friend/' He sat down at his desk, his head
leaning on his left arm, his open left hand supporting his fore-
head and protecting his face from onlookers. He wrote with
flying speed.

Japie Fourie was the last man to surrender. In Smuts' words,
his band "was the only one to remain contumacious." Defying
all rules of warfare, the treacherous Defence Force Officer dis-
carded his rebel uniform and fought on in mufti. He let his
wild, black beard grow so that his cheeks, his chin, and his
mouth were almost hidden behind his whiskers. Yet everyone
recognized him by the piercing look in his eyes, by his long,
irregular brows, and by the enormous flower he wore in his
buttonhole, as was his custom. He assailed and ambushed
straggling officers and soldiers, and killed them with calcu-
lated cruelty. However, he remained faithful to the hallowed
Boer tradition. On Dingaan's Day South Africa's Fourth of
July he refused to fight.

It was on this very Dingaan's Day that Colonel Pretorius,
the grandson of the founder of the Transvaal, and Fourie's
own cousin, trapped the outlaw at Nooitgedacht. He asked
Fourie to surrender. Instead, the bandit and his men opened
fire at a range of twelve yards. Twelve of Colonel Pretorius'
men were killed before Fourie was captured. He was immedi-
ately brought to Pretoria. A court-martial was arranged, strictly
according to military law. One of its members asked General
Smuts to be excused from the jury, since he was an old friend
of Fourie's. So much the more he should sit on the bench,
Smuts replied.

The trial took place on Saturday. Japie Fourie made a defi-
ant speech. He asked for mercy to be shown to his brother,
who had only followed his own lead. He did not try to conceal
his crimes. He boasted of them. He concluded with a curse
against England. The verdict, condemning him to death, was
unanimous.

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OLD MASTER

Friends of Fourie tried to interfere on his behalf with Botha.
They could not reach the Prime Minister, who spent the criti-
cal week end in strict seclusion at his son-in-law's farm.

On Sunday morning a volley in the Pretoria prison yard put
Japie Fourie to death. The echo of the shots resounded for
many years throughout South Africa. The irreconcilable Boers
had their martyr.

In Parliament, Smuts defended the decision of the court,
pointing out that the case was not a question of "Khaki versus
Boer," but "the pith of a nation against a marauding band/'

Even Hertzog declaimed in the House of Assembly: "The
government has done its duty in suppressing disorder and vio-
lence in the country. I have never accused the government of
having done anything wrong in so doing/' This miserable op-
portunist and fence-sitter wisely passed over in silence the
potent fact that a single word of his at the right moment would
have prevented the whole revolution.

A commission of inquiry was appointed, and a Bluebook on
the rebellion laid on the table of the House. The nationalists
attacked both the commission and the Bluebook, edited by an
outstanding university professor, in unmeasured terms. Hertzog
was again back where he belonged. He led the choir of vituper-
ation. He asserted that Maritz had used his name without his
authority. "Why did Hertzog not repudiate him?" a heckler
asked. "I would have lost all my influence over the people!"
came the frank reply. "If I would have spoken openly, I would
have been placed where others were already in jail. If I had
reproached the rebels, I would have prostituted myself. I was
never much a man of hollow protests, nor was I inclined to go
to jail to please the Minister of Defence/'

The Honorable J. W. Quinn, Unionist member from the
Rand, expressed the unanimous feeling of the majority: "I
would have shot the honorable member from Smithfield. But
his is not the kind that gets shot. He is safe. He walks in the
dark, and you can't shoot men in the dark/'

The surviving traitors were dealt with extremely leniently.
Although De Wet was captured as he was about to go over to

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the Germans, Smuts testified on his behalf that there was
not the slightest evidence of his having had any connection
with the enemy. The martinet was condemned to a term of six
years, but released after less than a year and a half.

General Kemp and his prophet Van Rensburg, who had es-
caped to South West Africa, surrendered as Botha invaded the
German colony, while Maritz fled to Germany. They were per-
mitted to return. No punishment was inflicted upon them. Gen-
eral Kemp is still today a Member of the House of Assembly,
and one of the most ferocious opponents of Smuts.

The five shilling revolution ended ignominiously. None of its
objects was achieved. Only military operations in German
South West Africa were delayed for three months, greatly to
the advantage of the not-quite-prepared South African Defence
Force.

When Smuts was duly indemnified in Parliament, he joined
Botha, who was already at the front, in driving the Germans
out of the South West.

Chapter 20 TWO-FRONT WAR

IN THE MIDDLE OF APRIL, 1915, GENERAL SMUTS SAILED TO GER-

man South West Africa, to take command of the southern forces,
while General Botha was operating in the North. There was
little doubt about the outcome. Forty-four thousand men of
the Defence Force were pitted against nine thousand Germans.
It was, however, the baptism of fire for the South Africans, the
first military action in the short history of the Union, whereas
the Germans were seasoned colonial veterans. Moreover, the
equipment of the Defence Force was rather sketchy, its organi-

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OLD MASTER

zation was still in its infancy, and there was no trained general
staff.

While Botha operated from Swakopmund, Smuts' force
pushed in from Luederitz Bay, which an English f ortnation had
taken months before, and went on, struggling against sand-
storms, torrid heat, and venomous insects. The Germans had
abandoned the flats along the coast. But before retreating they
had littered the soil with land mines, and poisoned every water
hole. The Union soldiers had to rely on distilled sea water,
hauled over the desert sands for hundreds of miles. Not before
they reached Garub did they find fresh natural water. Garub
lies on the edge of the desert, only a few miles before the high-
lands begin. Here the Germans had entrenched themselves in
strong positions. The only pass leading through the pathless
hills was the neck of Aus, which was fortified with trenches cut
in the solid rock.

Smuts applied the lessons the Boer War had taught him. The
commandos had rarely ventured upon frontal attacks. They
preferred to swing around the flanks, and by-pass the enemy.
True to his old pattern, as guerrilla raider, Smuts outflanked
the obstacle. The Germans were threatened in the rear. They
fled. The dreaded neck of Aus passed into the hands of the
Union forces.

Throughout the time this operation took, Smuts had secretly
dispersed four powerful columns. The first column executed a
brilliant march across the Kalahari Desert, trekking a distance
of over seven hundred miles of desolate country with practi-
cally no grazing for the horses, and very little water for the
men. A few canisters were transported by motorcar. The horses
could chew the thorn bushes. Most of the animals had to be
left behind, but the column made a beeline for the German
railway center at Keetmanshoop. At the same time the three
other columns pushed on from the southeast and the south.
Finding themselves menaced on all sides, the Germans precipi-
tately retreated to Windhoek, the capital, and the seat of the
wireless station which was the first and most important goal of
the campaign. Botha anticipated the enemy's move, and hur-

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ried in forced marches to arrive before the Germans. At this
stage Herr Seitz, the German Governor General, made his first
suggestion for an armistice. He pointed out that, despite the
retreat in his own territory, the Germans were winning every-
where in Europe, and that this factor would decide the war.
South Africa would have incurred the wrath of a world-domi-
nating German Empire. Why not avoid this fate? Why not call
it a campaign? Each side should remain in the possession of
the territory held at this particular moment. Fighting should
stop.

After consultation with Smuts, Botha insisted on the surren-
der of all South West Africa. Seitz refused, left the conference,
but reappeared on the next day to announce his unconditional
surrender.

Some of his followers carried on their struggle for a short
time. But when they felt the first bombs from British airplanes,
they ran. However, they did not forget to strew mines behind
them. Six thousand were removed by the South African engi-
neers, for a loss of only six lives. Now the last German com-
mander resisting, Colonel Franck, approached Botha with the
insolent words: "I come to give up, Mr. . . . hm, Mr. . . . Shall
I call you Mr. Botha, or how else? Of course I cannot recog-
nize you as a general. Generals are made in Germany."

Botha replied that his rank did not matter, as long as his
terms were accepted: unconditional surrender. The German
bully threw up his hands.

Peace was concluded a few days later. The Union of South
Africa had conquered a territory larger than France. But Smuts
insisted immediately that the vanquished should get a fair deal.
He issued an order of the day: "All ranks of the Union forces
are reminded that self-restraint, courtesy, and consideration of
the feelings of others on the part of the troops, whose good for-
tune it is to be the victors, are essential."

The conquest of South West Africa, executed with clockwork
precision, was the first Allied success in the First World War.
Due to Smuts' constitutional leniency, the Germans in the ter-
ritory, however, never learned that they were beaten. Mono-

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OLD MASTER

cled, horsewhip in hand, their disarmed officers strutted along
the streets of Windhoek. Every night German national songs
were chanted. German South West Africa, although later at
Versailles made a mandate of the Union of South Africa, re-
mained the hotbed of Pangermanism, and became the strong-
hold of incipient Nazism in Africa.

Flag-waving, and covered with garlands, Pretoria received
the victors, Botha and Smuts, toward the middle of July. But
this demonstration of loyalty was deceptive. The capital was
flooded by witnesses to the inquiry into the five-shilling revo-
lution. Although the nationalists boycotted the inquiry, without
being punished for their defiance of the law, the tension was,
once again, almost unbearable. It was increased by the after-
math of the Lusitania demonstrations. After the Germans had
committed the crime of sinking the Lusitania a. crime that
materially affected feelings in the then still neutral United
States, and undoubtedly contributed to America's entry into
the war the Loyalists in most important towns in the Union
lost their patience with the government's complacency toward
the Germans in South Africa. It was particularly Smuts who
had warned the people against "persecuting" the Germans in
the country. "Myself," he had stated in Parliament, amidst peals
of laughter, "I am frequently taken for a German." When the
news of the Lusitania came through, however, Johannesburg
patriots got out of hand. They had already held a number of
protest meetings against the lenient way in which the Defence
Department dealt with the internment of Germans, and against
continued trading with the enemy meetings against which
Smuts had protested in a telegram to the mayor. Now aroused
masses occupied the premises of firms which continued busi-
ness as usual with Germany via the Portuguese colonies. Offices,
shops, warehouses and even private residences of subversive
elements were wrecked. Similar scenes were repeated at Kru-
gersdorp and elsewhere in the mining area. They also occurred,
though on a smaller scale, in Pretoria and Natal.

The government was compelled to step up the internment

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OLD MASTER

of Germans. In a way this measure backfired. It kindled the
flames of hatred among the rapidly increasing number of na-
tionalist Boers. Suddenly half of them claimed their own Ger-
man descent. The victorious campaign in South West Africa
was not popular with them. Smuts tried to minimize the new
wave of agitation. Dismissing the recruits from South West
Africa, he warned them ironically that they would hear terrible
atrocity stories about their conduct during the campaign, as
soon as they returned to their farms and dorps. In fact, such
stories mushroomed. On the other hand, complaints about al-
leged cruelties were intermingled with derision of Botha and
Smuts for not having taken more prisoners. Hertzog, who stood
behind the new upheaval, carefully, as ever, in shadow, played
both ends against the middle.

Johannesburg repeated the triumphant welcome Pretoria
had given Botha and Smuts. In the hope of bringing the Eng-
lish population and the sensible and decent part of the Boer
people together, the government decided to hold general elec-
tions. The House was five years old. It no longer represented
the opinion of the nation.

Smuts and Botha found the going worse than rough. Even
Johannesburg was in a miserable state. The Rand industry was
faced with almost insurmountable obstacles. Yet it had to carry
on. Its output of gold was of vital importance for the Empire
at war. Other difficulties were due to war conditions. Military
priorities as well as the dangers of the U-boat made impossible
replacements from England of obsolete machines, whereas
South Africa, at that time, had no steel industry of its own. The
labor situation was even more of a menace. All able-bodied
Englishmen, to the last man, had joined the forces, both the
Defence Force and the Imperial troops overseas. Among them
was Mr. Creswell, the Labor leader. His place in the Labor
Party was taken by power-drunk, illiterate Boer union bosses
who instigated a rule of terror. The miners, now mostly Dutch
peasant boys, exacted conditions which all but ruined the in-
dustry. They extorted unlimited and exorbitant concessions in
wages, working hours, paid holidays. Discipline was entirely

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OLD MASTER

gone. Directors, managers, and even foremen lived in constant
fear for their lives. In the end, working costs per ton far ex-
ceeded the value of the gold won at standard prices. These ab-
surd circumstances prevailed throughout the war.

The Nationalists under Hertzog, although arch-reactionaries,
encouraged "syndicalism," as the forerunner of Communism
was called, in the mines, in order to cause trouble to the gov-
ernment and to impede the war effort. Hertzog declared at
Edenburg: "South Africa has done enough for the Empire.
Personally, I object to any more money being expended on the
cause of the Empire."

Smuts retorted that South Africa was fighting for her own
cause. It was impossible to tolerate Germany as a neighbor.
Besides, the whole expenditure of the South West African cam-
paign had been less than fifteen millions, an amount worth the
conquest of a country almost as big as the Union itself, and
opening the gates to further expansion.

This very argument incensed the Nationalists still more. They
hated Smuts' budding conception of Pan-Africa. They did not
want to be mixed up with countries settled by non-Boers. They
feared the idea of losing their scant majority among the white
people.

Smuts carried on the fight for his vision of the future, Afri-
can brotherhood, which was later to develop into the ideal of
human brotherhood. "Our northern boundaries will not be
where they are now, and we shall leave to our children a huge
country, in which to develop a type for themselves, and to form
a people which will be a true civilizing agent in this dark con-
tinent. That is the large viewl"

The large view? "Rhodes reborn!" shouted the Nationalist
press. "Civilizing agents!" To hell with this nauseating civiliza-
tion! The children should become God-fearing Calvinistic plan-
tation owners, as their forefathers were. Among the three sects
of the Dutch Church, only one, the United, gave the govern-
ment a modicum of support. The other two, the Hervormde
and the Gereformeerde, sent their somber predikants right into
the fray, to attack and curse the government.

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OLD MASTER

The paper that had called Smuts "Rhodes reborn/' was a
newcomer to the South African press. Its first issue appeared in
Cape Town the very day Botha returned from the South-
western campaign. Its editor was Dr. Daniel Frangois Malan,
Hertzog's henchman. The unfrocked clergyman was entering
the newspaper world, he insisted, to raise the level of political
debate, and to reinstate the old dignity of controversy. Die
Burger was soon involved in more slander, libel, and blackmail
cases than the rest of the whole South African press together.
Today it still leads the choir of the pro-Nazis. Keerom Street,
where Die Burger's premises stand, sounds as Cliveden sounded
once in England.

At the same time another debutant bowed his way into the
public. Hen Oswald Pirow, then the Hertzogite candidate on
the Rand, declared ominously: "The ill-advised policy of our
opponents will ruin South Africa, and thereby, for all practical
purposes, rob the British Empire of the fairest of its colonies/'
His Dutch audience had difficulty in understanding the words
the round-cheeked, pale-faced young man with the piercing,
small, black eyes behind rimless spectacles, was sputtering.
Herr Pirow had difficulties with the Dutch language, which he
has not yet quite overcome.

De Wet was released from prison, where he had been treated
like a patient in a sanitarium. He pledged himself not to get
involved in politics. Immediately, however, he stumped die
country, predicting "great changes in the constitutional posi-
tion of South Africa" and confiding to his adherents that he
still regarded himself as the George Washington below the
equator.

Perturbed by the competition, Hertzog summoned his men
to a congress of the Nationalists in Pretoria. Advocate Tielman
Roos, the chairman of the Transvaal branch of the party, and
Hertzog's right-hand man, opened the attack by calling Botha
and Smuts "no better than hysterical old Kafir hags." The joke
was received with uproarious laughter. Ever witty Advocate
Roos' future in the Nationalist movement was assured. A dele-

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OLD MASTER

gate by the name of Roux told the Congress that he had been
walking some time "with dynamite in his pocket for Botha and
Smuts."

Hertzog remained conspicuously silent. The frail little man,
much too carefully attired for his surrounding, simply nodded
when the congress rose to cheer him at the end of the session.

Smuts was the principal speaker on the other side, both on
behalf of the government and for the cause of the war effort.
He conducted his campaign on the pattern of a khaki election.
He expressed his pride in the success of the first campaign
which should not be the last. In the face of furious resentment
he continued to call for volunteers, even for the Imperial forces
on the European battlefields. Vigorously he defended Botha
against the Nationalist slander that the Prime Minister had
"become an Englishman/' He appealed to the English voters
for support, asking them the very English question: "Have we
not played the game?"

"You have!" roared the Boers in reply. The hatred of the
irreconcilables became pathological. In all his meetings Smuts
was confronted with pictures of the dead men, De la Rey,
Beyers, and Japie Fourie. The latter's widow complained that
the corpse of her late husband had been desecrated. When
Smuts refuted this crazy insinuation, she insisted on seeing the
body. But the government had buried Japie Fourie in an un-
disclosed place, lest his grave should become the scene of riot-
ing and demonstration. After the elections it would be, and
indeed it was, opened to Mrs. Fourie, and she was satisfied
that her husband was resting in peace.

Mrs. De la Rey published an open letter laying the respon-
sibility for her husband's death squarely at Smuts' door. The
letter kindled the flames of the Boer racialists into white heat.
There was general talk of a new revolution. The talk did not
even stop when the fact was revealed that the infuriating letter
had been written while Mrs. De la Rey was staying as Mrs.
Smuts' guest at Doornkloof, and that it was a fake.

Like the furies the nationalist Boer women plunged into the

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OLD MASTER

upheaval. Thousands of families were torn asunder. The father's
hand was raised against his son; neighbors became deadly
enemies,

On September 23, the pandemonium climaxed in the in-
famous outrage at Newlands, the Dutch suburb of Johannes-
burg. Smuts was warned against speaking in this center of
hooliganism. He braved the danger. A terrific din arose as soon
as he entered the hall. His "dynamic" friend Roux, whom Smuts
later described as an "unkempt, desperate-looking man," was
among the audience, as was Mary Fitzgerald, in spite of her
English name one of the fiercest Boer furies. She had taken an
innocent tot along which, she pretended, was the orphan of
one of the "murdered" revolutionists of 1914, a man by the
name of Labuschagne. Jostled by the mob, the child cried, and
thus beyond doubt established its identity.

The rowdy meeting that ensued was well organized. First
rotten eggs were thrown at the speaker, then brickbats, and
beer bottles. When Smuts tried to speak, the crowd howled
him down with the words "Zuid Afrika Eerste" ( South Africa
First!), the battle cry of the racialists.

Smuts remained immovable. His friends urged and beseeched
him to leave. He did not listen. The first heavy stones were
thrown. Then only he decided that it was time to close the
meeting. Some innocent by-standers would be killed, he feared.
Personally fearless as ever, he battled his way right through
the densest crowd, who belabored his followers with sticks,
pick handles and sjamboks. Some even hit the Minister. He
returned blow for blow.

In front of the hall Smuts* faithful chauffeur, Hodgson, was
twice pulled out of the driver's seat before he could start. When
the car left, a few shots were exchanged. One was fired by a
detective, into the air, to frighten the hoodlums. A few shots
were undoubtedly aimed at Smuts, who did not bat an eyelash.
He was always sure that his was a charmed life.

A social gathering should have followed the political meet-
ing. Smuts' only comment was: "Verily, a sociall" But a few
days later he acknowledged: "I am the best hated man in South

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OLD MASTER

Africa." Yet he refused a worried friend's well-meant advice to
relax or better to resign, in order to save his life. He was no
quitter. Fate had burdened him with a great task. He rejoiced
in carrying his load.

The elections left the South African Party the governmental
party with fifty-four seats, as the strongest in the House. But
the absolute majority was gone. The Unionists, the English,
under Sir Thomas Smarrt won thirty-nine seats. Hertzog's fol-
lowing leaped from five to twenty-seven. The Labor Party re-
turned in the old strength of four men. There were six inde-
pendents.

A complete volte-face had taken place in the Free State. The
South African Party, which had carried all but one seat in 1910,
lost every constituency. In turn Hertzog, who had won his own
constituency in Smithfield with the overwhelming majority of
1,315 against 272, gained all the seats in the Free State but one
in Bloemfontein which went to the Unionists. More than 30
per cent of the voters were revealed as Nationalists, among
them a majority of the rural electorate.

In the first session of the new Parliament the government
passed important consolidating measures, attempting seriously
to deal with the industrial and social troubles. Parliament col-
laborated loyally. But restiveness was ever increasing on the
platteland. Incessantly Hertzog reiterated his battle cry: South
Africa First! When the government introduced a most modest
bill to curtail trade with the enemy and, in order to stave off
more radical demands by the Unionists, declared that South
Africa proposed to follow the United Kingdom's policy on that
matter, but not to go a step further, Hertzog jumped up from
his seat. "The government says that South Africa's interests
need not be considered, but that only the Imperial interests
count. The Ministry is intimating that what is good enough for
the United Kingdom is good enough for the Union. I warn the
government. That is a fatal policy."

Throughout the First World War South Africa remained an
unhappy and torn-asunder country. Anti-British feelings were

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OLD MASTER

widespread. Even the Dutch press supporting Botha and Smuts
could not refrain from gloating over English reverses, and from
mildly advocating the new creed of Hertzogism. Yet the posi-
tion of the government was assured. The Unionists, His Maj-
esty's loyal opposition, lent their political foes all their strength.
Colonel Creswell, the Labor leader, declared: "The Nationalist
speeches betray a wish that we may lose the war." He swung
his party into an all-out effort to see the war through. Hertzog
remained the leader of defeatism. Both on African soil and on
the blood-soaked European battlefields the South African sol-
diers, Dutch and English alike, put up an excellent show. Once
more they proved that South African troops, affectionately
called Springboks, in the right hands, are great and gallant
fighters.

On the fifth of January, 1916, Smuts, at Potchefstroom, re-
viewed a body of volunteers for East Africa. He emphasized
the hardships they must expect. German East Africa was the
haunt of the tsetse fly, the deadly enemy of man and beast. His
"beloved sons" would not find the sandy flats of South West
Africa. They would have to march through a country covered
with thick, in some parts almost impenetrable, bush. He re-
gretted that for compelling reasonsthe foremost of which, it
went without saying, was Hertzog he could not accompany
them. But they would have a gallant leader: the British General
Smith-Dorrien, the hero of Mons. Moreover, General Crewe
of the Defence Force, an English officer during the Boer War,
would look after the Springboks.

General Smith-Dorrien arrived at Cape Town. Immediately
he fell gravely ill. His illness, however, could not delay the
departure of the South African contingent. The rainy season
was drawing dangerously close, and the move had to be made
instantly.

London sounded out Smuts whether he would accept the
command. Smuts seized the opportunity with both hands. It
was an escape into the most advanced, most perilous fighting

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OLD MASTER

line. But it was an escape from a hated fratricidal strife at home
into a good fight against a real enemy in a hostile land.

On die tenth of February he was officially appointed Lieu-
tenant-General in the Imperial Army, and Commander in Chief
of the campaign in the German South East. Both the London
newspapers and the South African English-language press
showered him with praise. Die Burger, Dr. Malan's venomous
sheet, congratulated him, too now he would draw double pay.
It was a miserable lie. Smuts served the British Empire without
pay. He only drew his salary as a South African Minister.

On Friday, the eleventh of February, in the late evening, he
left Pretoria, where he had spent the last hours with routine
desk work. His family and a few friends gathered at the rail-
road station. One of them asked why he was leaving the coun-
try at such a critical period to venture into the land of the
anopheles, malaria, the tsetse fly, and the jigger flea. With a
quiet glance of his steel-blue eyes Smuts answered: "Do you
know that there are seventeen thousand of our men there?"

He kissed his grandchild, little Klein-Jannie, good-bye. The
train thundered away. A handkerchief waved from the window
of the reserved car. A few minutes after midnight, on February
12, the General had joined up again.

He was now an Imperial general, not only a Boer com-
mander. Yet he remained Springbok number one. He shared
the almost unbearable hardships of his men. Once he saw a
soldier in the ranks collapsing with an attack of malaria. The
Commander in Chief jumped from his horse, lifted the poor
devil on to his own saddle, led the horse, walking at the bridle,
and talking to the delirious patient, to impart to him something
of his own strength and confidence.

In due course Smuts himself was stricken with malaria. He
refused to yield to the disease. He lived on quinine pills, and
carried on. His very appearance was a tonic to the troops. His
big Vauxhall, in which, according to Frangois Brett-Young,
then an officer in the campaign, "Smuts daily risked his life"
was cheered wherever it was seen.

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OLD MASTER

There was nothing of the showman in him. On the contrary.
Once more he seemed inaccessible, not in his private conduct,
but in his conduct of the expedition. Probably he had already
learned that there was somewhere an invisible, but unbridge-
able gap between him and lesser human beings. Even his most
intimate collaborators, ranking among whom were General
van der Venter, his faithful companion during the Cape raid,
and the Boer General Joubert, were only let into his plans as
far as they were immediately concerned.

The men in the ranks knew nothing of this self-seclusion.
They chanted to the tune of 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?

Yes, I ken Jan Smuts, and Jourdain too,
Van der Venter and the sportsman Selous,
Springbok, and Sikh, for they're all true-blue
When they're strafing the Hun in the morning.

Unfortunately it was not as easy as that to strafe the Hun in
the morning. Germany had entrusted her most brilliant World
War number one general, von Lettow-Vorbeck, with the de-
fense of South East Africa. He was under Wilhelm II's special
order to hold the "gem of the German Colonial Empire" at all
costs.

When Smuts arrived, a reconnaissance force, on its first march
to M*buyuni, where the railway ended, had scouted the enemy
entrenched in great strength upon the eastern slopes of the
very difficult Kili terrain., The German "pom-poms" and moun-
tain guns were admirably placed, and difficult to locate. Smuts
reconnoitered the situation for himself. Again he permitted
himself one of his rare smiles. T'Chaka, the Lion of the Zulus,
had known a method of handling exactly this strategic position.
The great black swordsman had based his idea on die horns of
a bull, enveloping the enemy by an outflanking movement. On
this principle Smuts sent his mounted brigade, based on the

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OLD MASTER

Kill, to sweep along the western foothills. His Springboks, born
on horseback, were just the right men to do that. The main
force was concentrated for a thrust at Moshi, the terminus of
the Tanganyika-Kili railway. Stubbornly contesting every foot
of the ground, the Germans fell back. Emperor Wilhelm's As-
karis, shining black sons of the bush, grinned at the white
troops assailing them on this difficult territory that only a native
could really negotiate. To show them how wrong they were the
South Africans went at them in a most workmanlike and effec-
tive manner, with butt and bayonet.

The second position of the Germans was protected by seven
miles of dense bush, behind the River Lumi. In an arduous
night march the South Africans passed the Lumi. Their mounted
men occupied Chala Hill and other slopes. On March 11 Smuts'
infantry brigades attacked precipitously the bush-clad hills of
Reater and Latema. They worked their way through thick,
thorny scrub, which, however, offered little protection against
the guns of the sunken German cruiser Koenigsberg, now de-
fending the hills. It was a slow and costly advance. Its main
objective was a green kopje, surmounted by a fort, that alter-
nately flaunted the German and, in honor of the Askari garri-
son, the prophet's green flag. The Springboks rushed the first
and second lines of the trenches. By night, from the third line
of defense, the Askaris made a counterattack. They fought like
demons. The explanation of their reckless ferocity was revealed
in the morning. Water bottles filled with raw spirits were found
on the bodies of their dead. At dawn the Germans were driven
out. For the first time they practiced what from then on was
to become their habit: to leave behind their wounded, sick and
dead, for their foes to care for.

Smuts' own troops were plagued with diseases. He under-
stood that only colored troops were really able to withstand,
both constitutionally and morally, the conditions prevailing in
East Africa. He reported to London that it was impossible to
keep white troops for any length of time in this particular bat-
tle area, that produced not only bodily unfitness, but mental
depression. Moreover, native troops were immune to the scourge

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OLD MASTER

of malaria. Raw recruits from Nigeria and the Congo were dis-
patched to him, and he trained them, while he had already
made up his mind to send home most of his South African boys.
But as long as they were on duty, he tolerated no fatigue.
"Fear? Hunger? Thirst?" he asked, when his generals warned
him against overstraining his men. "No time for that!" He him-
self took no time out "for that." He looked pale, thin, emaci-
ated. But he drove the Germans from what General von Let-
tow- Vorbeck believed to be a practically impregnable position
around Kilimanjaro. Smuts captured this highest peak in Africa,
though at a cost in human lives that surpassed all the losses of
the South West Africa campaign together. Now he was in the
undisputed possession of the richest part of East Africa, the
Moschi-Aruscha region.

After the seizure of Moschi, the railroad of the Tanganyika
line, and with van der Venter threatening the central line from
Dar-es-Salaam to Tanganyika, Smuts' men made steady prog-
ress through dense bushes, under a blazing sun and torrential
rains, encircling elaborately prepared positions, fighting fiercely
and winning an endless series of minor engagements. The first
task was to clear the railway. Smuts proceeded methodically.
With three mobile columns he swept the country from the fron-
tier to Pagani. It was an adventurous enterprise. For the first
time human beings in concerted action worked their way
through the virgin bush along the foothills of the Pare Moun-
tains. The tire tracks of armored cars mingled with the spoor
of the ostrich. Airplanes, protecting the advancing columns,
frightened away the startled game by the thousands. Man
appeared in the jungle.

On June 13 Smuts* troops occupied the important center of
Wilhelmstal. In the meantime van der Venter, assaulting Kon-
doa-Irangi, attracted as many soldiers as Lettow- Vorbeck could
spare. For four days this German stronghold was besieged by
starving South Africans. But when the news spread that Smuts
in person was coming, the mounted Springboks with empty
bellies charged, drove out the German defenders, and chased
Lettow- Vorbeck's dwindling forces in the direction of Handeni.

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OLD MASTER

There Smuts himself went after them, but found the nest
empty. Again the native spies had warned the Germans. Colo-
nel Byron, with some British platoons, followed them through
the thick bush, correctly in the prescribed English battle for-
mation. He engaged the more numerous enemy, and, after three
hours of bitter fighting, when dusk fell was forced to retreat.
German machine-guns fired into their rear. This was too much
provocation. Colonel Byron commanded: turn about! The Ger-
man machine-guns revealed themselves by their spurts of flame.
In a night-long fight, Englishman against machine-gun, the
machine-gun lost. They were silenced. Once more the Germans
fled.

On June 23 Smuts issued secret orders for a night march
with "unwheeled" transport. The guns had to be carried on
mule back. Late in the afternoon long lines of infantry in
"Indian file" vanished in the dark recesses of the jungle. No
light was shown. Smoking was strictly forbidden. On the next
day the enemy was located as he waited behind the heavily
fortified Lukigwra River. General Sheppard advanced to make
a frontal attack. His raw men raised a terrific din. The Germans
immediately fell into the trap. They attacked while Sheppard's
men retreated in perfect order, but rather in a hurry. General
Hosken made a wide encircling movement. At noon his British
Fusiliers and Kashmiris took the hills protecting the flank,
but Sheppard, reinforced and this time in earnest, repulsed the
German attempt to break out of a trap by crossing the river.

Simultaneously Brigadier-General Crewe, the "co-operating
officer from the artillery," sent a mounted platoon forward, as
a reconnoitering patrol. Returning, the horseman could suggest
the distance and the direction of the targets, imparting a knowl-
edge particularly useful for "indirect" fire from guns firing from
a covered position at an unseen target. British artillery was thus
converted to an offensive weapon. Its accurate, deadly fire ex-
terminated the German contingent. Smuts showed himself
rather pleased. He had not made a frontal attack, which he
hated for its cost in human lives, but again one of his precious
flank attacks, so heavy with memories of the Boer War.

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Naval landing parties arrived. With their co-operation Smuts
could, at his leisure, occupy smaller ports. Now supplies
streamed in by sea. Smuts redoubled the energy of his drive.
On September 6 he entered Dar-es-Salaam, ironically called
Haven of Peace. The Union Jack was hoisted over the colonial
capital. The German administration fled to the native kraal of
Moro-Moro. But there they were driven out by Belgians from
the Congo after ten days of desperate fighting. Smuts con-
trolled practically all of South East Africa.

But the indomitable General von Lettow-Vorbeck now
played Smuts' own guerrilla game in reverse. Although his last
men had no more military importance, but only a certain nui-
sance value, they were still roaming East Africa on the day the
peace of Versailles was signed.

Soon after his departure from East Africa, Smuts received a
letter containing the perfect indictment of the German colonial
power which he had smashed. This letter, incidentally, was, on
October 24, 1918, presented to the American Senate by Mr.
Lodge, and embodied in the Senate Document of the Sixty-
Fifth Congress as Document 296.

The letter is dated Magila Mission, Mukeza, Tanganyika,
November 7, 1917, addressed to Lieutenant-General Jan Chris-
tian Smuts, "relative to German rule in East Africa," and writ-
ten by Frank Weston, D.D., Bishop of Zanzibar, Head of the
Universities' Mission in the Eastern Districts of German East
Africa, who had served as a porter, commanding African car-
riers in the coastal column of the East African Force. It reads:

Many thousands of porters and carriers who served the forces of
Great Britain would be executed by the authorities if the German
administration should return. If we let the Kaiser have East Africa
again, we would be guilty of a monstrous betrayal of thousands who
gladly trusted us and followed us into the war.

I have won my own personal experience in my twenty years of
residence in East Africa. I have many friends among Moham-
medans and heathen Africans. Swahili became "my language." So
I can say that the Germans rule entirely by fear. Their failure is due
to their inbred cruelty which they encourage their African under-

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lings to copy. Cruel punishments are their means of spreading
terror throughout the land.

Flogging is the German's pleasure. Twenty-five lashes are given
as commonly as in London on a big day the police cry "Move onl"
Fifty lashes are very frequently given in two installments. Now
there are floggings and floggings. The African does not easily cry
out. But those who have had to pass government buildings at flog-
ging times will bear me out that it was no ordinary flogging that
produced the shrieks to which we had to listen. The German
sjambok, or rhinoceros or hippopotamus hide, is cut to damage, not
merely to hurt. The colored soldiers who lay it on are past masters
in the art, and the German himself presides at the ceremony to see
that no mercy is given. To make it still more cruel there is a notori-
ous law of floggings. It is this: the condemned man is not tied up
as he ought to be. He lies on the earth, his face in the dust or on
a hard floor. After the first two or three strokes, he usually has to
be seized, and forced to keep still. If he continues to wriggle and
scream, he is liable to receive the same number of strokes again,
there and then. Again, when the punishment is over, if in his pain
and excitement he forgets to come to attention and salute the Ger-
man, he receives the whole punishment for the third time. Cruelty
is a mild term to describe it.

Torture is another recognized method of dealing with the black
man. The Germans always accept the word of their African under-
lings against a native. Torture is employed to produce confession
or evidence. I will give two cases of my own knowledge, both of
them concerning friends of mine: My first friend was sent by his
German officer into the woods. Policemen accompanied him, and
beat him with sjamboks for a whole week, until his body was a
mass of wounds and sores. My second friend was put into the "iron
hat." A band of iron was passed around his head, and tightened by
means of a vicelike screw, so as to press more especially his temples.
The agony is unspeakable. Another dodge is to tie a string to the
middle finger, pass it back under and round the forearm, and
tighten it steadily, till the man confesses whatever the German
wants to hear. With a system such as this the police can supply a
criminal to meet any exigency, and can also wipe out all private
grudges they may have against their fellow subjects. In fact, the
colored underlings are as bad as their German masters, and no one
dares complain. Revenge is, in my experience, always taken on those
who venture to appeal to the German.

Again, the punishment of the chain gang is a most serious cruelty.
Eight men, or thereabouts, are chained by the neck to one very

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OLD MASTER

heavy chain. They are not unchained at all, till their sentence is
finished. Day and night, at all times and under all circumstances,
the eight men live and move as one, while they are entirely at the
mercy of the jailers, who freely use on them sjambok, heavy-nailed
boots, or the butt ends of their rifles. I have seen women in chains

Many of my friends have been through this; some have died
under it. My teachers, who were caught during the war and locked
up, only because they taught an Englishman, have also told me their
experience of chains. A flogging, they say, is preferable. They
should know, because they have had a taste of both.

Deaths in jail are a common event. Of the brutality and ill treat-
ment causing them, there can be no question; there are too many
who have suffered it. The Germans encourage their colored police
in cruelty. Even in court, before his conviction, the native is knocked
about by the police. The German quite approves. If the accused,
or a witness, does not stand strictly at attention, if he moves his
hands while making his statement, if he calls the German bwana
masterinstead of bwana unkubwa great master if he shows hesi-
tation in answering, or if he does not understand the German's
broken Swahili, or if, as it so often happened, he blunders in the
effort to express his own vernacular in Swahili, the policeman boxes
his ears, or hits him with his fists. This is the custom. This exalts
German dignity.

The colored schoolteachers, appointed by the Germans, were
brought up in the same way. They were themselves so often flogged,
that they turned into great floggers. They find a sjambok, freely
used, necessary to educate small boys between seven and thirteen.
It is a disease, this flogging. It makes, the German feared every-
where. But it poisons the German's mind as well as the mind of his
African underling.

The vicarious punishment the German loves to mete out makes
parents and wives suffer for their sons and husbands. Another pe-
culiarly German habit is the persecution of native chiefs. Metaka,
one of the highest Yao chiefs, a sultan to his own people, died in
German chains. His offense was that he had written a letter to his
brother in Portuguese Nyasaland, warning him lest he move into
German territory. German spies intercepted that letter.

As a final example of German terrorism let me add that Germans
on inspection tours require to be supplied with a young girl at each
sleeping place. These are but a few typical examples of how the
German colonial system works. It is cruel, relentless, inhuman. And
the reason for all is that it is German.

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OLD MASTER

Chapter 21 ON THE ROOF OF THE WORLD

ON MARCH 17, 1917, SMUTS ARRIVED IN LONDON. HE HAD COME

to take Botha's place at the meeting of the Imperial War Cabi-
net. The Prime Minister could not leave South Africa. The
country was in the throes of the gravest crisis since the Boer
War. Unrest was worse even than in the summer of 1914, when
some ten thousand rebels had taken up arms. This time there
was no bloodshed. But more than half the Boer people clam-
ored furiously for republican independence.

Hertzog was carrying his crusade one step further. Thus far
he had only demanded the Boers' supremacy in a South Africa
loosely connected with the Empire. Now, while Great Britain
was entirely absorbed in her tremendous war effort, Hertzog
found the moment propitious to demand complete severance of
even the formal ties between the motherland and the Domin-
ion. He published a "manifesto" he issued such highfalutin
manifestoes throughout his ensuing career stating the three
points of Hertzogism: ( 1 ) All people have a right to choose for
themselves the sovereignty under which they wish to live. (2)
The small states have the same right to their sovereignty and
territorial integrity as the big states. (3) The world has a right
to be free from any disturbance of its peace that has its origin
in aggression and disregard of peoples and nations.

It sounded very well. It almost tallied with a diplomatic note
that the British Government was then addressing to the neu-
trals: "No peace is possible until reparations have been made
for violated rights and liberties, nor until the principles of
nationalities, and the independent existence of small states is
recognized/'

The difference was only that London was pleading for the
invaded, devastated, and white-bled countries of Belgium, Ser-
bia and others, whereas the Union of South Africa was, of its

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OLD MASTER

own free will, an independent, self-governing partner in the
Empire.

Hertzog and his gang, however, distorted the British note as
a complete justification of their own policy. Always a jump
ahead, Tielman Roos, the lion of the Transvaal, proclaimed, on
his own authority, the restoration of the Republics of the Trans-
vaal and the Orange Free State. He sent this declaration to
Lord Buxton, the Governor General, for transmission to the
British Government, and received a formal acknowledgment.
After long months of silence, he got in answer to his question
the reply from London: "Your earlier communication was en-
titled: 'A statement as to the attitude of the Nationalist Party'
toward a certain question. His Majesty's Government naturally
assumed that they were not being asked for, and were not ex-
pected to offer, an expression of opinion in regard to a state-
ment issued by a particular political party in a self-governing
Dominion."

This cool correctness on the part of the English, who at that
time had more weighty matters on their mind than the moods
of Messieurs Hertzog and Roos, only intensified the repeal
agitation which, under Hertzog's incessant urging, now swept
the platteland like veld fire. To an accusation by his own gov-
ernment that he was going back on his pledge and signature at
Vereeniging, he answered with his typical ambiguity: "Per-
sonally I have always been true to Vereeniging, and always will
be. But, nevertheless, a republican system would be better for
South Africa. Every nation has received its liberty in due
course. And, whether it lasts a hundred or a thousand years,
South Africa, too, will win back her freedom."

The lion of the Transvaal had no intention of waiting for the
millennium. "Now, right now, we must be a republic in prac-
tice as well as in theory. The idea of a sister state, as set forth
by General Smuts, is ridiculous!"

Minister D. F. Malan accused Hertzog of dishonesty, once
more pointing out the latter's endorsement of Vereeniging. The
crafty advocate found another ruse. "Vereeniging," he insisted,
"has merely stated that the burghers recognized Edward VII

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OLD MASTER

as their lawful king it did not make them agree to become a
part of the Empire."

When rumors of an impending new revolution became so
thick that one could cut the air with a knife, Botha decided on
a showdown. He moved a resolution in Parliament, to pray that
the Almighty might grant complete victory to the armies of
Great Britain and her allies. The House adopted the resolution
by sixty-three to twenty-one votes. Mr. Kenwood, M.P. for
Durban, cheered: "The King!" The Cabinet, the members, the
public galleries, rose and sang: God Save the King! Hertzog
and his followers remained seated.

It was against this background that Smuts came to represent
South Africa in the Imperial War Cabinet, which held its first
session on March 20. Lloyd George, the new Prime Minister,
opened the meeting with a declaration of British war aims. The
Central Powers must be punished and pay reparations, he said.
It was a bold demand, considering the almost desperate situa-
tion. Russia was clearly on her way out of the war. America was
not yet in, and no one could foretell her ultimate decision.
Moreover, the "unlimited" U-boat war had just been unloosed
by Germany.

Within a few days Smuts had made his mark, not only on the
Imperial Conference, but on the members of the British Cabi-
net. It proved no handicap that he was a Boer. He did not dis-
guise it, either. Proudly he stressed his being "just a Boer from
the veld" while his people were in a state of open uproar. The
very fact that he was a Boer, and yet, as everyone could see, a
passionate adherent to the Empire's cause, gave him a lofty
standing. In one of his first speeches in England, he eulogized
the Empire. "It is not founded on might or force," he said, "but
on moral principles on freedom, equality and equity. Our
opponent, the German Empire, still believes that might is right,
that a military machine is sufficient to govern the world. She
has not yet realized that ultimately all victories are moral. . . ."

Barely two weeks after the first meeting of the Imperial War
Conference, Smuts, almost a stranger, speaking with a distinctly

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foreign accent, was entrusted with a mission to the King of
Belgium and to Paul Painleve, the President of France. Pain-
Iev6 insisted that it was time for the Allies to prepare their
minimum demands in case Germany should make peace over-
tures. What, then, was the situation in Africa? Smuts left no
doubt that the Union would not consent to handing back the
German colonies, which he himself had conquered. Moreover,
a German-African Empire would endanger British sea power,
and her communications with both South America and India.
Albert, King of Belgium, was despondent. He had nothing on
his mind but his own country. President Wilson's first peace
feelers, he grumbled, had not been readily enough taken up by
the Allied statesmen. He even declared Alsace-Lorraine a mat-
ter of secondary concern. All that counted was the restitution
of Belgium.

Disappointed, Smuts returned to London. He felt that France
was too strongly influencing the development in Europe, and
he continued to think so for many years. Nor did heroic little
Belgium seem the hub of the world to him. Smuts* world has
no hub. Smuts' world is universal, with perhaps a slight priority
for South Africa.

He translated his universalism into global strategy. He agreed
with Lloyd George that all fronts were one battlefield. He
argued for the opening of many fronts. Perhaps one should first
attack the Turks, the weakest link in the chain of the Central
Powers. Churchill's Gallipoli expedition had been excellently
planned, Smuts insisted. It had been wrecked only through
inept direction from London.

In his survey of the general war situation, written toward
the end of April, Smuts expressed his regret that the British
forces had become entirely absorbed by the Western Front.
The British and French, the two most important Allied armies,
were stalemated in a theater of war of the enemy's choosing. It
was a war of attrition, gradually wearing down the enemy, but
immensely trying for the Allies themselves. "In that kind of
warfare victory is the costliest possible." He hated bloodshed.

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OLD MASTER

Relentlessly his mind centered on the question of how to make
victory cheaper in expenditure of human lives.

Again his thoughts reverted to Turkey. One could attack
them from Palestine, knock out the already tottering Ottoman
Empire, and push forward to the "soft underbelly" of the
Central Powers from the East.

Lloyd George was quickly persuaded. He offered Smuts
the Palestine command. But the War Office was against the
idea. Lord Robertson, chief of the Imperial staff, as he had
been in the Boer War, opened his heart to his newly won
friend. The Allied strategists did not think much of the "East-
ern conception." Smuts listened, and kept silent. He did not
agree with Lord Roberts. But, always a realist, and mostly
prepared to compromise on matters of tactics, he feared the
influence the strategists and the War Office would have on
Lloyd George. He himself would be far away, and perhaps
stuck with an unfinishable busmess unfinishable for lack of
support in the center until the end of the war. So he declined
Lloyd George's offer. A year later Lord Allenby carried out
what Smuts had planned, and won a historic triumph.

Lloyd George understood the reasons for Smuts' hesitation.
He gave Smuts, in exchange for the Palestine command, a seat
in the British War Cabinet. Now the "Boer from the veld? was
indeed in the center of things. The British War Cabinet, as dis-
tinct from the larger council, the Imperial War Cabinet, in fact
conducted the war. It was a body of six colleagues, Smuts, co-
opted as number seven, being the only "colonial" among them.
In the best English tradition his position in this supreme coun-
cil was never clearly defined. Sometimes he was called "Minis-
ter without Portfolio." But he never alluded to this ministerial
rank. He was Defence Minister of the Union of South Africa.
That was enough. Finally he joined the Cabinet Committee,
the innermost chapter, where he sat next to the Prime Minister,
Viscount Curzon, and Viscount Milner, the man whom in his
youth he had so bitterly pursued. Sir Maurice (later Lord)
Hankey acted as secretary. The committee was to supervise

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OLD MASTER

the entire political, military, and naval situation. Smuts sat on
the roof of the world. He called himself the Empire's handy
man.

By the end of May, ten weeks after his arrival, Smuts was
recognized as unparalleled among Dominion leaders, and un-
surpassed even by English statesmen. In the House of Lords a
banquet was held in his honor, which all the British leaders
attended. Smuts, eulogized by Lord French, whose troops had
harassed him throughout the Cape Colony, delivered a speech
that entered history. It was on this occasion that he coined the
phrase: "The British Commonwealth of Nations/'

"Do not forget in these times the British Commonwealth of
Nations," he exclaimed. "Do not forget that larger world that
is made up of all the nations that belong to the British Empire.
Bear in mind that, after all, Europe is not so large, and will not
always continue to loom so largely as at present. . . . Your
Empire is spread all over the world. This great commonwealth
to which we belong is peculiarly situated. It is not a compact
territory; it is dependent for its very existence on its world-
wide communications which must be maintained, or this Em-
pire goes to pieces. . . . The British Empire is much more than
a state. I think the very expression 'Empire* is misleading. We
are a system of nations, a community of states and of nations,
far greater than any Empire that has ever existed. . . . We are
not one nation, or state, or empire, but we are a whole world
by ourselves, consisting of many nations and states, and all
sorts of communications under one flag. We are a system of
states not only a static system, but a dynamic system, growing,
evolving, all the time toward new destinies. . . ."

By the autumn of 1917 all the Allies were weary of war,
France most of all. America, it is true, had come in, but the
United States was not yet in a position to render decisive aid.
Great Britain alone had to carry the brunt of the burden. But
England was imperiled by the U-boat war. Robertson and
Haig as the army leaders, and Jellicoe for the navy, evolved

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their plan for a great offensive to free the coast of Belgium,
deprive Germany of her most menacing U-boat bases, and
finally to annihilate the German fleet. Lloyd George was cau-
tious. The measure of French assistance obtainable, he was well
aware, was doubtful. The French had already lost two million
men. Milner and Bonar-Law sided with the Premier. But the
knock-out blow at Caporetto, under which Italy crumbled,
proved that there was only the choice between strong counter-
action or collapse. This was Smuts' opinion, and, according to
Lloyd George, it determined the decision. And so to Passchen-
daele. . . .

The British gained a few miles, and lost four hundred thou-
sand men. But Smuts never regretted that he had assumed the
responsibility for a disastrous loss. Passchendaele, he still in-
sists, staved off the German attack at the moment of gravest
crisis, gained time, and in its consequences led to victory.

Apart from his strategic activities, Smuts was concerned with
innumerable problems of a military, diplomatic, social, and
economic nature. He was again the man who once had held
four cabinet posts simultaneously. He was a member of the
Middle East Committee that helped and supervised Allenby's
glorious campaign. At the same time he was a member of the
Northern Neutral Committee, and third, of an unnamed, secret
committee to watch over the Netherlands, which could at any
moment be invaded by Germany. All this did not consume his
restless urge for activity. With his restlessness he combined,
then as always, a strong desire for tidiness. He made it his busi-
ness to tidy up the difficult and involved relations, the internal
struggles and rivalries, between the service departments. He
devised a War Priorities Committee, and was elected its chair-
man. Once more he excelled as a mediator. Peace was declared
between the Admiralty, the War Department, the Ministry of
National Service, and the Secretary of State for War. Even
England's fightingest man joined in the general appeasement.
The Minister for Munitions co-operated without the slightest
friction. His name was Winston Churchill.

Among Churchill's predominant interests was aviation, then

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OLD MASTER

a comparatively new arm. The rapid development of British
aircraft during the first three years of the war had been pri-
marily due to his insistence. But the enemy, too, had made
progress in mighty strides. London was no longer threatened
by helpless and slightly ridiculous cigar-shaped Zeppelins alone.
Scattered full-scale raids gave the first taste of things to come.

Smuts could not neglect a problem of such great importance.
Already he had demanded "an increase of aircraft not only for
the sake of defense, but to assist in an offensive bombing policy
against the industrial and munitions centers of Germany." Seen
from today's point of vantage, he certainly shared Winston's
visionary belief in air power.

Smuts organized a committee to deal with the air defenses
of London. Then it fell to him to unify the entire air service,
which had thus far been divided between the two service de-
partments. He urged the establishment of an Air Ministry, and
demanded that, until such a Ministry could function, an Air
Organization Committee should discharge its duties. He pre-
sided over this committee, which came into being in August.
In October all regulations in their minutest details had been
worked out. The R.A.F. was born. Undoubtedly Winston
Churchill was the father. But Smuts played a not unimportant
part at this birth. He was the midwife. Instantly the R.A.F.
proved its mettle. The air raids over London ceased.

After an unbroken chain of speeches which had moved and
shaken England, after having been showered with honors and
distinctions, after having validly and efficiently helped to tide
Great Britain over the perilous crisis, Smuts sensed the ap-
proach of peace, while the Allied staffs were still preparing a
great offensive for 1919.

Immediately the war lord turned pacifist. His last oration in
England, delivered on May 18, 1918, asked for clemency for
the Germans. T am persuaded," he said, "that this war will end
in decisive victory, and not merely in a stalemate. But when
you talk about victory victory is a vague term you must know
what you mean. There are people who mean by an Allied vic-
tory that we must completely smash Germany, that we must

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OLD MASTER

march to Berlin, occupy the capital of the enemy, and dictate
terms there. I am not of this opinion.

"I do not think out-and-out victory is possible any more for
any group of nations, because it will mean an interminable
war. It will mean that decimated nations will be called upon
to wage war for many years to come, and what would the
result be?

'The result may be that the civilization we are out to save
may be jeopardized itself. It may then be that in the end you
will have the universal bankruptcy of government, and you will
let loose the forces of revolution which may engulf what we
have so far built up. Civilization is not an indestructible entity.
As it has been built up, so it can be broken down, and you re-
vert to barbarism."

Chapter 22 GENERAL SMUTS' DILEMMA

SMUTS* PROPHECY PROVED ONLY HALF ACCURATE. THE FORCES OF

revolution were subsequently unloosed, but the greater part
of mankind did not revert to barbarism. On the contrary. In
their fight against barbarism many people in many countries
outgrew themselves. They rose to a stature unprecedented in
their history. Great Britain, in particular, to whose common-
wealth Smuts had addressed his warning, turned the years of
her gravest peril into her "finest hour." Toward the end of the
first war Mr. Smuts, the "simple Boer from the veld' 9 yet twice
British, by birth as well as by choice, had, in pleading for Ger-
many, out-Englished the English. The match was nearly over.
The captains of the opposing teams were supposed to shake
hands. Or so it appeared.

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OLD MASTER

General Smuts' dilemma, which beset him as the war drew
to a close and plagued him for many years to come, was rooted
in his innermost nature. An irrepressible urge in his otherwise
so well controlled system had burst forth when President Wil-
son, in January, 1918, published his first conception of a League
of Nations. Smuts was already a confirmed Wilson man, al-
though the two had thus far never met. However, the great
President's defense of the Hay-Paunceforte Treaty, which
opened the gates of the Panama Canal to the world, although
most Americans wanted the canal exclusively for themselves,
had deeply impressed Smuts. His sympathy had always gone
out to men who stuck to a great cause, in the teeth of a whole
nation's opposition. He was himself of this ilk. Woodrow Wil-
son was another. Moreover, the American President thought in
world-embracing terms, as did the prophet of "Holism."

Smuts had valiantly participated in the British war-leader-
ship until the last hour. But for many months, already, his
thoughts had been rotating around Wilson's great project.
While the last bullets whistled, he took time off to blueprint his
own League of Nations plan. On December 15, about a month
after the surrender of the Central Powers, when Smuts' job in
England was done, he resigned from the War Cabinet, and, on
the same day, came out with his League of Nations plan. It
was, by coincidence, the day Botha arrived in London.

Much of Smuts' blueprint was subsequently incorporated in
the Covenant of the League of Nations. Its central idea was
this: Three Empires were dismembered, the Austro-Hungarian
Monarchy, Tsarist Russia, and the Caliphate. New states were
arising, some of them, Smuts admitted, "deficient in the qual-
ity of statehood." Their supervision and guidance should fall to
the League, not to the white-bled and embittered conquerors.
As he saw it, Europe was completely broken. Of all the little
leagues which had made up the former empires, only the Brit-
ish Commonwealth remained, "the embryo league of nations,"
based on the true principles of national freedom and decen-
tralized political federation. As to the continent, he found "the
map of Europe dotted with small nations, embryo states, dere-

OLD MASTER

lict territories, reduced to its original atoms." "Europe/' Smuts
said in his most pregnant phrase, "is being liquidated, and the
League of Nations must be heir to this great estate."

This phrase enthused Wilson in turn, who for his part had
kindled Smuts' ice-cold flames. The American President, Secre-
tary of State Lansing reported, repeated Smuts' words again
and again.

Was Smuts right? His phrase, "the liquidation of Europe,"
and the League's obligation to administer a forlorn heirloom,
was, history has borne out, simply a catch phrase. Europe
remained the heart of the world. A fantastic development,
originating in the geographic center of Europe, in Germany,
appealing to the frustrated, the unbalanced, the misfits every-
where, set the world for the second time aflame. But as this is
written, a new Europe is about to emerge from the purgatory,
a Europe to which no lesser man than Winston Churchill
proudly announced his allegiance.

General Smuts was rather hasty in writing off Europe. And
he was wrong, entirely and definitely wrong, in taking Ger-
many to his heart. He believed in that fallacious difference be-
tween Prussian militarism and the German people that for
twenty years confused the minds of world democracy, and he
was foremost in creating that perverted guilt-complex, pre-
vailing, above all, among English-speaking peoples, that made
the victors of Versailles throw away their bitterly won suprem-
acy, and allowed a charlatan to plunge the world into the
gravest catastrophe of all time. If Versailles erred, it erred on
the side of leniency. If Versailles blundered, it blundered in not
partitioning Germany, in Balkanizing, instead of federating,
Austria-Hungary, and thus removing what might have become
a powerful stumbling block against German expansionism and
ravenous "hunger for living space."

This development Smuts did not foresee. Can one blame
him? Interdum dormitat Homerus. Smuts' visionary foresight is
mingled with a good deal of hindsight. A builder of a new
world, he remains the Boer from the veld. He is proud of it, and
his roots in the veld, are the very element from which he draws

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his indomitable strength. At Versailles he recalled Vereeniging.
Then he had been a loser himself. Since that time sympathy
with the underdog was in his blood. Vereeniging was a gentle-
men's agreement that had worked miracles. Why should one
not conclude a similar agreement with the German gentlemen?
The German gentlemen. . . . The vital difference between his
own little nation and the Germans did not occur to him. The
Boers, barely more than a million people, struggled, frequently
with an animal's ferocity, for their privileged place in the sun,
where they best liked to do nothing at all. The Germans lusted
for world domination. They wielded the tremendous, dark
power of robots, technically streamlined and mentally schizo-
phrenic, equipped with every device of modern science, apply-
ing them mainly to perennial preparation for war, sixty-five
millions in serried ranks, clamoring for the liberation of an-
other thirty-five millions of alleged brethren (who, for them-
selves, wanted nothing of the Germans but to be left severely
alone) and expressing their innermost desire in the anthem:
"Und wittst du nicht mein Bruder sein, so schlag ich dir den
Schaedel ein!" (If you don't want to be my brother, 111 crush
your skull).

Essentially, these Germans did not fit into Smuts' "holistic"
conception. But the whole conception depended on not admit-
ting this fact, not even to oneself. To concede the element of
human, national, or racial inequality which does not deny that
we are all God's children, but which allows for the fact that
God, like most of his images, has children of all sorts and kinds
would shatter the whole building of Smuts' lofty thoughts.
He allowed that sometimes the Germans were prodigal sons,
and he was the first to help punish them when they erred. But
to Smuts, in whose visions the millennium loomed, the passing
events of a day, or of a mere century, did not matter. Even if
the Germans were sometimes wrong, one could not wrong them
perennially.

Other personal experience, all acquired in his own South
Africa, increased his tendency to acquit the Germans. First
came his own complete indifference to hostility. He did not

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take it amiss that "General" Kemp had sworn he would make
mincemeat of Smuts. He bore no grudge against Hertzog,
whose every breath expressed insane hatred against him. More
than once Smuts insisted that, under the skin, Hertzog loved
him. His own hide had grown thick. The change from the shy,
easily hurt youngster was complete. He had learned to take it,
for otherwise he could not dish out his heart to human brother-
hood.

Finally, he deprecated both France and Russia. During the
war he had repeatedly declared that France's influence was out
of proportion to her actual achievement. The real reason for his
distrust of France, however, lay deeper, and further back. It
was the color question, South Africa's fatal question. France
was giving a bad example on the dark continent. France ac-
cepted the natives as equals. Theoretically England did so, too.
Nevertheless, England relied essentially on her own strength
to maintain her power in Africa. France, on the other hand,
trained hundreds of thousands of black troops. The Senegalese
and the Moors from Morocco were the French elite troops.
What would happen if and when all the natives of Africa
would demand arms? The Boers had had their experience with
the great Zulu fighters. Smuts did not hate the natives. He had
grown up among them. His children played with their children,
and natives accompanied him and served him on all his cam-
paigns. During his raid in the Cape Colony he had watched
with pain while one of his two faithful colored men was killed
and the other had both legs shot away. He was permeated with
the humanitarian English attitude. He regarded the natives as
his wards. Yet he was a Boer. And the Boers in South Africa
were outnumbered one to eight by the blacks. A tremendous
emergency would have to materialize before he would arm
them. The French had done so in the most tranquil days of
peace.

As for Russia, it was now Bolshevist. Smuts was a realistic
statesman. He was among the first to understand that the West
had to come to terms, or at least in contact, with Lenin. But
had the Bolshevists not caused all the trouble on the Rand?

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OLD MASTER

Had their agents not poisoned Labor, particularly his own Boer
young men from the platteland, who now, by the thousands,
were streaming into the mines, into the towns, singing the
Internationale, and becoming easy prey for the arch-reactionary
Hertzogites, with whom a hatred in common against the exist-
ing order united them?

Germany was the natural counterpoise to France and Russia.
Smuts, and, in a more subdued way, Botha, were among the
very few delegates at Versailles who sympathized with the
Germans.

Smuts, inaccessible as ever, kept his personal problems, pre-
dilections, and aversions to himself. But his strong, forthright,
wise, and yet somehow innocent personality made its mark
upon Versailles. He was immediately recognized as an intellec-
tual and moral leader in a great Empire. His influence far ex-
ceeded even the importance of his exalted rank. He was elected
a member of the Commission of the League of Nations, the
body under the chairmanship of President Wilson himself, that
finally formulated the Covenant. The Commission included
Lord Robert Cecil, the other delegate from the British Empire,
Lon Bourgeois for France, Roman Dmowski for Poland, and
the sharp-witted and blade-tongued Patriarch Venizelos for
Greece. Its work, done in daily sessions in the Hotel Crillon,
certainly achieved more fruitful results than the labor of any
other instrument of the Peace Conference.

Before he went to Europe, President Wilson had prepared a
draft for the Covenant. Smuts, for his part, produced a paper
out of his breast pocket which he termed "some practical sug-
gestions/' It was a draft he had worked out in London ironi-
cally with the help of the Round Table Group, the brilliant
young men who had emerged from Milner's Kindergarten.
Smuts' "practical suggestions" impressed President Wilson so
deeply that he prepared, and had printed at Paris, a new paper
of his own, embodying many of Smuts' ideas. (This paper was
subsequently published at the hearings before the Senate Com-
mittee on Foreign Relations.) No other delegation had pre-
pared any sort of a proposal.

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OLD MASTER

On January 19 the question came up how to reach an agree-
ment between the British and the American ideas. Toward the
end of the month the delegates of the two English-speaking
countries decided to get together in a separate meeting. Presi-
dent Wilson was accompanied by Colonel House. Smuts left
most of the talking to Lord Robert Cecil. Both men, inciden-
tally, were strikingly similar. Cecil, too, possessed that austere
simplicity combined with the most charming manners. His ar-
guments were supported by his almost unbelievable frankness
and shining sincerity. Like Smuts, Robert Cecil was a combina-
tion of the conservative, the realistic, and the idealistic. With
Wilson's and Smuts' ardor, he espoused the cause of a League
of Nations, and became its leading protagonist in Great Britain.
Several important decisions emerged from the separate meet-
ing, among them the plan for a Permanent Court of Interna-
tional Justice.

During the period between February 3 and February 13, the
Commission held three-hour meetings every day. Orlando of
Italy, the Czech leader Dr. Kramarsch, and M. Hymans from
Belgium, were loquacious. The Chinese Minister Wellington
Koo spoke rarely. The Japanese delegate was almost entirely
silent. But Smuts out-silenced even the Jap. He left to Lord
Robert Cecil the task of explaining the proposal dealing with
the thorny problem of the protection of minorities, which was
an important part of Smuts' paper, published in London on
December 15. The American delegation agreed with the pro-
posal. Smuts' brain child was incorporated with the Covenant
as Article 22.

There was a single difference of opinion between President
Wilson and General Smuts. Strangely, on this occasion Smuts
found himself on the side of those who wanted to burden Ger-
many with another retribution. President Wilson had most
vigorously declared that reparations should be limited to what
might actually be called material damage. Upon his strong in-
sistence the other chiefs of states withdrew their further-
reaching claims, and agreed to the great principle.

Only Smuts begged to disagree. "What was spent by the

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OLD MASTER

Allied governments on their soldiers, or on mechanical instru-
ments of war, might perhaps not be recoverable from the Ger-
man Government under the reservation that these expenses do
not in a plain and direct sense result from damages to the
civilian population. But what was spent, or is being spent, on
the citizen before he becomes a soldier, or after he has ceased
to be a soldier, or on his family at any time, does represent
compensation for damage done to civilians, and must be made
good by the German Government."

Wilson was convinced. When the lawyers attached to the
American delegation advised him that all logic was against the
resolution, the President exclaimed: "Logic! Logic! I don't give
a damn for logic! I am going to include the pensions!"

Smuts' innate Boer thriftiness had scored a double triumph:
over his warm clemency for the Germans, and over the cold
rules of logic. And a warm shower of pensions would compen-
sate the Springboks for hardships, gallantly borne.

Originally Smuts had dealt with the Germans according to
advice the unforgettable Oom Paul had given him in his youth:
"Smack him hard on one cheek, and rub him gently on the
other!" But now, as everyone was smacking him hard on one
cheek, and the German stubbornly refused to offer the other,
Smuts' pity came to his help. The weakness of a strong man is a
formidable weapon, particularly when this strong man is rec-
ognized as the highest moral authority. Again the patriotic
Boer, Smuts declared the return of the German colonies impos-
sible, but in almost every other matter he protested against
those who wanted to punish the guilty Reich. By March he had
already earned the reputation of being not only a moralist but
a gadfly into the bargain. His best friends shook their heads.
The delegates from the many countries which furor teutonicus
had devastated agreed that the man from comfortably located
South Africa did not know what war really was. Even Lloyd
George became nervous. Could one not find an adequate job
for the incurable peacemakers? A job on the side lines?

Indeed, one could. The line led straight to Vienna and Buda-

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OLD MASTER

pest. Vienna was to be only the halfway house. Budapest was
the terminus. A sort of comic-opera government, though of the
most sanguinary red color, was set up in Hungary. Bela Kun,
a Jewish trustee of Lenin, was the midget dictator. He was
famishing for world-wide recognition of his awkward, but en-
tirely unrepressed, terror system. Here was an excellent job for
an appeaser, made to measure for General Smuts.

Smuts decided to go and see. On April 1 at seven-fifteen in
the evening, he left the Gare de 1'Est, accompanied by Allen
Leeper, Colonel Heywood of the Military Institute, Cyril But-
ler of the Food Control Commission, Colonel Lane, Smuts' per-
sonal aide-de-camp, an Italian and a French officer, a small
clerical staff, some orderlies, and last but not least Harold
Nicolson, whom Smuts described as "a brilliant chap," and
whom he had personally invited to come along. Mr. Nicolson
afterwards gave a delightful account of the tragicomedy of this
journey.

The ostensible purpose of the mission was to delineate a line
of demarkation behind which Hungarian and Rumanian troops,
locked in their unending struggle, should retire. In fact, Smuts
wanted to find out whether Bela Kun was the man whom he
could use as a go-between for getting in touch with Moscow.
With his habitual reserve he let no one into what he believed
was his secret. During the journey he primed Allen Leeper
thoroughly. Austere and super-correct General Smuts could not
well soil his hands with a Bela Kun. The young British diplo-
mat should assume the responsibility for possible negotiations.
Mr. Leeper obliged, and serenely played the fool to the chief
of the mission.

The mission arrived in Vienna on the next forenoon. For the
first time the gentlemen got an inkling of how life looked on
the wrong side of the blockade. The appalling misery of starv-
ing and grippe-ridden Vienna, immediately after defeat im-
pressed the visitors. Mr. Nicolson was polite enough to un-
derstate the terrible aspect as, "a town with an unkempt
appearance/' It is doubtful whether General Smuts relished the
word "unkempt": it was the trade-mark of his Boers.

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OLD MASTER

The Viennese had never had their hearts in the fight for Ger-
many's greater glory. Toward the end of the First World War
they were completely subjugated and as miserably under the
Prussian jackboot as Germany's "allies" are in this war. The
first sight of Allied uniforms, of those blessed uniforms that
had, while ruining them, yet freed them from the unbearable
field-gray rags, came as a tonic to the Viennese people. A re-
spectful crowd, eager to demonstrate their sympathy, but too
badly beaten to venture to open their lips, gazed at the re-
splendent regimentals. That inexplicable sympathy that he al-
ways evoked sparkled around Smuts in khaki, walking the
streets of Vienna, silent, dignified, visibly reserved. The men
about town in Vienna, who, too, had gathered to have a first
happy look at the harbingers of peace, admired with unspoken
envy Messieurs Heywood, Lane, and Nicolson in their spotless
civilian attire. The Viennese gentlemen were wearing their
four-year-old Sunday best for this occasion. One could not hear
them sighing. But it was a long way to Savile Row.

At the British Embassy Sir Thomas Cunningham, head of the
inter-Allied military mission, and Mr. Philpotts of the British
Consular Service met Smuts and his entourage. From the first
moment, Mr. Nicolson observed, Smuts preferred the unassum-
ing Philpotts to Sir Thomas. The party went off to Sacher's, the
legendary restaurant, again followed by a respectfully staring
crowd. The luncheon vindicated Sachers fame as one of the
best eating places in a world gone down. The bill was 1,200
Kronen. It would be paid, Smuts was told upon inquiry, with
reparation funds. His eyes froze as he looked at Sir Thomas.
"This was a gross error in taste!" he said in front of everyone.
"From now on the mission will live entirely on our army ra-
tions. We will not take the least bit from a starving country."
Slowly he calmed down, while he listened to an explanation of
frontiers and armistice lines. He took dinner in a patrician Jew-
ish house, whose owner acted as right-hand man to the Inter-
Allied Food Commission. During all his months in Paris, inci-
dentally, Smuts had never accepted invitations to private

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OLD MASTER

houses. At ten o'clock in the evening the mission traveled on to
Budapest.

Bela Kun awaited the train at the station: a fat, little man in
his thirties, with an unhealthy, bloated face, an almost bald
head on which only a few short red hairs remained, he had the
restlessly shifting eyes of a professional killer who incessantly
fears the police on his tracks. Immediately he explained that,
personally, he wanted to make peace. But his government had
come in on a wave of nationalism. His Red Guard was under
the command of officers of the Royal Hungarian regime. They
didn't give a damn, Bela Kun admitted cynically, whether his
system was Communistic as long as the fight was for Hungary.
He was afraid of these mad dogs. He dared not let them down.
Yet he would proceed to a conference of the quarreling succes-
sion states either in Prague or in Vienna, if His Excellency
could guarantee him safe conduct. And now, he asked His Ex-
cellency to luncheon. The Hotel Hungaria was reserved for the
mission. Budapest's leading hotel had hoisted the Union Jack
and the Tricolor to give the population the impression that an
Allied delegation had arrived to beg dictator Kun for peace.

Smuts refused to leave the train. None of his entourage was
allowed to get out. The mission lunched off beans and cheese:
the army ration. At three o'clock Bela Kun returned from a
"Cabinet meeting." He had, in fact, telephoned to Moscow to
get his orders. Reluctantly, he entered Smuts' wagon-lit, look-
ing carefully around, as though he lived in eternal claustro-
phobia.

Smuts asked for the release of the British prisoners of war in
Hungary. Personally, Kun was inclined to release them. But he
could give no assurance without the consent of his "cabinet col-
leagues." He seemed relieved when he escaped from the sleep-
ing car, unkidnapped and alive. Again he telephoned to Mos-
cow. He returned in the evening, and was ready to sign the
release of all British prisoners of war. Smuts treated the rat,
Nicolson observed, "as if he was talking to the Duke of Aber-
corn: friendly, courteous, but without a trace of surrendering
his own tremendous dignity."

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OLD MASTER

Neutral visitors called upon Smuts in his rolling residence.
Everyone, including the Swiss and the Spanish Consuls, was
agreed that Bela Kun was a bloodthirsty jailbird. His Red
Guard looted the streets, the prisons were crowded, there was
general fear of a night of long-knives. Smuts had satisfied his
curiosity, when Bela Kun returned on the fifth of April. Smuts
handed him the draft of an agreement providing for the occu-
pation of a 'neutral zone between Hungary and Rumania by
Allied troops. If the Prime Minister agreed, the blockade would
instantly be lifted.

The Prime Minister scratched himself behind his ear, his
tongue licking his swollen, pale lips. His breath came quickly,
but heavily, from his drooping belly. He was visibly excited.
The document in his hands meant nothing less than interna-
tional recognition of his gangster rule. But the dictator of Hun-
gary was still a puppet, dancing on the Moscow wire. He would
convey his decision the day-after-tomorrow. "On the seventh of
April," which was the day after the next, "we are to leave at
seven fifteen," said Smuts.

Precisely a quarter of an hour before this deadline Bela Kun
reappeared with three equally uncouth accomplices, Ministers
of the Hungarian Government, this time escorted by a com-
pany of honor of the Red Guard. He was clearly staging a
grand affair of state. Yet, in the dining car of Smuts' special
train, the lights dimmed, the whole scene set for departure, he
was again the harassed, suspicious, uneasy fugitive. He gave
Smuts a note. Smuts read it twice, and handed it to Mr. Nicol-
son. "No, gentlemen," he addressed the gangster government.
"I cannot accept any reservations." The note had agreed to
Smuts' demands, but added that the Rumanian troops must
withdraw behind the Maros River. In his final word Smuts em-
phasized that the conference he was representing would not go
a single step further than his proposal had indicated. It was in
the Hungarian Government's own interests to accept.

The gangsters looked at one another. Fear was written in the
faces of gunmen who suddenly found themselves without or-
ders. What if they accepted and Moscow refused? What? One

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OLD MASTER

of the gangsters, a brute by the name of Kunfi, made a signifi-
cant gesture toward his comrades. He lifted his hand toward
his neck, describing a semi-circle. It meant hangingliquida-
tion, in Lenin's Russian language.

Only Kun did not lose his poise. He had been in much
tougher spots. As the danger increased that he would miss the
bus recognition of his rule and certainly be taken to task in
Moscow for his failure, he straightened his misshapen body,
tried to grin, and proposed what Smuts would have called a
Kafir bargain. "One could perhaps find a third line of compro-
mise . . ." he suggested.

Smuts looked at his wristwatch. It was seven fifteen. He rose.
"Well, gentlemen, I must bid you good-bye." Staggered, the
gentlemen retreated, step by step, much too polite to show
their backs to His Excellency, tumbling over one another's flat
feet.

With exquisite courtesy Smuts accompanied them to the
platform. He shook hands with every member of the Hungarian
Government. He nodded to his aide-de-camp, while standing
already on the step of his car. The train moved off. Four gang-
sters, baffled, looked after the engine. Then, in the same breath,
they muttered something in Hungarian which means, trans-
lated in its mildest form: "Double-crossed 1" It was a new expe-
rience: they were on the receiving end.

Smuts went to Prague, where he met Masaryk. For hours the
two men remained closeted in the President's study. It was
never disclosed what they had spoken of.

Back to Vienna. The people, no longer frightened, gave
Smuts a jubilant welcome. If nothing else came of his visit, his
presence meant at least that he would protect them from the
Bolshevism ravaging the land across the border, less than an
hour by railway. Perhaps his visit meant also food. Small groups
followed him respectfully. But as Smuts and his group entered
a cheap restaurant the military rations had given out no one
wished to disturb him. Even the few guests in the place left,
the ladies curtseying, the men bowing. The headwaiter took the
liberty of explaining "Die Herrschaften (the gentry) certainly

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OLD MASTER

wish to be alone among themselves/' Then he served, with
great ceremony, heaps of 6pinards, 1918- Viennese for boiled
grass. There was, however, still a pre-war bottle of sweet and
golden 1911 Tokay.

As the train rolled back to Paris, Smuts spoke of those really
indescribable nights on the veld. Mentafiy, he made three
notes: relief for Austria instantly necessary. The destruction of
the Austro-Hungarian State must be repaired, best by a union
of the succession states. Austria-Hungary is as much an indi-
visible entity as the Union of South Africa. Thirdly, Bela Kun
is not a desirable negotiator with Moscow. The newspapers
called it "fiasco of a mission/' To Smuts it was not a fiasco. He
is insatiably curious, and always satisfied when he has learned
what he wanted to find out.

Upon his return to Paris, he plunged again into his fight
against the Treaty, and for what he called a fair deal for Ger-
many. The line he stubbornly followed was to draw a sinister
picture of the terrible retaliation Germany would take at some
future date, visualizing most of the horrors that actually came
to pass. But he explained, nay he excused, this horror by the
unjust treatment the Germans were receiving at Versailles.
Subsequently even the advent of Hitler to power, and his first
crimes in power did not change Smuts' opinion about the
causes that had produced Nazism. To him it was the wrongs
the victors of 1919 had inflicted upon Germany.

Incessantly, he harped on the evils of the peace treaty which
was gradually taking final shape. In the middle of May he
wrote identical letters to Wilson and Lloyd George, asking for
"drastic revisions at the eleventh hour." He demanded the re-
vision of the occupation, reparation, and punishment-for-the-
war-guilt clauses. He rejected changes along the German East-
ern frontier, the occupation of the Saar Valley, military and air
clauses preventing German rearmament. All these minimum in-
surances against Germany's taking to arms immediately and
unloosing the next war within a couple of years were "pin

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OLD MASTER

pricks" to Smuts, "such as I had to suffer at Vereeniging."
(Where he had emerged top dog.)

Wilson answered: "I feel the terrible responsibility of the
whole business, but inevitably my thought goes back to the
very great offense against civilization which the German State
committed and to the necessity for making it evident once
and for all that such things can lead only to the most severe
punishment/'

Smuts beseeched the British Empire delegation to use their
influence for modification of the border regulations at the
German-Polish frontier ("Poland is a historic failure, and will
always be a failure"), for limiting the German reparations to a
fair sum, possibly five billion Reichsmark (in fact Germany
paid ten billion and borrowed thirty, so that American and
English creditors had the privilege of paying for much of the
German rearmament), and for Germany's immediate inclusion
into the League of Nations.

In another letter to Lloyd George Smuts stated bluntly: "As
far as I am concerned I wish to make it quite clear that I can-
not agree to anything less than to the recasting of the Peace
Treaty and to its transformation. ... I very much fear that we
are endeavoring to make a peace of the twentieth century
which might have had its place in the seventeenth or eight-
eenth/'

Lloyd George became irritated. He replied with a few ques-
tions: "Am I to understand that it is your proposal to depart
from the principle of nationality, and leave great numbers of
downtrodden Poles under Prussian rule? Are you prepared to
forego your own claims for pensions? Are you prepared to al-
low German West Africa and South East Africa to return to
Germany?"

Lloyd George hit where it hurt. Of course Smuts could not
return to his people with empty hands. No delegate could.

But he still stuck to his dismantled guns, again prophesying
the right thing, but offering the very worst solution: leniency,
which the Germans had always interpreted as weakness. "This

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OLD MASTER

Treaty breathes a poisonous spirit of revenge" (which it did
not, by any means ) "that may yet scorch the fair face not of a
corner of Europe, but of Europe'* (which happened).

On June 23 old General Foch threatened to reopen war and
cross the Rhine although the British Empire delegates had
unanimously refused to authorize the British Army and Navy
to renew hostilities in order to enforce acceptance of the terms
of peace if the Germans resisted further the laboriously
patched-up peace treaty compromise. Foch was the only man
who knew how to deal with the Germans. They surrendered.
On June 28, 1919, on the fifth anniversary of Sarajevo, the
peace treaty was signed.

The last struggle was no longer between the conquerors and
the vanquished, but between General Smuts and his friends.
Botha made it perfectly clear that, for his part, he must sign,
since this was die first international document which the Do-
minions were adhering to under their own responsibility. With-
out the signature of the Prime Minister of South Africa the
Union would clearly not demonstrate its independence within
the framework of the Empire.

The question was discussed whether Botha should sign and
Smuts protest. Resigned, Botha agreed with the proposal.
There was no more fight in him. He was a dying man, stricken
with a liver disease, hereditary in his family, and plainly
doomed. He hated to part company with Smuts, at least on the
surface, now that their lifelong teamwork, the very symbol of
the Union of South Africa, was coming to its crowning ful-
fillment.

For once Smuts was forlorn. Lloyd George found the solu-
tion. Why not, he suggested, sign under protest? General Smuts
could publish his protest at the very moment he put his signa-
ture to the Treaty.

Smuts did so. His signature, one among a great many, went
all but unnoticed. His ringing protest, however, resounded
around the globe. Indeed, his very blunder catapulted him to
world fame. The great moralist, the purest of the pure was for
the Germans! For years his hard-hitting phrases of condemna-

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OLD MASTER

tion of Versailles were quoted by the Germans, whose chief
witness he was to remain for many years. For years the ap-
peasers and the defeatists claimed Smuts as their man, although
he was, despite his one grave error, the very opposite of the
yellow crowd. For years the sentimental as well as the mer-
curial-minded friends of the new Germany silenced their oppo-
nents with the single syllable: "Smuts!"

Throughout the ensuing ups and downs of his political for-
tunes, Smuts' moral authority grew. His shadow loomed large
over the globe, which his vision embraced as a whole. The tes-
timony of such a man was worth more to Germany than the
secretly built Luftwaffe.

Paris had broken Smuts' heart. He repeated it over and over
again. He had seen through the hollowness, the emptiness of
human civilization. When he returned home, after four years in
uniform, he was but forty-nine. Yet his hair was white. Oom
Jannie was the Oubaas the Old Master. He developed more
and more into a character of Greek tragedy. At Versailles he
had burdened himself with his innocent, his tragic guilt.

283

Part Three
PHOENIX

Chapter 23 UPS AND DOWNS

IN DECIDING TO RETURN TO SOUTH AFRICA, SMUTS WAS WELL

aware that he was sacrificing world fame for personal misery.
England wanted to keep him. It was suggested that he should
stand for a constituency, and, as a duly elected member of the
House, join the Cabinet. He was offered the Vice-Royalty of
India, and also the Governorship of Palestine. The budding
League of Nations needed his supervision, his support, his in-
spiration. World opinion held him in high esteem. His aberra-
tion on the treatment of Germany did not impair his prestige.
His critics bowed to the patent sincerity in his pigheadedness.
His following increased by leaps and bounds. His arguments
persuaded millions. English-speaking people are not endowed
with the capacity for hatred. They are not revengeful. More-
over, the inevitable reaction to the war rapidly materialized.
The United States of America was disgusted with the whole
business, and retired into its shell. Europe was exhausted. A
wave of cynicism and indifference engulfed the world. Smuts
stood out, in bold relief, the great impartial, the umpire, the
man with the clean hands, the reconciliator. Everyone loved
him. There was only one country in which he was loathed with
an insane hatred: South Africa.

Smuts did not waver. Botha was dying, and the leader's man-
tle would fall on him. His family could only live in South
Africa. His children must grow up as South Africans, there was

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OLD MASTER

no doubt about that. After years of absence, he hardly knew
how family life felt. But he knew where his duty lay. Before
leaving for England in 1917, when he had been attacked as an
Imperialist for attending the Imperial Conference, he had
given his solemn pledge that, as long as there was breath in
him, wherever he worked, whether on the battlefields or in the
Imperial Councils, he was working for South Africa. Now was
the moment to redeem his word. He shouldered his cross.

He did not come with empty hands. In South Africa the war
boom did not end as abruptly as in most parts of the world.
England was still buying the most important products of the
country, particularly wool, at those exaggerated prices on which
the Dutch farmers had insisted during the war. The deprecia-
tion of the British currency in America, in July, 1919, came as a
relief to the already tottering gold industry. Now Johannesburg
sold gold for good dollars and translated them into devaluated
pounds. The margins thus obtained enabled the industry to
carry on without the losses of the war years. It was, however,
only a transitory amelioration. The currency value of gold
reached its peak in February, 1920, but already the costs of
mining had caught up with it. By then wages were inflated.
Union leaders made not only the reduction of wages, but even
the slightest relaxation of their cramping regulations impos-
sible. By the middle of 1920 half the industry was again work-
ing without profit, and some mines actually at a loss. The Na-
tionalists did not care whether the mines went to pieces. Mostly
farmers, they did care for the wool prices, but they would have
never acknowledged that the boom in wool, as well as the ex-
pansion of the country's trade and industry, was due to the
war. The gain of German South West Africa did not impress
the Boers. It was a large, neglected country full of agrarian
possibilities. They wanted it. But not from Botha and Smuts.

Botha's heart was broken. By innermost desire he needed the
same sympathy he offered. He received it from many adher-
ents. But the majority of Boers slandered and cursed him.
Gravely affected by his physical disease, he died in the early
morning of August 27, 1919, the time he had, a year before,

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predicted his death, and three weeks after Smuts* return to
South Africa.

Smuts and Mrs. Smuts were in Heidelberg when they heard
the news. They hurried to the house of mourning. There Louis
lay, his body shrunken, his eyes closed. It appeared to an eye-
witness that Smuts envied his dead friend.

The passing of Louis Botha was more than a terrible be-
reavement to Smuts. With him fell the last bridge between the
old-fashioned Boers and the government. Many Afrikanders
who had felt affection for Botha's ways and manners could not
understand the new Prime Minister. Even his friends agreed
that there had never been a South African like Smuts. In this
they were right. Smuts had to muster all his strength to explain
to the country, seething with contempt for his personal success
abroad, that he, in fact, had advanced the cause of South
Africa's independence, and he had won full international recog-
nition for the country. For the first time the Union had signed
an international treaty as a full-fledged free nation in her own
right. He challenged the believers in what he called "the eter-
nal yesteryear" to remember the conference at the Hague, at a
time when the Transvaal was an independent republic. Then
the nations of the world would have nothing of the Boers. A
motion to invite the South African Republic to join the Confer-
ence had been defeated. How, on the other hand, had all the
delegates, the British, the Americans, even the French, this
time, at Versailles, clamored for the signature of South Africa's
second delegate! What a change in the Union's position!

Smuts' explanation was in vain. Hertzog heckled the new
Prime Minister. He wanted to know whether South Africa had
the right to secede from the Empire; whether the Dominion
could renounce the king or whether it could petition the king
to renounce South Africa. Three times Smuts answered: De-
cisively, no.

The elections were fought exclusively over secession. For the
first time Hertzog emerged as the leader of the strongest party.
He received over one hundred thousand votes, his party got
forty-four seats. Smuts was second victor. He trailed the Na-

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OLD MASTER

tionalists by ten thousand votes and three seats. Colonel Cres-
well, with twenty-one Labor members, staged a triumphal come
back. The Unionists English Party received twenty-five seats.
Three were Independents, sympathizers with Smuts.

To the outside world the elections in South Africa, where a
mere handful of votes decided things, was a storm in a teacup.
To Smuts South Africa was the microcosm.

After the inconclusive outcome of the polls, certain peace-
makers talked of a coalition between the two main parties.
Smuts immediately took up the suggestion. But Hertzog stub-
bornly refused. He was biding his time. Smuts had to fall back
on the help of the English Party; it was his only means of get-
ting a parliamentary majority. But open coalition with the
Unionists would have meant open revolt in the platteland.
Hertzog was just waiting for this chance.

This was one more of the many occasions on which detached
observers could not understand why Smuts, the statesman of
world stature, the helpmate whom Great Britain repeatedly
claimed, the friend who was the solace of Woodrow Wilson in
his sudden political isolation, the thinker who belonged to hu-
manitywhy this damned fool Smuts did not give South Africa
a kick that would resound around the equator, and return to
the center of men and things.

Duty, said Smuts. His stubbornness disheartened his best
friends, his greatest admirers.

Smuts demanded from others the same sense of duty, the
same self-sacrifice, he imposed upon himself. He summoned
the leader of the Dominion Party, the official opposition, to an
indaba. In the most critical hour he found the savior, a man
who, in his tough, yet casual manner, would have laughed up-
roariously had someone called him "the savior," a man whom
history has all but forgotten. His name was Sir Thomas Smarrt
He was twenty-odd years Smuts' senior, a fighting Irishman by
birth and disposition, a medical man by profession, and had
come in Smuts' birthyear to the Cape Colony as District Medi-
cal Officer at Britztown. In many ways he was Smuts' perfect

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OLD MASTER

counterpart. Sir Thomas, too, had the secret of eternal youth.
He, too, had gone through an anti-British period. He, too, was
helplessly in love with the veld. Like Smuts, he became a model
farmer, like Smuts, he served his political apprenticeship in the
Afrikander Bond, and finally, like Smuts, he was a discovery of
Cecil Rhodes.

He was attracted to the Dutch cause, he confessed, not only
by his Irish blood, but above all by the doggerel:

We want no British government
No cumbrous code of laws,
No grand, expensive officers
With plunder-seeking jaws.

As a follower of Cecil Rhodes he entered the Cape Legisla-
tive Assembly, where his pungent Irish wit immediately at-
tracted attention, and caused much hilarity. Like many of his
ilk, he had the time of his life in the old Cape era, which came
to an end with the raid of his friend Dr. Jameson.

Thomas Smarrt belonged to the few Bondsmen who fol-
lowed Rhodes and Jameson into the political wilderness. His
sympathy with the Dutch had always been more fun than con-
viction. He really did not know what sort of convictions he
had, he admitted. He was only sure that he always had a tre-
mendous thirst. The Boer War taught him conviction. The
fighting Irishman jumped headlong into the English camp. He
fought well, and returned to the Cape Assembly, a convinced
Imperialist. He was inseparable from Jameson during the lat-
ter's Premiership. After Union, the crowning conclusion of "Dr.
Jim's" adventurous political life, Smarrt succeeded him in the
leadership of the English Party. He changed the name of the
party from Progressives to Unionists. For his merit in helping
to bring about Union he was knighted in 1911, at a time when
London showered tides and distinctions upon their new part-
ners in South Africa. He had reached the pinnacle, but some-
how the man of the gay Seventies in the good, old Cape felt, in
spite of his insatiable zest for living, that he was surviving him-
self. He became the darling of the Union Parliament, his jokes

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OLD MASTER

still amused the House, but he was also smiled at when he
spoke in gravity and pretended earnest.

It was this old war horse, still going strong, to whom Smuts
appealed in the emergency. He told Sir Thomas that he needed
the Unionists' voices, but that he could not enter into an open
coalition with them. All he demanded of his good friend was
complete self-effacement. The founder of the Unionists should
dissolve his own party, and merge with the South-African Party,
Smuts' Dutch group.

Sir Thomas thought that Oom Jannie was in one of his rare
jocular moods. He chuckled: "Shall we dissolve and merge
tomorrow?"

There was a Unionist meeting on that very evening. It was
decided to give up the identity of the English Party, in order
to reinforce Smuts' battalions. This supreme self-sacrifice was
made to stave off the threat of Hertzogism. For three years this
policy succeeded, until, in 1924, Hertzog's landslide swept away
the English. In spite of forming almost 45 per cent of the white
population, they have, since then, played no political role of
any great importance. But they do not complain as long as
Smuts watches.

"Smuts' party is swallowed by the Rand capitalists and by
the jingoes!" yelled Hertzog. "He can never more be regarded
a true Afrikander!" This time he overreached himself. The con-
servative Dutch were ready to swallow a lot of nonsense, but
that Oom Jannie, whatever his faults, should not be an Afri-
kander would not go into their stubborn heads. The platteland
remained quiet, although the embers of dissatisfaction smol-
dered on.

But there was never a dull moment in South Africa. On the
Rand, labor that since the prewar strikes had not settled down
once more became rebellious. Thousands of poor whites, once
bywoners on the farms, streamed into the big town. These men,
who had never worked, were entirely unfit for any sort of pro-
ductive occupation. Moreover, unabashed, they transgressed
the South African taboo, the color bar. They taught the natives,

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OLD MASTER

who were by nature not eager to work either, how to make a
living by trouble-making. The Kafirs formed their own illegal
unions. They struck in all the factories and mines as soon as
they had their organizations, mostly under white bosses. First
minor disturbances flared up. Soon over seventy thousand na-
tives were on strike. Bloodshed ensued.

The government remained passive. Had Smuts taken protec-
tive measures for the mines, the cry that he had sold out to the
jingoes and the capitalists would have been vindicated on the
surface. Chaos prevailed. The Nationalists rubbed their hands.
"General Smuts has brought South Africa to the verge of ruin,"
Hertzog said. His lieutenant Tielman Roos expressed himself
more distinctly: "Smuts must break his own neck before he has
the chance to break ours."

"I am like St. Paul," Smuts confessed. "I die daily." This sigh
of resignation was his signal to attack. Early in 1921 he called
the people to a new election. His ear to the ground, he heard
the tide of fanaticism receding. From Russia came atrocity
stories about the Bolshevist regime that frightened many Hert-
zogites away from their leader's unnatural coddling of the
Reds. The threatening words the trade-union bosses used
brought about a healthy reaction, indeed resistance, among the
politically indifferent masses. The nearer Hertzog's threat of
secession seemed to come, the more the calculating Dutchmen
realized that they would cut off their noses to spite their faces.
They would lose their best customer, which, after all, was Eng-
land. Besides, secession from the Empire could not be accom-
plished without revolution, and revolution would entirely wreck
both business and the country.

Smuts conducted a whirlwind campaign, to whose speed
Hertzog, a man of slow brains, was not equal. Instinctively,
however, Hertzog felt that the call for secession would not suf-
ficiently appeal to the country. He made another volte-face.
"Secession," he declared, "is not an issue at this point. It will
come in time. But the time is not yet herel" Instead, he in-
vented a nonexistent Great Empire Banking Trust, whose mys-
terious henchmen squeezed South Africa's economy. He as-

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OLD MASTER

serted that the British shipping companies were robbing the
South African trade. Why, he asked, did Smuts promise our
whole production to England? Why does he exclude the free
world market? The reason was that England, for political rea-
sons, paid higher prices for some South African products. But
Hertzog only saw, and cried out in the market place, that Eng-
land was getting the better of South Africa, and that Smuts
was aiding and abetting the Imperialists in enriching them-
selves.

Not to be outdone, his henchman Dr. Malan had discovered
a plan according to which England and Japan would force the
participation of South Africa in a war against the United States.
Tielman Roos wisecracked: "I do not speak of deporting Smuts
to Europe, but a free ticket to Europe will be at his disposal
as soon as we come to power!"

There was much excited talk about deportation. Prices were
skyrocketing. Both wings of the opposition, Nationalists as well
as Labor, demanded that the government should deport the
hoarders and profiteers.

Smuts could not speak in a meeting without being inter-
rupted by shouts: "Hang the profiteers! . . . Why don't you
deport them, at least? Once you knew how to do that!"

"I am no longer as ruthless as I once was," Smuts admitted
with a faint smile. "We all mellow/'

Behind him were the English, who owned all the big news-
papers in the country. Incessantly the press reminded Hertzog
of his old secession babble. The dangers of a Hertzog victory
were painted in dark colors. A "Conference of International
Socialists and Communists" came, most involuntarily, to Smuts'
aid. This conference resolved to vote for the Nationalists, since
a Hertzog victory was more likely to plunge the country into
turmoil and civil war than any other event.

In March, 1921, the country voted. Smuts' South African Party
won seventy-nine seats, Hertzog forty-five. Labor lost more
than half its representation. Its members were reduced from
twenty-one to nine. Even Colonel Creswell went down. Smuts

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OLD MASTER

had a safe majority of twenty-four members in the House of
Assembly.

After victory he no longer had to conceal his English allies.
He reconstructed his ministry, and took in three Unionists. Sir
Thomas Smarrt, the lover of the veld, made an excellent Min-
ister of Agriculture. Mr. J. W. Jagger, nicknamed the "merchant
prince/' applied sound business methods to the railways, and
cleaned up their permanent deficit. He is still remembered as
the best Minister of Railways a job otherwise noted as a grave-
yard of political reputations the Union ever had. Patrick Dun-
can, once Milner's principal private secretary, became Minister
of the Interior. He was later knighted and is now Governor
General of the Union.

All decent people sighed with relief. For the next five years
at least, for the normal duration of the new House, one could
lock the skeleton of a new civil war in the closet.

Chapter 24 DOWNFALL

"iF WE LOOK TO WORLD PEACE, WE MUST DO NOTHING TO AT JEN-

ate Japan. ... I am anxious that we should avoid this, because
Japan is the danger of the future: there is no doubt about that."
The Imperial Conference, gathered in London in June of 1921,
listened attentively. Here in two sentences was their friend
Smuts in a nutshell: prophet and appeaser. He said a few more
visionary things: "The only path of safety for the British Em-
pire is a path which she can walk together with America. In a
certain number of years we shall be in a great crisis in Europe,
and not all the time in a position of independence, but involved
with France and all the odium which her policy may bring

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OLD MASTER

upon us, and not really strong and independent to act accord-
ing to our own interests. That is why I am looking more and
more in the other direction that is, to America."

But for his permanent inclination to burden France with
most of the evils for which Germany was responsible, the fu-
ture, "in a certain number of years" bore out his prediction.
Once again he was in top form. Smuts belongs to the few peo-
ple who like the London climate, and with the great many who
are happy in the London atmosphere. He likes English sur-
soundings best, his friends assert. His heart? His heart, of
course, he leaves behind in South Africa.

Back in South Africa things were deceivingly quiet. For
once, the Union was not the noisiest spot in the world. The
noisiest spot was Ireland. Inevitably, Smuts had to rush off to
the Emerald Isle.

These were the days of the Black and Tans. King George V
was about to go in person to Belfast, to open the Ulster Parlia-
ment. The rebels in the South regarded this as a provocation.
It all depended on what sort of address from the Throne His
Majesty would deliver. Smuts was received in audience. He
remained overnight at Windsor and drafted a speech which,
after some minor alterations, the King delivered on the next
day at Belfast. It was an appeal to appeasement.

Now de Valera sent a secret emissary to Smuts. The rebel
leader was in hiding, somewhere near Dublin. Perhaps Smuts
would kindly visit him to talk things over. Lloyd George, to
whom Smuts faithfully reported the overture of the conspira-
tors, was perfectly willing to let his friend go. Smuts was the
right choice for peace negotiations. Lloyd George, and with
him England, wished for nothing better than to arrive at a
peaceful settlement with the Irish rebels. Smuts sent word to
Dublin that he would come. A few days later Mr. Smith betook
himself to the appointment.

The Irish rebels did not expect an unassuming Mr. Smith.
They were looking for a gold-braided general. There was a
slight comedy of errors. Finally Mr. Smith Smuts' nom de paix
when he is on peace missions and de Valera met. They met

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OLD MASTER

for the first time, but to Smuts, de Valera's every word sounded
familiar. He was Hertzog all over again. Hertzog spoke of "sev-
ering the British connection," de Valera called it "cutting the
painter." That was the only difference.

Once more Smuts had to repeat the exhortation with which
for years, desperately and entirely without success, he had
tried to convince the Hertzogites. A republic, he said, does not
necessarily mean freedom. South Africa, for instance, had much
more freedom as a self -governing member of the British Gov-
ernment than the Transvaal ever had had as an independent
republic. He knew what he was talking about. He had been
a leading administrator of, and had given his blood for, this
republic. A midget republic had no position, no dignity in the
world. It was, due to its very narrowness, torn by parochial
strife and dissension. A Dominion within the Commonwealth
is happy. There are only happy Dominions. Why shouldn't Ire-
land ask for self-government, which, Smuts was sure, would be
granted, and become a Dominion? Because of Ulster? For the
time being, he advised, leave Ulster in peace. Natural devel-
opment will bring both parts of John Bull's other island to-
gether. Members of the same Commonwealth . . . islands grow-
ing together . . . natural fusion . . . Smuts was in his element.
De Valera was evasive. He never used the upright pronoun.
He always said: "They . . ." to indicate that he was only the
servant of his people, and that "they" would have to be per-
suaded.

Yet he accepted an invitation from Lloyd George, which
Smuts had suggested upon his return to London. Smuts was
already long back in South Africa when that painful truce be-
tween Great Britain and Ireland was negotiated, which, during
long years, was again and again amended to Eire's greater ad-
vantage. Undoubtedly, Smuts had negotiated the first steps.
He was quite pleased. He remained a friend of the Irish. In the
present war, he points out, two of the fightingest regiments of
Springboks are the Irish Transvaal and the Cape Colony Irish.
One hundred and fifty thousand Irishmen are volunteering in
the British Army. About Mr. Eamon de Valera, whose hospi-

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OLD MASTER

tality has made Dublin the world center of wartime Nazi es-
pionage, there is not a single word by Smuts on the record. He
does not speak about unspeakables. He sticks to this habit.

On his return to Cape Town, aboard the S. S. Saxon, Smuts
was accompanied by Sir Thomas Smarrt, his cabinet colleague,
and Sir Lionel PhiLlipps, the mining king, patron of art, and
philanthropist, who, by this time, had become the elder states-
man of the English Party in South Africa. Both men used the
long voyage to discuss cold facts with their premier. "You must
save the government from plunging over the economic preci-
pice for which you are blindly headed," Sir Lionel put it. Smuts,
his head still full of the Irish trouble, admitted candidly that
he was really little familiar with the state of affairs. "State of
affairs? . . . The imminence of catastrophe!" Sir Lionel cor-
rected him.

The S. S. Saxon arrived belatedly in port. A fire had broken
out aboard the ship. It took more than a day to bring it under
control. Perhaps it was a foreboding.

Soon after his homecoming Smuts, with a staff of technical
advisers, went up to the Rand. Although not an expert in finan-
cial questions, he surprised the shrewdest members of the
Chamber of Mines with his rapid understanding of the situa-
tion. He gauged the damages. He saw which of the shut-down
mines could not be reopened. He understood that millions of
tons of gold could no longer be recovered. But the shutdown of
half the mines still functioning (under almost unbearable con-
ditions), could be averted if the right, and, alas, unpopular,
measures were taken.

Smuts was fully aware of the consequences of a complete
shutdown of the mines; wholesale unemployment, general de-
pression, a crippled treasury, finally the collapse of his own
government. He began to share Sir Lionel's anxiety. He got in
touch with Colonel Creswell, the Labor leader, and wrested
from him his consent to the employment of more natives, and
to a modification of the union conditions hampering efficiency.
Unfortunately, Colonel Creswell, although still leader in name,

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and again spokesman of the parliamentary Labor group, no
longer represented the real feelings of the unions under the
new boss system. To them striking was a game, played without
rules. Every minor disciplinary measure provoked a new strike
wave. Such scattered strikes mostly backfired. The strikers had
to return to work, after losing a good deal in wages, without
gaining anything. Even public opinion, usually not sympathetic
to big business, was angered over the irresponsible strikes.

Smuts tackled the situation determinedly. Due to the para-
lyzing crisis on the Rand, the Union's revenues showed a defi-
ciency of 6,435,000, an appalling amount for a large, but lit-
tle developed country, as South Africa was at that time. The
situation of the railroads, next to the gold mines the country's
only big industry, was precarious. Mr. Jagger saved them by a
slight increase in the fares, and by cutting down inflated wages.
The society of Railroad Employees threatened to strike. But
they had not yet quite forgotten their own sad experience with
Smuts, and so they chose for a while the better part of valor:
caution. Taxation was increased, causing an uproar in a coun-
try that had thus far only paid infinitesimally small direct taxes,
and those grudgingly or not at all. Heavy retrenchment was
imposed upon the civil service. Smuts himself set the example
by cutting his own salary in half. He also cut the allowances of
officials and employees, from the cabinet minister to the local
postman.

The Boers could not take it. Since time immemorial they
were used to living on nepotism and patronage. Now every man
in the street had to pull in his belt. Retrenchment and economy
saved the nation, but hit everyone.

Hertzogism was in clover. On the platteland the leader still
attacked Smuts as a "lackey" of England, and presented him-
self as the god-sent, one-hundred-per-cent, dyed-in-the-wool
Afrikander. But in the towns his anti-Imperialism yielded to a
poisonous exploitation of social and economic grumblings. In
this way he killed two birds with one stone. He hurt Smuts,
and gradually approached the Labor Party which, under
Creswell, had always resented his anti-Imperialism. Hertzog

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brooded over captivating Labor. Some day this small group in
the House might tip the scales. Tielman Roos and Dr. Malan
encouraged him. Dr. Malan recalled that the Dutch Reformed
Church had dismissed him for his "social" inclinations. Tielman
Roos peeled off his coat, and stumped the veld in his shirt
sleeves. His popularity mounted by leaps and bounds.

Smuts felt painfully that his own popularity was waning. His
triumphs in Europe had only aroused the suspicions of the
Boers at home. Tielman Roos scored in accusing the Prime Min-
ister of having brought the "khaki pest" into the country. The
peasants, whose cattle were already cursed with Rinderpest,
were frightened. By-election after by-election went against the
government.

Beneath the surface, economic grievances, racial hatred, and
the dislocation following the war were merging. Returning sol-
diers found their jobs already taken. They were unemployed.
And if they did get their jobs back, their displaced substitutes
sank another step lower on the social ladder: they augmented
the hundreds of thousands of poor whites. During the years of
regimentation, both at the front and on the home-front, people
had forgotten how to decide for themselves. Now they could
neither think nor act on their own. They formed groups, mobs,
masses. The worst were the bands of young backvelders, who
had serenely sat out the war and occupied the posts of the
fighting Englishmen. Both great industrial enterprises in the
Union, mines as well as railways, were teeming with a new
Boer youth: constitutionally lazy, inbred rebels, swaggerers,
and blackguards. Most of them followed Hertzog's slogan that
the Afrikander should be baas everywhere. This they claimed
as their reason for keeping out the English. Some of the new
unions accepted no English members. While the South African
Trade-Unions had been traditionally affiliated with the Labor
Party, they were now an annex of the Nationalists. The Labor
Party, in turn, had to outbid the Hertzogites, to recover some
of the lost ground. In both camps radicalism flourished tropi-
cally. It was strengthened by the repercussions of the general

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social unrest in the world, above all by the exciting tales flow-
ing in from Bolshevist Russia. Illiterate young Boers sang the
Red Banner and the Internationale.

Yet each of these Boer Communists had a master-complex.
In a country in which practically all heavy manual labor was
done by Kafirs, there was a premium on white skins. Most of
the English disregarded it. But the lower the Boer, uprooted
from the veld, forlorn in the towns, and forming the first white
proletariat in South Africa, the stronger his claim to be baas.
Racialism and Communism blended. Hitler was still an un-
known beer-cellar agitator in the suburbs of Munich when the
National Socialist combination burst forth on the Rand. The
ensuing trouble was not as much directed against the govern-
ment, as against the genuine working class in South Africa: the
Kafirs.

The similarity between the Rand rebels of 1921 and 1922 and
budding Nazism is striking. A "Committee of Action" replaced
the Council of the Trade-Unions. It formed commandos every-
where. Boer commandos, some Irish commandos, and even
women commandos, who subsequently behaved like the furies
themselves. The men drilled and got practice with the rifle.
Calisthenics and athletics, their leaders called it. Imported
Bolshevist agitators worked hand in glove with Hertzogite
estate owners, who promised the rebels food from their farms,
if and when. . . .

The embodiment of this unholy union between arch-reaction
and undiluted Communism was Advocate Tielman Roos. Witty
as ever, but already gravely ill, and thus spurred on to direct
action for he had not much time to lose he summoned a con-
ference of Nationalist and Labor leaders in Pretoria. This
"Roos's Parliament/' as it later came to be called, issued a reso-
lution, passed by six thousand crazed followers: "The time has
arrived when the domination of the Chamber of Mines and
other financiers should cease. To that end we ask the Members
of Parliament assembled in Pretoria to proclaim a South African
Republic and to form a provisionary government for this coun-
try." Since the rabble leaders, however, could not agree who

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should lead this provisional government (differences as to
whether Lenin or Hertzog should be asked to decide could not
be solved), the South African Republic, latest edition, came to
nothing.

The white miners, dominating the unions, were the only
well-organized class in a country, four-fifths black, with only a
very thin upper crust and with farmers and burghers still living
in yesteryear's seclusion. The miners terrorized the Rand, and
the whole country. "The miners" were the bugaboo, particu-
larly for the poor shopgirls, cobblers, or little storekeepers,
whom they could, at will, "pull out" of their places of employ-
ment when strikes were proclaimed, and reinstate, if they
pleased, when the strike was called off. They were the holy
terror to the natives. If General De Wet had lashed his Kafirs
with the sjambok, the Boer miners had worked out an elabo-
rate system of pin pricks, anything from a kick in the pants to
a slight case of manslaughter, to make work difficult for their
black mates, who were guilty of the crime of sweating for a
tenth of the white man's wages.

When the depreciation of sterling was fully compensated by
inflation, the mines had one problem: cut down expenses or
shut down. The reduction of expenses affected inflated wages
first. A Boer miner, mostly raw and always undisciplined, could
earn over twenty pounds a week. An unskilled coal miner, it is
true, earned only thirty shillings a week.

On January 1, 1922, the anniversary of the outbreak of the
great strike eight years before, the workers in several Transvaal
coal mines walked out. They refused a reduction in wages to
twenty-five shillings. The owners of the coal mines, already
working at a loss, insisted on their demands. The whole country
was scared. For three uneasy weeks the haggling went on. Then
the employers dismissed the miners. Smuts' heart did not beat
on the left. Himself a farmer and a farmer's son, at home on
the veld, and a lover of the platteland, although it rejected him
spitefully, he compared the miners' lot, even the worst paid
of them, with the farmers'. There was not a farmer who made
twenty-five shillings a week all year round.

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OLD MASTER

But he did not interfere. He stayed his hand. Dictatorial in-
clinations, if, indeed, he had felt them in his youth, were gone
with the years. He understood that in a democracy public opin-
ion was the supreme judge, and in spite of his terrible experi-
ences with South Africa's public opinion he was, now aging, a
confirmed democrat. He did not yet know how painfully and
slowly democracy works in a miners' strike. He confined him-
self to pleading with the gold miners: they should not follow
the bad example in the coal mines. Never strike before all pos-
sibility of negotiation was exhausted, he advised them. In their
low economic condition the gold mines would not survive a
strike. Half of them would close for good, and the miners them-
selves would no longer be strikers, but unemployed.

Uproarious hilarity on the Rand answered Oom Jannie's
pleading. Man by man, shoulder to shoulder, singing obscene
songs, beating up the foremen and officials, killing a few Kafir
bystanders, the gold miners of the Rand walked out. For the
first time all mines were closed.

The strikers were in high spirits. The Hertzogites would come
to their aid. They had the promise, not from the leader himself,
but from scores of his underlings.

They fought the employers, the public, the natives, but the
real target of their hatred was Smuts. They only rarely used his
name. Everyone knew who was meant when "the agent of the
Chamber of Mines" was cursed.

Smuts divided his time between Pretoria, the seat of the
executive, and Cape Town, the seat of the legislature, receiving
deputations, appealing to the strikers, dealing with the em-
ployers, trying to calm the country, and yet to make it aware
of its peril. All his attempts failed. Milner's shadow loomed
over him, black and menacing. "Everyone who has a bad hand
at bridge damns Milner!"

In the middle of February the Council of Action urged the
strikers to hold out. Many, particularly among the oldsters,
were disgusted. They did not relish the outrages of their young
mates. They wanted their work and pay. But woe to him who
whispered it! The sjambok dealt with the "scab." The sjambok

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OLD MASTER

was not the only weapon. Provocatively, the commandos of
strikers paraded the streets with rifles and guns; once they pro-
duced a machine-gun. The commandants were mostly Hert-
zogites. None of the new Union bosses had ever worked in a
mine.

In the House of Assembly, Smuts put the onus where it be-
longed: at the door of the Hertzogites. They were inciting labor
with their infamous slander of the government. Personally, he
did not care. But the country should care. The government, he
insisted with a stubbornness that was unanimously criticized,
would keep out of the struggle. "We shall draw a ring round
the disputants, and allow them to fight it out/' were his words.
They were long remembered throughout South Africa, and
never forgiven. Public opinion refused to think and act for it-
self. -As late as on March 1, Smuts insisted: "I think we shall
allow things to develop." "I think I shall not get married to-
day," was not nearly as often quoted.

The Chamber of Mines, in its despair, grew stubborn, too.
They refused a conference with the strike leaders. They were
fed up with eating humble pie. Upon their refusal a general
strike throughout the country was proclaimed. And now, as the
popular saying in Johannesburg had it, "the balloon went up."

The general staff of the strikers, who were open revolution-
aries, established headquarters in Fordsburg, one of the mining
towns around Johannesburg. The sixty miles of the Rand were
under their terror. Strangely, they left a few business streets
and the railroad station alone. One of their strongest citadels
was in a school building on, paradoxically, Jan Smuts Avenue.

Smuts called up the burgher commandos. A few days before
the Hertzogites had tried to do the same. But in a grave emer-
gency the solid burghers hearkened to the call of the law. In
their own right they established martial law in and around
Johannesburg. Smuts was still saying in Parliament that this
was not a government order. He still wished to avoid blood-
shed.

On March 10 the burgher commandos sailed forth in a fron-

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OLD MASTER

tal attack. Now the Prime Minister sanctioned their attack by
legalizing martial law. Fighting was going on almost all over
the Rand. Where and as long as the revolutionaries were still
top dog, they stormed private houses, assaulted the people,
insulted the wives, terrified the children. Another terror spread
over the Rand. The Kafirs were in an uproar. Some of the revo-
lutionaries killed them on sight. But they could not kill 260,000,
the entire black population of the town. The natives staged a
fantastic uprising, half blood-crazed, and half desperate. Smuts
had addressed them when the trouble began. He had asked his
colored people to stay in their houses, and to be confident that
the government would give them protection.

Protection? . . . Government? . . . Where were they?

They were on their way. Smuts had left Parliament without
disclosing his whereabouts. He took the train to Johannesburg.
Only the Revolutionary Committee of Action knew that he was
coming. And only Smuts knew that the committee knew. Eighty
miles before reaching Johannesburg he transferred from the
train to an automobile. Some twenty miles nearer the embattled
town the train was held up, while Smuts, in his motorcar, drove
through a hail of bullets. One of the tires was blown out. But
nothing happened to him. Again a charmed life.

He arrived in Johannesburg on March 12, before dark. He
directed the end of the fight. He watched his airplanes drop-
ping not bombs but pamphlets which urged all loyal citizens to
leave the town. They went. A great many of them were disloyal
fugitives from their own revolution. Perhaps Smuts had had
this aim in mind. He did not care to have people shot, when
all was over. Only four of the revolutionaries were subsequently
sentenced to death. They had been caught as snipers.

Toward noon the white flag was hoisted over the revolution-
ary headquarters in Fordsburg. Almost three hundred police-
men and burghers, one hundred and sixty revolutionaries, some
one hundred bystanders, and an undisclosed number of natives
were killed or wounded.

In Parliament an acrimonious debate ensued. Tielman Roos
asked the House for mercy for the revolutionaries. The word

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OLD MASTER

mercy from the bloated lips of the most vitriolic speaker in
South Africa sounded strange. There was no reply. Hertzog
criticized the government's attitude in the strike for which he
himself was largely responsible, but in which, as usual, he had
taken no active part. The reactionary of reactionaries accused
Smuts of an attempt to crush organized labor by force.

A judicial commission inquired into the "chief causes of the
revolutionary movement," and found three explanations: "First,
the belief held by a large part of the strikers that they would
receive armed assistance from the Nationalists in the Orange
Free State and in the Western Transvaal. The strikers expected
that the burghers would accept the suggestions of Tielman
Roos and decline the government's call for assistance. Sec-
ondly, the actions of certain members of the Nationalist Party
in endeavoring to make political capital out of the industrial
upheaval. Thirdly, the desire of the Nationalist element among
the strikers to take advantage of the industrial dispute to obtain
a republican form of government for South Africa/'

Each one of these carefully chosen words lashed Hertzog.
The House rejected his motion of non-confidence in the gov-
ernment. Smuts' majority was fourteen. He was fully vindi-
cated.

He was doomed. He knew it.

His coalition government had started with a majority of
twenty-four. After the Rand revolution fourteen were left.
Patriarch Merriman, Smuts' political godfather from the Cape
and now his most important supporter, was bedridden. For all
practical purposes he had to be counted out. That left thirteen.
A few other veterans were similarly, if not quite as completely,
incapacitated. The South African Party was definitely over-
aged. Smuts had a habit of recompensing old friendship with
seats in the House. It was his only form of nepotism, or rather
avunculism. Not all his veteran comrades were still going strong
in their advancing fifties. Like the little nigger boys, soon there
were seven, six, five. . . . The fate of important divisions in the
House sometimes depended on three or four votes, and on an

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OLD MASTER

equal number of attacks of gout, influenza, and gastric calami-
ties which kept legislative patriarchs at home. Smuts himself
persistently refused to acknowledge his recurrent afflictions of
malaria, acquired in German East Africa. When they came, he
looked tired and pale. But he never missed a single session,
except when he went abroad.

He visited Rhodesia at the time when Cecil Rhodes' contract
with the British Government, handing over the colony to the
Chartered Company, had run its course, and when the Rhode-
sians were free to choose their own future destiny. Smuts had
come, he asserted amid general hilarity, only as a simple tourist.
But he could not refrain from talking of Pan-Africa, the Do-
minion of the Federated States of Africa, self-governing under
the Union Jack. A merger of Rhodesia and the Union would be
a decisive first step on this long way.

The cartoonists at home depicted Smuts vrying in the best
old Boer manner, a candle in one hand, and a moneybag in the
other. He appeared as a senile curmudgeon, whereas "Miss
Rhodesia" was prim and demure. The Boers wanted no in-
crease in the British element. Least of all did they want to be
burdened by the colony's permanent deficit.

The white population of Rhodesia, all English, was strongly
attracted by Smuts. Even in his decline his enigmatic personal
magic was as strong as ever. But the Rhodesians wanted noth-
ing of the Afrikander baas, no strikes as in Johannesburg, no
Kafir-baiting. They felt safer, and very much more cozy, under
British protection. A plebiscite rejected union with the Union.
Smuts fully understood. The Union of brothers, his daydream,
was not established even in South Africa. He was ahead of his
time.

In 1923 he attended again the Imperial Conference in Lon-
don. The French had just marched into the Ruhr basin to en-
force the delivery of coal which Germany offered to transfer
by way of reparations. But the Ruhr mining magnates with-
held the coal under flimsy pretences. Yet Smuts thundered
against the Ruhr "invasion." He impressed England strongly,

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OLD MASTER

mercy from the bloated lips of the most vitriolic speaker in
South Africa sounded strange. There was no reply. Hertzog
criticized the government's attitude in the strike for which he
himself was largely responsible, but in which, as usual, he had
taken no active part. The reactionary of reactionaries accused
Smuts of an attempt to crush organized labor by force.

A judicial commission inquired into the "chief causes of the
revolutionary movement," and found three explanations: "First,
the belief held by a large part of the strikers that they would
receive armed assistance from the Nationalists in the Orange
Free State and in the Western Transvaal. The strikers expected
that the burghers would accept the suggestions of Tielman
Roos and decline the government's call for assistance. Sec-
ondly, the actions of certain members of the Nationalist Party
in endeavoring to make political capital out of the industrial
upheaval. Thirdly, the desire of the Nationalist element among
the strikers to take advantage of the industrial dispute to obtain
a republican form of government for South Africa."

Each one of these carefully chosen words lashed Hertzog.
The House rejected his motion of non-confidence in the gov-
ernment. Smuts* majority was fourteen. He was fully vindi-
cated.

He was doomed. He knew it.

His coalition government had started with a majority of
twenty-four. After the Rand revolution fourteen were left.
Patriarch Merriman, Smuts' political godfather from the Cape
and now his most important supporter, was bedridden. For all
practical purposes he had to be counted out. That left thirteen.
A few other veterans were similarly, if not quite as completely,
incapacitated. The South African Party was definitely over-
aged. Smuts had a habit of recompensing old friendship with
seats in the House. It was his only form of nepotism, or rather
avunculism. Not all his veteran comrades were still going strong
in their advancing fifties. Like the little nigger boys, soon there
were seven, six, five. . . . The fate of important divisions in the
House sometimes depended on three or four votes, and on an

304

OLD MASTER

equal number of attacks of gout, influenza, and gastric calami-
ties which kept legislative patriarchs at home. Smuts himself
persistently refused to acknowledge his recurrent afflictions of
malaria, acquired in German East Africa. When they came, he
looked tired and pale. But he never missed a single session,
except when he went abroad.

He visited Rhodesia at the time when Cecil Rhodes' contract
with the British Government, handing over the colony to the
Chartered Company, had run its course, and when the Rhode-
sians were free to choose their own future destiny. Smuts had
come, he asserted amid general hilarity, only as a simple tourist.
But he could not refrain from talking of Pan-Africa, the Do-
minion of the Federated States of Africa, self-governing under
the Union Jack. A merger of Rhodesia and the Union would be
a decisive first step on this long way.

The cartoonists at home depicted Smuts vrying in the best
old Boer manner, a candle in one hand, and a moneybag in the
other. He appeared as a senile curmudgeon, whereas "Miss
Rhodesia" was prim and demure. The Boers wanted no in-
crease in the British element. Least of all did they want to be
burdened by the colony's permanent deficit.

The white population of Rhodesia, all English, was strongly
attracted by Smuts. Even in his decline his enigmatic personal
magic was as strong as ever. But the Rhodesians wanted noth-
ing of the Afrikander baas, no strikes as in Johannesburg, no
Kafir-baiting. They felt safer, and very much more cozy, under
British protection. A plebiscite rejected union with the Union.
Smuts fully understood. The Union of brothers, his daydream,
was not established even in South Africa. He was ahead of his
time.

In 1923 he attended again the Imperial Conference in Lon-
don. The French had just marched into the Ruhr basin to en-
force the delivery of coal which Germany offered to transfer
by way of reparations. But the Ruhr mining magnates with-
held the coal under flimsy pretences. Yet Smuts thundered
against the Ruhr "invasion." He impressed England strongly,

305

OLD MASTER

and finally succeeded in driving the first wedge between the
English and the French. In Berlin, Dr. Stresemann listened. He
had always been a long-distance admirer of Smuts. Both men
dreamed the same dream of international co-operation and
brotherhood. Both were, each in his own country, apostles of
the League of Nations. And both were equally hated by their
own people. Stresemann died of a kidney disease, which was,
as in Botha's case, in truth a broken heart.

When Smuts returned home, Hertzog and Colonel Creswell
were engaged in a series of hands-across-the-table talks in the
koffeehuis of the House of Assembly. Their meetings were so
plainly in the open that even Smuts scented no evil. Hertzog, it
appeared, wanted to display his beautiful English. Creswell
wanted to cure his conversation partner of his anti-British ob-
session. Both men wanted to oust Smuts.

Personally, Hertzog was prepared to continue preaching his
gospel of Britain-baiting until he had converted a majority, and
could establish an independent government, to sever the British
connection. But there was no majority obtainable against the
English voters plus Smuts' followers, the progressive Boers.
Most of Hertzog's followers were becoming weary of wander-
ing in the political wilderness. True Afrikanders, they famished
for the fruits of office. Tielman Roos, ever a good mixer, had
brought Hertzog and Creswell together.

Both forgot their previous vicious attacks on one another.
The last campaign lay three years back, an eternity for South
African politicians. Hertzog could no longer resist his hench-
men's hunger for pork and patronage. He was the leader; he
had to follow. Creswell, for his part, saw his influence on the
Rand vanishing. The beaten mob wanted action. On April 23,
1923, Smuts was stabbed in the back. The unnatural coalition
of Nationalists and Labor united in voting against the govern-
ment.

Immediately Smuts dissolved Parliament, and appealed to
the electorate. On June 17, 1924, after a bitter campaign, he
went down in defeat. Hertzog had won sixty-three seats against

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OLD MASTER

Smuts' fifty-three, and Labor, now Hertzog's vassal, had gained
eighteen seats into the bargain.

Oom Jannie resigned before the new House met. Hertzog
was sent for. He swore his oath of allegiance to the Crown.
After twelve years of political exile he was back in office, this
time at the helm of the state.

Smuts had been in office throughout all his mature life, ex-
cept during the time of Milner's proconsulate. He remained un-
ruffled. Gladly he relinquished his official residence in the
Groote Schuur, which had always been a bit too grand for his
tastes. He would farm again, and read a little more. Worries?
Certainly, the family would have to retrench. Smuts' law prac-
tice was long gone. He had never been in business. The Smuts
tribe would have to subsist on the meager salary of an M. P.
All of them, father, mother, and the children, looked most hope-
fully into the bleak future. Smuts did not worry that his bank
account was overdrawn. He did not even know it.

Chapter 25 THE LEAN YEARS

THE FUNDAMENTAL CAUSE OF SMUTS POLITICAL DOWNFALL LAY

deeper than the accumulated social, economic, and racial trou-
bles which, on the surface, brought about his undoing. In spite
of its turbulence, South Africa was bogged down in bread-and-
butter politics. Smuts' vision became broader, wider, cosmic,
as the years went on. His feet still firmly planted on the veld,
he had grown too big for his narrow frame.

It was entirely characteristic of him that he did not seek
revenge for his defeat. Although he played his part as the

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OLD MASTER

leader of the opposition, he gave little thought to politics. He
spent most of his time on his farm, brooding over the central
problem of his intellectual life, and writing his chef-d'oeuvre,
Holism. As a mere achievement of industry and energy it was
a remarkable piece of workmanship. The bulky volume, explor-
ing and analyzing the most subtle philosophical and psycho-
logical problems, surveying the thought of all the great phi-
losophers and founders of religion, of artists and scientists, was
written within six months, without assistance, without even, it
was said, the help of a secretary. The book makes difficult read-
ing, although it contains some almost poetic passages, yet it is
unforgettable as a perfect blend of cool science, deeply felt
religion, and a philosophy, deriving from Aristotle, developed
by Spinoza and Leibnitz, and siding rather with St. Thomas
Aquinas than with Darwin, to whose theory of material selec-
tion Smuts opposes his own law of the human personality, ris-
ing from its physiological origins to a fusion of body and mind,
and becoming a part of the whole holos in Greek which is
greater than all its parts.

A book of this kind could never become popular, but Smuts'
endeavor "to attain a Holistic universe" in which there would,
of course, be no war won him recognition throughout the sci-
entific world. The highest tribute paid to him was an invitation
to preside over the Centenary Meeting of the British Associa-
tion for the Advancement of Science, which was to meet in
London, in the autumn of 1931. He accepted the invitation
with hardly concealed emotion. "I can only tell you that noth-
ing in my chequered life has made me prouder," he answered.
It appeared that Smuts had done with politics, and was about
to devote himself to the vast realm of the spirit. At home things
were going from bad to worse. In the elections of 1929 he had
taken another bad beating.

The ruling government of reaction and revolution, of fire and
water, was a combination of amateurs. Hertzog himself, who
took the Ministry of Native Affairs in addition to the Premier-
ship in order to carry out his long advocated native policy, was

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OLD MASTER

the only member who had previously held office. His colleagues
were mostly job-hunters. Labor had to confine itself to two
members in the Cabinet. Colonel Creswell took the posts of
Labor and Defence, his comrade Boydell got the portfolios
of Post and Telegraph, as well as Public Works. The stalwarts of
the Nationalists reaped a rich harvest. Advocate Tielman Roos
became Minister of Justice, Dr. Malan grabbed three offices
at once Education, Public Health, and the Interior Charlie
Malan and Willie Beyers, both furious rabble rousers, shared
between them the Railways and the Mines. Two rebels of the
1914 uprising came into power. General Kemp, of "Smuts into
mincemeat" fame, became Minister for Agriculture, and Piet
Grobler, Oom Paul's kinsman, received the Lands, the juiciest
post, since he could not allot farms to meritorious party
members.

This combination of intriguers and know-nothings was fa-
vored by incredible luck. Hertzog had barely come into office
when the shadows of world depression began to recede. Tor-
rential rains, such as the country had not experienced for fifty
years, made for a record corn harvest that brought the fanners
six million pounds from overseas. This superstitious lot was
now convinced that the Lord approved of Hertzogism. When
platinum was found on many farms, the last doubts about
Hertzog's divine mission were dispelled. Smuts had reorganized
the mining industry. His successors thrived on the outcome of
the measures they had so violently opposed. With industry
again profitable, the government had large revenues to spend.
"Klaasie" Havenga, Hertzog's man Friday, and Minister of Fi-
nancethe only member of the government, incidentally, who
had lasting success spent the money wisely. More white labor
could be employed, the wages of the railway workers rose, the
poor whites, Hertzogites to the last man, were settled on the
land, and tax-exempt. Yet Klaasie Havenga could show a mod-
est surplus in the Treasury from year to year.

The biggest boom was the arrival of the Prince of Wales. The
Prince had been expected a year earlier. But when Smuts dis-
solved Parliament, the state visit was postponed. Now His

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OLD MASTER

Royal Highness came, saw, and scored. Trade boomed. The
Boer belles, most of them venomous Britain-baiters, bought silk
stockings and white gloves, ostrich-trimmed hats, silver shoes,
and even lipsticks. They hoped for a dance with the Prince, or
at least to help to prepare tea for him. The Rough Riders from
the Boer War joined with the English ex-soldiers at mounted
parades in honor of "Ons Prins" Hertzog, the weathercock,
crowed in Parliament: "I say positively that I have not the
slightest intention of recommending secession from the Empire.
I say here again that I am strongly in favor of the British con-
nection being maintained."

But as soon as the Prince had left and retail trade was again
reduced to normal proportions, the old racial quarrel was re-
opened. Hertzog proceeded step by step, and, as usual, under
cover of front-men. To the general astonishment of the House
of Assembly, the Laborite Arthur Barlow, himself an English-
man, proposed an address to the King, praying that he "here-
after may be graciously pleased to refrain from conferring any
titles upon your subjects domiciled or living in the Union of
South Africa or the mandated territories of South West Africa."
Thus the visit of the Prince of Wales was not followed by the
shower of titles which the leaders of society, predominantly
English, would otherwise have had conferred upon them.
Hertzog himself came into the open. He attacked titles as a
danger to democratic ideals, and called them "a pestiferous
institution that even Europe would like to be free from if it
could." Moreover, titles were conferred upon those who pleased
the British Government. Hertzog was no longer prepared to
tolerate such tampering with South Africa's independence.
"Don't let us be the lackeys of anybody!" he concluded. He
had dug out one of his oldest stock-in-trade phrases.

Preferential tariffs for British goods were abolished. Large
government orders for railways were, for the first time, placed
in Germany. A ferociously conducted battle of flags ensued
which tore the country for two whole years. Hertzog wanted
a "purified" flag, without the Union Jack. The British section
insisted on the Union Jack, but conceded that the two flags of

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OLD MASTER

the defunct republics could be included. Both Houses of Par-
liament, all political parties, even the courts were involved. In
the end the Earl of Athlone, the Governor General, brought
about a compromise settlement.

The time had come for Hertzog to attend an Imperial Con-
ference in London. Before leaving he shouted that he intended
to ask for a clear definition of the free and independent state
of the Union. It was not sufficient, he said with his shyster law-
yer's insistence, that Great Britain and the Dominions were
agreed on the matter. The world should be notified of the ex-
isting full equality within the Commonwealth.

This was one of the rare occasions that brought Smuts to his
feet. At a mass meeting in Johannesburg he said: "A declara-
tion such as General Hertzog has proposed would mean the
breakup of the British Empire."

Hertzog, however, succeeded in London in obtaining one
more statement on the problem of equality, which no one had
contested. It was, essentially, a reassertion of the existing status.
But for home consumption Hertzog turned it into a personal
triumph: "The Old British Empire exists no longer," he told his
listeners at the Paarl: "As a result of what the Imperial Confer-
ence has done, nothing remains of the old Empire." In Parlia-
ment he claimed that, after the decision of London, every Do-
minion had the right to neutrality if Great Britain were to be
involved in war! Smuts rose, and said quietly: "I doubt whether
such an interpretation would be finally and definitely accept-
able." It was only a short exchange of thrusts. But years later
these two sentences were to make history.

The first five years of Hertzogism-in-office were character-
ized by a muddle of thinly veiled anti-British legislation. Every
South African Trade Commissioner abroad was elevated to the
rank of Minister Plenipotentiary. A Press Act endangered the
personal security of opposition journalists. All political articles
had to carry the full name and address of the writer. Hertzog's
hooligans were waiting around the corner. Afrikaans was made
the second official language. A new trade agreement with Ger-

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OLD MASTER

many, Hertzog boasted, "breached the Imperial Preference
System/' Finally a Department of External Affairs was set up.
Hertzog himself took it over. Almost all the budding South
African diplomats were Afrikanders.

This sort of selection embittered the English part of the
population. Their protests were unavailing. But a good many
Boers joined them in attacking the shameless favoritism now
practiced. More than one ministeras the old saying goes-
while providing for his relatives, did not forget his in-laws,
either. These "jobs for pals" became a bone of contention even
within the ranks of the Hertzogites. The government declared
that it would favor the appointment of those men who were
most eager to apply its ideas.

At the same time the coalition began to crack. The first split
occurred within the Labor Party, the English wing of the anti-
English government, a queer mixture of gentlemen and rabble
rousers. There were now two Labor parties: the Creswellites
and the National Councilites. The leader of this leftish wing,
Mr. Madeley, had to be co-opted into the government, in ex-
change for a right-wing Labor man who was kicked out. Mr.
Madeley became Minister for Post and Telegraph. Immedi-
ately, he trebled the wages of the Kafir employees. This was
too much for his Nationalist partners. Hertzog asked Madeley
to resign. The latter, copying Hertzog's stubbornness in 1912,
refused. Hertzog aped Botha, resigning on behalf of the whole
Cabinet. He was sent for again, and built a new government,
excluding Madeley. The whole maneuver took him three hours,
while Botha had taken six days. Hertzog boasted that he was
a better man than his dead, but still hated, antagonist.

The little incident of the Kafir pay was the snowball that
became the avalanche. The general elections of 1929 were ap-
proaching. Hertzog decided to make the native question the
chief issue. Smuts, although not very active in politics, was still
the principal enemy. He must get at Smuts.

It so happened that Smuts delivered a speech at Ermelo,
dealing with his favorite topic. In his best Cecil Rhodes man-
ner he pointed out the rapid development of the vast British

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OLD MASTER

territory in Central and South East Africa, and suggested the
Union's co-operation to form a great African Dominion extend-
ing all over the continent.

This was the cue for which Hertzog had been waiting. To-
gether with his henchmen Dr. Malan and Tielman Roos, he
issued a violent manifesto, unsurpassed in its falsifications and
slander. Smuts was called "a man who puts himself forward as
the apostle of a black Kafir State, of which South Africa is to
form so subordinate a constituent part that she will know her
own name no more. Smuts preaches political equality for all-
Kafir and white man, everywhere on an equal footing. This
means the downfall of the white man and his civilization in
South Africa. Shall the people of this country stand passively
by and watch how South Africa is being wiped off the map, as
General Smuts desires, in order to be dissolved into an English-
Kafir State?"

It was the most vituperative attack, even for the rowdy poli-
tics of South Africa. But it hit the people on their sore point.
It pointed out the approach of the menace under which the
Boers had lived ever since they had conquered the land by
slaughtering the blacks. Throughout dorp and veld the mani-
festo was distributed. "Smuts for votes to the Kafir!" was inces-
santly repeated, and the question was asked: "Do you want to
save your children from the blacks? Vote Nationalist!" Finally,
the condensed form of racial appeal emerged, and swept the
land: "Dutch vote Dutch! Dutch means Hertzog!"

The townspeople kept their heads. But the platteland was
swept by a nationalistic landslide when the elections came.
Hertzog got seventy-eight seats, Smuts sixty-one. The Cabinet
was reorganized. Tielman Roos retired, and left for Germany,
allegedly to consult a doctor. The Ministry of Justice went to
Oswald Pirow whom Smuts had beaten in his constituency,
Standerton, but who succeeded in getting himself elected else-
where. The first avowed pro-German joined the government,
in fact, the first pro-Nazi.

Smuts accepted an invitation to deliver the Rhodes Memo-

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rial lecture at Oxford, where he breathed the fresh air of Eng-
land for two months. Then he carried out an old plan. The
League of Nations' tenth anniversary was about to be cele-
brated in New York. Simultaneously he received, after many
similar invitations, an offer from a lecture agency, which had
managed ex-President Taf t and Prince William of Sweden, for
fifty lectures throughout the United States and Canada. It was
a great opportunity. It was not the lecture fees that lured him,
although they too may have exercised a certain spell, but the
chance of impressing America with his world-embracing ideas.

He crossed the ocean at the end of 1929. He was showered
with civic honors and university degrees. The entire press of-
fered him bouquets. Many editorials called him the greatest
living statesman. Only the Irish extremists attacked him fero-
ciously. He might, they feared, end the British-Irish impasse in
such a way that Eire would not realize her republican aspira-
tions. The Christian Science Monitor presented the most accu-
rate view: "He has always served high ideals in a way that has
ever inspired a strange confidence. He was not closing his eyes
to mistakes, one felt, where mistakes were made. His devotion
was inspired by a much larger conception of things than that
involved in the generally accepted meaning of the word pa-
triotism.*'

American visitors were startled by his intimate familiarity
with Irving, Poe, and Emerson. No one knew that he had writ-
ten an unpublished book on Walt Whitman. Yet he disguised
his bookishness with that shyness that is an important part of
his make-up. "I am 80 per cent a farmer, and, at that, a Boer,"
he said, adding smilingly: "Most people think a Boer must be
a barbarian." He showed little interest in seeing skyscrapers,
but he was intent on visiting the farm belt in the Middle West.
"You people have made farming a science. I wish that South
Africa could emulate you. We have farms in a vast area. But
we have not yet attained an adequate development."

In America he made his famous declaration on behalf of a
Jewish home in Palestine. He would serve their cause, he prom-
ised, not because it was Jewish, but because it was a great

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human cause. He soon had an opportunity to prove that he
stood by his word, even at his own political peril. On the ship
returning to South Africa, he received the news that Parliament
in Cape Town had voted a bill that would practically exclude
"Eastern Europeans" from immigration. Most terrifying was
the fact that not the Hertzogites alone, but almost all his own
party, had voted the so-called "Quota Bill." He arrived in the
nick of, time to take part in the third reading. He found no sup-
port. Again he went down in defeat.

The lower his fortunes sank in South Africa, the higher
surged his fame in England. Now was the time for the Cen-
tenary Meeting whose Presidency he had so gladly accepted.
He had some of his happiest days in England. He needed them.
Five thousand scientists from all over the world were congre-
gated. Respectfully, this most distinguished group listened to
Smuts dwelling on The Scientific World Picture of Today. He
was in his element. He presided over illustrious meetings, took
part in the work of no less than thirteen commissions, spoke
in public halls and exhibition grounds packed to overflowing
with plain people. He was given the freedom of York, and had,
several times a day, to acknowledge distinctions and honors.
Everyone sought his company: fellow botanists, fellow agricul-
turalists, fellow philosophers, fellow historians, fellowwhat
not. He had long and elaborate talks with leading economists,
thoughtfully discussing what would happen to the world now
that England had gone off gold. Suddenly the lights went out.
Only very few days of undisturbed happiness at one time are
allotted to General Smuts. South Africa refused to go off the
gold standard. It was insanity. If she did not want to become
the most expensive country in the world, to paralyze her trade
and business, she must immediately follow England, Smuts
urged in repeated cables.

The Hertzogite Cabinet received his urgent messages and
explanation with riotous chuckles. Did Oom Jannie not know
that he was already surviving himself? Did he indeed fancy
that South Africa would still follow England slavishly as in the

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bygone days of his power? Did he want to stage a come back?
They refused his pressing advice hilariously, but with grave
suspicion. What was the old devil scheming? He could not be
as stupid as that to propose that the country producing half the
world's gold should go off the gold standard!

The Chamber of Mines, and a few experts, understood per-
fectly well. Moreover, they would not be adversely affected by
an increase in the price of the gold they were producing. This
simple fact everyone understood, even the bearded Boers on
the platteland, and now it was clear beyond doubt that Smuts,
in England, was again plotting with industry and the Jews.

In November he returned to South Africa. His country was
choked with its own gold. Prices were far above world market
levels. Exports had stopped. The farmers did not know where
to sell their crops. Every other country that had gone off gold,
including all the other Dominions, undersold them. Australia
had even gone further than England. One could get Australian
cattle, wool, corn for half the South African price. But General
Hertzog, in Parliament, lifted his finger accusingly against
Smuts and said that Smuts' off-gold propaganda was ruining
the credit of the Union.

It happened rarely that Smuts defended himself against in-
sults. It was his habit to gaze into the air, while a torrent of
abuse poured down upon him. Sometimes he explained: "The
dogs bark, but the caravan marches on." That was as long as
he was in power. Now he was out. Now he said contemptu-
ously: "This is no government. This is terror." He piled figure
upon figure to prove his simple facts. He was still derided
until bankruptcies followed one another rapidly, shops closed
down, mass suicides occurred, and the farmers, the real power
in the state, began to lose their patience. They had been
plagued by another drought, already in its fourth year. Per-
sistent bad weather always brings government changes in the
Union. The impossibility of selling their expensive crops, their
own inability to buy fodder, forage and tools at excessive prices,
in addition to the drought, bode ill for Hertzogism. One by-
election after another went to Smuts' followers.

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It was at this moment that Tielman Roos came in. After his
return from Germany, he had no longer played a role in poli-
tics. His health was too badly shattered. He had received a
seat on the Bench of the Supreme Court in Bloemfontein. But
he could not stand the dignified tranquillity of a supreme jus-
tice. The toothless Lion of the Transvaal roared again. At
Christmas 1932, after having resigned his seat, he had a new
message for the country. It was exactly Smuts' message: "Off
gold!"

Now things were different. Now people listened. Tielman
Roos, everyone's pal, the most popular jolly good fellow in the
Transvaal had he forgiven his lifelong arch-foe? Indeed, he
came as a peacemaker. He suggested the adoption of Smuts'
proposal with Hertzog's consent. Both men should join a "best-
men" (coalition) government. And since one could not expect
either of them to submit to the other, he, again plain Advocate
Tielman Roos, would bring the supreme sacrifice of acting as
Prime Minister.

The time was January, 1933. It was just before Hitler came
to power in Germany. But South Africa had only one problem:
gold. Hertzog yielded. The Union followed the devaluation of
sterling. A riotous off-gold rush ensued, unprecedented even in
the annals of Johannesburg. The country was flooded with
money. Smuts' prophecy was vindicated a hundredfold. But
Tielman Roos had stolen the show. His tremendous popularity
had forced the government to give in, while Smuts had been
the crier in the desert.

Roos made a formal offer to Smuts to accept his leadership.
For his part, he would win over the majority of the Hertzog-
ites, if necessary, against the will of the leader. Who were his
followers? Smuts asked. Roos could not yet disclose them.
Smuts declined. Tielman Roos was not a newly won friend. He
was a successful turncoat. Smuts did not sacrifice his principles
for a share in the power.

Once more Smuts had proved his infallible instinct. The tide
that had carried Roos sky-high ebbed as rapidly as it had
surged. People lost interest in politics. It was disclosed that

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Roos had no political followers of any importance. He had no
financial backers. He was reduced to his natural proportions.
Now Smuts could deal with him. He offered him a minority in
a cabinet which he himself would lead. Roos insisted on all or
nothing. He got nothing. Heartbroken, he returned to Bloem-
fontein. He was now fifty-five, diseased, penniless. He had to
start life all over again. It proved impossible. He still hung
about for a little while, ever joking, ever the good companion.
Then his light went out. Smuts eulogized him at the unveiling
of his memorial. He has the habit of praising his enemies.

He resumed his lonesome walks in the veld. The country, he
reflected, needed peace after all this excitement. The people
were sick of political haggling. A dark cloud was appearing on
the horizon over Germany. A very distant cloud, not yet bigger
than a man's hand, it was true. Smuts was not so far too badly
concerned about this fellow Adolf Hitler. The decision of his
own lifetime was at stake. Hertzog's government was shaken.
The recurrence of this eternal racial conflict could perhaps be
prevented. Should he try to return to the government? Upset
Hertzog, if possible, and establish the rule of his own tottering
party against another party of about equal strength, and against
the shadow of Roos, that still loomed behind the scene? Would
that be union? Fusion? Brotherhood?

It was at this moment, when both Smuts and Hertzog stood
at the crossroads, that the kingmaker of South Africa inter-
fered. "Old Bailey" Sir Abe Bailey had almost twenty years
before dropped out of active politics, although he might have
become the dominant power. Yet he had refused to stand again
when the first Union Parliament expired, excusing himself in
his inimitable way with the words: "As I was always at cross
fire in politics, I had the wonderful achievement of keeping
myself out of office. I wish to keep my record straight/' In fact,
no other man's record was as chequered as his. He had inher-
ited Cecil Rhodes' Midas touch, as well as the colossus' con-
tempt for money not serving a higher purpose. He was the man
to carry on Rhodes' self-imposed mission. Like his spiritual
predecessor, "Old Bailey" was one of the greatest latter-day

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OLD MASTER

Imperialists, perhaps the last one of the honorable line, and
again, like Rhodes, he wanted to make the Dutch in South
Africa a pillar of the Empire.

His methods were shrewder and more direct than Rhodes',
He had, after all, not made his millions in diamonds and gold,
but in odd adventures: as a prize fighter and a stock broker, a
"farmer," as he modestly called himself (he became the world's
largest estate owner), a land speculator. "I always tried to keep
up appearances by keeping up the payment of my debts, espe-
cially the small ones that squeak the loudest," he once con-
fessed.

But he was not particular about his "friends" including
everyone in South Africa paying their debts. Practically all
Dutch leaders knew where to borrow funds, either for them-
selves or for their causes. Botha had built his house in Pretoria
with a loan from "Old Bailey" which was punctiliously repaid.
Hertzog sought capital for his multiple newspaper enterprises.
He never touched a penny for himself. But for the good of his
mission he frequently visited Rust en Vrederest in peace Sir
Abe's manor in Muizenberg, the fashionable beach near Cape
Town. Old Bailey lavished money on enterprises to advance
whatever Afrikaans culture there was. He founded, and richly
endowed, a Voortrekker's scholarship for research into the his-
tory of "our pioneer ancestors," although he was the son of a
Yorkshireman from the West Riding. This scholarship was en-
trusted to the University of Stellenbosch, which had once been
Victoria College, Smuts' alma mater. The university was, and
remains to this day, the Mecca of the British-baiting Afrikan-
ders. The Union Club in Johannesburg, at the corner of Bree
and Joubert Streets, which Old Bailey founded and supported,
was the only club in the country where British and Dutch gen-
tlemen met on an equal footing. Time and again he used his
great influence, and spent some of his wealth, to foster in Lon-
don the cause of the Union of South Africa.

This was the man, with one foot in the English, the other in
the Dutch camp, his heart beating for the Empire, who wielded
perhaps the greatest influence in the decisive hour. He spoke

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OLD MASTER

Botha was lionized). During the First War Mr. Garvin, one of
the most influential journalists, suggested retaining Smuts as
Foreign Secretary. Sir Philip Gibbs even looked upon him as
the obvious successor of Lloyd George. Similarly, many Eng-
lishmen wanted to keep him in the country, when he visited
London during the present war. Smuts never seriously consid-
ered such suggestions. But he likes to come to the tight little
island as a friend. It is the only place on earth where he does
not shun the limelight.

In his own country even his friends say that aloofness is his
predominant quality. He finds his chief solace in philosophy,
and in his model marriage. (About Mrs. Smuts, South Africa's
much beloved "Ouma" the story made the rounds that she runs
her house with a grandchild at one hand and the Greek gram-
mar in the other.) Everyone knows Smuts as a superlatively
clever, singularly subtle, extremely cautious, but, by the same
token, unusually daring statesman, and as a glutton for work.

But only a very narrow, limited circle knows the real Smuts.
Some have suggested that he should occupy a chair for meta-
physics at an ancient seat of learning. Others call him a country
gentleman, interested in herds and crops and in the wide open
spaces. Even those who see him predominantly as an out-of-
doors man, understand, however, that it is not only his passion
for mountain-climbing and his inbred horsemanship that make
him a part of the South African landscape. The grass of the
veld has a particular meaning to him; Smuts is one of the
world's outstanding botanists, specializing in grasses. Country
life also gives him an opportunity for mental repose, commun-
ion with himself, for reflection on the eternal verities. He has
made most of his great decisions after a solitary walk. Before
he at once signed and protested the Treaty of Versailles, the
most spectacular incident in his career, he marched, since no
veld was at hand, up and down the Champs Elys^es.

Most of his admirers wonder about, some even regret, his
complete indifference to jealousy, rivalry, ambitions, disap-
pointments, and to the bitterness of public life that no contem-
porary statesman has experienced to anything like the same

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OLD MASTER

degree. No one who has ever watched him from the gallery of
the House of Assembly can forget the faraway, transcendent
look with which he, immovably, without response, without any
reaction, tolerates the outpouring of abuse that has been
heaped upon him as upon no other living man. His enemies
loathe him because they know that he towers sky-high above
them. He appears detached even among his followers in the
House. One can see him striding along the corridors, lost in
reflections, but always with his ear to the ground, lest he miss
a single word of the debate behind the door.

In social contact he is candid and courteous, but intimate
with no one. Even his relations with Botha, it is said, were con-
fined to their work and vision in common, to that telepathy
that united them, but this did not extend much beyond their
common interest in their cause. Botha took time off for his
famous bridge games, for golf and tennis, whereas Smuts
crammed every moment with a double order of work and
study. It is doubtful whether his knowledge of card games
goes beyond a little old-fashioned whist. He relaxes now and
then with his family, his horses, his wanderings, his books. His
life is austere. He drinks only coffee, the mother's milk of the
Boer, and although he likes his biltong dried venison he eats
modestly. He has succeeded in keeping his weight steady for
many decades.

His handwriting is noted for its illegibility. His manner of
speech is forceful, convincing, persuasive. Sometimes he speaks
with vigor, more and more rarely with emotion. In great mo-
ments he has the rapid, passionate speech of the seer and
prophet. In private conversation he is frank and cordial, but
he does not allow familiarity. Whatever he says and however
he presents it, his words ring on.

South Africa calls him "slim": crafty, cunning, sly. But every-
one is aware that only pure and enlightened motives direct his
political game of chess. For reasons which must lie in invisible
depths, all South Africa also calls him "Oom Jannie." Even
Botha, eight years his senior, used to call him so. No one ever
called Botha, the man with the magic touch, radiating sym-

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OLD MASTER

pathy, "Oom Louis." Perhaps a comparison with Cecil Rhodes,
who was, already at the age of thirty, "the old man" to every-
one, is permissible. He used to refer to himself in these words.
Smuts has but two passions: his romantic patriotism, which
makes him call the story of South Africa "the only romantic
adventure story in modern history," and his passion for bigness,
an obsession he certainly shares with Rhodes. He has also fre-
quently been compared with Alexander Hamilton, particularly
for his work as the chief architect of the Union. He has, indeed,
Hamilton's world sense.

The word for Hertzog, his antagonist, later his chief, is:
petty. His very narrowness made him the idol of the kraal-
walled Boers. Physically, he was undersized; mentally he was
slow. He owed his success to his limitations. His brand of na-
tionalism was exclusive and jealous. He fitted well into a time
in which the envious, the dissatisfied nationsbig ones like the
Germans and the Japanese, small ones like the Irish and the
Boers were everywhere in the ascendant.

When he was at Victoria College (at the same time as
Smuts ) , he was not a bookish youth like his younger colleague,
but rather a bookworm. Painfully, he wormed his way through
bulky tomes of the Old Roman-Dutch law, while Smuts, until
his mind became oversaturated at Cambridge, was known for
his capacity of learning a book by heart after one reading. Hert-
zog, descendant of a family of German immigrants, refused to
study at an English university. Hence he was not admitted to
the bar in the then British colonies. He had to confine himself
to practicing in Bloemfontein, the capital of the furiously anti-
British Free State. After the Boer War, in which he only played
an insignificant part, he entered politics, of which he knew
nothing. But the Free Staters saw in the foreigner their own
flesh and blood. He became the champion of all those who
could not understand why they had been defeated by the tools
of the "Jews and the capitalists." Hertzog devoted himself to
the task of rebuilding a downhearted and broken nation. His
program was merely the airing of grievances, his outlook en-

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OLD MASTER

tirely racial. He hated the world, and sympathized only with
other "downtrodden" peoples: the Indians, the Egyptians, the
Irish. All were members of the British Empire. He came to
loathe the Empire with an abiding hatred. He hated progress
and civilization. To play down the fact that he was an outland-
ish newcomer as it must have appeared to the proud descend-
ants of the Voortrekkershe appealed to their deepest and
basest racial instincts.

The First War not only intensified his hatred for Britain, it
made him set all his hopes upon Germany. Whereas to Smuts
the Germans were prodigal sons of the great human family,
who should be welcomed back after the good spanking they
had received but, by all means, kept out of Africa, where they
were liable to build up and train enormous black armies to
Hertzog the Germans were the redeemers of the future. At the
Imperial Conference in London he told the members of the
British Government frankly that he disapproved of their ap-
parent distrust of Germany. Why, German blood was flowing
in his own veins, and did he not, despite his wild words, prove
a perfectly amiable business partner? After the First War a
picture of Frederick the Great hung over Hertzog's desk, oppo-
site the picture of his own German grandfather.

His predilection for national isolation in a thinly populated
and faraway country made him the natural enemy of Smuts'
Pan-African conception. Smuts' Holism was treason to Hertzog.
Smuts' eloquence was a challenge to his own manner of losing
himself in cumbersome, never-ending sentences, which, inci-
dentally, many Boers liked, since they need not listen quite so
attentively and could have a good nap during the three hours
Hertzog took to speak. Yet his persistence, his dogged repeti-
tions, the fact that his creed, Hertzogism, consisted of four or
five ever-recurring platitudes, made his appeal popular. There
was this smoldering flame in him that kindled the platteland.
He was obscure, often unintelligible, habitually cautious, until
he burst out in a rage.

His was a double life. As if to offset the wild man from the
veld, his conduct in private life was gentle and ingratiating.

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OLD MASTER

He had many English acquaintances, provided they were good
South Africans, not jingoes. He spoke their language without
the slightest foreign accent. Megalomaniac in politics, he was
simplicity incarnate in his off-stage bearing. In society he felt
insecure, but he was sure of his hold on his old friends and
liked their company. He cared little for money, and not at all
for amusements. He was entirely deficient in humor. He was
single-minded, and an introvert. Some day the little man would
no longer be satisfied with play acting the big boss. Some day
his repressed passions, the true ones, would burst out.

Smuts strove hard and honestly to make the coalition work.
Hertzog remained stubborn and evasive, although he, too,
wanted to give the new combination a working chance. For
the time being it was the only instrument that would keep him
in power.

Dr. Daniel Frangois Malan had different aims. He attributed
Tielman Roos' downfall to providential dispensation. He had
loathed his chief competitor with that Old Testament hatred
that only the Dutch Geref ormeede Church can teach. When he
heard of Tielman Roos' punishment by the Lord that the ail-
ing, prematurely aged man could scarcely eke out a living, and
that his family suffered direst need he spent all day in church
praying, he said, that the Lord may have mercy on a sinner.
When he left the church, Alderley Street, Cape Town's Fifth
Avenue, saw a show that no one had ever seen: Dr. Malan
strolled leisurely down the promenade, and, good Lord, Dr.
Malan laughed.

He was now the undisputed chief lieutenant of, and heir
presumptive to, Hertzog. But at the age of sixty it was no
longer enough to be a lieutenant, or an heir to the throne. Dr.
Malan, a faultfinder throughout his life, saw through Hertzog's
emptiness. Hertzog was a relic. What the nation needed was a
reformer. Had he himself not borne the burden of reforms dur-
ing the coalition government with Labor? Had he, Dr. Malan,
as Minister of the Interior, not made Afrikaans the official lan-
guage? Curtailed the power of the old-fashioned, pro-Smuts

OLD MASTER

Senate? Appointed reliable Britain-baiters to all offices of in-
come under the Crown? Destroyed Smuts' educational system,
so that the Boers should remain on the soil, and become farm-
ers as their fathers and grandfathers had been? Who else, if
not he, had borne the burden of the struggle in the flag quar-
rel? Should all his reforms be marred by a compromise with
Smuts? This was a good time for reformers. Germany had this
man Hitler, another Bismarck, another Frederick die Great.
He, Dr. Daniel Frangois Malan would be damned forgive,
Lord, forgive! he would be most unhappy if he did not be-
come the Luther of the Boers.

Although he had saved his mandate in a faraway Cape dis-
trict only due to the help of Smuts, who had come to campaign
for his perennial vilifier, Dr. Malan now refused to join the new
Cabinet. Instead, he organized a head committee of the irrec-
oncilables in order to outbid Hertzog's now necessarily some-
what subdued racialism and to steal his leader's thunder.

As duly elected chairman of the head committee, Dr. Malan
asked Prime Minister Hertzog whether he agreed "that the
British Crown, in so far as the Union is concerned, is divisible,
that we possess the right of neutrality, and that we have the
right of separation."

Hertzog was trapped. He could either agree to renew the
anti-British campaign at this moment, which would endanger
the coalition, or lose his aureole as Britain-baiter number one.
This seemed the graver menace. He answered Dr. Malan:
"With regard to the question of sovereign independence and
the removal of court anomalies it gives me pleasure to be able
to state that the intention is as presumed by your head com-
mittee." The British Crown, to which Hertzog had four times
sworn fealty, was now "court anomalies" to him.

The head committee went one step further. It demanded a
status bill to bring the Prime Minister's declaration into legal
form.

Hertzog agreed. He would move the bill.

To Smuts this decision came as a terrible blow. The Cabinet
to which he belonged was about to deceive England. Perhaps

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OLD MASTER

the merits of the act did not matter so much. Smuts felt con-
fident that he could stave off the worst. But the breach of con-
fidence involved, the fact that South Africa adopted an at-
titude which must appear as if the Union was going back on
Vereeniging, and on the Statute of Westminster, on both the
great declarations of freedom which he himself had materially
helped to bring about the double-dealing, the foulness of his
coalition partners, aroused his wrath. Should he break out of the
kraal? It would mean a renewal of fratricidal strife. It was im-
possible. He had to fall in line.

For the whole duration of the coalition government such
conflicts recurred, on a smaller or larger scale, conflicts not im-
portant because of a thinly veiled split inside the Cabinet, but
terrible because the split was inside Smuts. It was the conflict
between the South African and the philosopher. The Old Mas-
ter surpassed himself in exercising his strongest power: self-
control. He preserved South Africa for the great test that was
approaching.

He turned to Hertzog. Smuts implored him to watch his step.
With all his persuasiveness he wrestled for what he called
Hertzog's soul. The weathercock yielded a few inches. He gave
Smuts a written promise that those points on which they had
disagreed in the past would not be touched by the new act; he
and Smuts would merely continue to disagree about them.

In Parliament Smuts fought valiantly to keep the new act
within the frame of the Statute of Westminster. On this occa-
sion he delivered one of his historic speeches, celebrating the
Statute of Westminster as the magna charta of freedom. To the
people of South Africa he gave the promise that they would
not be asked to do anything they should not be asked to do.
He pleaded with London not to be unduly disturbed.

But the Dominion Party, the small group of independent
South African English under Colonel Stallard, was distrustful.

The new Status Act was passed with a great majority. Both
Hertzog's and Smuts' followers voted for it. The Dominion
Party was opposed and, strangely, the Malanites as well. Al-
though Dr. Malan's head committee had declared: "When the

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OLD MASTER

present Status Bill is passed by Parliament South Africa will be
more free than Paul Kruger's Transvaal was in 1884!" the act,
suddenly, did not go far enough for their appetites. Having
tasted his first victory, Dr. Malan wanted more elbow room.
With a handful of followers he seceded from the United Party.

The Boers had won the Boer War in 1934. It was the com-
mon opinion in South Africa. The English in the country knew
it best. Smuts saw their confidence waning. They had but a
couple of seats in Parliament. They were no longer a political
factor of any importance. But their distrust hurt Smuts deeply.
He addressed a few heart-rending words to them: "If I cannot
be trusted after what I have done for a lifetime, then who
can be trusted in this country? ... If I cannot be trusted,
who can be trusted in this world?"

On the same day Dr. Malan founded his party of "Purified
Nationalists." Its constitution was drafted on the pattern of the
National Socialistic Labor Party in Germany.

Nazism grew tropically on South Africa's hot soil. Its tenets
confirmed what most of the Boers had always suspected. Al-
ready during the Boer War they had unanimously assured Win-
ston Churchill, their prisoner of Pretoria, that "the Jews and
the capitalists" were responsible for the war. While Adolf Hitler
was still a schoolboy in Linz, Upper-Austria, Boonzaier, South
Africa's foremost cartoonist, discovered that one could make a
good living on Hoggenheimer alone! on the caricature of a fat,
apelike, bejeweled Jew, standing for the Rand capitalist. Hog-
genheimer held an enormous cigar in his left hand; his right
hand pulled the strings on which a shrimp with Smuts' likeness
danced.

Against a flood of rabid anti-Semitism, Smuts stood out to
protect the Jews, almost alone. A little assistance came from an
unexpected quarter. In 1933, Tielman Roos, shortly before his
death, lifted his fading voice against anti-Semitism. But by then
the Nazi locusts were already swamping the land.

Smuts did not yet know Hitler's secret weapon: the hypo-
dermic. Methodically, Nazism poisoned South Africa's blood

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OLD MASTER

stream. Nazi propaganda mushroomed on the hot soil. Nowhere
else were conditions for spreading the gospel of racialism as
favorable as among the race-crazed Boers. Moreover, in no
other civilized country was there so much destitution. South
Africa fell prey more easily to Nazism than Germany itself.

Twenty-two per cent of the white population were poor
whites: men of European descent who could not make a living
on civilized standards and who did not keep clear of the color
bar. Crushed between the haughtiness of skilled white labor,
from whose ranks they were barred, and cheap native labor,
with which they could not compete, three hundred thousand
poor whites, many of them bywoners on the farms, others slum
dwellers in the towns, lived in a state of physical and mental
decay that made them ripe for every revolution. According to
a report of a Carnegie Commission of Inquiry, another 34 per
cent of South Africa's white population were unable to feed
and clothe themselves, to be decently housed or to send their
children to school without government assistance. There were
neither English nor Jews among them. They were Boers to the
last man.

The bigoted Calvinists who loathed the English with Old
Testament hatred, as well as the irreconcilable Republicans,
who dreamed of the return of Oom Paul's golden days, set all
their hopes on Hitler. Moreover, the "national awakening" in
Germany appealed irresistibly to that third of the Boers who
claimed German descent. Most of them had long forgotten
their ancestors, mercenaries, who had come as soldiers of for-
tune in the pay of the Dutch or of the East India Company.
But now, as Hitler thundered at the gates of the world, it
became a promising proposition to recall a German great-
grandfather.

Hitler's urge for living space was essentially the Boers' own
craving. They could not see the smoke of their neighbor's chim-
ney. It was proverbial. And if the Hitler-Germans claimed to
be the master race why should not the Boer himself be the
baas in South Africa?

Throughout the year 1934 Nazism in South Africa spread

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OLD MASTER

like the plague. Smuts was disturbed. But he was not yet pre-
pared to antagonize Germany. The German measles would be
cured as soon as the world gave the Third Reich a square deal.
Delivering his rectorial address at St. Andrews, Scotland, how-
ever, he made Human Freedom his topic.

He returned to South Africa by airplane. Bodyguards re-
ceived him at the airport. They followed, and screened him,
everywhere. Smuts protested. Would they not, at least, let him
alone when he was mountaineering? They would not. They
were under orders. Nazism was rampant.

Chapter 27 PRELUDE TO WAR

SOUTH AFRICA SEEMED A PRIZE CATCH TO HITLER. HERE WAS THE

nucleus for the vast German colonial empire of which Wilhelm
II had once dreamed. He who holds South Africa holds the
whole continent below the equator. He also commands the con-
fluence between the Atlantic and the Indian oceans. He has
the key to the world. Furthermore, he has the earth's richest
gold output.

The Nazi penetration of South Africa was entrusted to Ernst
Wilhelm Bohle, boss of the "League of Germans Abroad," who
also founded the bunds in this country. But Bohle's heart was
never in the United States of America. It was always in Cape
Town. Son of a professor of electrical engineering at the Cape
Town University, he had grown up under the shadow of Table
Mountain, but he remained an undiluted boche whose every
thought was treason to the land of his birth. His right-hand
man was his venerable father, then living in Berlin in "retire-
ment," in fact as chief of the African Division of Dr. Hau-
shofer's "Geopolitical Institute," Hitler's brain trust.

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OLD MASTER

The Bohles, father and son, sent masses of German immi-
grants to South Africa, particularly to the mandated territory
of the former German South West. Four thousand alleged Ger-
man ' miners" who wanted to disembark at Windhoek, were
refused admission, and had to return on their ship. But this was
the only case on record in which the Hertzog government pro-
tected the country against Nazi infiltration. Even the Prime
Minister did not wish to hand South West Africa back to Ger-
many. Hertzog declared that the return of the Reich as a great
colonial power in Africa was both inevitable and desirable, but
he tried to persuade the Germans to help themselves to the
Belgian and Portuguese colonies. He disposed as magnani-
mously of other people's countries as his model, Hitler, himself.

He did nothing to stop the influx of German agents into
South Africa proper. Eighteen thousand Germans, less than 1
per cent of the total white population, were German settlers.
They had no influence in politics, but their little hamlets were
scattered all over the map.

Bohle's agents, arriving in droves, took care that the Nazis
obtained majorities in the committees for German schools and
in the councils of elders for German churches. All Germans, in-
cluding Jewish refugees, were registered by Nazi functionaries.
If they did not want to contribute to the German Winter Hilf e
winter relief their relatives in the old country would be
herded into concentration camps. The funds, allegedly for char-
ity, were used by the Nazi press fund, headed by Manfred
Zapp, who later shifted to New York. German businessmen in
South Africa were forced to hire Nazi employees, if they did
not want to lose their trade with Germany. German residents
had to see movies from Bablesberg, the German Hollywood.
German steamers in South African ports arranged "socials" for
the Germans in town. The friendly invitations carried the
words: "Attendance obligatory." Hitler was shown in the news-
reels, and the bored crews in the audience had, time and again,
to feign enthusiasm. By way of relaxation, they staged propa-
ganda marches through the streets of Cape Town.

An army of agents and spies was unloosed over South Africa.

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OLD MASTER

Botany professors, pretending to draw samples of the rare
South African flora, sketched bridges, harbors, the site of muni-
tion dumps. Ethnographers came to study the vanishing bush-
man. They brought literature with them. Between covers with
scientific titles were folded reprints of articles from the
Stuermer, the notorious anti-Semitic sheet. German exchange
students and professors proved so charming, although admit-
ting their undying devotion to Hitler, that the Nazis could not
be so bad, after all. Missionaries from Germany preached neo-
paganism.

Occasionally, more important visitors came. Miss Rutkowsky,
a fanatic Nazi schoolmistress, toured the country with a cam-
era, and showed in hotels and schools films of the Nazi move-
ment. Her preferred shots were pictures displaying the neo-
pagan rites of the believers in Wotan. This disgusted even the
pro-Nazi Dutch Reformed Church, and she was asked to leave
the country. Another case of attempted religious infiltration oc-
curred in the Trappist monastery at Marianhill, in Natal. The
brothers extended their hospitality to a group of German mis-
sionaries who talked incessantly of the unholy combination of
Judah and Rome. Trappists, for their part, do not talk at all.
They are bound by an oath of silence. Silently, they went at
their German brethren, who, within a few minutes, collected
their bones outside the monastery.

A Nazi with the suspiciously Jewish-sounding name of
Hirschfelder represented the heavy industry in the Ruhr. He
penetrated South African big business, and offered, not unsuc-
cessfully, such barter agreements as Dr. Schacht had intro-
duced to get imports free of cost. At present Hirschfelder
enjoys the hospitality of a South African detention camp.

The most sinister uninvited guest was Gestapo chief Diverge,
assistant editor of the Schwarzes Korps, mouthpiece of Hitler's
elite guard. He visited Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town,
and Durban, and reported on every single German in the four
biggest towns of the Union. His accounts were detailed: did
the man drive a German car, or did the traitor use a car of
American make? Did he employ a German chauffeur or a Ne-

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OLD MASTER

gro? His wife and secretary took down his interviews in short-
hand, and sent them to Berlin. Diverge was also commissioned
to investigate the German Legation and the Consulates in the
Union. He was not satisfied with Dr. Leitner, the Minister, and
relegated him to third rank in the Nazi hierarchy, subordinated
to boss Jasper, who had had a hand in the rape of Austria, and
to the second in command, a gunman by the name of Lierau,
who later became notorious in fomenting trouble in the Sude-
tenland. To prove his reliability as a Nazi, Dr. Leitner pro-
tested to the Prime Minister when the City Councillors of Cape
Town had refused a German offer for harbor installations, al-
though cheaper than the British tender. After profuse excuses,
Hertzog sent his Under Secretary for External Affairs, Dr.
Bodenstein, himself a German by descent, to the Town Fathers
of Cape Town. Dr. Bodenstein was told that Hertzog might
betake himself to the opposite place to Heaven. He had no
right to interfere in matters of local jurisdiction.

Hertzog, a bad loser, compensated the Reich by giving large
orders for railway construction to the German industry. More-
over, he sold to Germany South African wool to the tune of
three million pounds sterling for clothing the Reichswehr, and
manganese for the German steel industry, working full speed
at rearmament.

Smuts, smarting under his exclusion from real power, toured
the country, and addressed the crowds. He spoke about irriga-
tion, the fight against locusts, the introduction of new improve-
ments in agriculture, and ended regularly with an appeal to
keep faith with the British Commonwealth. Only once he hit
out against Nazism, but even on this occasion he carefully
spoke only by implication. A German hairdresser in Cape Town
by the name of Weichardt had founded the Greyshirts, an or-
ganization which trained Boer and German youth in throwing
stones, some day to be replaced by hand grenades. "The Grey-
shirts are subsidized from abroad," Smuts warned. Nothing
happened. The Nazis took heart. The Blackshirts sprang up.
Soon they outnumbered the Greyshirts.

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OLD MASTER

After more than two years of superhuman patience, Smuts,
in the end, had one success. When Italy grabbed Abyssinia,
everyone understood that the Union itself was menaced. All
Mussolini's balderdash about the great Italian Empire he was
creating certainly did not refer to Ethiopia alone. The Duce
meant Kenya, Uganda, the Congo, and Tanganyika. The ma-
jority of the Boers did not care about British and Belgian colo-
nies. Yet even Hertzog understood that Italy on both sides of
the Transvaal would mean the end of South Africa, and thus
of his own regime. Under Smuts* influence, he consented to the
strongest representations in Geneva on behalf of sanctions
against Italy. But the democratic powers shied away from im-
posing oil sanctions, the only ones that could have broken
Mussolini. The stock of world democracy sank lower and lower
among the Boers.

Early in 1938 their resentment found violent expression at
the Centenary Celebration to commemorate the mass slaughter
of their pioneers, the Voortrekkers, by the Kafirs. Voortrekker
Day is the day when Afrikanders think with their blood. In
1938, when another war was looming, another mass slaughter
in which the majority of the Boers wanted no part, all previous
celebrations were surpassed. From all parts of the Union ox
wagons, the ark of the veld, in which the Voortrekkers had
traveled, and lived, and made their homes, rolled slowly to
Pretoria. Groups of Boer youths, in relays, marched from Cape
Town to Pretoria, carrying the torch of liberty. Tens of thou-
sands of men and women in Voortrekker costumes congre-
gated; the women in long frocks and bonnets, the men in
breeches and colorful waistcoats. All the men, including hun-
dreds of Nazi agents, had for many months carefully grown
luxuriant beards. The Centenary Celebration ended in a gigan-
tic demonstration for the Republic.

The Boers were where Hitler wanted them. Innumerable of-
fers from would-be spies flooded the German Consulate in Por-
tuguese Louren9O Marques, where the Nazis still maintain their
African espionage headquarters. One of the most significant of

335

OLD MASTER

these letters was revealed in Parliament by Mr. Harry Law-
rence, Union Minister for the Interior. It read: "My sentiments
are with Germany. I feel that my knowledge of South Africa,
its people, its political parties, its armaments and defense in-
stallations may be of great use to you in Germany. I have first-
hand information about the Jewish question, and about the
possibilities of trade with Germany. Knowing all sections of
the community so intimately, speaking their language fluently,
and having access to influential political, military, and financial
quarters, I feel I could provide information of use to Germany.
I know Mr. Bruckner de Villiers, who controls Die Burger, and
on whose behest Dr. Malan adopted the policy of open anti-
Semitism. I know Mr. Pirow. I could even easily invite myself
to General Smuts' farm at Irene, and obtain definite informa-
tion on his opinions. I could without difficulty arrange to see
the airports at Robert Heights, or find out more about the great
harbor works at Cape Town and their fortifications."

The writer of this letter was a man by the name of J. W.
Gadow, the secretary of the Greenside Branch of the Purified
Nationalist Party in Johannesburg. The letter was intercepted
by the Union Intelligence Service. The ensuing investigation
disclosed that it had been the third of his offers, that Gadow,
indeed, had been in Germany, where he had been treated as a
guest of honor, and equipped with money. Mr. Bruckner de
Villiers, though gravely compromised, remained silent. He was
not only the backer of the leading Nationalist paper, but also
one of the most influential members of the mysterious breeder-
bund which wields the real power behind the scenes of politi-
cal Afrikanderdom. Entrenched in this strong position, he felt
certain that the law would not dare to lay hands on him. He
guessed right.

During the days of Munich, secession seemed near. Smuts
had neither protested Hitler's rape of Austria, nor did he find
the Fuehrer's claim to the Sudetenland improper. Why, it was
the first step to Holism: the fusion inside the individual nation
preparatory to the fusion of all nations. The facts that Aus-

336

OLD MASTER

trians and Germans were entirely different nations, and that
the people of the Sudeten had never been, nor did they wish to
be, incorporated with the German Reich were too trifling to ar-
rest his world-embracing attention. Yet Hertzog was suspicious
that his deputy might, in the case of a showdown between
England and Germany, want to drag the Union alongside
Great Britain into a war that appeared menacingly near.

In his neat longhand Hertzog wrote the memoranda on his
official stationery. The first, written on September 1, 1938, was
headed: "A statement of the standpoint to be taken by the
Union of South Africa in the case of war in Europe with Eng-
land as one of the belligerent parties: South Africa will remain
neutral, but stick to the contracted obligation in connection
with the naval base at Simon's Town." He signed formally:
James Barry Munik Hertzog.

Four weeks later he penned another memorandum: "In case
war should break out in Europe as a result of the quarrel be-
tween Germany and Czechoslovakia, and England should be
involved in it, the attitude of the Union would be as is ex-
plained in greater detail in the accompanying documents A and
B, signed by myself." These documents had been communi-
cated by Hertzog to Smuts in the early days of September, dur-
ing the Sudeten crisis. They stated that South Africa would not
be involved in a war to safeguard the Sudetenland for Czecho-
slovakia. Smuts had accepted them as referring simply to the
situation in these days, but not as a declaration of a general
policy of neutrality in the future.

Neither Hertzog nor Smuts, it appeared, saw the warning
beacon of the agreement of Munich. However, Munich taught
South Africa a lesson. Hitler's technique of creating dissatisfac-
tion among German minorities as a pretext for interfering on
behalf of the "oppressed" might well be applied in South
Africa, too. The general nervousness increased, when the
Fuehrer announced that his next demand would be the claim
for the return of colonies.

With the half-hearted consent of Hertzog, the Union authori-
ties began to take an active interest in the German spies and

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OLD MASTER

agents who thus far had operated quite unmolested. Mission-
aries, exchange students, lecturing professors, and traveling
salesmen from Germany were put under control. But no meas-
ures to stop or deport them were applied.

The English part of the population as well as many Dutch
followers of Smuts expressed their anxiety over the miserable
state of the defences in no uncertain terms. On October 24,
1938, a sensational newspaper article laid the responsibility for
this state of affairs at the door of Oswald Pirow, the Minister
for Defence. Mr. Pirow, the paper said, was responsible for the
grave neglect of Simon's Town, the British Naval Base in South
Africa, the maintenance of which was entrusted to the Union.
The guns of Simon's Town were obsolete. They were incapable
of keeping out of range any modern cruiser armed with six-
inch guns. The material for the repair of these deficiencies had
been available for many months, but it had not been installed.

Pirow answered with the subterfuge that he wanted to wait
until more powerful modern guns could be shipped from Eng-
land, even if this should take another two or three years. More-
over, he would soon travel to England to discuss the defense
plans with the British War Office, and to supervise the pur-
chase of arms and equipment.

On the very day of this acrimonious debate, a "German
South- West African League" was founded in Windhoek. Dr.
G. E. Conradie, the administrator, asked his government's per-
mission to forbid the league. Hertzog only allowed the admin-
istrator to forbid civil servants to join any sort of political
organization.

The Germans in South West Africa profited from the appar-
ent weakness of the Union government. They formed about a
third of the white population of the territory (8,500 against
almost 20,000 Boer post-war immigrants and 2,500 English set-
tlers), but they found help among the Boers. "Manic" Maritz,
the traitor of 1914, had returned from Germany. He came as a
Hitler agent, distributing his pamphlet My Lewe and Strewe
My Life and my Strife which contained such vulgar anti-

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OLD MASTER

Semitic passages that the author had been fined seventy-five
pounds. This mild punishment encouraged the Germans and
their Boer fellow travelers. Dr. Hirsekorn, Hitler's appointed
gauleiter of the South West, called up all Germans to enroll in
a "German Fighting League."

The trouble in the South West caused immediate repercus-
sions in the Union. A Nationalist paper in Pretoria demanded
measures against the refugees who were endangering the
Union's friendly relations with Germany. Dr. Malan, at a con-
gress of his "Purified Nationalist Party," adopted anti-Semitism
as an official point of the program, and passed a resolution
congratulating the Sudeten Germans upon their return to
Germany.

In the midst of the general turmoil, Pirow, the stormy petrel,
slipped out. He did not go to London, as he had announced.
Instead he toured the Fascist countries. His first step was Lis-
bon, where Dr. Salazar, the dictator of Portugal, received him
to the tune of Die Stem of Zuid Afrika, the Boer republican
hymn. Pirow was a minister under the British Crown. But God
Save the King was not played. Sir Eric Phipps, the British am-
bassador in Lisbon, who was present, froze.

While the Spanish republican government at Burgos was still
officially recognized, Pirow called upon General Franco, com-
mitting, as it was generally put, a "blazing indiscretion." He
duly eulogized Franco, and hurried on to the real aim of his
journey: Berlin. Hitler received him with high honors. The
Fuehrer and his presumptive gauleiter of South Africa drove
through the Berlin streets, where a million people were lined
up to cheer. Photographs, immortalizing the handshake be-
tween the two "kinsmen" were displayed in all German shop
windows.

Pirow ordered his daughter to follow him. The half-grown
girl took an English ship. Innocently, she told interviewers at
Southampton: "I am really a German girl. All my four grand-
parents are German. My father spent his youth in Germany.
German is our household language. I once visited England. But

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OLD MASTER

I felt every moment that I did not belong. I belong to Ger-
many." Upon her arrival she immediately joined the Deutschen
Madchenbundihe League of German Girls. She still lives in
Germany. Unfortunately, her father returned to his adopted
country. He presented the bill for his traveling expenses. The
South African taxpayers had to refund him 1,329.

The new session of Parliament opened on February 2, 1939.
Shrewdly, Hertzog calmed the storm that was awaiting him.
He published an exchange of letters between himself and his
son. Advocate Albert Hertzog had demanded that his father
should assume leadership of a movement to be called Afri-
kander Unity with the aim of excluding the English-speaking
South Africans from all political rights. With great dignity
Hertzog pere stated that he had immediately refused this de-
mand. The English-speaking section should henceforth be "con-
sidered" as before.

The first measure of consideration was a bill, presented by
Dr. Bodenstein, Under Secretary for External Affairs, with the
aim of forbidding the English-language press to criticize Hitler
and Mussolini. At the same time Pirow, as Minister of Defence,
moved his "emergency bill" to suppress hostile demonstrations
and propaganda in the case of a European war. "Hostile" re-
ferred to any demonstrations and propaganda in favor of Eng-
land. A number of anti-Semitic bills were introduced by Na-
tionalist members.

On March 15 Hitler invaded Prague. The whole world real-
ized that sooner or later this meant war. The rumblings that
followed were loudest in South West Africa. On the very eve-
ning the occupation of Prague became known, the streets of
Windhoek were crowded with German insurgents. Dr. von
Oelhaven, the former German Consul in Windhoek, returned
surprisingly and told a meeting of Nazi athletes: "If you trust
the Fuehrer and rely on him, he will keep his pledge and liber-
ate us in South West Africa."

Now Smuts acted. Appeasement was dead. Smuts fell in
line. On Monday, April 17, three hundred policemen with ar-

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OLD MASTER

mored cars, machine-guns and Bren guns, grenades and rifles
embarked from Cape Town and Pretoria for South West Africa.
Legally, Union police had no right to interfere with the man-
dated territory. But this was one of the repeated moments in
Smuts' life in which he was the law. He had acted in time.
Papers were seized in Windhoek disclosing that the Nazis had
planned a putsch for April 20, Hitler's birthday. They wanted
to seize Walfisch Bay with its radio station, and broadcast the
signal calling for a general upheaval. They had planned to give
short shrift to the two hundred twenty-four local policemen
scattered over a territory almost three times the size of the
British Isles. Instead, twenty trucks with Union police and
machine-guns drove through the streets of Windhoek on Hit-
ler's birthday, and the Exhibition Grounds were transformed
into an armed camp. The jubilation of the Boers in the South
West, the great majority of whom had no intention of returning
their farms to the old German owners, forced Hertzog to smile
bittersweetly on his deputy's resolute action.

Behind Hertzog's bittersweet smile and Smuts' stony mask
the struggle for power had broken out openly. The majority of
the Boers were easy prey for uninhibited racialism. The United
Party, torn from top to bottom by the thinly veiled strife be-
tween the two leaders, but on the surface still intact, lost, on
the day after the police action in the South West, a most sig-
nificant by-election at the Paarl to the "Purified" followers of
Malan. The Hertzogites became nervous. On the next day
Smuts moved a bill in the House of Assembly to put the man-
dated territory under the permanent control of the Union Po-
lice. Dr. Leitner, the German Minister, rushed to Hertzog to
protest on grounds of international law. The Hertzogite ma-
jority within the United Party heeded the protest, and defeated
their Deputy-Premier's bill.

But Smuts was again in his stride. He acted on his own re-
sponsibility. He established a burgher force in the South West,
which was well able to take care of the Germans. He called out
volunteers for National Service. Not only the English people

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OLD MASTER

among whom not a single appeaser was left after Munich but
also a great part of the Boers responded. Youngsters left school
to join up. Even German immigrants who had served during
the First War in the Imperial Army, volunteered. The cleavage
between the Boers became apparent. A determined minority,
the aggregate of the best elements, followed Smuts. The major-
ity, however, became day by day more infuriated against the
English. Three English teams, a tennis, a soccer, and a rowing
team were just visiting South Africa, and, except for a single
football match in the Southern Transvaal, the "bloody foreign-
ers" took all the honors.

On the evening of April 24, the Naziphiles, as usual, tuned to
Zeesen, the German shortwave station, were amazed to hear a
voice addressing them in Afrikaans. They felt honored, but dis-
appointed. They were accustomed to Naughty Naughty, the
Lord Haw-Haw for South Africa. With his spicy reports on box-
ing matches, with his subtly understated translations of Hitler
speeches, with his ever-recurring assertions that he could not
forget England, although he had not really been treated well
under the government of war mongers, with his Nazi poison
sugar-coated with perfect English gentleness, Naughty Naughty
had attracted even a wide circle of English listeners in the
Union. In a quiet, unobtrusive manner he used to address fans
who had written him to Berlin, and he promised every South
African that he would speak via Zeesen to his beloved ones at
home, if he came to visit Germany.

Unfortunately, on the twenty-fourth of April the charmer
Naughty Naughty was replaced by Eric Holm, a dyed-in-the-
wool Afrikander. His speeches were unconcealed hymns of
hate. He addressed the republicans, the racial fanatics, the poor
whites. He started to speak to Dr. Malan himself. Referring to
Smuts as "J an Smutskowitz," he excelled in Jew-baiting, un-
hampered by the fact that the Government Information Serv-
ice soon disclosed that Eric Holm's father was an Elder of the
Synagogue Council in Cape Town. Kate Voss, the self-styled
nightingale of South Africa, now in Berlin, and generally rec-

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OLD MASTER

ognized as the only friend Ribbentrop and Goebbels shared in
common, was another great attraction. Radio Zeesen scored.
Today still the German broadcast in Afrikaans is the strongest
medium of Nazi propaganda in South Africa.

On July 1 Hertzog celebrated his fifteenth year as Premier.
Smuts eulogized him duly, and most of South Africa jubilated:
"Another fifteen!" Hertzog promised he would remain in office
as long as his mental and physical strength would hold out. His
main objective was to keep South Africa out of war if Europe
should go up in flames.

Two months of almost unbearable tension ensued. Greyshirts
and Blackshirts demonstrated freely. The Afrikander students
of the University of Pretoria organized a "peace strike/' Smuts
toured the country, appealing for racial co-operation.

On August 25 Hitler told Sir Nevile Henderson, British am-
bassador in Berlin, that he could no longer tolerate the perse-
cution of the German minority in Poland. When Zeesen broad-
cast the news, Pirow rushed to Hertzog's farm. Pirow had just
received Lord Francis Scott, the leader of the English settlers
in Kenya, who was perturbed about the colony's complete lack
of defenses, and had assured Lord Francis in the most folksy
and engaging manner: "If you people in Kenya will allow us,
we should like to look on your northern border as our own
frontier, and if you should get into trouble there, we should be
prepared to send you at once three hundred airplanes."

It was a different Pirow who now put pressure on the
wretched, aged Prime Minister. Pirow's receding hair stood up
like a brush in Prussian fashion. His small, dark eyes under the
broad, bushy brows, his tight lips, even his bat ears, trembled.
He was playing the game of his life. Although he knew that
Hertzog would not like it, he appeared in his hurry informally,
in a sloppy, rumpled black suit, and with a gray, loudly striped
tie around a German stand-up collar. That is how his body-
guard, appointed by a watchful Government Information Serv-
ice of Smuts' creation, described the Minister of Defence, as he
buttonholed the Premier. Now was the moment to declare neu-

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OLD MASTER

trality and to break away from England. He was in league with
the Blackshirts, he disclosed; they would march upon Johannes-
burg if the great leader would give the signal.

Hertzog was not good at giving signals. He preferred to be
dragged along by events. Yet Pirow must have made a deep
impression upon him. Throughout the ensuing fatal days he
kept the dangerous adviser at his side.

Dr. Malan was the next visitor to Hertzog's farm. In stark
contrast to the unbalanced German Pirow, the ex-predikant
and frustrated professor of theology, did not lose his dignity for
an instant. His square, heavy-set face, clean-shaven and rosy,
was expressionless. His high thinker's forehead, looking twice as
high due to his baldness, remained unlined as he spoke in an
unctuous voice. Even his ample double chin did not lose its
natural poise. He had come with an offering. He offered Hertzog
reunion. The full support of the Purified Nationalists "more
dangerous a competition than we care to be" would be his for
the mere asking. The Prime Minister should declare South
Africa's unwavering neutrality. The Purified members of the
House had often proved the power of their vocal cords. They
would again shout down Smuts, and Parliament would be stam-
peded into submission.

No bodyguard accompanied Dr. Malan. No one was within
hearing distance during the interview. Smuts had no report of
the meeting beyond the mere fact that it was mentioned in the
papers. Yet, in a parliamentary spech he delivered a few days
later, he reconstructed the negotiations between Hertzog and
his two visitors with translucent accuracy indeed, with the
visionary insight of a man who knows human fallacy.

Saturday morning, the second of September, Smuts stalked
into the Prime Minister's Chambers. Pirow and Havenga shad-
owed Hertzog. Simultaneously all three assailed Smuts with
their policy of neutrality. "Impossible!" said Smuts. He fell into
silence. But silence, his habitual protection, was .not permitted
when the fate of the world was at stake, and, what counted
more, the fate of South Africa. With unending patience he tried

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OLD MASTER

in his own words "to show them why neutrality was an im-
possible policy." The argument lasted the whole forenoon.
Hertzog remained intransigent. Smuts demanded a full Cabinet
meeting to lay the matter before their colleagues.

After luncheon, while all the police squads of Cape Town
were mobilized, the whole Cabinet gathered. The discussion
lasted throughout the afternoon, the evening, the night, until
dawn. All the time Hertzog had Dr. Malan's written offer of
support in his pocket, but he did not mention it.

After the first inconclusive day, the Cabinet met again on
Sunday afternoon. In the meantime Hertzog had received an-
other promise of support from the "Purified," which he also
concealed.

Smuts and his six followers in the government advised
Hertzog to summon a party caucus. Again Hertzog refused
abruptly. With the letter, his secret weapon, in his breast
pocket, he felt sure of obtaining a majority in the House.

The negotiations led nowhere. Smuts expected Hertzog to
dismiss him and his followers, reform his cabinet, and appeal to
the electorate. Instead the Prime Minister appealed to the
House. When Smuts bowed his way out of the Cabinet council,
Hertzog whispered, grinning: "I have my majority, Oom Jan-
nie. I do have it ... in the pocket."

Parliament met on Monday, September 4. Hertzog dropped
his mask. The outburst, long overdue, revealed the little man as
an undiluted Nazi. "I understand the Germans perfectly ," he
said. "I sympathize with Hitler. I know how he feels. I, too,
have been downtrodden. We, too, the Boers, are a downtrod-
den people. We have no quarrel with the Germans. This is not
South Africa's war. If Hitler were out for world domination, no
one would oppose the Germans more fervently than I," he con-
tinued. "There is, however, no proof that this is Hitler's object.
... I have gone through Hitler's struggle myself, and I know
what it is to be trampled underfoot so long that eventually one
prefers destruction to further humiliation/'

Replying, Smuts was again complete master of his feelings.
His voice never wavered. Only his fist struck the desk occa-

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OLD MASTER

sionally to emphasize his arguments. Once or twice he showed
anger when the Nationalist benches made foolish "humorous"
noises. Until then the House had listened in deadly silence to
Smuts, who said: "We are up against the most vital issue for
the future of this country. The position we take is that it would
be fatal for this country not to sever relations with Germany at
this stage. In September, 1938, the country had been prepared
to recognize that Hitler had a strong case when he claimed the
return of the Sudetenland. Since then we have seen an entirely
un-Germanic people, the Czechs, absorbed by the Germans.
These developments have shown the real objectives and mo-
tives of the German Chancellor. The next demand, after Dan-
zig has been wiped off the slate, will be the return of the Ger-
man colonies. What will our position be when we are treated
as Austria and Czechoslovakia have been, and Poland is now
being treated, when we have to surrender what we consider
vital to the Union at the point of the bayonet? We are not
dealing with a faraway problem, but with an issue which may
touch us here. If we dissociate ourselves deliberately from the
line of action taken by the other members of the Common-
wealth, we are going to get what we deserve." He concluded
with a motion to sever relations with Germany, to continue co-
operation with the associates in the British Commonwealth, to
defend South Africa's interests and territory, but not to send
forces overseas as in the last war.

While the debate continued all day, Zeesen had already
broadcast: "Union of South Africa remains neutral." The divi-
sion took place shortly before nine o'clock in the evening. The
Speaker put Hertzog's neutrality motion to the House. A roar
of "Ayes" was out-thundered by a hurricane of "Noes!" The
division bells rang. Across the gangway the whole opposition
came to Hertzog to reinforce his thirty-odd supporters in the
United Party. On the other side the balance of the United
Party, Labor, the Dominion Party, and the three representa-
tives of the Natives gathered. The tellers swiftly ticked off the
names. There were sixty-seven Ayes against eighty Noes. Smuts
emerged with a majority of thirteen.

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OLD MASTER

On the fifth of September Hertzog resigned. Smuts was sent
for. He formed his cabinet within an hour. He himself took the
Ministry of Defence, his own creation, in addition to the Pre-
miership. On the same day, the Prime Minister of the Union of
South Africa severed relations with Germany. On the next day
he declared war.

Hitler, it was said, laughed at this declaration.

Chapter 28 ELL-GAMELAYO-WAAH

ON THE DAY AFTER THE DECLARATION OF WAR GUNNERS MANNED

battle stations at Simon's Town, which, for more than a cen-
tury, has been the South African base of the British Navy. "It is
the cornerstone on which our freedom was built," Smuts said
on this occasion. "The Dutch-speaking South Africans hold the
might and power of the British Navy in high regard. For centu-
ries she has ruled and policed the seas, and never once during
those centuries has that power been abused. Picture for your-
self what would be the position if Germany ruled the seas to-
day. No nation would have the right to trade or ply the oceans
freely. It is not guns and power of weapons which in the end
will make victory certain. It is the great tradition on which the
British Navy is founded, the morale of its seamen, men who
could well be excused if in the heat of action they left their
swimming foes to drown, but who at their own risk stick to the
great tradition of their service that, friend or foe, human lives
must always be saved wherever possible."

Smuts' first statement in the war was humanitarian. His first
action was to crush the enemy within. The Union government
issued Emergency Regulations which gave them the power to

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OLD MASTER

deal effectively with Nazis and their fellow travelers. It proved
that Smuts had not been idle while the moles were undermin-
ing the country. His office possessed authentic lists of each
Nazi organization in the principal towns of the Union, as well
as a register of Nazi agents working in the rural districts. Pho-
tostatic copies of documents disclosed the contacts between
these and the Blackshirt leaders. The documents revealed a
Nazi plan for using the mob of the Blackshirts for a march to
Johannesburg and Pretoria. Smuts had known this conspiracy
all the time. He had been informed of every step of the chief
organizer. This man was Counsellor Stiller of the German Le-
gation. Hertzog would never have permitted any action against
a German diplomat. Smuts' world record in patience had re-
mained unbroken. But now he hit out with both fists. In con-
certed action, all over the Union, the police swooped down on
the Nazi agents and Blackshirt leaders. Those who did not
cross the Portuguese border in time were arrested and sent to
camps of detention. Thus Smuts prevented a repetition of the
1914 revolution. To general surprise there was no uprising and,
at the beginning of the war, only very little sabotage. However,
Hertzog was still a formidable foe. Many Boers, by no means
all Nazi sympathizers, expressed their traditional devotion to
their "personal leader." A crowd of twenty thousand people,
mostly women, celebrated Hertzog in Pretoria. Within a week
after the beginning of the war, the fallen man had captured
the United Party machine in the Transvaal, thus far Smuts'
stronghold. The platteland, however, remained quiet. Many
more farmers than had been expected supported Oom Jannie.
Smuts understood perfectly well that he had to bring his
house in order before he could approach the other problem of
the war effort. The miners on the Rand used the outbreak of
the war to make exorbitant demands for wage increases. Smuts
spoke to their bosses. The old English Trade-Union leaders,
who, in recent years, had played a rather shadowy role, re-
asserted their authority. The miners received a slight rise in
wages, which were stabilized for the duration at a reasonable
level. A National Supplies Control Board was created. Prices

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OLD MASTER

were fixed. Stringent measures to prevent hoarding and profit-
eering were introduced. All volunteers received the promise
that their jobs would be safeguarded for them. The social prob-
lems, in peace times South Africa's headache number one, were
solved within a fortnight after the beginning of the war. On
the social and economic front there has been no unrest up to
this day.

Now Smuts could throw all his strength into the task closest
to his heart: to transform the world's most pacifist country into
a fighting unit. He passed the War Measures Bill in the House,
which empowered the government to suspend Acts of Parlia-
ment by proclamation but did not allow any interference with
already existing legislation. The bill reaffirmed the provisions
of the Defence Act that no one could be compelled to serve
with the colors beyond Africa south of the equator. Military
service would be compulsory only for the suppression of civil
strife or for defending the borders of the Union.

Recruiting started instantly. Smuts himself took the lead. His
usually repressed romanticism blossomed. He appealed to local
and provincial traditions, to the tribal pride both of his own
Boers and of the Scottish, the Irish, the North Country English,
and the stubborn Welsh who formed the British part of the
population. Had the Cape Colony Artillery not proved its met-
tle a hundred years earlier? Were the great traditions of the
commandos in the Boer War forgotten? He was well aware
that he was addressing romantic realists. The South Africans
would be the best fed, the best paid, the best looked-after sol-
diers in the world. They would draw at least their peacetime
wages. Their employers would make up the difference, and
where small employers could not do so, a pool, richly endowed
by the mining industry, helped out. In time, Smuts promised,
the whole South African force would be mechanized. Every
man would learn a trade that would greatly help him in the
technocratic world of tomorrow. They would get the best medi-
cal care available. Above all, it would be a democratic army.
Each man carries the marshal's baton in his knapsack. All men
applying for commissions must first enlist in the ranks. If they

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OLD MASTER

are worth their salt they will soon prove that they are able to
lead men. The most amazing part was that all these high-flown
promises were carried out, word for word.

The largest part of South Africa's youth knew that Oom Jan-
nie would be as good as his word. All able-bodied English
males enlisted. Among the first units organized were the Cape
Town Highlanders and the Irish Brigade. The Boer youth was
in commotion. The Nationalist section had no desire to die for
Poland, a country full of hook-nosed Jews, as some were known
on the platteland. But the majority of the Boer youth heeded
the call to the great adventure.

"Old Bailey" emerged out of his retirement. Again he issued
one of his manifestoes: "You are up against Hitler, a clever
man, but one whose veracity requires confirmation, and it
should warn all but those who wish to be deceived. Fortunately
we have a great Afrikaner, General Smuts. He is holding us to-
gether, and with great dignity devoting his individual talent to
South Africa's future. It will win him perpetual renown that he
brought order and common sense into a dangerous position.
When I see some of the papers attacking General Smuts, and
I look back at their birth, I might easily be called their illegiti-
mate father. The Dutch and the English prefer living together
to dying together. So let us discard racialism and unite as one
people throughout our country. Nothing will stop our collective
march." At this time "Old Bailey" was already more of a legend
than a man. The South African youth knew little about the
tremendous sum of his life's achievement. But his fame as a
prize fighter, as a huntsman, a soldier in a dozen encounters
lived on. His manifesto was a tonic to the recruiting campaign.

In a way the rush to the colors was even embarrassing. There
were no uniforms, and many of those in existence had no but-
tons. There were plenty of suspenders, but no trousers to attach
to them. There were neither guns nor airplanes. When Smuts
took over his old department, he found the Defence Force in
a state of chaos. Pirow, who had held the office for almost ten
years, had sabotaged the country's defenses because he feared
the force would protect important industrial and urban areas

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OLD MASTER

against Nazi sabotage. Mr. Pocock, M.P., leveled this charge
against the traitor in open Parliament. Colonel Stallard, the
leader of the Unionists, concurred. He had himself been asked
by Pirow when the turncoat was still Minister under the
Crown, and before he had dropped his mask to form a Volun-
tary Citizen Force. But he had been so badly hampered by the
Minister that he could not carry out his task.

In fact, after ten years of Pirow's regime the Union was de-
fenseless. Smuts found an actual shortage of 548 trench mor-
tars, 780 anti-tank guns, and 833 Bren guns, a shortage of al-
most the whole artillery the Union had on paper. But for 500
Lewis guns which Great Britain had sent in the midst of her
own feverish rearmament after Munich, South Africa would
have had no guns at all. Pirow had also falsified the figures of
men in the air force. He boasted of having 2,000 skilled me-
chanics at Roberts Heights. He never disclosed that many of
them, after having been trained, had gone into "the industry"
for higher wages. When Smuts took over, he found only 1,350
mechanics at Roberts Heights, 500 of them unskilled appren-
tices. Officers of the Ministry of Defence had investigated the
ammunition supply. They found only stocks enough for one day
under battle conditions, and bombs for three air squadrons for
three days. They reported these conditions to Pirow. But the
Minister never informed his Cabinet colleagues of this report.

The coastal defense was entirely neglected. Port Elizabeth
and East London, two of South Africa's four principal ports,
had not a single gun.

Early in 1939 Parliament had passed three million pounds for
extraordinary Defense Services. "How much of this sum was
spent when Mr. Pirow resigned on September 4?" Mr. Pocock
asked.

Pirow lowered his head.

"Nothing!" interjected Mr. Hofmeyr, the new Minister of
Finance.

"The House has adopted one of your schemes calling for
137,000 men, including three divisions totaling 67,000 for the
Union's normal defenses," Pocock continued. "Could you, Mr.

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OLD MASTER

Pirow, have only put two equipped divisions into the field?"
Other questions followed like hammer blows: "Only one? . . .
Was even a single brigade fully equipped? . . . You once told
the House that the Union had trained and prepared 150,000
riflemen able to take to the field. How many rifles had we at
the outbreak of the war? . . . How many of them were fit for
service? . . . You have assured us that die Union could place
28,000 men in the field on very short notice. Were there last
September 28,000 sets of equipment in this country to arm
these men? . . . There was nothing but an Emergency Plan is-
sued by you last March/' Mr. Pocock concluded his accusations.
He quoted contemptuously: "No one in the forces should en-
gender or aggravate feelings of hostility towards a state or a
country with which the Union was at peace. It is forbidden
to listen to overseas broadcasts, such as the British Broadcast,
for example. . . ."

Pirow jerked. "Why does the Prime Minister not say these
things?"

Smuts did not yet "say these things/' because he did not talk
at all. Once more he spent day and night at his desk, building
up his model army from scratch. The coastal defenses came
first. He got a last consignment of guns from England, already
shipped in the face of the U-boat menace, while the pocket
battleship Graf Spee was plying the waters off South Africa.
Now Table Bay, the harbor of Cape Town, was protected by
nine-inch guns at Robben Island, and other coastal guns were
placed in strategic positions. The two so far undefended ports
were armed with six-inch guns, powerful enough to keep off
enemy cruisers. Smuts, who had always warned South Africa
against building a "tin-can fleet" of her own, now created the
Seaward Defence Force to clear the sea of mines and hunt
down U-boats. It was an entirely new beginning. When he had
come back to office, the Union's whole navy consisted of an
obsolete, engineless, immovable, discarded English sloop, re-
christened General Botha, and converted to a training ship.

It was, however, impossible to protect 2,500 miles of coast-
line with a handful of converted trawlers and whalers. Smuts

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OLD MASTER

founded the Coastal Command of the Air Force, the forerunner
of the R.S.A.A.F., which covered itself with laurels as the war
proceeded. It was again a very modest beginning. The South
African Airways, the company in charge of civil aviation, had
some twenty German Junkers with American engines. Some of
them had already served to punish rebellious native chiefs and
to drop food parcels to flooded areas. Now they went to war.
The Junkers were fitted with bomb racks. Some of them did
very well within a short time. Other machines were so old and
obsolete that they came to pieces during the test flights.

At the same time the Volunteer Defence Force was called up
to guard the land approaches to the ports, power houses, am-
munition stores, bridges and other key positions. The air was
thick with rumors of sabotage. Pirow stumped the land and
talked unabashed of organizing storm troops on the German
pattern. He chose his men among the Nationalist slackers who
were determined to sit out the war. Among a white population
of two million, most of them spekfet strong and healthy to
use Smuts' word, some three hundred thousand were able-
bodied men, fit for military service. Two hundred thousand
listened to Smuts' call for eer en plig honor and dutyand
volunteered. A great majority joyfully accepted the orange
flash, indicating first that they were ready to serve anywhere
in Africa, not only south of the equator, and later that they
would fight anywhere in the world. Finally, only volunteers for
a global war were taken. Some twenty thousand men were
essential war-workers or holders of industrial key positions,
carrying a badge that identified them, but wearing it with an
uncomfortable smile, almost apologetically. Fanners and farm
hands were not exempt. The racialist youth listened to Pirow,
the foreign adventurer, until a more seducing little Fuehrer
appeared.

Smuts built his army while watching one man. Mussolini was
his personal enemy. Smuts never doubted that the Duce would
decay until he became a mere slave of Hitler, and, in Ger-
many's iron grip, plunge the dagger into the back of the French.

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OLD MASTER

But Smuts was more concerned about Africa. It was clear to
him that Mussolini would thrust southward. He observed Mus-
solini's preparations. Under the poor subterfuge of having to
"pacify" restive native tribes, the Italians built a large highway
south from Addis Ababa. Gasoline and oil, tanks, guns, and men
streamed into Eritrea and Somaliland. The ports of Massawa
and Mogadiscio were crammed with Italian submarines, tor-
pedo boats, and all sorts of small craft. In Addis Ababa enor-
mous assembly shops for bombers and fighters were built. All
this indicated that as soon as France faltered an attack would
be made on Kenya, Uganda, and finally South Africa.

Smuts confirmed in earnest Pirow's traitorous promise of pro-
tection to the British colonies. He took instant measures to
strengthen their border defenses. He surrounded himself with
a staff of ranking officers, some of whom had fought on the
other side in the Boer War, others who were veterans from the
First World War. He made Colonel C. H. Elaine Assistant Sec-
retary of Defence, and General J. J. Collyer, the famous strate-
gic theoretician, his private military secretary. Both officers had
been his enemies in the Boer War, but his close assistants in the
South West and East African campaigns. Sir Pierre van Ryne-
veld, a hero of the First World War and one of the first ace
pilots in the budding R.A.F., was appointed Chief of the Gen-
eral Staff. Brigadier-General Dan Pienaar received the Com-
mand of the First Division.

The men were ready. The army was built. Voortrekkerhogte,
the Aldershot of the Union, produced a gallant new officers'
corps, mostly with instructors who had been officers in the last
war, and had taken a short refresher course. Medical services,
map-printing units, scouts, engineers, anti-aircraft units, and
an ever-increasing corps of women auxiliaries made Oom Jan-
nie's Force a perfect, self-contained, small model army. Racial
differences were entirely discarded. The brothers in arms were
the grandsons of the men who had fought one another in the
Boer War.

A true miracle was the shift to war production on the home
front. Before the war, South Africa had only two industries of

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OLD MASTER

importance: mining and railways. A small factory, a depart-
ment of the Royal Mint in Pretoria, had produced some .303
ammunition. The total number of shells available would have
barely sufficed for one day of active combat. Every other item
of equipment had to be imported from Great Britain. Now Eng-
land herself was hard pressed to manufacture enough arms for
her own needs. South Africa must help herself in order to con-
tribute effectively to the war effort of the British Common-
wealth. Fortunately, the "Iscor," the Iron and Steel Corporation
in Pretoria, was prepared for the job. Dr. van der Bijl, the man-
ager general, became the czar of the entire South African in-
dustry, which sprang up almost overnight.

He developed South Africa's steel production to such an ex-
tent that subsequently half a million spare parts a year could
be shipped to the African battle fronts. The "Iscor" is now pro-
ducing small arms as well as howitzers, and armored cars with
American engines and chassis. Not only satisfying almost all
her own military needs, the Union became famous as the repair
shop for the Allied armies in the Middle East. No less great
is her contribution to the Allied naval war effort. Within the
two-year period ending in March 1943, 6,428 Allied ships
among them American ships in increasing numbers were re-
paired and refitted in South African ports.

Smuts and his men were ready when Mussolini struck. In
fact, Italy had already muscled into the war before the Duce's
balcony speech of June 10, 1940. Some two weeks previously a
lighthouse keeper at Agulhas, the most southernly point in
South Africa, had detected floating mines. They were duly
removed by South African mine sweepers. Zeesen bragged that
the furthermost reaches of the seas were no longer inaccessible
to German U-boats. But the mines were identified as being of
Italian make. An investigation disclosed that some Italian craft,
sailing under the Portuguese flag, had sown them in the Allied
shipping lanes.

On June 9 the Commissioner in the Italian border fortress
Moyale dined and wined his colleague from the other side of

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OLD MASTER

the track, the British Assistant Superintendent of Police, P. L.
Carter. In the dawn of the following morning Mr. Carter, to-
gether with a sergeant of the sappers engineers and a Somali
police sergeant, was kidnapped by a party under the hospitable
Italian Commissioner's leadership.

Some hours later Mussolini thundered from the balcony of
Palazzo Venezia. Smuts replied in a broadcast from Pretoria.
All South Africa was agog. Now they would have to defend
their own skins.

A squadron of South African Air Force took to the air and
blasted Moyale almost out of existence. For the first time the
war cry of the Springboks resounded:

ELL-GAMELAYO-WAAH.

Chapter 29 TWO-FRONT WAR AGAIN

WHILE THE ARMY EXPANDED IN MIGHTY STRIDES, AND THE COUN-

try's war industry, as it were, was born, the home front was
torn by dissension. The first serious crack was revealed when
the Sunday Times of Johannesburg disclosed Nazism inside
the South African Broadcasting Corporation. A Committee of
Inquiry was set up. After weeks of painstaking investigation
the committee admitted that a section of the staff was "ani-
mated by anti-government spirit."

Already before the war the Nazis had tried, not altogether
unsuccessfully, to penetrate the South African radio. Insidi-
ously, they had parked a few fifth columnists in the offices.
There were a number of incidents on the prewar record. Reu-
ter's correspondent in Berlin had reported the lack of essential
foodstuffs for the German Christinas holidays. The Afrikaans

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OLD MASTER

speaker refused to transmit this news; it would be an affront
to Germany. Although regulations prescribed that English and
Afrikaans broadcasts must be identical, the stubborn Afri-
kander received permission to omit the passage to which he
objected. On another occasion, Dr. Leitner, German Minister
in Pretoria, complained to Hertzog that one Dr. Trimmler, a
broadcaster imported from Berlin, had not enough liberty of
expression; his political diatribes had been trimmed.

After the outbreak of war, every member of the staff was
asked to sign a declaration of loyalty to the new government.
A number of Afrikander members refused their signatures;
they even refused to join the Company's Employees Associa-
tion on account of its partly English membership. Some refused
to join the Civilian Wireless Reserve. They wanted no part in
the war effort. When Sapa, the official South African Press As-
sociation, distributed news from Germany which rubbed the
Afrikaans speakers the wrong way, they would not transmit
"sensational and possibly misleading" stuff. A few Afrikaans
staff members were declared Nazis. They left, before being
weeded out. On the others rested the Committee of Inquiry's
blame of "neither giving loyal support, nor co-operating in
carrying out the policy of the board/'

The government made every effort to play down such inci-
dents. Smuts was hounded by the specter of a renewed civil
war. He confined himself to the most necessary measures for
safeguarding the law. For the rest he trusted to his old proverb:
'The dogs bark, while the caravan marches on."

Hertzog led the opposition choir. He was still respectfully
listened to, but his unprincipled vacillations confused even his
most gullible adherents. Within a single week he was able to
produce the following statements: On Monday he shocked the
whole Parliament with a spiteful attack on Smuts. On Tuesday
he addressed the caucus of his shrunken group, the Afrikander
Party, pleading for unity, and fulminating against racialism.
On Friday he spoke under the Kruger Statue in Pretoria: "I
am convinced that General Smuts has acted sincerely and with
conviction. We others must fight for neutrality by constitutional

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OLD MASTER

means." Yet he stood while speaking between Dr. Malan and
Pirow. Next he warned his listeners in Bloemfontein that no
division should be permitted between Afrikaans and English-
speaking South Africans. Rather than have to watch such a
division, he would prefer to retire from the political scene. On
the following day he appeared, arm in arm with Dr. Malan, at
a meeting at the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, and
shouted: "The union of the Afrikanders is reborn. The war in
Europe is no concern of ours. We must by all means struggle
for neutrality." He nodded, when Dr. Malan added: "A re-
public should be the ideal of all of us."

Smuts replied to this muddle: "General Hertzog has rendered
great service to this country. It grieves me to see that in his old
age he is busy destroying the great work which he did in the
past six years, and I deeply regret that he has become a tool in
the hands of Dr. Malan. I do not accuse him. He was misled
by collaborators around him, and especially by one who pre-
tends to be a 100 per cent Afrikander. But upon this man the
people of South Africa look with deepest suspicion. This coun-
sellor of General Hertzog was the cause of his downfall. Today
this man is busy seeking favor with Dr. Malan. Now the nation
must be brought into confusion, and must be torn in two, be-
cause General Hertzog has lost the day. We shall hear a good
deal more of the personalities to which I have referred in the
days to come/'

Hertzog replied by moving a peace motion in the House.
"Germany," he said, "is being encircled and crushed while fight-
ing to regain living space. Hitler's persecution of the Jews may
be ugly, but it is only a passing phase of the struggle. Reports
about alleged German barbarism in occupied Czechoslovakia
and Poland are nothing but atrocity stories. I sympathize with
Hitler's leader-principle. My own party is very much run on
the same line. Hitler has always encouraged loyalty to the lead-
ers rather than to dirty politics."

Even the Afrikaner members of the House shook their heads.
Was the great, little, old man mentally disturbed? At second
glance it did not seem so. He was still as alert as ever. He could

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OLD MASTER

simply not reconcile himself with his personal disappointment.
He exhibited the stubbornness which had always been his most
formidable weapon, now that his set opinions and prejudices
clashed with the country's interest.

Pirow answered Smuts' criticism in his own inimitable way.
He announced that he had already organized storm troops, and
that he would build up "cells of action" inside the Nationalist
Party.

Rarely in his long career had Smuts bothered to attack a
personal opponent. But Pirow's challenge could not go unpun-
ished. Smuts took off the gloves. In the session of Parliament
on March 15 his slashing blows hammered the foreign ad-
venturer.

Smuts started with a dangerous smile, pointing out that
Pirow had, during five years in office, omitted to carry out his
defense plan announced in 1934. "I have no objection to the
plan itself," he said jovially. "I will fulfill it just as I have ful-
filled other promises made and broken by Mr. Pirow. Mr. Pirow's
work," and now Smuts' smile faded, "was more a danger to the
country than a protection. His plans were all right, but they
were just grandiose plans and talk. It was all something on
paper. Mr. Pirow has nothing to boast of." A long list of Pirow's
sins of omission followed. Mr. Pirow left only two bombers and
a few unusable old fighters behind, while he had planned three
squadrons of aircraft consisting of twenty-six bombers and
twenty-six fighters each. The artillery, ten guns instead of the
promised ten batteries, had not enough ammunition for a single
day's fighting. The whole tank force consisted of two obsolete
tanks. And so on and so forth. . . . "Mr. Pirow dreamed for five
years, publicly and before all the country," Smuts concluded.
"Now we are working day and night, not to make a plan, but
to make an army. That was Mr. Pirow's duty in those five years.
But he left it completely to us. We have to do it today."

Pirow took his punishment silently. His head was sunk be-
tween his high-lifted shoulders. Nervously, he licked his lips.
When the chastisement was over, his shifty eyes looked to the
Nationalist benches in search of aid and comfort. The Nation-

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OLD MASTER

alists, for their part, looked the other way. They had not for-
given the turncoat his "sins" in the coalition government.
Pirow's seat-neighbor heard him cursing: "VerdammtF Then
he got up and walked into the wilderness.

Even his brother disassociated himself from the Nazi disciple.
Dr. Hans Pirow, President of the South African Boy Scout As-
sociation, declared pointedly: "The religious persecutions tak-
ing place in the world, and even fostered by irresponsible
trouble-makers in South Africa, and the use of racial hatred to
serve political interests make it evident that the time has come
to fight that type of mental disease."

Brother Oswald was incurably contaminated. He got mixed
up in every political mischief that occurred in war-time South
Africa. He tried his hand as a mixer, negotiator, go-between for
the rival racialists. Sometimes he was used, more often abused.
He became the lone wolf.

The first Allied reverses filled the racialists with joyful ex-
pectation. The complete breakdown of the British Empire
seemed near, at least from the perspective of the African bush.
The German invasion of Norway was hailed by both Hertzog
and Dr. Malan. Hertzog appropriated the lie that Hitler had
been forced to act in order to remove the English-sown sea
mines that menaced peaceful German shipping and trade. Dr.
Malan insisted that the Germans had anticipated an Allied
invasion.

But since only few of the bearded denizens of the platteland
knew that Norway was a country, and almost none where this
strange land might be located, the opposition returned to harp-
ing on domestic issues. Smuts was attacked for locking up Nazis
and fellow travelers in internment camps. He replied by dis-
closing new putsch plans which the Information Service had
unearthed. Every man on the new lists was immediately ar-
rested. He could appeal to the courts, and was sure of obtain-
ing a legal hearing if he felt injured. Moreover, Sir Theodore
Truter, the chief control officer of the internment camps, had
been vice-chairman of the Transvaal United Party when Gen-

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OLD MASTER

eral Kemp, one of the most noisy rabble rousers, had been
chairman, and was, as chairman of the Transport Board, an
appointee of Pirow, during the latter's term as Minister for Rail-
ways. A man with this record was certainly above suspicion of
undue harshness against Nationalists.

Hertzog, Havenga, his man Friday, and Pirow interrupted
Smuts persistently whenever he spoke. The choir of Nationalists
raised a racket so loud that no one could hear his own words.
Rowdyism had broken out in the venerable House of Assembly,
and it had come to stay.

In April, however, the noise was silenced by one of Smuts'
master strokes. He had negotiated a wool bargain with Great
Britain that saved the wool fanners from being choked by their
unsellable crop. Before the war the average price of South
African wool was 8s 3d. This season's price was raised a third.
Moreover, England pledged to share with the growers any
profit that might accrue from reselling part of the wool abroad.
The wool fanners in the Free State were Hertzog's staunchest
followers. But they grabbed with both hands the profits Smuts
had procured them from much maligned England. The Free
State Branch of the National Association of Wool Growers re-
solved that the agreement should continue after the war. They
had now a personal stake in England's survival. Britain also
bought the entire export of South African butter, cheese, and
eggs, thus saving the agricultural market from an inevitable
crash, since no other outlet was open to them.

Smuts had secretly negotiated the agreement since Decem-
ber, 1939. His position in the country was markedly strength-
ened. A "Union Truth Legion" sprang up. More than 650,000
signatures, far the most numerous petition ever signed in South
Africa, urged General Smuts to carry on to peace through vic-
tory. At a tremendous meeting in Cape Town scores of white-
clad girls handed over to Oom Jannie seventy volumes con-
taining the signatures. Brigadier-General H. N. W. Botha, M.P.,
assumed the chairmanship.

Strokes of luck, good or bad, never come singly. A bombshell
exploded in the House when Mr. Wallach, member for Pretoria-

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OLD MASTER

West, read a letter which, he said cautiously, had been ad-
dressed to one of the most distinguished families in the Free
State. The writer was Dr. Leyds, once the arch-enemy of Great
Britain, who had left South Africa during the Boer War to in-
trigue in Germany, and who had spent the next forty years in
seclusion in Holland, writing books in which the Boer War was
fought over and over again. His letter read: "We are sitting
here, waiting what Hitler will do, and in this uncertain atmos-
phere one never knows what will happen the next day. History
can take queer turns. I with my feelings of abhorrence and
contempt for the old Joe Chamberlain would gladly stand
shoulder to shoulder now with his son in his fight against the
Germans who, in my eyes, are a curse to the world. This nation,
particularly the youth, is receiving an education which is re-
ducing them to something worse than barbarians. Fortunately,
I have no business in Germany, because my wife and I would
undoubtedly and expeditiously be consigned either to a con-
centration camp or to death."

Dr. Leyds, the man who, by egging on Kruger, was more
than any other individual responsible for the bloodshed of the
Boer War, had now reached his eighty-first year. He was still
going strong. The giant with the white lion's mane had, more
than a year previously, been celebrated at a banquet in Cape
Town, at which all surviving officials of the two Republics had
been present. Smuts had eulogized him as the greatest figure,
after Kruger, in Transvaal history.

This man's conversion made a strong impression on the coun-
try. But it was utterly lost on Hertzog and his followers. Hitler
invaded the Lowlands on May 10. The abortive resistance of
Holland and Belgium was unavailing. Two days after the rape
of Holland Dr. Leyds died. He had retired into a hospital when
the Germans came, but he could not bear the incessant tramp-
ing of the Nazi jack boots. His son had already been for some
time in London. He had obtained British citizenship, and, al-
though himself advanced in years, joined the English Home
Guard.

A fluctuating majority of the Boers, comprising the progres-

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OLD MASTER

sive part as well as most of the fence sitters, received the news
of the fall of the Netherlands, their mother country, with a
deep shock. Only the racialists appeared completely unper-
turbed. They had never felt any sympathy for the older, richer,
and more civilized country from which their ancestors had once
been kicked out. Furthermore, they hated the arrogant Hol-
landers in their own midst.

Hertzog, who, fifty years before, leaving the University of
Utrecht, had written the well-meant verse: "Adieu, thou land
of freedom sprung, By freedom's bracing power sustained . . ."
shunned the special session of the House, convoked for a sym-
pathy demonstration toward Holland. He retired to his farm,
leaving behind the message to his people: "Let us not become
partisans toward one or the other nation or country/* In Parlia-
ment, Dr. Malan, substituting for the leader, declared that he
felt sympathy for Belgium or Holland, but that the nature of
modern warfare explained Hitler's lightning invasions suffi-
ciently, and that the Fuehrer's desire to seize the important
naval bases of Flanders was perfectly legitimate. Neither Hol-
land, nor Belgium, nor the Hollanders living in South Africa
could expect him, Dr. Malan, to erase his neutrality motto on
their behalf.

Smuts cabled to Queen Wilhelmina in London: "All South
Africa would consider it the greatest honor to offer sanctuary to
the Netherlands Royal Family." The officers of the Secret Serv-
ice sighed with relief when this friendly offer was most gra-
ciously declined. The Hertzogite Press was so viciously sputter-
ing at refugees, royal or Jewish, that the task of protecting the
Queen's life would have been immensely difficult.

Smuts broadcast an impassionate speech about German ag-
gression. "Now you see," he addressed his own people, "that
neutrality does not mean protection. Germany stops at nothing.
Unless we resist, our day will come as it has come to other
nations. But Dr. Malan still sticks to neutrality. He is getting
deeper and deeper into the mud. I leave him there."

Even in Stellenbosch demonstrations of sympathy with Hol-
land occurred. Professor Keet of the Theological Seminary, the

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OLD MASTER

stronghold of Calvinistic reaction, confessed: "We should no
longer be civilized people if we did not condemn this crime.
In our hearts there can never be neutrality toward this act of
barbarism." Yet the great majority of Stellenbosch professors
displayed their Nazism ever more shamelessly, and the univer-
sity, already the Mecca of the fighting Afrikaners, was soon to
become the parade ground of a new revolutionary movement.

On the whole, Hitler's rape of Holland strengthened Smuts'
position in the country. Parliament passed a special credit of
eight million pounds four times the amount of the normal mili-
tary budget for the Defence Force. The bill was voted without
debate. The Nationalists did not appear in the House. Evi-
dently they feared to provoke the prevailing sentiment too out-
rageously. But on the next day Dr. Malan resumed his vitupera-
tions. Germany had invaded the Netherlands for the Dutch
people's own good, he said. Zeesen had broadcast the same
phrase a few hours before.

Thousands of new recruits flocked to the colors. Cape Town
was in a patriotic ecstasy. Table Bay was crammed with British
sea giants. A merchant fleet of almost 300,000 tons, among
them the Queen Mary, the Aquitania, and the Mauretania,
protected by some 200,000 tons of naval vessels, had brought
the greatest convoy of troops that thus far had crossed the seas,
to proceed through South Africa to the Middle East. Smuts
and Wavell had laid out the plan a month before, when Wavell
had been in Cape Town on a flying visit. Shoulder to shoulder
with the Aussies and the New Zealanders, whom the ships had
brought, the first contingent of the Springboks left for the front.
They were in high spirits, lusting for a go at the "Eyties." The
railway coaches were chalked with inscriptions: "Attention,
Musso! . . . Next stop Rome! . . ."

In his old general's coat, which he had worn on the Western
front, but now with the orange flash on the shoulder, Smuts
was among his men. He bade them farewell: "More no man
can do than offer his life for his friends. That offer, the highest
and most solemn offer a man can make, you are now making.

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OLD MASTER

You are going to face hardships, danger, and sacrifice, perhaps
death itself in all its fiercest forms. But through it all you will
gather the experience of life and enrichment of character which
is more valuable than gold or precious stones. You will become
better and stronger men. You will not return the same as you
went. You will bring back memories which you and yours will
treasure for life. You will not be mere items of the population.
You will come back as builders of your own nation. Your chil-
dren will be proud of you. A nation is never proud of its Tiands-
uppers/ its fence sitters, its players for safety."

Oom Jannie was now truly his soldiers' father. In the teeth
of an incessant campaign of hatred and slander, such as no
other man in public life is exposed to, living in a world of
thoughts, hard realism and dreams of the millennium mingled,
he felt and acted, above all, as the guardian of his happy war-
riors. Each of his "beloved sons," as the otherwise reserved old
man repeatedly called them, was his personal ward. He ap-
pointed a committee, composed of Cabinet members and medi-
cal men, to investigate conditions in the Defence Force. There
were initial difficulties, inevitable in view of the rapid growth
of this fine volunteer army, to be overcome. There was too
much red tape. Professional officers were in some cases not suffi-
ciently versed in handling problems of administration and or-
ganization. Inter-departmental rivalries blossomed as in every
new and great establishment. In the purely military sphere,
however in regard to training, discipline, mechanization the
job was supremely well done.

Smuts appointed Dr. A. J. Orenstein, an American, Director
of the Union's Military Medical Service. Dr. Orenstein had for
seven years served as a member of the Panama Canal Medical
Service, and had won fame for his mosquito control. Then he
was called to become chief medical adviser to the Corner House
group, the largest mining combine in Johannesburg. Now he
worked miracles in protecting the Springboks against the poi-
sonous flies and insects, the principal enemy in the African
theater of war. Smuts himself saw to it that his beloved sons
should get the right diet: no longer the stormjaegers and the

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OLD MASTER

maagbomme on which their grandfathers in the Boer War had
thrived, but vitamins and calories. The Springboks were the
first combat troops to get concentrated orange juice with their
rations. They were treated according to General Smuts' own
prescription: give them plenty of good, wholesome food, com-
bined with hard training and ample opportunity for recreation.

On the tenth of August they took Kornidil, south east of
Moyale. The drive against the Italian Colonial Empire was on,
with the Springboks in the vanguard. At the same time the
South African Air Force went out daily to intercept the air
pirates of the Regia Aeronautica.

While watching and supervising the progress his troops were
making, Smuts set himself another task. He was going to make
"the South African coast no place for hostile battleships/' Colo-
nel Craig, Deputy Director of Fortifications, who had just
finished the work on the great new harbor of Cape Town, per-
fected the fortifications on Robben Island and on the mountain-
side above LJandudno, where General Smuts' 9.2-inch howitzers
now occupied the sites of Pirow's blue-funk 15-inch guns.

A few days after South African forces had entered active
combat, the doom of France was sealed. Smuts was not sur-
prised. He had always believed that France was gravely over-
rated. But this darkest hour of the war, the moment of the
gravest shock, spurred him to a renewed confession of faith:
'The Dominions are unhesitatingly ranging themselves along-
side Great Britain in her resolve to continue the war, even if
she has to stand alone. Of all the Dominions South Africa is in
the gravest danger, and her interest in taking this stand is there-
fore the greatest of all. Germany has her historic ambitions in
Africa, and South Africa with her gold and mineral resources
and her strategic position in this world is the prize most worth
having on our continent. If Germany wins this war nothing will
save this country. We can therefore but choose to stand with
Great Britain to the end in this mortal struggle. . . . Don't be
downhearted! By next year Germany's war effort will be crip-
pled, and the tide of war will begin to turn. Germany's ambi-

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OLD MASTER

tions and her thrust toward world hegemony will have raised
a world war in which the alignment of powers will be very dif-
ferent from what it is today. The end might come with the same
suddenness of collapse as that which ended her victorious career
in the last war. This war, which began as Hitler's war, will end
as God's war!"

Only Winston Churchill, and no third man in the world,
could speak with the same great vision and determined confi-
dence. Churchill, indeed, replied: "The great General Smuts
of South Africa, that wonderful man with his immense and
profound mind, his eyes watching from the distance the whole
panorama of European affairs, does well deserve our gratitude/'

Hertzog, on the other hand, thought differently about Smuts'
merits. The fallen leader was already surviving himself. Men-
tally unbalanced, he had retired into the seclusion of his Sabine
farm at Waterval. There he wrote a letter to Smuts: "In view
of the disastrous course of the war and the collapse of the Al-
lied forces, our further participation in hostilities against Ger-
many and Italy threatens the existence of the country and the
people. You will forgive me if I say now that as far as South
Africa is concerned the time has come to put an end to this
game of self-deceit, and of deception of the people. I demand
immediate steps to withdraw from the war."

Smuts firmly rejected Hertzog's "dishonorable proposal,"
pointing out that it had already been rejected by Parliament
on September 4, 1939, and would undoubtedly meet the same
fate again. "The government," he concluded, "will carry out
the policy on the mandate of Parliament, and will not allow
the execution of that policy to be nullified by propaganda or
threats of violence." He did not comment on the fact that Hert-
zog's letter, in violation of all rules of decency, had been pub-
lished by Die Vaderland, Hertzog's mouthpiece in Johannes-
burg, before it had reached its recipient.

The open letter kindled the ire of all the Nationalists in
Johannesburg, a particularly spiteful lot, living as a small mi-
nority, submerged by an overwhelmingly English population.
Two hours after Die Vaderland was sold on the streets, three

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OLD MASTER

Hertzogite hooligans, disguised as policemen, called upon Mr.
F. M. B. Ferreira, a member of the East Rand Board School
and a local leader of the 'Truth Legion." They kidnapped him,
drove him to a lonesome spot, stripped him of his clothes, and
tarred and feathered him.

On the home front the rule of terror began.

While the war went from bad to worse for the British Com-
monwealth, now alone defending the ramparts of human free-
dom, the seditious movement in South Africa increased by
leaps and bounds. Hertzog lent it whatever strength he had
left, although he was already more a shadowy figure than a
protagonist. Dr. Malan had achieved the aim of his hypocritical
life. He had dethroned his leader, and was now boss himself.
He founded the Herenigde (re-united) Nasionale Party. Most
of the Nationalistic rabble congregated around him. Only a
handful of faithful followers remained true to their "personal
leader." They offset in noise what they lacked in numbers.

Dr. Malan coined a new slogan: "Smutskowitz's" he used
the name Eric Holm, the traitor of Zeesen had coined "duxmg-
maatreels (measures of enforcement) must be stopped by all
means, and the broeder-oorlog (fratricidal strife) between
Boers and Germans must come to an end." He was little con-
cerned about the fact that he himself was inciting to broeder-
oorlog in his own nation.

His underlings outcried and outbid one another. Following
Hitler's advice to make one man the single scapegoat for all
evils, their barrage of lies and calumny was concentrated on
Smuts. General Kemp, the traitor of 1914, later minister in the
coalition government, invaded Smuts' own camp. In Malmes-
bury, Cape Colony, whence Smuts hailed, he addressed a
meeting crowding the town hall: "England has become the de-
fender of the small nations only to plunder and rob them of
their possessions. Never again will I hold out the hand of
friendship to General Smuts."

Pirow, the foreign adventurer, went more slyly to work. In
Pretoria he said calmly: "The occasion might well arise that

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OLD MASTER

South Africa would voluntarily side with Great Britain in a war,
for instance if Japan were the enemy. But never, never against
Germany/'

The first rumblings about the Ossewa Brandwagihe senti-
nels of the oxcart were heard. Smuts insinuated, ever in his
cautious legalistic language, "that this new movement had
negotiated with the Nazis with a view to its being used as an
instrument for acts of an illegal nature." It was a deliberate
understatement. Smuts knew perfectly well the name of the
Nazi official involved, a former counsellor of the German lega-
tion in Pretoria, as well as the identity of the Brandwagters
who had met him in Portuguese Louren9o Marques. But Mr.
Sauer, the chief whip of the Herenigde Party, shouted: 'The
Ossewa Brandwag is a purely cultural movement! If Smuts
looks for treason, he shall look before his own door."

Messieurs Bruckner de Villiers, Nationalistic Senator and
chairman of Die Burger, and Senator Oosthuisen, another spon-
sor of Dr. Malan, themselves two of the fattest moneybags in
South Africa, called Smuts "the slave of capitalism."

In Parliament Dr. Malan and his followers lavished praises
on Adolf Hitler, and bolstered up the demand for neutrality
with fulminations against General Smuts, "himself the most
ruthless dictator."

Hen Pirow, and General Kemp, not satisfied even with these
excesses of the Herenigde Party, founded splinter groups of
their own. Pirow's program was: proclamation of a Republic,
immediate peace, cancellation of the Simon's Town agreement,
recognition of Die Stem as the sole national anthem, stricter
censorship to stop "imperialistic propaganda." When he left
the University of Pretoria, where he had made this declaration,
deliberately in an old-fashioned horse and buggy, the enthused
students outspanned the horses and themselves dragged the car
to the railroad station.

His followers closed the ranks around the Old Master. Hof-
meyr, Steyn and Reitz the latter two sons of republican leaders
in the Boer War fought valiantly for their chief. Once more
"Old Bailey" came to help. Although both his legs had been

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OLD MASTER

amputated within the last year, he was still possessed with his
old zest for life. He could not pass away without a last joke,
full of a deeper meaning. His swan song read: "I have always
joyed in Africa. Here I am, maybe the largest landowner and
farmer in the world. I grow horses, cattle, sheep, tobacco, and
over five thousand tons of fruit a year. As the Yankees say:
We eat what we can, and can what we can't!' I have had a
colorful life, unique, perhaps, in the history of the world. Now
I am old, and a little deaf. So I cannot hear anyone speaking
about me behind my back. With all my increasing infirmities
I shall soon be taking a non-stop into the next world. I shall
certainly not live long enough to see my legs grow again. But
I do not wish to hear some people talking of how they hate
living in this period. Personally, I should think they would be
proud of the experience, and do what they can to win the
war/'

To Smuts, his own fate, the fate of one individual mattered
little in this time of storm and stress. He was satisfied with the
rapid growth of the Union Army, and with their proud progress.
In Groote Schuur he gave the prescribed annual garden party
for four thousand members of the United Party. Each of the
guests was astonished at how well the Old Master knew all his
visitors' names and families, and how he even remembered
where their farms were located.

On July 27, street rioting flared up in Cape Town. Nazi pam-
phlets in large bundles had been left in the tram cars. The
population was sick of the constant provocation. Nazi fellow
travelers had a bad time. Smuts spoke over the radio, beseech-
ing his people not to follow the example of lawlessness. His
voice sounded harsh. Was he heartbroken? Smuts heartbroken?
It was simply that he had a heavy cold. Since he believed the
situation to be firmly in hand, he heeded his doctor's advice,
and retired for a few days to the lowveld. There he botanized
with a vengeance, and returned, his cold worse than ever.

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OLD MASTER

Chapter 30

BLITZ OVER ENGLAND-THUNDER IN SOUTH AFRICA

"THE MAN WHO CAPTURED CHURCHILL!" YELLED THE SCREAMER
headlines of the Nationalist press.

So Hitler had done it. He was in London. The swastika was
waving over Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey. Now
was the moment to unfurl and to hoist all the hidden Vierkleurs,
from Table Mountain to the Limpopo. Now was the chance to
bring Smuts to account.

Unfortunately, the man who captured Churchill had done so
almost forty years earlier. Now, at the blessed age of seventy-
nine, Mr. Richard Alexander Knipe, of Zoekmakaar, headmaster
of the Christelike Nasionale Onderwys Skoolone of those
private schools under the supervision of the Dutch Gerefor-
meerde Church in which the children learned the ABC from
Nazi pamphlets had peacefully passed away. The Nationalist
press told the story of his life and death in that sensational
manner that passed in Keerom Street for "Americanism/'

The much-mourned headmaster had also been a popular
author, a regular contributor to Die Kerkbode (The Church
Messenger) and Die Huisgenoot (The Home Companion),
except for the Old Testament the only reading matter on the
platteland. For almost forty years he had repeated the same
story, and ever again it kindled the imagination of the nation
with the longest memory. Mr. Knipe, his story went, had cap-
tured Winston Churchill during the Boer War. Somewhere
near the Germiston station, he pretended, he had seen a horse
that could not possibly have belonged to a Boer. The mare
looked suspicious, and so did the small house with the shut-
tered windows in front of which she stood. Far from venturing
upon a dangerous frontal attack, such as kicking open the door,
Mr. Knipe boasted of having "besieged" the hut, until a hatless,

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OLD MASTER

beardless man came out. He threw up his hands. "My name is
Winston Churchill," he introduced himself.

In itself the story was of no importance. South Africa is still
seething with old-timers who have singlehanded taken prisoner
the British warlord. But the headlines caused by the death of
a small fry from the backveld, characterized the state of mind
of many Boers. While their sons sweated their way through
Italian Somaliland, the fathers and grandfathers fought the
Boer War all over again.

So did the mothers. On Sunday, June 23, 1940, more than
seven thousand well-organized Boer mothers, their gray hair
still severely brushed back, clad in cheap imitations of the cos-
tume the Voortrekker vrouwe used to wear, duly primed and
assured of the Lord's blessing by the Reverend P. J. de Klerk,
staged a peace-at-any-price demonstration in Pretoria. Smuts
refused to receive their delegation. Until Monday night no re-
spectable citizen of the capital ventured on to die streets, for
fear of being attacked by the parasol-armed, peace-minded
furies.

The Afrikander universities were rebellious. In Johannes-
burg, on July 1, Smuts addressed a meeting of the National
Union of South African Students. He tried hard to explain the
problem of the war. "If the enemy attack succeeds finally, this
noble order into which we were born will be destroyed, free-
dom and justice, mercy and humanity will be blotted out, and
another dark age will settle over this fair world. The State will
be totalitarian, omnipotent, and will be the new deity. The
human individual will become an automaton, without freedom
or rights, without a soul to call his own. Instead of the upward
reach to the stars, we shall follow the downward and backward
road to the beehive or the antheap. The lights of the mind and
the soul will be dimmed or extinguished in the new blackout
of the human spirit."

Whereupon Constable Gert Hendrik Theunissen, of the
Cleveland Police Commissariat, Johannesburg, on duty at the
door of the hall, remarked to Constable Verwey: "I wish I had

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OLD MASTER

a revolver. Then I could shoot the dead, when he comes
out!"

The subsequent investigation disclosed that Theunissen had
been transferred from the alien registration branch of the police
special staff, where he had easy and pleasant duties, to the
fatiguing job of tramping his beat, because he had failed to
take the oath. Of course, that Smuts was guilty for his trans-
fer. Theunissen declared unabashed that he wanted to go to
Pretoria to help the students in their contemplated revolt, be-
cause "the police were treated just like slaves." He admitted
frankly that he was a champion of the Nazi cause and in the
habit of giving the Hitler salute.

Innocently, Constable S. R. Excell, a witness, testified: "It is
fashionable at Cleveland barracks to discuss politics openly,
defying the government. Theunissen is by no means the only
one at Cleveland to hold anti-Smuts views. Many comrades
have said to those who did take the oath of allegiance to the
government that they were now on Hitler's blacklist, and if he
wins, they will be in for it. Theunissen would not take the oath
since he had no intention of fighting for a dog like Smuts. And
if it were in his power, he said, others would not fight either.
At least not on the English side. A large section of the Johan-
nesburg police celebrated the fall of Paris, and other Nazi suc-
cesses."

On Smuts' personal intervention, Theunissen was only ac-
cused on a charge of using improper language in a public place,
or, alternatively, with conduct incompatible with the proper
conduct of a member of the police force.

A few days after Smuts' address to the students in Johannes-
burg the first open disturbances broke out. Characteristically,
they occurred in the internment camp at Baviaanspoort, where
1,200 Germans were detained. The internees were leading most
comfortable lives, under conditions far excelling the regulations
prescribed by the Geneva Convention. Their food was good
and ample, beer and tobacco were among their privileges; they

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OLD MASTER

were allowed radio sets, newspapers, and visitors. Thousands
of racialists obtained, under the most flimsy pretenses, visitors*
passes. They assured the poor Nazis that the whole country was
in sympathy with them.

Incited by such assurances, the entire body of internees re-
volted. The unarmed wardens, among them a good number of
Nazi sympathizers, were either too weak or unwilling to restore
order. Police had to be called in. Only using their batons, they
broke up the upheaval. A hundred internees suffered slight in-
juries and bruises, two ringleaders were moved to the Johannes-
burg prison. German arrogance had suffered a defeat.

But what would Hitler think of the beating up of his faithful
followers? The collapse of France was still a fresh memory, and
an invasion of England seemed not unlikely. Certainly the Al-
lied cause was done for, and the internees from Baviaanspoort
would be South Africa's gauleiters and district-leaders of to-
morrow. Senator Brebner, otherwise a comparatively moderate
Nationalist, declared: "General Smuts is in the position of the
former French Prime Minister Reynaud, who could not con-
clude an honorable peace because of his previous invectives
against Germany. This is the danger General Smuts represents.
His words are worse and more scandalous than Reynaud's.
General Smuts will continue to speak about the *beast of Ber-
lin* and will continue to bring South Africa more and more into
danger. The time will come when another government will
have to be set up to do the things General Smuts will not be
able to do!"

Instead of answering the calumny, Smuts broadcast to the
people of Great Britain and America. "Although the Germans
can show an uninterrupted series of most spectacular successes,
England will prove an impregnable fortress if Hitler attacks
her. If Hitler does not attack, he is equally lost. He will in the
end be unable to hold down the vast populations whom he is
dominating, starving, and seeking to enslave. To the specter
of a Nazi-dominated Europe we oppose the vision of a truly
free Europe. Freedom still remains our sovereign remedy for
the ills from which human society is suffering. But we have

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OLD MASTER

also learned that discipline and organization must go hand in
hand with freedom. We therefore aim at a society of nations
which will possess a central organization equipped with the
necessary authority and power to supervise the common con-
cerns of mankind. In such an international society there will be
no place for self-appointed leaders and fuehrers. He who will
be master, shall be servant. Our aim and motto will be a nation
of free men and women, an international society of free nations/'

It certainly took courage to prophesy a new world during
the very hours the blitz struck London with bestial fury. Eng-
land was no less courageous than General Smuts. While the
battle of Britain was at its peak, a large number of heavy Mar-
tin bombers, originally destined for France, were diverted to
South African pilots, enabling them to wreak havoc on Musso-
lini's African positions. "The South African Air Force plays a
vital and brilliant role," Sir Archibald Sinclair attested.

At the same time the various groups of Boer Nationalists and
racialists, defeatists and pro-Nazis struggled for position on the
home front, each outbidding the other for Hitler's grace. Secret
societies mushroomed, others came out into the open, all were
the objects of violent rivalries between the republican leaders
and underlings. Colonel J. C. Laas startled South Africa with
his sudden demand for supreme authority for his Ossewa Brand-
wag, since only a "military group" could maintain order. The
O. B., a prewar growth, started in the beginning of 1939, had
thus far deceitfully claimed to be nothing more than a cultural
and social society, devoted to the "awakening and development
of the Afrikander's national pride." Smuts had known for a long
time that a great number of O. B. leaders and members had
been using their "cultural" organization for sinister ends. He
knew that supporters of his government had been eliminated,
and that the O. B. was developing along military lines. Yet he
did nothing to root out this weed. Watchfulness, he trusted,
would be enough.

Perhaps the old tactician also relied on the ferocious com-
petition going on within the Afrikander camp. Pirow tried to
best the O. B. in adding a Handhawersbondleagae of artisans

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OLD MASTER

to his storm troopers, assigning to his new foundation the
functions of a South African Gestapo. But when the Handha-
toersbond was making headway, the same dark forces that
really dominated political Afrikanderdom, and to whom the
German turncoat was never more than a contemptible instru-
ment, kicked him out of his own foundation. A Reddingsdaad
Bond, an economic league to promote Afrikander small business
at the expense of English and Jewish, and an F. A. K. ( Union
for Afrikaans Culture) added to the number of subversive
groups. Keerom Street, Dr. Malan's headquarters, wrangled
violently with the last Hertzogites, now practically led by Mr.
Havenga, for domination of these societies. Malan's personal
enemies attempted to set up a Boerevolk organization to unite
the gray-bearded survivors of the Boer War and their descend-
ants in an Afrikander elite, which would exclude the instru-
ments of Keerom Street. They succeeded in driving Dr. Malan
from Cape Town, where he had spent most of his life. Under
the pretext that the center of South African politics had shifted
to the Transvaal, the old man with his wife moved to Pretoria.
The change of air did him no good. The capital smiled at dour
Dr. Malan who could so ill conceal his nostalgia for the bustle
of Adderley Street, the Table Mountain mists, the oak-lined
avenues, and the koffiehuise of the mother city. He tried to
work off his personal ill-feeling in redoubled radicalism. His
Purified Nationalists, Die Suiderstem, Smuts' mouthpiece, dis-
closed, had worked out a plan for a Christian-Nationalist Re-
public on the Nazi pattern. Mass meetings in the four provinces
should culminate in a National Convention at Bloemfontein:
"the one great meeting before we are free."

Smuts called in all the rifles in the hands of the civil popula-
tion. His object, he explained, was not to disarm the people,
but simply to get the small arms which were so necessary for
the defense of South Africa. Rifles, he insisted, were the scarcest
war-requirement in today's world. But he added: "The govern-
ment cannot be accused of having abused its powers. If there
is any charge against the government with a semblance of sub-
stance, it is the charge that the government is being far too

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OLD MASTER

lenient. There is not a single government anywhere in the
world which would have allowed what the Union government
has allowed. The government has done so because it realizes
the peculiar position in South Africa. It appreciates the political
differences between the people, and knows that it has to make
allowance for exaggerations in speech. We shall continue to be
patient with the people of South Africa," he concluded, "but
if there are minority influences doing subversive work, I wish
to tell the country that the full powers of the War Measures
Bill will be used."

To test his determination, the racialists invented a particu-
larly insolent provocation. Cape Town observed a two-minute
pause at noon. When the bugles sounded, all traffic, walking,
speaking on the streets stopped. In reverent silence the popula-
tion paid homage to the heroes and the victims of the war. Eric
Louw, a Nationalist youth leader, suggested to the students of
Stellenbosch that they should band together and parade Ad-
derley Street in Cape Town during the noon pause, to disturb
the sacred and solemn moment which most passers-by used for
a short prayer. On July 29, a group of Stellenbosch academic
hoodlums, indeed, appeared in the center of Cape Town. The
very moment the bugles had sounded the pause, the hooligans
crossed Adderley Street, laughing and shouting raucously. For
two minutes the noise-makers remained undisturbed. Then
literally all Adderley Street turned on them, and they received
an unforgettable thrashing.

At the same time other university hoodlums, back in Stellen-
bosch, attacked and beat up the colored news vendors, chil-
dren between six and twelve, who sold English-language pa-
pers. Some grown-up natives tried to defend the newsboys. The
local police interfered. They pushed back the natives, and pro-
tected the academic rabble.

The score in the South African Civil War was 1 to 1 Cape
Town pro-war, Stellenbosch anti-war when, on August 1, 1940,
the Springboks entered active combat. Ten days later they oc-
cupied Kornidel, south east of Moyale. It was a glorious bap-
tism of fire.

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OLD MASTER

Within a fortnight the R.S.A.A.F. had established its superi-
ority in the skies above Italian East Africa. Overnight the
budding air aces became national heroes, better known by their
nicknames such as "Sultan" or "Sheik." The most hilarious
among the many stories about them was the account of "Sul-
tan," who was sitting in a tree, clad only in drawers, when an
air-raid warning announced the enemy's approach. "Sultan"
rushed through the bush to his plane in a minute, and was
climbing skyward. It took him another five minutes to shoot
down a Caproni. The Italian mechanic was killed. But the pilot,
although burned and sorely wounded, still looking smart in his
snow-white uniform, glanced at his victorious foe and remarked
acidly: "To think that I, an ace of three wars, should have been
shot down by a naked ape!"

The Air Force was the pride of South Africa. The artillery
and the tankmen ran a close second. The Union was proud of
its new tanks and howitzers, the first to be manufactured in
the country, and already coming rapidly off the assembly lines.
The old Imperial barracks at Potchefstroom were converted
into a huge training camp for the South African Artillery.
Potchefstroom is also the site of University College. The atti-
tude of the hopeful youth was explained by the chairman of
the Students' Representative Council, a youngster by the name
of Coetzee: "We stand aloof from the soldiers. We walk out
of the movies while God Save the King is being played. We
should all be interned for republican sympathy. We refuse to
fight against Germany."

But they did not refuse to attack solitary soldiers who had
come from the camp for an evening stroll through the town. A
sergeant by the name of Poth was pushed off the sidewalk and
kicked into the gutter. "Soldiers are not allowed with decent
people on the sidewalk," his assailants said. A few minutes
later a number of other students dragged a soldier from his
motorcycle. He had a bad fall. "Serves him right for wearing
khaki!" commented a belle. "It's a pity he was not killed out-
right," nodded another. Both girls wore Normal College blazers.
Corporal Oats was attacked by five young men, mercilessly

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OLD MASTER

beaten, and had to be taken to a hospital. It became the general
custom among the blazer-wearers to give the Nazi salute when
they saw a soldier approaching. A gunner's wife was spat at by
three women. "We don't want General Smuts!" was the ex-
planation. Even Colonel Noel Poulton, commander at Potchef-
stroom, was waylaid by students on a narrow street corner,
where he was turning his car, spat at, insulted in the most
obscene manner, and followed by a jeering crowd as he drove
off.

For a few days rowdyism went unchecked. But on the eve-
ning of August 7 five hundred artillerymen, who had lost
their patience, gathered in front of University College, and
gave every student that fell into their hands a severe beating.
The young rowdies retreated into the building. Armed with
nothing more than sticks and make-shift weapons, the artillery-
men followed them into the premises. The students retreated to
the upper floor. A few soldiers pursued them. The first to place
his hand on a stair-rail received a violent shock, and was thrown
back. The ingenious students had charged the stair-rails with
electricity. After suffering three or four casualties, the soldiers
understood the device, and applied their hands where they
rightly belonged. For weeks scores of students went about with
black eyes. The King's uniform was no longer insulted in
Potchefstroom.

But the students were by no means disheartened. They re-
ceived support of the Church. The Reverend J. D. Vorster
addressed the Afrikaanse Nasionale Studentenbound: "Hitler's
M ein Kampf points the way to greatness. Afrikanders must be
fired by the same holy fanaticism that inspires the Nazis. . . .
The foundation of the republic shall be that the Afrikander
shall no longer co-operate with the Englishman. He will lay
down the conditions, and the Englishman will be compelled to
subscribe. The Englishman must also surrender his language.
We want to hear nothing more about this liberal-democratic
swindle!"

The Reverend Jacobus Daniel Vorster, Minister of the Nuwe
Kerk, Bree Street, Cape Town, was a "general" in the Ossewa

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OLD MASTER

Brandwag, like many of his brethren, and a very zealous one
into the bargain. He induced Corporal Broegart of the Coastal
Command in Simon's Town to betray defense secrets, the num-
bers of batteries, caliber of guns, the strength of the garrison,
which immediately found their way to the German espionage
center in Louren9o Marques. Broegart suffered pangs of con-
science, and went to the police to confess. "General" the Rever-
end Vorster was arrested and tried. During his trial Mr. Har-
toges, the magistrate, received a threatening letter, signed
"Trou En Trots, Die Memse wot Verraaiers doodskiet" ( Faithful
and proud, the people who shoot traitors dead) . Also the Crown
witnesses were threatened with murder. Nevertheless, Vorster
was sentenced to a long term.

His Church did not dare to side openly with the traitor.
However, the Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church in the
Free State sent a message to Smuts: "The Church cannot be
convinced that the German people are out to destroy Chris-
tianity and its principles. As to Hitler's alleged plan of world
domination, the Church does not know what goes on in Hitler's
heart. He who sheds blood and tears merely on suppositions
goes too far. The Afrikanders did indeed choose to stay out of
the war, but in Parliament they were outvoted by the repre-
sentatives of the other section which in origin, tradition, voca-
tion and interest are opposed to the Afrikaans-speaking people.
Now these people are not only being governed by an alien
majority who are themselves afraid of going and fighting a
bloody war, but they are also being dragged, life and property,
into this war. The people, therefore, do not recognize a govern-
ment ruling at its own discretion. The people must always and
in everything be more obedient to their God than to their gov-
ernment. The Church urges the government to make immediate
peace, and bases its request on the Word of God. In the name
of the Synod: P. H. van Huyssteen."

Exactly one week after this message was published, one of
its authors, by the name of Christiaan Rudolph Kotze, a Minis-
ter of the Chief Dutch Reformed Church in Bloemfontein, was
indicted by the Circuit Court for common assault.

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OLD MASTER

The Ossewa Brandwag was encouraged. It organized politi-
cal demonstration in the Churches. The Wolseley congregation,
which had been united for two years after having been split
for longer than a century over a previous dispute, was again
torn asunder. The Kerkraad (Church Council) asked the min-
ister to cancel a service to which men and women of the local
O. B. marched in serried ranks. The minister declined, where-
upon the greater part of the congregation left. Old women
wept: "There is no longer room for us in our churchl" Having
won the day, the O. B. group roared, in front of the crucifix,
the hymn Afrikanders, Landgenote, which is sung to the tune
of "Deutschland iiber Alles "

Strangely, the strongest resistance against Nazification of the
Church came from a German minister. The Reverend Wilhelm
Luckhoff, Minister of the German Lutheran Church at Bloem-
fontein, declared that Nazism and Christianity were in an ir-
reconcilable conflict. The members of his church council cen-
sored him. During the first week of the conflict he received
three threatening letters, one of which read: "Pastor, you are
a marked man. I must earnestly request you to leave the coun-
try at the earliest possible moment for your own safety. They
know everything about you: all the information you have given
about your countrymen, your trips up here, your contacts with
the heads of departments, etc., etc. Your life is in danger.
Friend." The strangest thing about this letter was its envelope.
It bore the imprint of the Office of Patents, Designs, Trade
Marks and Copyrights, and was posted at Johannesburg.

When members of the congregation asked the Reverend
Luckhoff to pray for Hitler, the Niemoller of South Africa re-
plied: "To ask God's blessing on Hitler's person would be a
mockery of prayer." He was instantly dismissed. His farewell
sermon was based on the text: "He that is not with me is
against me, and he that gathered not with me, scattereth
abroad."

Pirow covered the country, speaking darkly of the coming
social and economic revolution, a new system of government,

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OLD MASTER

military education for the nation, and a new relation between
state and citizen. "We require nothing less than an economic
and socialistic revolution," he asserted. "The state will have to
look after the citizens in a manner which today would be re-
garded as Utopian. The citizen should have to submit himself
to a control which today would be regarded as militaristic. The
domination by capitalism and by the capital-controlled press
must stop/' Even Keerom Street was afraid of this undiluted
Nazism. Pirow's speeches were tucked away in the Nationalist
press. Yet the difference was only one of degree: while Pirow
dreamed of a sub-Nazi dictatorship, he himself lording it over
South Africa, with a privileged class controlling the people by
a gestapo and storm troopers, Die Burger had no moral objec-
tions to such methods of achieving domination of South Africa
for one narrow section, but only feared the dangers involved.
Pirow's Handhawersbond grew into a sixth column. It re-
garded itself as the political police of South Africa. The mo-
ment for action would come with Hitler's invasion of England.
Then the Handhawersbond, all of whose members were calling
themselves "generals," would give Smuts forty-eight hours to
resign and hand over the government. A president "with the
powers of Hitler" would succeed him. "If things in Europe
should not go as we expect," the program cautiously added,
"and if we must remain within the British Commonwealth, we
demand that the reins of government shall be taken over by
the Handhawersbond, which stands for action. The trouble is
that we have too many timid Afrikanders. In the Handhawers-
bond we want only die bulls who are unafraid. We want to
play the role of policemen in politics, and in this way get con-
trol of the government." A number of prominent government
and railway employees accepted leading functions. They were
swayed by Pirow's promise: "Under the present system things
are measured in terms of gold; under the new system the yard-
stick will be the happiness of the people and their progress.
The disciplined labor power of the people will be our new
wealth. There will be a place for youth in the national admin-
istration." Eagerly the underpaid white collar men and the job

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OLD MASTER

hunters listened. No one knew that Pirow was simply parroting
Hitler's words. No one objected to his aping Nazi manners at
his meetings. The speaker on the platform began: "We de-
mand. . . ." Short pause. The crowd fell in: "... freedom." It
was Nuremberg all over again.

But the Handhawersbond, for all its martial pretences, was
only a mere shadow of the real thing: the Ossewa Brandwag.
On September 13, 1940, Lieutenant-Colonel J. C. C. Laas, the
founder of the "purely cultural" organization (who, inciden-
tally, had received from the Hertzog-Smuts government the
difficult task of organizing the Commandos in the Free State),
declared that there was no longer any necessity for secrecy.
The O. B. was strong enough to come into the open. Its aim
was to obtain political leadership and supremacy in South
Africa.

A few days afterward the Reverend J. S. du Toit, another of
the innumerable self-styled "generals," described the O. B/s
military organization. At the top was the Commandant-General,
under him the generals, then the commanders, each of whom
had three field-cornets. This hierarchy formed the general staff,
or, in the civil-war parlance which the O. B. preferred, the
Vigilance Committee. Three assistant field-cornets were ap-
pointed to each cornet, three corporals to each assistant field-
cornet, and every corporal lorded it over eight men. Thus the
individual commando averaged two hundred fifty men, ap-
proximately the combat strength of a commando in the first
months of the Boer War, before many of the mounted fighters
had galloped home.

Already in May arrangements had been made to purchase
twenty thousand yards of veld-green corduroy to equip at least
the higher-ups with uniforms reminiscent of the Boer War
days. But a government ban on private uniforms had put a
premature end to this venture. Consequently, every O. B. offi-
cer was compelled to buy a fancy uniform of his own. He wore
regalia at meetings, but arrived and left cautiously in mufti.
The badge was worn openly. It was an exact replica of the
German Nazi badge, the same, incidentally, the Youth Section

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OLD MASTER

of the Bunds in the United States of America used to display.
The membership was as chequered as the first groups of Nazi
hoodlums had been. Members of the civil service mingled with
miners, lawyers, doctors, poor whites everyone was welcome
who proved his republican sentiment by undergoing a medi-
eval blood oath.

The O. B/s first "direct action/' still carried out in secrecy,
was the organization of a boycott of all those Boers who sup-
ported the government. Loyalists were socially ostracized and
driven out of business, at least in the dorps in which the ma-
jority of the customers were Republican.

The prophet Van Rensburg, the same whose dreams had in-
cited the revolt of 1914, emerged out of oblivion. Already a
shrunken oldster, he rose to a new peak of fame by predicting
the fall of Paris a few days before the tragedy actually oc-
curred. During the battle of Britain he published a pamphlet
which, at one and six, had a record sale on the platteland.
Britain would shortly be blitzed to death, he prophesied, and
a few weeks later the Smuts government would crumble. After
two great battles five big German ships would come to South
West and South East Africa, and to Cape Town. Parliament
would be in session. It would rain heavily, and the grass would
be green. Three blue letters would arrive. The third one would
be read in Parliament. The members would scramble, and flee
out of the Cape. "If they come here," the prophecy ended, "I
see us sitting on horses and moving in the direction of Lichten-
berg. There by a hill we meet, and there a man in a brown suit
speaks to us/'

The advent of Hitler in South Africa was predicted. Smuts
had not another moment to lose.

Parliament was actually in session. Smuts appeared as domi-
nating as ever. His tanned face beneath the white hair had lost
none of its vigorous expression, although it seemed a little thin-
ner than six months before. He still walked in his brisk fashion,
a little impatient, as it were, with a nod for one member and
a quip for another. He met Hertzog most courteously. His old
foe had also visibly lost weight, but he, too, was still bronzed

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OLD MASTER

and fit. He made it clear that he still felt himself leader of the
opposition, and that he did not mean to be driven out by the
extremists under Dr. Malan, who themselves were shivering in
their shoes for fear of the new competition: the O. B. Smuts
and Hertzog had a brief and formal discussion about the co-
operation of the opposition in operating the parliamentary ma-
chine. No agreement was reached. Hertzog reserved the right
to spend hours in harping on his favorite theme: the poor,
downtrodden Germans. But there were no precious hours to
be lost. Smuts moved, and carried, his "guillotine" motion,
which strangled any attempt at obstruction. Otherwise he
treated the House with the full respect of a veteran parliamen-
tarian democrat. Even the Hertzogite ex-President of the Sen-
ate C. E. van Niekerk thanked him for the friendly and tactful
manner in which he was handling the business. "Yes, one must
keep one's tongue under control," Smuts replied. "There are
people who speak just a bit too harshly. Now, whenever I hear
hard words it reminds me of the old days when I was young.
President Kruger once said to me: 'Smuts, your whiplash cracks
too harshly/ I think, as we grow older, so do our whiplashes
cease to crack. Unfortunately, in some places there are still
those who cannot keep their whiplash in leash."

Instead of his "whiplash" his police cracked down on the
subversive elements. The offices and houses of the known lead-
ers of the O. B. in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Pretoria, and
Bloemfontein were raided. All lists of membership and a great
number of secret documents were seized. In Pretoria the uni-
form of a woman general of the O. B. was found: khaki-colored
casement cloth with epaulettes indicating the high rank of the
wearer. In the Bloemfontein house of Colonel J. C. C. Laas, as
well as in the houses of the Reverend D. G. van der Merwe and
of Advocate Swart, the up-and-coming man of the racialists,
explosives, arms, ammunition, anti-government pamphlets,
heaps of Nazi literature in German, and precious membership
lists were unearthed.

After the raid Mr. H. G. Lawrence, Minister of the Interior,
could disclose a number of interesting details. In the O. B.

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OLD MASTER

headquarters in Johannesburg, 403, Voortrekker Gebou, Hoek
Street, a report about available arms and ammunition, supplied
by Dr. Wertz, German Consul at Lourengo Marques, was
found, also a circular to all generals and officers of the O. B.
dealing with methods of organization, with special reference
to the duties of various ranks. The "war council/' the storm-
jaegers (storm troops), and the women's section had each their
functions assigned. "There is no room in the O. B. for anyone
who is not prepared to serve in any capacity."

One hundred seventy thousand members, a terrifyingly high
number, were prepared to serve. The type of service was speci-
fied in the papers of the organizing secretary Abraham Spies,
who managed to escape to Portuguese territory. Some of the
members had to obtain information about defense, railways,
factories, troop movements. Others were to inform on danger-
ous persons "inside and outside" the O. B. A scout corps was
formed for "immediate action." Attempts at infiltration by
members of the O. B. into the police, railway services, and
defense forces were made. Evidently some of these attempts
had been successful. Among the confiscated documents were
plans of Defence Camps with the number of men and their
armament, and names of particularly "reliable" soldiers: Janse
V. R. of Casseldale was specially qualified as an Air Force
mechanic and machine-gunner, whereas W. J. Jacobs of Wit-
port possessed expert knowledge of Bren and Vickers guns.
The police found evidence that the O. B. had been behind the
strike in the East Rand Proprietary Mines. The organization
had promised the strikers its support, attacked the government,
magnified the men's grievances and was responsible for a num-
ber of other wildcat strikes.

The worst crime of the O. B. was to unloose the sabotage
wave, the true curse of South Africa. Bombing outrages oc-
curred in widely separated areas. It was a new method of
crime, imported after the outbreak of war. In spite of all peren-
nial hooliganism on the Rand, the dynamiter had previously
not been known. Now bombing was a daily event. The govern-

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OLD MASTER

ment introduced a bill setting the death penalty for dyna-
miters, and making it retroactive. For a time it helped. The
raid had eliminated some of the worst elements in the O. B.
Colonel J. C. C. Laas, the commander general, resigned. Hun-
dreds of his underlings were sent to internment camps, where
discipline was rigidly enforced. It was high time to take such
measures. The camps at Leeuwkops, Baviaanspoort, and Anda-
lusia were seething with insubordination. An epidemic of es-
capes had broken out. The Internment Guards had been per-
meated with Nazi sympathizers. Now they were replaced by
troops. General L. Beyers, Commander of the Fifth Brigade,
was appointed Camp Director with full powers. The First Bat-
talion of the Sixth Infantry Regiment and the Sixth Battalion
of the Infantry Reserve Brigade were at his disposal. Immedi-
ately all visits were canceled, broadcasts and newspapers were
banned, the singing of the Nazi anthem was effectively stopped.
At the same time the search for fugitives was vigorously con-
ducted. Five Italians who had escaped into Swaziland were
captured by the police after the greatest man hunt the jungle
had ever seen, before the native chiefs, who had joined die
hunt with a vengeance, could get at the heroes of Abyssinia
and roast them on their spits.

Toward the middle of October Smuts organized a National
Reserve of Volunteers in two sections: the military section took
over internal security duties, whereas the Civilian Protective
Services guarded the key positions. These measures, combined
with news of the ignominious beating the Luftwaffe had taken
in the skies over England, did much to restore order. With his
infinite patience and unwavering determination at the critical
moment, Smuts had staved off a revolution on an unprece-
dented scale.

Looking anxiously at her husband's tired face, Mrs. Smuts,
who, a short time before had received the first evacuee children
from bomb-torn Britain and was teaching those on her own
farm, Irene, her old childhood games, klip-klip and bok-bok,
decided that he needed a holiday. His Cabinet colleagues con-

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OLD MASTER

curred in this opinion. They insisted that their beloved leader
should take off at least a week.

Smuts yielded. "I might pay a visit to our boys up North!"
he murmured. "But don't rush around too much!" Mrs. Smuts
was reported to have warned. On an evening late in October
the Oubaas got out some maps, and ran his fingers northward
to Kenya, the Sudan, and Egypt. Pointing out Tanganyika he
reminisced about the bush and wild life during the East Afri-
can campaign. Peering through his spectacles, he remarked on
the vastness and great possibilities of Africa.

Early on the next morning he put on his old general's uni-
form. A fast American-built bomber swooped over Pretoria.
The General went north. After sunset he arrived at the Nairobi
airport. It seemed almost as if his aircraft were falling from the
deep-purple sky. The airport was illuminated by floodlights.
Smuts inspected the South African guard of honor, and met
large groups of senior officers. He attended a soiree at Govern-
ment House that lasted late into the night. Yet he was the first
only accompanied by his aide-de-camp Lieutenant-General
Barnard to venture out before dawn. For hours he drove
through rain, mist, mud and slush. At the first Springbok camp
he met dozens of officers, who escorted him on motorcycles
while the Old Master inspected the camp. He watched the sig-
nallers receiving their instructions. He observed maneuvers:
machine-guns in action, a charge of soldiers with gas masks, a
mortar attack through the bush. Back at the camp he looked
at other units digging trenches in their mud-stained working
clothes. He obviously did not feel in the mood for speeches.
"The Union is behind you. I have no doubts for the future,"
was all he said. The soldiers were so impressed by his simplicity
that they forgot to cheer. Only an old bald-headed man, with
his helmet in his hand, replied quietly: "God bless you, Sir!"

A soldier among his men, the Oubaas strode along: in an old,
worn gabardine uniform, with helmet and Sam Browne belt,
swinging his cane. His mannerisms were familiar to all. While
discussing, he fingered his Imperial reflectively; while simply
chatting he stood hands on hip, drumming with his fingers.

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OLD MASTER

He motored to the artillery park, called at the casualty clear-
ing station, went through the operating theaters and wards,
and smiled benignly when he came to "J an Smuts Ward." At
the air station he talked with all the members of the crews,
pilots, navigators, gunners, wireless operators and mechanics
alike.

Accompanied by Lieutenant-General Sir Pierre van Ryne-
veld, Chief of the General Staff, he toured the front with
Lieutenant-General Alan Cunningham, then general officer
commanding in East Africa, to whom Smuts introduced a great
many of his Springboks in person. At a front-line outpost he
was talking to a young man in battle dress who stood smartly
to attention until the bomber arrived to take the General back.
Only at that moment Second-Lieutenant Jan Smuts relaxed:
"Good-bye and good luck, Pops!" he shouted.

Smuts 7 visit up North lasted eight days, within which he
covered 7,500 miles by air, held a number of important con-
ferences, attended social functions, delivered a few addresses,
and had personally inspected the positions of the South African
divisions as far as the most extreme outposts. In spite of this
exertion he looked sprightly and refreshed when he returned
to Pretoria on November 4. Only then his "holiday" was di-
vulged. Until Casablanca it remained the best-guarded military
secret of the war.

Chapter 31 OSSEWA BRANDWAG

"THE NAZI MENACE is FELT TO BE WORLD-WIDE, so MUCH is THIS
the case that I feel convinced that in the last resort America
will not as indeed she cannot afford to stand out. Under the
great and inspiring leadership of President Roosevelt she will

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OLD MASTER

country. He does not know the Afrikander people. Ever since
the time of the Boer War he has been the arch-enemy of the
Afrikanders. Today he fights alongside the same English who,
during the Boer War, had promised to the natives the farms of
the Boers and selfs hutte vrouens (even their wives) if they
would take arms against us. I repudiate Smuts root and branch."
On behalf of the O. B. the acting Commander General, a
Boer by the name of Smith, endorsed the alliance with the
Herenigde (Re-United) Party. The O. B., he promised, would
see to it that no defections occurred. 'Traitors will be driven
back into our ranks with the sjambok!" he announced. To dif-
ferentiate him from other bearers of his not infrequent name
he was henceforth called Sjambok-Smith.

"South Africa will not change from democracy to a Fuehrer-
system without blood and tears/' Smuts replied. 'The message
for a new order came from Munich or Berlin. The O. B. has to
be carefully watched. This is an organization of precisely the
same character as the organization which brought Hitler into
power in Germany. Its methods come straight from Germany,
and its purpose is nothing else but to introduce into this coun-
try by underground means the system flourishing in Germany.
Its organizers keep on saying that the O. B. is not a secret or-
ganization. Why, then, do they talk so much about traitors?
The other day Mr. Swart, one of their leaders, said that traitors
must be branded and treated as such. But if the movement has
no secrets, how can it be betrayed?"

The Old Master's appeal to common sense was wasted. Pres-
ently, the same Mr. Swart, whom Smuts had singled out, won
the by-election at Winburg, a 100 per cent Afrikaans constitu-
ency, by an overwhelming majority against the Prime Minister's
old friend and supporter Theron.

In this dark hour Nazism seemed as invincible among the
Boers as on the European battlefields. Both Dutch Churches
condemned Bolshevism, but never Nazism. Many divines were
profoundly influenced by the pamphlets the Fichtebund and
the Weltdienst smuggled across the Portuguese border. The
Afrikaans universities were hotbeds of Hitlerism. The students

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OLD MASTER

sang German songs, voted peace resolutions, and adopted
"Opsaair for Heil Hitler! as a salute. The professors and in-
structors, particularly at Stellenbosch, taught philosophy, his-
tory, even gymnastics on the German pattern. The Voartrekker-
Youth, the Afrikaans counterpart of the boy scouts, became
"race-conscious/* although its members were all of a tender age
below fourteen. The boys in their advanced teens joined the
stormjaegers\he youth-organization of the O. B. or the Grey-
shirts. Many families were disrupted. Others were agreed on
the blessings of Hitlerism. One Sunday a month they ate the
one-dish-meal, as Hitler had ordered in Germany, to save some
money for the O. B. English housewives on die Rand were
terrorized into contributing to the collection.

At the beginning of 1941 two hundred thousand Boers, one-
fifth of the whole nation, were committed to active Nazism.
The drive to segregate the Afrikaner nation into a racial kraal,
and to set up the dwarf -nation as Africa's Herrenvolk master
racedominating in a narrow republic of Hitler's grace, insu-
lated against foreign influences, wilfully blind to world collabo-
ration, went on with ever-increasing vigor. It was the very
opposite of Smuts' worldwide outlbok. This was the principal
issue in the fight for South Africa.

Strangely, the first casualty in this fight was the first avowed
Nazi in the country: old man Hertzog. The man who spent the
eve of his life aping Hitler and pitying the poor downtrodden
Germans still remained a relic of the old days. Fanatically as
he hated the Empire, he would not acquiesce in making the
English-speaking South Africans politically rightless, provided
they had abjured the devil of jingoism. He wanted a republic
as passionately as anyone. But he wanted its proclamation by
consent, not by a coup tfetat. The new generation could not
understand this reluctance. Hertzog's own son associated him-
self with the men of "direct action." Although his caution, in-
herited from his father, forbade him to take direct action him-
self, he defended a good many dynamiters, saboteurs, and
traitors in court. As was said of his father, Dr. Albert Hertzog
also became a lawyer, not a soldier.

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OLD MASTER

Old man Hertzog's political career ended when the Trans-
vaal Congress of the Re-United Party laughed, shouted, and
voted him down, although he was again, after his conflict with
Dr. Malan had been patched up, the nominal leader. The party
decided to adopt the revolutionary course. Hertzog, who had
preached sedition all his life, was devoured by the monster of
his own creation. Even the constituency of Smithfield, which
he had represented for forty years, rejected him. In the third
week of December he resigned his parliamentary seat. One man
alone followed his example: "Klaasie" Havenga. A few other
veteran followers banded together in an "Afrikander Union"
to promulgate the threadbare gospel of Hertzogism.

The only effective help came from Smuts. He passed a mo-
tion in the House, granting his fallen foe a pension of 2,000
a year. "General Hertzog has never thought of himself," he
said, "although there was much temptation in a young coun-
try. He did not even make provisions for his old age. It is now
our duty to make these provisions."

On the very day Hertzog retired from Parliament, another
resignation occurred, an act that was to influence events in
South Africa considerably more strongly. Dr. J. F. J. van Rens-
burg resigned from his post as Administrator of the Orange
Free State. The country was electrified. "The old leader has
gone. The new leader is coming." Then for two weeks nothing
happened.

Business went on as usual. At night solitary unarmed sol-
diers, or preferably members of the air force, were attacked,
kidnapped, taken to some lonely spot on the veld, stripped of
their uniforms which the hold-up men needed for good, sub-
versive reasons, and left naked, sometimes with profuse apolo-
gies. Afrikaans soldiers on furlough in their dorps were greeted
by their neighbors as 'loyal Dutch." English-speaking Spring-
boks were assured that their "little England complex" would
soon be shattered by a crushing German victory. Stories circu-
lated, and even appeared in print, of casualties in the North
so heavy that the blood-stained uniforms of the dead were ar-

394

OLD MASTER

riving at Voortrekkerhoogte in truckloads. The Boer-Nazis'
most tender concern went out to General Smuts. Poor Oom
Jannie had collapsed from a heart attack, scores of thousands
whispered on the appointed day. Smuts himself heard the ru-
mor when he returned from his habitual ten-mile stroll around
his farm, Doornkloof . "How many doctors are attending me?"
he asked.

Occasionally the scare stories backfired. Gossip had it that
banknotes would soon be worth only paper. "Get silver and
hang on to it," friendly neighbors advised each other. The bank
was exposed to a rush for silver. The Pretoria Mint wished for
nothing better. It coined more silver at ample profit, and when
the panic had run its course, silver trickled back into circula-
tion. Then it was rumored that the government was going to
seize all investments. Not only the Boer-Nazis, but a great
many poor, misled people queued up at the Post Office Savings
Bank to cash their savings. Every penny was paid out, every
demand was punctiliously met. The money returned, and more
was put into bank accounts than had been taken out. Confi-
dence in the South African currency was stronger than ever.

Jewish shops were blown up, railway lines were sabotaged,
telegraph poles were axed in the best Boer War manner. But
such incidents were no longer remarkable. No one paid much
attention until Dr. Malan announced: "Conditions in South
Africa amount to no less than the rule of jingo terror. Where is
General Smuts leading South Africa? Does he want civil war?
If he does, he is going in the right direction. I hope the day is
not, far off when the Brandwag and the Afrikaner nation are
one and the same thing!"

This was the clue. Immediately after this speech, Kleinbaas
Hans, as the English-language press baptized him, took over.
On January 1, 1941, Dr. J. F. J. van Rensburg was appointed
"Chief Officer and Commander General" of the Ossewa Brand-
wag. Friend and foe alike recognized him as a man with whom
one would have to reckon. The van Rensburgs were the first
family of Afrikander society. Their ancestor had led the Voor-
trekkers some one hundred years before. He was a national

395

OLD MASTER

hero. His descendants were patricians in Stellenbosch. The
youngest scion had served his apprenticeship as private secre-
tary to Tielman Roos, the lion of the Transvaal. At the age of
thirty Kleinbaas Hans was Under Secretary for Justice, a year
later Secretary, and soon afterward Administrator of the Trans-
vaal. Such rapid careers were rare in the Union. Dr. van Rens-
burg caused much attention. But no one was surprised when,
shortly before the outbreak of the war, the remarkable young
man visited Hitler in Berlin. The van Rensburgs had always
been ultra-nationalists. None of the tribe, however, had ever
looked the way Kleinbaas Hans looked upon his return from
the Third Reich. Now he was the answer to every cartoonist's
prayer: the "boche" incarnate. His slightly curled, carefully
greased hair was parted on the left, while one wave drooped
over his forehead. Furrows between his eyebrows, a pugnacious
nose, tightened lips with deep lines running from the corners
of his mouth to his receding chin gave his clean-shaven, fish-
eyed face the perfect appearance of a Prussian lieutenant in
mufti.

His first act after his resignation was to claim the handsome
pensions which were due to him from the various civil service
posts he had held. Then he delivered his maiden speech: "As
long as our Supreme Council can maintain and improve disci-
pline," he mingled promises with threats, "there will be no
danger of disorder and violence among the two hundred fifty
thousand men of the O. B. We do not want to cause disturb-
ances in the country. We only want to see to it that Afrikaner-
dom shall not be crushed to death. This is the calling of the
O. B. The Supreme Council appointed me, and if I cannot an-
swer to this body, I will resign. The O. B. is mobilized Afri-
kanerdom mobilized in economy and culture, and for mutual
protection. Whatever Afrikanerdom may have in superfluity-
droughts, pests, poverty and politics discipline is not among
these things. If we do not cultivate this discipline and mutual
trust, no one need hope for new orders, worlds, republics. I
have not joined the O. B. to start a rebellion or to spill blood.
I am well aware that we would suffer defeat in such an attempt.

396

OLD MASTER

I have been an officer long enough to know how hopeless and
reckless such an action would be. I give the government every
assurance on that point. I wish to give General Smuts the as-
surance that the O. B. is at least as concerned as he is to main-
tain order and law in the country. As a philosopher General
Smuts will realize that an idea always triumphs over violence,
provided the idea is imbued by vitality. General Smuts knows
that the Afrikaner, true to tradition, is peace-loving, unless he
is too strongly provoked/' It was polite blackmail.

No answer came from Smuts. The Old Master kept his ear
to the hot African ground. He heard the first rumblings of the
incipient revolt of native chieftains in Abyssinia. He was proud
of his Springboks. On the last Dingaan's Day they had stormed
El Wak in Italian Somaliland, capturing nine of fifteen guns
and all the Italian transports. Brigadier Dan Pienaar, Smuts'
personal favorite, had surprised and routed the enemy. He now
received the D.S.O. for gallant leadership. At the same time
the Union's Seaward Defence Force left their South African
ports to assist the British fleet. For the first time South African
warships co-operated with the Royal Navy outside their home
waters. On October 22 Wavell announced the capture of To-
bruk. The South Africans had been in the vanguard. Twenty
thousand Italian prisoners were taken. Simultaneously, Spring-
boks captured El Yiba and El Sardu, two Italian outposts on
the Ethiopian border. This was too great a time for arguments
with Kleinbaas Hans.

Not for the racialists, however. Pirow instantly espoused the
cause of the O. B. under its new commander, who would take
care, he hoped, that there should be more action and less kul-
tuur. Van Rensburg, fully conscious of his importance as the
new czar, tolerated Pirow for a while, but soon shook him off.

Was Hdnschen klein really the new czar? To some stalwarts
of nationalism he appeared merely an upstart. Professor A. C.
Cilliers rose against him, a formidable foe, the kingmaker in
political Afrikanerdom. Officially he was the spokesman of the
Republican Nationalist majority of the body of Stellenbosch
professors. In fact he had been Hertzog's brain-truster number

397

OLD MASTER

one for many years, the champion of reunion of all Afrikanders
long before the war, and, it was said, an influential figure in
this mysterious Broederbond which never came out in the
open, but wielded tremendous secret powers. Cilliers had his
finger in every pie. He was endowed with a peculiar reputation
as an "insider." He could allegedly outwit every man on earth
but Smuts. This Professor Cilliers attacked the O. B. openly.
He called it a curious organization that made the confusion in
the confused opposition ranks only more confused. "It appears
in front and behind, above and below and everywhere between
the ranks of political leaders/' he said. "The O. B. wants Afri-
kaners to subject themselves to a self-appointed group of
anonymous leaders. It is a terrorist organization, to be dis-
banded as soon as possible."

The first bloody outrage, instigated by the O. B., occurred
on January 31 in Johannesburg. The Afrikaanse Tool en Kul-
tuur Vereeniging, the O. B/s "cultural" section, met at a concert
in the town hall of Johannesburg. A few sailors in uniform
wished to buy tickets, but were refused admission. A brawl
ensued, developing into a street fight. The police used tear-gas
bombs against the sailors and a group of soldiers who came to
the assistance of their comrades. Sticks, knuckle dusters and
lead piping were used as weapons. All together some five hun-
dred men were involved. But this was only the prelude.

On the next day, a Saturday, rioting assumed a much more
serious character. Thousands of soldiers marched through the
streets. They stormed and damaged the premises of the pro-
Nazi newspaper The Transvaaler and of Hertzog's own mouth-
piece Die Vaderland. On the other side thousands of Nation-
alists gathered in Simmond Street. They were protected by
police, only a few of whom wore the orange tab of loyalty.
"Where are your tabs?" the soldiers shouted. This was the sig-
nal for the police attack. The worthy descendants of the Zarps,
the brutes from the platteland whom Kruger had pitted against
the uitlanders, drove in trucks right into the crowds of soldiers,
who were soon dispersed. One of the groups of soldiers, how-

398

OLD MASTER

ever, overturned a police van. Petrol streamed on to the ground.
Someone lit a match. Flames roared sky high. Soon fire-engines
raced through the streets. All the ambulances in the city were
called out. The streets reeked with the fumes of tear-gas bombs.

The soldiers withdrew to the vicinity of the Soldiers' Club.
There they were met by a group of police wearing the orange
tab, accompanied by members of the Military Police. "Think of
General Smuts!" the M.P.'s said. "The old General won't let
you down! Don't make it hard for him!" These words had a
magic effect. The soldiers returned to their camp.

The Rand Daily Mail wrote about the causes underlying the
riot: "The soldiers' action was plainly stupid. But the riots did
not arise without a strong cause, and the cause is evident. For
months past isolated soldiers have been set upon by bearded
men, knocked down, kicked when they were on the ground, and
left unconscious. Rarely in such cases has anyone been brought
to trial. In some of the country districts soldiers cannot walk
alone. Their families are being boycotted and persecuted. In
none of these instances did the government do anything really
drastic. Is it not natural, is it not, indeed, inevitable, that the
soldiers should eventually hit back?"

Smuts promised the House an impartial inquiry into the riots.
The first findings were published within ten days. They proved
that the police had indiscriminately hit, struck, and kicked sol-
diers. A few had been attacked who had been entirely uncon-
nected with the riot, as they walked by, some with their wives.
At the Voortrekker-gebou, the Brown House of Johannesburg,
the police had even called O. B. men to "defend" the building
against the soldiers.

The final findings of the Rand Riots Commission, published
on April 8, were still more grave: "In order to restore public
confidence in the Police Force it is necessary to enforce severe
disciplinary measures against those members of the force who
disobeyed orders or committed unnecessary acts of violence. At
the outset there was no organized attempt on the part of the
soldiers to create disturbances. The exercise of more tact and
forbearance on the part of the police might have prevented the

399

OLD MASTER

disturbances that followed. The baton charge by the police
against the soldiers and civilians in the neighborhood of city
hall was made without an order by a superior officer, and was
unnecessary, violent, and brutal. Certain civilians, who had
come armed to the concert and remained on the scene with the
obvious intention of participating in any trouble that might
occur, joined the police in the baton charge and further aroused
the soldiers. Some of the South African police, in carrying out
the charges, used unnecessary violence in striking on the head
soldiers who were running away and soldiers who already had
been felled and were lying on the ground. The police indis-
criminately attacked persons, including women who were ob-
viously spectators. The chief offenders were non-tabbed mem-
bers of the force.

"Members of the O. B. incited crowds by their attitude out-
side the Voortrekker-gebou, and by carting missiles from the
windows and roof of that building. Certain members of the
O. B. joined the police in the baton charge. The vast dispropor-
tion between the numbers of wounded soldiers as against the
numbers of policemen injured, as well as the severe nature of
the injuries inflicted upon soldiers, is significant. Medical evi-
dence shows that most wounded soldiers suffered head injuries
of a serious nature which in a great majority of cases were re-
ceived on the back of the head or in such a position that they
could only have been inflicted from behind. The police indis-
criminately clubbed soldiers and women, a body of police with-
out badges went about beating soldiers and civilians.

'The O. B. contributed considerably to the feelings of di-
vision and friction which arose between soldiers, police, and
certain sections of the public. This organization is distinctly
sectional in character, with a racial bias. It is not only undemo-
cratic and anti-government, but also un-Afrikaans. In the O. B.
the Grand Council, not the three hundred fifty thousand mem-
bers, choose the Commandant-General. Van Rensburg says,
when speaking of democracy, that when you have worn out an
old shoe you throw it away. The fifteen members of the Grand
Council have the fate of three hundred fifty thousand people

400

OLD MASTER

in the hollow of their hands, and can dictate a policy which
their adherents willy-nilly must carry out. The Commander-
General has openly stated that if his organization were at the
head of affairs he would not under the same circumstances tol-
erate a body with a membership of three hundred fifty thou-
sand opposing his policy and working actively against it. It
seems to us that in the present circumstances the O. B. could
have no just grounds for complaint if they received the same
treatment as they admit they would, if in power, mete out to
others."

The most terrifying statement, in this document was the es-
timate of the commission that the O. B. numbered three hun-
dred fifty thousand members. In the three months since van
Rensburg had taken over, its ranks had almost doubled. In the
middle of April, 1941, more than every third Afrikander (in-
cluding women, children and even infants) was an organized
Nazi of the South African brand.

Still Smuts was determined to ride out the storm. His gov-
srnment only took half-hearted measures. Civil servants were
Forbidden to join the O. B., or received two weeks' time to
sever any existing relations. But a great many incidents proved
that even this order was disregarded. The whole country was
disturbed. Only the Old Master seemed in high spirits. Looking
the image of radiant health, he flew to Nairobi on his second
^var-time visit to East Africa. His amazing vigor was evident
when his plane flew at an altitude of twenty thousand feet over
Mount Kilimanjaro. As a rule, pilots flying above fifteen thou-
sand feet use oxygen. But Smuts refused it. He would not be
listurbed. He was too deeply engaged in gazing at the snow-
Jad peak, towering thousands of feet above the clouds. When
:he aircraft landed in Nairobi, the pilot said: "The only pas-
senger who seemed not the least bit affected by the altitude
ivas well, you know whom I mean."

From Nairobi Smuts went on to Cairo, where he conferred
Mr. Eden, Sir Archibald Wavell, and Sir John Dill. Asked
reporters whether he wished to make a statement about his

401

OLD MASTER

conferences, General Smuts obliged most readily. He let the
cat out of the bag: "The possibilities of the new situation called
for careful consideration in our Cairo talks. A review of the
whole Mediterranean position took place, which is certain to
have an important bearing on future developments in that part
of the world."

No one can call Smuts a chatterbox. Few have ever called
him jovial. Yet it was a jovial Prime Minister who returned
from the battlefields, just in time to attend the Victoria F6te
at Greenpoint near Cape Town. He appeared in a lounge suit,
and in his happiest mood since prewar days. As usual, his first
tribute went to Mrs. Smuts, who, he proudly jested, was being
called "Old Gifts and Comforts" in the Transvaal (on account
of the Gifts and Comforts for Soldiers' Fund, over which South
Africa's beloved Ouma presides). Then the Oubaas compli-
mented the ladies "who have gate-crashed my army in the
North. . . . They are better than the men," he said. "They are
keener. They have even stopped titivating themselves. . . ."
Finally he paid tribute to the colored transport drivers, al-
though none of them happened to be a guest at the Victoria
Fete. 'They are partly responsible for our victories in the
North!" General Smuts said earnestly.

Victoria Day was a day of many gatherings. In the best,
almost Prussian fashion van Rensburg blared to his audience:
". . . and the O. B. has the right to decide whether it obeys the
law, and upon whom it wishes to enforce it. . . ."

A thin, fading voice explained to a few faithful old followers
who were spending the holiday at the Sabine Farm Waterval:
"I have broken with General Smuts because. . . ."

Dr. Malan, the old man on the flying trapeze, tried desper-
ately to have one foot in the O. B. camp and the other among
the old Afrikanders. "But for Smutskowitz," he declared, "the
Re-United Party embraces. . . ."

The Old Master made a bow to his guests at Greenpoint. His
last words to the assembly are on record: "Thank God, this is
not a country of bachelors. I dislike them. They are a sign of
decadence."

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OLD MASTER

Chapter 32 AS THE TIDE FLOWS

THE OLD MASTER WAS NOW CARRYING A BURDEN ALMOST BEYOND

human endurance. In addition to running South Africa's war
effort and keeping a restive, turbulent country on an even keel,
his advice was sought by the Allied leaders before every stra-
tegic movement in the African theater of war.

The war, it appeared, proceeded on schedule. On April 5 the
British forces, with the Springboks in the vanguard, marched
into Addis Ababa. On the same day the Cape Town regiment
returned from Cairo for a short leave, bringing with them 7,500
Italian prisoners. All went well. So Oom Jannie could take off
an afternoon. In a khaki shirt open at the neck, the sleeves flap-
ping loosely at his wrists, his feet in a stout pair of boots, he
set off across the brown veld for a good twelve-mile tramp. A
heavy stick in his hand, he swung along four to five miles an
hour, striding in his eager, loose-limbed way, bent slightly for-
ward. His companions not to call them his bodyguards were
hard put to keep up with the Old Master.

Sometimes accompanied by his wife, he stumped the platte-
Iand 9 preaching confidence and good cheer, which he himself
radiated. The wool farmers in the Free State received him with
the anxious question whether England would renew her wool
purchases. "If the German U-boats do not make shipping im-
possible. . . ." Oom Jannie replied cautiously. Many Free Staters
had Hitler's picture hanging in their farms. But most of these
disappeared rapidly after Smuts' simple remark.

A "War Train," rolling for six weeks through the length and
breadth of the Union, did excellent propaganda. It carried an
exhibition of the huge output of the six hundred new South
African war factories. Thousands of backvelders came from the
most distant hamlets. They could see for themselves the first
howitzers made in South Africa. They thrilled at the boom of
eighteen-pound guns and the rattling of machine-gun fire. The

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OLD MASTER

will not be broken by the new appointment. I am too old now
to change names/'

Even as an Imperial Field Marshal he wanted to remain the
Boer General. But this expression of fidelity did not satisfy the
opposition. "We are very pleased," wrote the leading National-
ist paper. "From now on it will be impossible to mistake the
British Field Marshal for the General Smuts of the Boer War."
Boonzaier, the creator of "Hoggenheimer," expressed his con-
gratulations in a cartoon depicting Smuts as a sentry, standing
guard on the South African shores. "Who goes there?" he asks
a shadowy stranger. "Enemy of AfrikanerdomI" comes the an-
swer. "Pass, my friend!" says the sentry Smuts.

Heir Adolf Hitler, however, seemed seriously perturbed over
Smuts' promotion. His own Erwin Rommel was still a simple
Lieutenant-General. Moreover, Rommel was at that moment
hiding in some foxhole, so that he could not come to Potsdam,
where, since time eternal, conquering German war lords have
received the marshal's baton. Herr Hitler broke another prece-
dent. Posthaste he sent a marshal's baton to Africa, where Rom-
mel snatched it with little ceremony. "Field Marshal Rommel!"
Zeesen blared triumphantly on the same evening. The South
African station continued, modestly, to refer to the Old Master
as "General Smuts."

The Springboks entered Sidi Barrani and Sollum. Ouma and
seven of her grandchildren had a bird's-eye view of Pretoria,
flying above the capital in a captured three-engine Caproni
bomber. Lord Croft, British Under Secretary for War, eulo-
gized the South African troops: "They are the spearhead of the
later operations in East Africa," he said. "Their advances in
the race against the long rains were amazing. To the Union
troops, under the umbrella of their airmen who have flown an
immense mileage with amazing immunity from losses, fell the
great honor of that remarkable uphill advance from the Awash
River, and when they entered Addis Ababa, instead of taking a
well-earned rest, they started in further pursuit of the enemy.
Already their advance from Kenya to Jyiga was surely a world

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OLD MASTER

record of distance made in astonishingly short time. To that
record must be added the exploit at Ambi Alagi, 1,400 miles
from the Kenya border, and 1,731 from their original railhead.
These achievements can never, I think, be equalled for time/'

The Springboks, in fact, conquered within five months an
area larger than the whole German East Africa, from which,
dining the First World War, Germany was ejected only after
three years' fighting. The subjugation of Abyssinia and Italian
Somaliland was achieved within one-seventh of that time. It
was, of course, the conquest of a less pestiferous, swampy and
malaria-ridden territory than German East Africa. But the main
reason for the success was the highly organized efficiency of
the services. Mechanical transports replaced the huge armies
of native porters. Food was better in quality and more varied
than in any previous campaign. The medical service under
Brigadier Dr. Orenstein was exemplary. Moreover, Italy had
not produced a Lettow-Vorbeck. In close comradeship with
the R.A.F. the South African Air Force had given the enemy a
terrible grueling. Italian fighters were swept from the skies.
The morale of II Duce's ground forces, particularly of their
black contingents, was destroyed. Excellence of staff work, fine
qualities of leadership, the fighting spirit of all ranks, and
streamlined equipment scored. Above all the success of the
campaign was due to the inspiring guidance and long-range
vision of General Smuts, who from the outset had laid out the
plans for crushing Mussolini.

Now even the Dutch Churches paid eloquent tribute to the
valor, endurance, and "finishing power" of the South African
troops. The slime-flood of Nazism in the Union was beginning
to recede when the German invasion of Greece, the conquest
of Crete, and the ensuing British reverses in North Africa re-
vived the furor. As always, the South African airmen had val-
iantly done their share. They had protected British warships
and merchantmen evacuating the Imperial troops from Crete.
Smuts appealed for new volunteers. He predicted heavy fight-
ing. "The Italian menace has been eliminated," he said, "but
now we will have to meet a more formidable threat: German

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OLD MASTER

forces in North Africa. South Africa calls on every man and
woman to do his and her duty."

In response, the united opposition met at a rubber-stamp
congress at Bloemfontein. Twelve hundred delegates crowded
town hall. All the stale grievances were repeated, the Vierkleur
was waved, Nationalist anthems were sung. The foreign situa-
tion was not mentioned by a single word, and the war only to
be ferociously condemned. Dr. Malan moved a motion: "The
Congress rejects Smuts' war policy with determination and in
its entity, and demands the immediate withdrawal of South
Africa from the war." But while he sputtered his venomous
words, his voice sounded broken. He was the dictaphone, no
longer the dictator. He was the leader under the lash of the
O. B. sjambok. Behind him stood Pirow, the self-styled man
of destiny, who emphatically warned President Roosevelt to
keep out of the tangle, and grinning van Rensburg. All three,
van Rensburg, Pirow, and Dr. Malan, a poor third, were in the
race for Hitler's favor. All that was left was for Adolf to win the
war.

America's entry would prevent it, Smuts repeated inces-
santly, once even at the opening of a new and splendid Johan-
nesburg movie theater with a Hollywood picture. Before boy
met girl, General Smuts appeared on the stage, and smiled:
'They say that the United States is a country of hustle. If
hustle means what I think it does, then, I trust, America will
live up to it in the near future. I am sometimes a prophet,
often a false one, but occasionally a true one, and I feel tonight
I can venture on a prophecy. If you read hustle and the United
States of America in terms of the present world crisis, I think
you will not be far wrong!"

"General Smuts has suggested that the United States shall
inherit South Africa," Dr. Malan replied in Senekal, a sleepy
small town in the Free State. "We will oppose America just as
we have struggled against foreign domination during the past
one hundred fifty years. We will not shirk the battle. It is clear
that the United States is only concerned with her own interests.
She wants a say in the peace conference and wishes to be heir

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OLD MASTER

to the British estate. The Royal Navy is Britain's movable prop-
erty, and the United States wants to hold a mortgage in case
Britain should lose her fleet." Hitler, on the other hand, Dr.
Malan assured, had none but honorable ambitions as far as
South Africa was concerned. As a token of his trust in the great
man he, Dr. Malan himself, was now ready to accept the title
volksleier, Afrikaans for Fuehrer. He frankly offered himself as
Quisling: "Germany wants a government in South Africa which
would be amiably disposed to her. We can provide a govern-
ment of men who have already shown that they have no hos-
tility toward Germany/'

Pirow thought the same thing. The difference was only that
the gauleiter wanted nothing of a volksleier. "The program of
the Herenigde Party is good, but still diluted by too much milk
and water," he carped. To emphasize that he was the right
man, and no one else, he promised: "I will continue to advocate
African National-Socialism and changes upside down!"

Dr. Malan took up the gauntlet. To beat Pirow at the game,
his first action as volksleier was to overhaul his party, and re-
establish it on the Nazi cell system. The platteland, deeply
impressed by the latest German successes, liked the change.
But shrewd peasants as they were, they preferred the whole
hog to half a hog. They deserted both Malan and Pirow, and
streamed in masses to sjambok-wielding O. B. Commandant-
General van Rensburg, whose very looks identified him as the
real thing: a genuine Nazi.

"Russia becomes ally against Hitler. The Allies are fighting
the war on behalf of Jewish Imperial Capitalism!" shouted Die
Burgers flaming headlines across eight columns. Since the Pact
of Moscow the Nasionde Pers, the powerful Afrikaans press
combine with Die Burger as its most important mouthpiece,
had never attacked Soviet Russia. For two years Dr. Malan had
not mentioned Stalin's name. Now he issued a statement:
"Churchill and Smuts are dragging us with open eyes into the
abyss. Britain, and through Britain, we, now stand in alliance
with Russia. If it had not been for Germany, the tidal wave of

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OLD MASTER

Bolshevism long would have swept the world. Now Mr. Church-
ill, with his arm around Stalin's neck, and with Field Marshal
Smuts at his coat tails, has decreed the total destruction of the
only bulwark against Bolshevism, which, for a long time, has
had its eyes on South Africa. We have always been against
participation in this war, but if we ever had good reason to
demand that South Africa should withdraw, then we have a
hundred times more reason today."

Once again Smuts proved his visionary foresight. He under-
stood that Russia's entry into the war, although tremendously
important in itself, was the harbinger of a real world war.
Quietly he conferred with Mr. Wilfred J. Kennedy, the Presi-
dent of the Johannesburg Chamber of Commerce. The out-
come was the decision to restrict severely Japanese imports,
and all trade with Japan. Then he broadcast a message to his
people, which, indeed, anticipated the Allied invasion of North
Africa by a year and a half. Predicting heavy fighting on the
Russian front, he foretold on July 14, 1941: "But the final
knock-out blow will come elsewhere. The definite turn of the
tide will probably begin in North Africa, and the Springboks
will have their share in the crowning glory just as they have
had in the first successes of the war."

On the next day Winston Churchill, in the House of Com-
mons, quoted another passage from Smuts' broadcast. "With
his usual commanding wisdom General Smuts has made a com-
ment which, as it entirely represents the view of His Majesty's
Government, I should like now to repeat: 'Nobody,' said Gen-
eral Smuts, 'can say we are now in league with the Communists
and are fighting the battle of Communism. More fitly can the
neutralists and fence sitters be charged with fighting the battle
of Nazism. If Hitler and his insane megalomania has driven
Russia to fight in self-defense, we bless her arms and wish her
all success without for a moment identifying ourselves with her
Communistic creed. Hitler has made Russia his enemy, and not
us friendly to her creed/ "

The Nationalist press raged against Smuts. It proved that
Hitler's attack on Russia, on June 22, 1941, had unloosed the

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OLD MASTER

final stage of the life-and-death struggle between two diametri-
cally opposed philosophies. Now the papers of the Nasforude
Pers formally embraced the creed with which their country
was officially at war. Their entire propaganda was concen-
trated on the fight against Communism, next to the "black
danger" the peril most easy to exploit among the Church-loving
fanners. In this respect Hitler's invasion of Russia was a god-
send to the Boer Republicans.

Into the struggle over Bolshevism crashed the battle over V.
Smuts was quick to grasp that the coming general election
might go to him who fought it under the V sign. On July 23,
he started the V campaign in South Africa with a broadcast:
"We adopt the V sign as our own. It stands not only for Vic-
tory, but in our country also for vryheid freedom. It is there-
fore to us a symbol of the two things for which we are now
making the greatest national effort in our history. The V sign
will be the symbol of protest of all good South Africans against
disloyal and often treasonable talk, against the subversive
propaganda of certain sections. Let the whole world see our
colors this V symbol of our faith in our cause. This common
symbol will thus become a source of unity, strength and in-
spiration to us in the trials and difficulties which may still face
us before the final victory."

His appeal found a tremendous echo among the Loyalist
section of the population. An onrush to the colors ensued.
Young and old volunteered. The youngest recruit was a lad
of, he insisted, seventeen, who gave his name as Smuts and
did not deny a distant kinship with the Prime Minister. The
recruiting officers scrutinized him suspiciously. He seemed a
little underdeveloped for his age. Ouma was sent for. Smiling,
she took her thirteen-year-old grandson home. "He shall first
get his matriculation certificate," she decided. "Then he will
go up North."

Among the oldsters Colonel Creswell emerged out of obliv-
ion. His prestige with labor was unimpaired, although he had
already been living in political retirement for many years. The
lifelong socialist spoke about British tradition, ending it was

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OLD MASTER

his opinion an invasion of Europe would be inevitable. And a
strong American Expeditionary Force would have to be in it.
Mrs. Smuts had an equally busy program of engagement.
Visiting hospitals, she said to a wounded Springbok: "You are
not only fighting for South Africa. You are also helping Great
Britain to save western civilization/' The former Isie Krige of
Stellenbosch had come a long way.

With her sweet grandmotherly smile Ouma visited the quar-
ters of the Mossies, the South African Wrens. She complimented
the "army of girls" upon the important part they were playing
in the war. She gave a tea on the Lotus Houseboat on the Nile
where the women in uniform spent their time off. She shook
hands with hundreds of South African soldiers, noted their
home addresses so that she might inform their families that
their sons were well, and formally opened the Springbok Club.

At the opening, the Old Master related that the idea of the
air commando had really been his wife's. After her tour over
Pretoria in the captured Caproni a propaganda stunt to aid
the Gifts and Comforts Fundshe had broached the question.
"As a good husband I followed my wife's advice," Smuts con-
fessed. "We broadened the idea to become the air command
that is now flying over the length and breadth of the Union/'

A high-ranking observer, watching Smuts' unforced intimacy
with his men, smiled: "The Smuts rule is, indeed, a patriarchy."

It is, to be exact, at once a patriarchy and a matriarchy.

As if an epilogue to Smuts' conferences in Cairo, the late
Sir Patrick Duncan, Governor-General of the Union, on behalf
of the King, handed Smuts his Field Marshal's baton on Octo-
ber 1. "My dear Field Marshal," read the royal message, "I was
hoping to present your Field Marshal's baton to you person-
ally in England, but I well understand the reasons why you do
not want to be away from South Africa for so long at the
present time ... I should like you to know how proud my field
marshals are to count you among their number. . , ."

This was all the formal part of the ceremony. The Governor-
General's tribute sounded rather like recollections from an old

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OLD MASTER

friendship that had weathered many a storm. Tactfully and
persistently, he called the new Field Marshal by his old title.
Sir Patrick, indeed, had spent most of his political life in close
association with Oom Jannie. Their old antagonism at the time
when the then Mr. Duncan acted as Milner's chief secretary
and Advocate Smuts was hell-bent on ousting the proconsul
with his kindergarten, had given way to decades of co-opera-
tion and alliance in the service of a common cause. Now both
old men stood in the mellow light of the evening sun.

"The baton is an emblem of military dignity, but it would be
quite inadequate to suppose that General Smuts' services have
been purely of a military kind," Sir Patrick said. "I can tell you
from my own experience that there is no one inside or outside
South Africa who has to make decisions, whether on military
strategy or state policy, who would not seek and follow the
advice and counsel of the General. He is a great rock in a weary
land. On the one side General Smuts met flattery and approval,
on the other the breezes and blasts of enmity. But he has been
neither softened by the one, nor hardened by the other. He has
pursued his own way. I have never seen General Smuts more
cheerful, more the center of jokes and laughter, than when he
was going out to confront some critical occasion where his own
personal safety was very much involved. It is not only in the
spheres of war and statesmanship that our general is consulted
and listened to. In high centers of philosophy and science his
name is respected. So this friend of ours is a man of many parts
and of great distinction, a prophet not without honor save in
his own country. . . ."

Thus far Smuts had listened with his habitual composure. But
the Old Master flushed with pleasure at his friend's last sen-
tence: "In spite of many adverse blasts there are few South
Africans today who are not in the depths of their hearts proud
to acknowledge General Smuts as a son of South Africa/'

This was all that the universal genius wanted for himself.

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OLD MASTER

Chapter 33 THE FALL OF TOBRUK

PEARL HARBOR SHOCKED THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA AS MUCH

as it did the United States. In point of fact, the Japanese peril
was considerably nearer to South Africa, whose east coast is
washed by the Indian Ocean. Smuts had certainly sensed the
danger. Ten days before Pearl Harbor he had opened a con-
ference "to improve the protection and increase the working
capacity of South African'harbors." Since Italy seemed practi-
cally out, at least out of Africa, and German U-boats could
endanger the shipping lanes but not the harbor fortifications,
it was easy to guess against which potential aggressor the new
defense measures were directed.

The very instant the news of the barbaric assault came, an
official statement assured the public that South African gunners
and the airmen of the costal command were ready for any
emergency which might result from Japan's entry into the war.
Heavy guns, manned by excellently trained gunners, guarded
the coastal approaches day and night. Long-range bombers con-
stantly swept the sea routes. Anti-submarine patrols and mine
sweepers ensured safe passage to Allied shipping. On Sunday
night Cape Town had its first blackout.

The Union Cabinet met on Monday morning. After the ses-
sion Smuts received Mr. Keena, then United States Minister to
the Union. The American diplomat was told that the declara-
tion of war against Japan must await certain formalities, but
that the decision had already been taken. On the next day a
Gazette Extraordinary published in Pretoria declared that the
Union of South Africa and Japan were at war. In the evening
Smuts spoke to a party meeting in Cape Town. He began by
welcoming a group of American visitors: "We have known for
a long time that our American friends were with us. We have,
however, waited a long time for them. The longer they stayed

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OLD MASTER

away, the greater was our anxiety/' And he concluded, after a
sharp indictment of Japan's "black record" with a comparison:
"In America, too, there was bitter division on the war issue,
just as in South Africa. Yet today the most bitter opponents of
the President are supporting him. Is that not the pattern of a
truly great nation? If there is any love of our country here, let
us copy the example of the great American Republic!"

The Nationalists answered Smuts 7 call to unity by unloosing
another wave of sabotage along the Witwatersrand and ter-
rorism in town and country. Dr. Malan was busy telling them
that America, now fully occupied in the Pacific, would no
longer be able to supply Britain with implements of war. Hit-
ler's victory was absolutely assured. The sinking of the Prince
of Wales and the Repulse clearly indicated the end of the
Empire.

But most South Africans felt that the war menaced their own
doorsteps since Japan was in it. A number of by-elections shat-
tered the opposition, although Smuts was still the target of
insane hatred. "Stalin's comrade" was one of the milder epithets
hurled at him. But more and more Boers came to recognize
that the country could not do without him. Major P. V. G. van
der Byl put it in this way: "General Smuts has not shirked, or
complained of the appalling load of responsibility that his
people laid on his shoulders at a time when our country was
shaken to its foundations, and he, he alone had the courage,
the brain, the leadership, the strength, and the ability to carry
it. ... A man is as old as his physical strength, his nerve, his
courage, and his brain make him. Measured by this yardstick
General Smuts is hardly middle-aged. He draws his strength
from the confidence his people have in him. He has only one
urge: to serve his great love the people and the country."

To this eulogy by a follower and Cabinet colleague a leading
Nationalist answered: "Damn Smuts! We want a Republic!
But who shall be President? Dr. Malan? That papbroek (weak-
ling) no, thank you! Herr Pirow? He shall go to Germany.
... I think we'll have to elect Jannie Smuts!"

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OLD MASTER

"Be up and doingl" was Smuts' New Year's message to his
people. "Double your efforts!"

Like a voice from the grave came the echo from Hertzog's
farm: Afrikanderdom should call him back, was the gist of his
address. Only if he returned as Caesar would South Africa be
free and her participation in the war end.

The war up North went excellently. The Springboks were
hotly engaged in Libya. Together with British and New Zealand
troops they had taken part in severe hand-to-hand fighting
near Sidi Rezegh, the keypoint of the whole Libyan offensive.
They helped raise the siege of Tobruk. Bardia surrendered
after an assault by South African and British troops lasting
sixty hours. They had an important part in the capture of Sol-
lum. Springboks under Major General de Villiers defended a
sector of the Halfaya hellfire Pass against a powerful Axis
force.

The war, into which South Africa had entered with a scant
majority of thirteen votes in Parliament, and which a large
section of the population had just endured, became popular.
Hertzogite stalwarts came over to Smuts. Mr. Quinlan, M.P.,
one of the oldest Nationalists, could no longer stomach the sub-
servience to Hitler shown by Dr. Malan and Pirow. "I made a
mistake about the war," he announced. "I am a Nationalist. To
me patriotism means love for South Africa, not hatred for Eng-
land. Now that democracy is in danger, lip service is no longer
sufficient. It is necessary to support the government. Since my
efforts to persuade my own party failed, I have only one alter-
native left: personally to support General Smuts." Mr. Havenga,
since the days of the Boer War Hertzog's fidelis achatus, did
not go as far as to announce his support of the government.
But, protesting his unending love for Hertzog, "the only true
volksleier" which was a quip against Dr. Malan he formally
parted with the idol of his life, who now was a blunted tool
of Hitler. Finally, Professor Cilliers of Stellenbosch, for many
years Hertzog's political tutor, dropped "the advocate of Naz-
ism."

These conversions deeply impressed the country. But the

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OLD MASTER

irreconcilables were driven into a fury. They tried to make up
in increased terror what they were losing in popular appeal.
A new sabotage wave swept the Rand. The Johannesburg
police seemed unable to check it. This was the moment for
which Smuts had waited so long and so patiently, and so little
understood by his own most faithful followers.

A parade of the police and detective corps was arranged on
Marshall Square. The police were lined up on one side, the
National Volunteer Brigade on the other. Four hundred known
Brandwagter among the police and detectives were called out,
man by man, while the National Volunteers held their rifles
ready. The guilty men were put under arrest. Military trucks
took them to the fort in Johannesburg. The whole affair had
been planned so secretly that neither the police nor the Na-
tional Volunteers had been informed why they were paraded
on this particular afternoon of January 20, 1942. Police from
other parts of the Union were drafted. Two days after the
purge the Johannesburg police force was again at full strength.
The pest of sabotage was not yet under control, but at least
crime was no longer aided and abetted by accomplices within
the forces. Quiet, calm, imperturbable as ever, Smuts told
Parliament: "For the moment the government has gone far
enough in stamping out sabotage. But we will certainly take
stronger measures if things go further/*

Things did go further, and not for the better. The Japanese
conquests stunned the world. Rommel began to assert himself
in Libya. Again a wave of half-heartedness swept the country.
And again Smuts was at his post. Paternally he scolded his
people for their lukewarm attitude, for behaving as if they were
not part of the war. "Some people still look to maintaining con-
ditions as they were before the war. They seem not to realize
that we are all engaged in a life-and-death struggle, in a global
war in which South Africa has a vital stake. Yet some people
feel the little deprivations. When we have to pay more for this
and that, or find that things previously common are difficult
to obtain, we should remember that bearing this patiently is
only a very small contribution. We must make our contribution

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OLD MASTER

without criticism or grumbling. Our fate is at stake in a way
never before experienced in history. Let us cultivate the spirit
of gravity/' Life, in South Africa, alas, had been too sweet and
bountiful to foster much spirit of gravity.

In addition to all his strenuous duties the Old Master had
now to deliver his daily pep talk. "The time will come when
the Japanese will run the other way . . ." he said, and, "cer-
tainly the Allies are passing through difficult times, but war is
like that." The first German setbacks in Russia filled him with
great expectations. "After losing a million of men, a great mass
of war material, and the richest part of their country the Rus-
sians have made a grand recovery. It all reads like a miracle."
He rarely spoke about conditions in his own country. Only
once, on one of the most critical days of 1942, he put his finger
on the sore spot: "South Africa is not a country where conscrip-
tion can be applied. But although the burden falls only on a
portion of the people, there is no country in the world where
war service is conducted with so much earnestness and devo-
tion. The tragedy is that this war burden is being carried by
the few, and is not an all-out effort. The few are carrying on
their backs the unwilling ones/'

All decent people in the country thought that Smuts himself
was carrying too heavy a burden. Some old friends in the Sen-
ate voiced this fear openly. But how could the Old Master take
a rest while Australia was training guerrillas in preparation for
an attack, Rangoon had fallen, followed by Singapore, while
the Indian ocean seethed with enemy raiders, and the hideous
outrages at Hong Kong aroused the world? Even South Africa
awaited a Japanese attack by air and sea.

Smuts made a momentous declaration: "Before the Japanese
take this country, I will see to it that every colored man and
every native who can be armed, will be armed. It will help us
to know that if the struggle comes to our coasts and frontiers,
we will not be alone. I will train and arm any non-European
prepared to help defend South Africa. I have not the slightest
doubt whatsoever that the bulk of our people agree with me in
this attitude."

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OLD MASTER

With his habitual courtesy Smuts called the natives: "non-
Europeans." But to the racialists they were kleurlinge and slep-
sels, just creatures, less than human. Nationalist members in
the Senate, where Smuts had made his announcement, shouted
and yelled. Smuts had his famous steel-rod glance in his eyes
when he quietly took the opposition to task. "For a consider-
able time members of the opposition have said that they were
going to remain aloof at all costs and that they would not even
participate in the defense of our soil. But the natives and the
colored porters and drivers have voluntarily come forward to
make their contribution, notwithstanding the restrictions placed
upon them. There are sixty thousand non-Europeans in the
army, all in non-combatant services. But they want to be
armed. They do not want to be regarded as inferiors, but as
citizens. If we grant their demand they will come forward to
fight in great numbers. I am very sorry to say that the attitude
of the native population is in many respects more praiseworthy
than that of some honorable senators opposite. There is no
doubt that those sixty thousand non-Europeans who have vol-
untarily taken part in the struggle, even if they were only per-
mitted to serve in a limited capacity, are an example to many
of the white people who stand aside at this grave crisis."

The battle of the Middle East was interrupted by a lull.
Smuts grew restless. With the old warrior, as in war itself,
motion was everything. He went up North again. He covered
another two thousand miles by car and by plane to inspect
Egypt and Cyrenaica. He repeated his already customary tour
of bases, hospitals, aerodromes, and trenches. Yet he set up a
new record: he was the oldest soldier and the only Field Mar-
shal ever to venture out into the first line of battle, where he
spent three days. At the headquarters of the Eighth Army, as
the Army of the Nile had been rechristened, he met representa-
tives of all the South African units in the field. They were weary
of months of comparative inactivity. The sight of Oubaas
cheered them up. Smuts acquired another nickname among the
Springboks: Old Tonic.

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OLD MASTER

Between audiences with the Kings of Egypt and Greece, re-
spectively, Smuts traveled along bumpy, dusty desert tracks,
made most uncomfortable by the hot, dust-laden khamseen
that cut men's faces like sharp blades. Untiring, the Old Master
braved the blazing sun for hours. He could no longer climb
Table Mountain, although it was strictly forbidden to mention
this fact. But here at the front he proved that he could per-
fectly well climb escarpments to watch points of specific in-
terest. He visited the Springboks' proud battlefields at Bardia
and Sollum. He took his meals with his men, unless General Sir
Claude Auchinleck or Mr. Casey got hold of him for dinner.
With a group of Springboks he went bathing in the sea. Healthy
and bronzed, he stood for a few minutes on the beach of a
little cove between Tobruk and Bardia. Then he plunged into
the water. "I am going to swim in the Mediterranean, and I am
not going to ask Mussolini's permission, either," he decided. He
could only stay a few minutes in the water. A wildly gesticu-
lating man stood on the beach, signaling the Field Marshal to
return. Lieutenant-General Ritchie, then commander of the
Eighth Army, had been hunting Smuts for several days.

At a press conference he reaffirmed his unshakable belief in
the strategic importance of this very theater of war. During
this dangerous lull, which everyone knew was exactly what
Rommel, the desert fox, needed to prepare for the leap, the
Old Master predicted: "J ust as Wellington held on to an ap-
parently worthless strip of Portugal, until Napoleon was bro-
ken, so we must hold this Middle East block, and we will hold
it. There is a possibility that it will become the base for a great
offensive. I have come to the conclusion that we will see a great
trial of strength. You may see it here in North Africa, which,
I have always felt, is destined to become one of the great bat-
tlefields of this war." The day was May 22, 1942. The young
man, who had been Smuts' inseparable companion during his
tour of the front, nodded respectfully.

This mystery man was Mr. S. F. Waterson, then Union High
Commissioner in London, now Minister of Commerce in Smuts'
government, and, many believe, one of the coming men of

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OLD MASTER

South Africa. Smuts used every free moment they were rare
enough for whispered conversations with him. Obviously, a
grand strategic plan was in the making. Smuts' trustee should
convey it to Churchill. So much was clear. But no one could
guess as to the facts and merits of the Old Master's grand
strategy. It remained an anxiously guarded military secret. On
his return to Pretoria, Smuts disclosed that he had discussed
with Mr. Waterson the important matter of South African wool
prices and the general rise in the production costs of South
African agriculture. Mr. Waterson had been instructed to ap-
proach the British Government with the request that an in-
crease in the wool price should be considered at an early date.

Another result of his inspection was that Smuts, early in
June, announced he had decided on a complete reorganization
of the South African army. Both Springbok divisions in North
Africa should be turned into tank divisions, which would "enor-
mously increase the Union's contribution to the general war
effort." Simultaneously Smuts formed two new home com-
mandos, a Coastal Command, and an Inland Command, under
Major General J. P. de Villiers, the victor of Halfaya, Bardia,
and Sollum, consisting of full-time forces, fully trained, per-
fectly equipped, and highly mobile. This latter commando
boded ill for the future of the Ossewa Brandwag, whose sedi-
tious, already revolutionary, activities had reached an all-time
peak while Rommel was lurking around the corner.

"We are back in the Boer War days," the Old Master ex-
claimed joyfully. "Our ancient traditions fit splendidly into the
most recent developments in tactics. The days of stationary
warfare are past. The experience of the First World War has
largely been negatived by what has happened today. We are
once more launched upon a warfare of mobility, of surprises,
tricks, ruses, and all the sort of things we practised and knew
so well in the Boer War. Then there were no textbooks, no red
tape. We kept our eyes open and moved fast by night and day,
surprising the enemy."

Oubaas was in his twenties again. The King's field marshal

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OLD MASTER

was the general by the grace of a defunct republic and by the
choice of three hundred comrades on stolen horses who trusted
him blindly.

"If you go to Libya today and look at what is happening,"
Smuts continued, "you will see that there is no front. It is a
wild war dance between the armies. They are here, there, and
everywhere. Tanks, almost as mobile as motorcars, have made
all the difference in the world. The mounted forces of the Boer
War repeat their tactics in the age of steel. Here in this war
we do not sit in fortifications and pillboxes. There is room for
maneuver!" Did the old warrior hear his stallion neighing from
the grave, one of the dozen horses the English had shot from
under the raider of the Cape, the man with the charmed life?
He heard, it appeared, two voices, and both at the same time:
the undying melody of the past, and the clarion call of the
future. It is this complex faculty that makes Jan Christian
Smuts.

He is a prophet, even in disaster. Less than three weeks after
he had announced his intention to mechanize the entire Spring-
bok force, Tobruk fell. An entire South African division was
captured. When the terrible news came through, Smuts, ac-
cording to reliable reports, asked only two words: "How many?"
Fifteen thousand, he was told. Again two words: "So many?"
It later proved that the number was less than thirteen thou-
sand. Major-General Dan Pienaar reported that the troops had
been condemned to a passive role by lack of tanks, "although
they had only Italian opposition against them. When they at
last had an opportunity of attacking, it was too late."

It was, his friends, insist, the heaviest blow General Smuts
had sustained, not only since the beginning of the war, but for
a great many years. His sudden pallor frightened his entourage.
To lose fifteen thousand young men, each of whom the Old
Master loved like a son. . . .

It was time for a scheduled broadcast. Without a break in
his voice he sent a message of hail and good cheer to a meeting
of the Friends of Soviet Russia.

On the next day he made his famous Tobruk statement. He

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OLD MASTER

spoke crisply, accurately, to the point: "The fall of Tobruk has
involved the capture by the enemy of substantial numbers of
the South African forces in Egypt. The exact composition of the
South African Forces which formed part of the Tobruk garri-
son is not yet known. The general situation is confused as a
result of the withdrawal of the Eighth Army. While we should
not minimize the seriousness of the losses, there remains in the
field a strong, well-equipped and experienced fighting force,
the larger part of the total South African forces sent to Egypt.
These units together with reinforcements which South Africa
will now provide will play a vital part in the defense of Egypt
and in the ultimate wresting of Libya from the Axis. South
Africa can take it, and South Africa will seek retribution/'

The General spoke of Egypt and Libya. But he meant Italy.
The Springboks took a valiant part in the epic of the Eighth
Army. When the last Italians were driven into the sea, they
shouted: "We are coming, Musso!"

Chapter 34 SOUTH AFRICA FIGHTS

"AVENGE TOBRUK!" SMUTS EXCLAIMED, ms WORDS BECAME SOUTH
Africa's battle cry. He had carefully worked out his new re-
cruiting campaign, the biggest and most successful, as was soon
proved. The provinces vied with one another to replace their
losses. Proud regiments with a century-old tradition were fully
restored. The Western Province of the Cape established a new
Cape Field Artillery Regiment. The Eastern Province rebuilt
the Kaffrarian Rifles, and Natal the Mounted Rifles. At the
same time Smuts pressed the conversion of the Union's fighting
divisions to armored and mechanized troops. On August 1,

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OLD MASTER

1942, he announced that the Seaward Defence Force would
henceforth be known as the Royal South African Navy. The
"tin-can fleet" of converted trawlers and improvised mine
sweepers was now a formidable naval force of sixty-four units.
South African ships convoyed Allied merchantmen through the
Mediterranean, then known as the "alley of death." At the end
of July the Admiralty in London congratulated the new sister
fleet upon the exploits of the Protea and the Southern Maid
which, between them, had destroyed a pack of German U-boats
and captured the survivors. Nevertheless, the U-boat menace
off the South African shores was increasing. The sea lanes,
along which the Allies had to send practically all their supplies
for the Eighth Army, were infested with German submarines.
Smuts later confessed that he had many a sleepless hour while
pondering the U-boat problem. Soon events proved that his
brain is most fertile when he cannot sleep, which, incidentally,
happens rarely.

All loyal sections assisted in recruiting. The Rand industry
decided to keep staffs necessary only to maintain production,
but not to expand business, despite the alluring possibilities of
the war boom. Smuts appointed advisers from the trade-unions
to sift labor in search of new volunteers. A committee under a
Cabinet minister Colonel Deneys Reitz transferred civil serv-
ants to the army. Transport was restricted in order to free em-
ployees for the forces. Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Durban,
the three biggest English-speaking towns, achieved a record in
recruiting. But also the Dutch-speaking platteland contributed
its fair share. Colonel Werdmuller, Director of Recruiting,
toured the country as the special emissary of General Smuts.
His meetings, he reported, were "crowded and spirited." But
the young Dutchmen from the veld could not volunteer with-
out exposing themselves to being called "Hanskhakis" ( substi-
tute Englishmen) or, politely, "Rooi-luise" (red lice) by their
Nationalist neighbors.

"Many people sneered and jeered at the Avenge Tobruk cam-
paign," Smuts said over the radio. "But we help each other.
The Defense organization of South Africa is a circle of friend-

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OLD MASTER

ship. We do our best to meet our difficulties and misunder-
standings. To me, of course, the recruiting work comes first and
foremost. And I can say, I am getting my men."

While the fight with Rommel still hung in the balance, South
Africa's contribution to the Allied war effort advanced in
mighty strides. At a particularly critical moment Major-General
Dan Pienaar, commanding the First Springbok Division, said
cheerfully: "Rommel will never enter the Nile Valley, or oc-
cupy Alexandria, or dine on Shepheard's Terrace, unless he
goes there as a tourist after the war."

The Springboks were as good as their commander's word.
The Royal Natal Carabineers, the senior volunteer regiment
of the British Empire, attacked on the El Alamein front. At
8:30 P.M. the troops advanced on a path through the enemy
mine fields English sappers had cleared. Hundreds of guns fol-
lowed them. At 9:20 the troops were in battle position. In-
telligence officers briefed them where to take prisoners. At
ten forty the Germans started a diversion in the south. But
there the Australians countered instantly. While the Aussies
fiercely engaged the enemy, the South Africans moved forward,
unnoticed by the Germans. The sky began to light up before
midnight. At five to twelve the South African guns opened fire
to silence the heavy German mortars sending barrage after
barrage into the Aussie's lines. The German mortars replied,
and the Springboks started their bayonet attack through a hail
of German 88 mm. shells bursting all around. At twelve thirty
the Brigadier reported: "Our boys have now penetrated the
wire into the mine field." Six minutes later came a report from
the Natal Carabineers: "Having a thin time with shells and
heavy machine-gun fire." At one o'clock, however, they were
inside the mine field. At one ten they had advanced seven
hundred yards, and were just in front of the German pillboxes.
At one fifty British units marched through the gap into the
mine fields. A hurricane of gunfire received them. It was a
desperate attempt to stave off a bayonet attack, which Jerry
fears most of all. The attempt miscarried. Soon Jerry evacuated
most of his pillboxes.

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OLD MASTER

Rommel was retreating, and, for all practical purposes, the
enemy within was beaten. When Smuts had the whole direc-
torate of the Ossewa Brandwag arrested and interned, "Com-
mander General" van Rensburg whined that he was only an
appointed officer, not responsible for shaping the policies of the
organization. Suddenly Dr. Malan spoke about the long and
tiresome path of the polling booth which would, some distant
day, lead to the Republic. He speculated on the political set-
back that follows every war.

Now Smuts could carry out a plan he had cherished for ten
years. He availed himself of Winston Churchill's repeated in-
vitation. In a new Lockheed Ventura, piloted by Lieutenant-
Colonel Piet Nel, he flew to England. He arrived in London
on October 13, two days ahead of schedule. As always, his
decisions and actions were swift. He had been so impatient that
he did not permit his plane to interrupt the journey at the
regular stops. He came, he said, for consultations and discus-
sions; not with preconceived ideas, but as a champion of a defi-
nite settlement of the campaign in North Africa.

With an audible sigh of relief the Old Master said on arrival:
"And so I am back in London after an interval of many years.
That I have not come earlier is due to circumstances largely
beyond my control. Like other Dominion Prime Ministers, I
had frequent and pressing invitations from Mr. Churchill. But
unlike them I was peculiarly tied down to my duties in South
Africa and to a political situation very different from that in
other Dominions. The position in that respect, has, however,
considerably eased. My talks with Mr. Churchill last August
in Egypt made it clear to me that there might be some advan-
tage in further talks in London."

Mr. Churchill whisked him right from the aerodrome to at-
tend a meeting of the War Cabinet at Downing Street starting
at ten o'clock in the evening.

Throughout his stay in London Smuts moved in with all his
old speed and urgency. He had comein Churchill's words
at a stern and somber moment. Nearly all his numerous confer-
ences were directly concerned with the immediate purpose of

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OLD MASTER

his self-imposed mission: acceleration of the general conduct of
the war. Yet he proceeded in London just as informally and
simply as he was in the habit of performing his routine duties
at home.

Frequently he visited South Africa House. Crowds were
gathered outside to cheer the Old Master when he showed him-
selfdespite the London October chill without an overcoat.
Again he met the members of the War Cabinet. He lunched
with the King at Buckingham Palace. The Old Master had
brought a little gift: a complete collection of current issues of
the stamps of the Union and South West Africa. He knew that
George VI would appreciate it. The times had changed since
the Edwardian era. It was no longer the biggest diamond in
the world a grateful Dominion had to present its sovereign. The
present King, a keen philatelist, enjoyed the collection of stamps
probably more than his grandfather had relished the Cullinan.
To keep the balance, another high-ranking philatelist was on
the same day presented with another set of the collection:
President Roosevelt, it is said, was much pleased at this at-
tention.

After lunch Smuts attended a meeting of the Defence Com-
mitteethe chiefs of staff presided over by Mr. Churchill.
Then the Old Master issued his first public statement. Empha-
sizing South Africa's dominant strategic position, he declared
that the war was entering upon a new phase: from defensive
warfare to the offensive. With victory in sight, if only at a dis-
tance, he could not refrain from making a reference to the
peace to come. "This is a man-made war," he said, "and the
peace to follow it should not prove beyond human capacity
beyond the untapped sources of wisdom and planning, of fore-
thought and good will."

To the Cabinet he delivered what one of its members called
a "masterly expose of the war situation." He was confident of
Russia's staying-power, and viewed the future with cautious
optimism. He had lunch with King Haakon of Norway, inter-
views with Ambassadors Winant and Maisky, and a long talk
with Vincent Massey, the Canadian High Commissioner. For

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OLD MASTER

the week end he retired to a country house to prepare his great
speech. Throughout his ride to the countryside his dark blue
limousine was everywhere recognized and cheered.

He spoke on Wednesday. The scene was unique in the his-
tory of Parliament. A thousand members of both the Houses
were gathered, the Lords occupying the front seats, behind
them the faithful Commons. On the platform sat Smuts in his
field marshal's uniform, between Churchill and Lloyd George.
On the left was a small tribune for the lady guests, including
Mrs. Churchill and Mrs. Eden. The brilliant assembly chatted
for half an hour. Then three cheers were given: Lloyd George,
the father of the House, rose. He looked frail, thin and worn in
his simple navy-blue suit. Yet his magnificent voice had lost
nothing of its resonance. Lloyd George said only a few words:
"Smuts is one of the foremost statesmen of my generation/'
That was about all. Winston Churchill jumped up from his seat
of honor to help the old man into his overcoat.

Now Smuts took the floor. Every point he made was quickly
seized by the audience. "My small country" brought an out-
burst of laughter. Stating the great issues at stake, he was lis-
tened to with the closest attention. A solemn hush reigned as
he quoted Scripture. It was followed by general hilarity when
he dealt with Hitler's blunders. He more than hinted that Pearl
Harbor was a blessing in disguise. He evoked a storm of ap-
plause with the statement: "This is Trafalgar Day!"

Smuts predicted the war would last until 1944. The Allies
had had to cope with an exceptional run of bad luck. Russia
was doing more than her share. The German Army was bleed-
ing to death on the Russian front, while Stalin's army would
certainly hold out. The unloosing of the yellow flood and the
Allied reverses in the East were largely caused by the tragic
fall of France through the treacherous surrender of Indo-China
by Vichy.

In the silence that followed, Smuts said with raised voice:
"Once the time has come to take the offensive and to strike
while the iron is hot, it would be folly to delay, to overprepare,

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OLD MASTER

and perhaps to miss our opportunity. Nor are we likely to do
so. Of that I am satisfied."

The speech rose to a noble, generous tribute to all that Eng-
land had endured, and a eulogy of the Commonwealth of Brit-
ish Nations. "This is its glory," he said with deep emotion. "To
have stood in the breach, and to have kept open the way to
man's vast future. This is the glory of the spirit which sees and
knows no defeat or loss, but increasingly nerves, nourishes, and
sustains the world to final victory."

Smuts ended in his best manner by pointing to the future:
"This is at bottom a war of the spiritof man's soul. Hitler has
tried to kill this spirit and to substitute for it some ersatz-thing,
something which is really its negation. His faith is a revival of
the pagan past and a denial of the spiritual forces which have
carried us forward in the Christian advance, the essence of
civilization. Hitler has trampled on the cross, and substituted
for it the crooked cross. He has started a new era of martyrdom,
an era of persecution such as mankind has not known since it
emerged from the Dark Ages. At the bottom, therefore, this war
is a new crusade, a new fight to the death for man's rights and
liberties, and for the personal ideals of man's ethical and spir-
itual life.

"We cannot hope to establish a new heaven and a new earth
in the bleak world which will follow this most destructive con-
flict of history. But certain patent social and economic evils
could be tackled on modest, practical lines on an international
scale almost at once. In sober resolution, in modest hope and
strong faith, we move forward to the unknown future. There
is no reason why we should not hopefully and sincerely attempt
to carry out for the world the task which now confronts us.
Health, housing, education, decent social amenities, provisions
against avoidable insecurities, all these simple goods and much
more can be provided for all, and thus a common higher level
of life can be achieved for all.

"As between nations, a new spirit of human solidarity can be
cultivated, and economic conditions can be built up which will
strike at the root causes of war, and thus lay deeper founda-

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OLD MASTER

tions for world peace. With honesty and sincerity on our part
it is possible to make basic reforms, both for national and in-
ternational life, which will give mankind a new chance for sur-
vival and for progress. Let this program, by no means too ambi-
tious, be our task, and let us now already, even in the midst of
war, begin to prepare for it."

Fifteen million people in the United Kingdom alone, accord-
ing to the BBC estimates, had heard his speech. Immediately
afterward Smuts hastened to Downing Street to take part in the
deliberations of the Pacific War Council which lasted all night.
Everyone was amazed at the Old Master's vitality and stam-
ina. In the company of Winston Churchill and two American
friends, Messieurs Henry Morgenthau, Secretary of the United
States Treasury, and Averill Harriman, President Roosevelt's
personal envoy, he went to inspect the Dover defenses. He ad-
dressed a parade of the Civil Defence Workers: "I have very
unpleasant memories of Dover from the last war, when I came
across the channel and left in a small destroyer. I thought these
unpleasant memories of 1917 would be the only ones of Dover
I should carry into the future when I read reports of blitzes on
Dover, singled out by the enemy for special punishment. We
really thought that Dover was gone. But now I come here, and
find Dover's men and women smiling, happy and still alive.
There'll always be a Dover!"

A couple of sentimental visits followed. Smuts called upon
Lloyd George at his farm at Churt, in the most beautiful part
of Surrey. The father of Parliament showed some of the results
of his experiments in fruit growing. The Old Master, in turn,
gave accurate data about his prize bull, Doornkloof's acquisi-
tion from America. The war was forgotten. The veterans were
exceedingly happy. On Sunday Smuts took his son, Captain
Japie Smuts, on a motor trip to Cambridge to see his old col-
lege, Christ's. The students interrupted dinner to give the
doyen of the alumni a rousing cheer. Smuts joined them. Seated
at the right of Professor Raven, the master of the college, he
displayed a most healthy appetite.

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OLD MASTER

His every hour was crowded. On a single day Wednesday-
he had an audience with Queen Wilhelmina, whereupon he
broadcast in the Dutch language to Holland and Belgium. An
engagement with Mr. Harriman followed; the outcome was
that President Roosevelt sent a group of lend-lease administra-
tors to South Africa. Lord Leathers, British Minister of Trans-
port, was his next caller. Smuts saw General de Gaulle, had
dinner with Mr. Eden, and attended another night session of
the War Cabinet after having put in a short appearance at a
reception at the South African Club.

One event stood out: on October 31, three thousand Welsh
coal miners were assembled in Central Hall, Westminster.
Churchill and Smuts addressed them. What the two leaders
had to say was so serious that their speeches were not released
until half a year later. They asked the miners to increase pro-
duction because England was faced with the very great danger
of fuel shortage. The time of peril was not yet over, both speak-
ers emphasized. The U-boat menace was becoming worse; the
danger of invasion was still real, and Hitler was hell-bent on
achieving a stalemate, his last, desperate hope. He was trying
to turn Europe into a fortress that would be able to hold out
for years, waiting for the Allies to grow weary of war, fall out
among themselves and agree to a compromise peace. Under
such conditions no internal disturbances could be tolerated.
Coal miners and operators must get together. The ensuing Coal
Conference brought them, indeed, together, and removed for
good the danger of serious disturbances in the mines of Wales.
Churchill had again proved his intuition in calling in Smuts,
the peacemaker par excellence to help in bringing about a
reconciliation.

During his entire stay in London Smuts was in constant con-
tact with South Africa. The news was good. Two by-elections
went to his followers. But the U-boat peril had reached South
African waters in earnest. During the second half of October,
U-boats struck for the first time west of the Cape to interrupt
the stream of supplies and reinforcements to the Allied armies
in the Middle East. A few weeks later German U-boats were

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OLD MASTER

sighted off South Africa's east coast. Obviously they were the
same packs. This meant that they had already been at sea eight
or nine weeks, and would take another three weeks to return
to their nearest bases in the Bay of Biscay. They must have
been furnished with fuel, fresh water, and torpedoes by Ger-
man supply ships, probably anchored somewhere along the
coast of the Portuguese colonies. There was another possibility,
too. A few small islands in the "Roaring Forties/' south of the
Cape, Gough, Bouvet, Prince Edward, Marion, and the Twin
Islands, had, in peacetime, been used by whaling fleets as tem-
porary bases. Smuts decided to have these almost inaccessible
rocks cleared up. But this was only a local expediency. The Old
Master joined in establishing a supreme anti-U-boat staff to
supervise the campaign to stamp out the menace. Churchill
himself presided.

Again, as in the First World War, Smuts had an important
part in shaping the Allied grand strategy. He was recognized
as a man of outstanding intellect, of profound experience in
war and peace over half a century, and, above all, as a man,
for reasons of race and geography, able to take a broader view
of events and development than that generally prevailing. His
work in London re-established him as one of the acknowledged
leaders of the United Nations, more particularly of the British
Commonwealth of Nations, somewhat aloof, but passionately
in the center of things, sharing in the making of history.

In conferring the freedom of Plymouth upon him, Lord Astor
acknowledged his peculiar position: "The South African Prime
Minister exemplifies all that is best in the traditions and ideas
of the British Commonwealth of Free Nations." Addressing
Smuts directly, he continued: "You are not of British blood. At
one period you actually fought against this country. But you
are the answer to the critics of the British Commonwealth."

Smuts' last speech in England summed up what he had come
to urge: the acceleration of the pace of the war. "The issue of a
second western front takes new shape," he said, "and several
new fronts against vulnerable areas should now become pos-
sible. All western and southern Europe lies exposed not only to

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OLD MASTER

attacks from Britain, but also across the Mediterranean. Our
lines of movement are multiplied. Possibilities become tremen-
dous. The offensive should continue without rest or pause, and
attacks on enemy countries should make it most difficult for
them to regain their lost offensive. We have already wrested air
supremacy from the enemy. There remains the sea offensive.
By this I mean the U-boat campaign, the most serious menace
against us. It is evidently the last hope of Germany, so it should
be our foremost task to tackle it. For this purpose we command
unrivalled skill and experience. We have the air supremacy to
demolish U-boat building bases in enemy and occupied coun-
tries, and to hunt U-boat marauders from the high seas. We
have, besides, the finest scientific genius in the world, consist-
ing not only of the foremost British physicists of the age, but
also of brilliant sons of Germany, now refugees here and in
Allied countries." Then he smiled: "I speak, of course, with all
due modesty. I am only a landsman from Africa. Others would
know much better how to proceed about this job."

All England smiled in return, gratefully and affectionately,
when the Old Master stepped into his Lockheed to return to
his old home, but ever to new destinies.

"General Smuts' presence in London was sinister evidence of
the weakness of Allied arms and the darkness of Allied pros-
pects!" Die Burger received the homecoming Prime Minister. It
sounded like a cry in the dark. Dr. Malan knew that the game
was up. While his great opponent had made history, he himself
had been sidling from dorp to dorp, endlessly dissecting the
barnyard squabbles of his volk. Frustrated and bitter, wrapped
in archaic flags, making safe threats of "going to jail," he failed
even in the leadership of a handful of Afrikaners. Now he was
to pay the penalty of basing his whole policy on nothing more
substantial than impotent rage and obsolete prejudices. Al-
though the opposition Afrikaners, even in the judgment of their
progressive fellow Boers, were the most stupid isolationists in
the world, they reacted more quickly to events in the world
than any other section of the population. Their own fate, after

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OLD MASTER

embracing Hitlerism, was even more dependent on what hap-
pened abroad.

A short time before Dr. Malan had still used a secret trans-
mitter to discuss with Zeesen the conditions a victorious Hitler
was willing to grant to a subservient, dictatorially run South
Africa. Now his retreat from Nazism coincided with Rommel's
retreat, but it was considerably faster. He directed all his at-
tacks toward van Rensburg and Pirow. Those two were hope-
lessly compromised. They were doomed, the moment Hitler
should fall.

The Old Master no longer deigned his opponents a single
word. He was above the squabble. His lifelong austerity was
mellowed by the serenity of active, purposeful, highly success-
ful age. Nothing could affect him.

Nothing?

Dan Pienaar was killed in an airplane crash. Smuts' face went
white, when the news came. "It is as bad as Tobrukl" he mur-
mured. But instantly he pulled himself together. He ordered
done everything necessary for Dan's widow and the families of
the other airmen who had perished with their general. He sug-
gested that the news of the tragedy should be held back until
Sunday morning. He did not want to ruin the big rally in Jo-
hannesburg in his honor. In the late afternoon he wrote a per-
sonal tribute to the memory of his young friend who had died
just as he was on the way to greatness. Dan Pienaar's position
was sure to increase while the Axis would have been blasted
out of Africa and the battle would roll to the south of Europe.
Moreover, Dan Pienaar was scheduled to become commander
of the South African Army after the war, succeeding Smuts,
and perhaps also to make a great contribution to the political
reconstruction of the country.

Smuts looked tired, when a crowd of twenty thousand
cheered him in Johannesburg. But he recovered as he spoke,
and he spoke much more personally than usual. Reporting on
his journey to England, he summed up, as it were, the experi-
ence of his life: "I wish to express to my British friends, known

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and unknown, my deep gratitude for the reception they have so
warmly and spontaneously given me. In my person as a South
African and as a Boer the British system of today stands vindi-
cated before history. Promises have been kept, freedom granted
in fullest measure, and a generosity has been shown, unprece-
dented in history, which in turn has evoked the most moving
response on the part of the British people, both in the last war
and in this. The critics of the British Empire have their answer.
At the same time it is a reminder to the British people that the
Empire is no mean thing, but something to be proud of, and
worth serving and dying for. My visit in the Empire's historic
setting was a symbol and a reminder of what was deepest and
best in this vast system of ours, which will endure beyond this
war, and point the way to mankind towards the future com-
monwealth of the world.

"In all practical matters I have found single-mindedness and
open-mindedness in the Prime Minister, and a fanatic inflexi-
bility in his only objective of winning the war. To him, above
all, the success whatever it may be of my visit has been due,
and my deepest thanks are due to him, my old enemy and later
comrade of a lifetime. Forty-three years ago I had to sit in
judgment on him and condemn him to internment as a com-
batant passing under the guise of a press correspondent. I was
right then. Ever since he has continued as a fighter, as a com-
batant, in spite of the aliases of politics and literature. What
else can one expect from a member of the tribe of Malbrouk?
To me the most comforting sign of all I saw was the solid and
enthusiastic support of the whole nation behind Churchill. So
forward to victory behind the leader!"

Now he devoted most of his energy to the training of the
new Sprinkbok recruits to which he applied the scientific Smuts
touch. The men were schooled in the fine art of mechanic war-
fare to become, as tank crews, the spearhead of the fighting
forces. Special courses were given to the assault troops. Poten-
tial officers and non-coms received instruction to develop the
quality of leadership. The secret of fighting, the Old Master re-
peated, was initiative. The Springboks were born desert fight-

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OLD MASTER

ers, crafty and experienced in the trickiness this particular sort
of warfare demands. Some of their regiments soon proved out-
standing qualities. The Transvaal Scottish were an example.
Many were awarded the Military Cross or the Military Medal
for particular bravery, extreme gallantry, initiative and good
leadership in patrol activities, cutting enemy wires, crossing
German mine fields, hand-to-hand fighting, raiding, night re-
connaissance, taking individual patrols, and harassing the vet-
erans of the Afrika Korps. As commander of the First South
African Armoured Division, Dan Pienaar was replaced by Major-
General W. H. Evered Poole, an officer who had received the
D.S.O. for "great gallantry and devotion to duty" at the start
of the Alamein offensive.

The support the conquering Eighth Army received in South
African war supplies was no less magnificent than the contri-
bution of the South African soldiers. The Union's new industry
delivered the goods while the Axis was being driven out of
Africa. Tens of thousands of heavy aerial bombs, of shells, gre-
nades, land mines, scores of millions of rounds of small arms,
ammunition, hundreds of guns, mortars, tanks, as well as cloth-
ing, boots, transport vehicles, and highly specialized technical
gear such as gun sights, radio sets, carbide, wire ropes, and
structural steel flowed from South African workshops. More
than five hundred thousand replacement parts for tanks and
guns were delivered to the Eighth Army. Captured enemy guns
were reconditioned and many special steels, including armor-
plates produced in the National Steel Works in Pretoria. All this
was new for South Africa. Also the drastic taxation Smuts de-
manded was new to a country famous for having the lowest
taxes in the world.

The country did not grumble. Slowly but steadily the popu-
lation fell into step with the Old Master. He did not promise
them early relief. After the Axis had been driven out of Africa,
he said: "We are very far from the end of the war. Only the
first long phase of defensive warfare has been successfully con-
cluded. A second phase is beginning. The great danger is th&t
the people might tire of the war, and slacken in their effort.

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OLD MASTER

That is the peril to be avoided." And again he insisted: "Don't
forget that Hitler is still holding more of Europe than Napoleon
at the peak of his triumphs."

In Standerton, his old constituency, he opened his electoral
campaign. Standerton, which he has represented, so far, for fif-
teen years, is the place where he makes his most important and
most personal speeches. "During the past years I was like a cap-
tain guiding a ship through a rocky sea. But things have im-
proved, and I am grateful for that. The political squabbles in
South Africa today leave me ice-cold, more than ice-cold. I am
not interested in them, because I am too busy with my work.
I have had repeated invitations from President Roosevelt to go
to the United States. But I was afraid that if I stayed away too
long you would forget me. Perhaps I shall go to America later.
If it is in the interests of South Africa I shall certainly go.
I have been told that I should not fly so much, and not take so
many risks. But we are fighting for a very great cause, and if
anyone can do anything to help in the attainment of victory
it is his duty to take risks and make sacrifices. For South Africa
I will go to England, to America, I almost said to Moscow,
I will go to the gates of hell!"

This was the old soldier's bugle call, opening the electoral
campaign. Meekly Dr. Malan replied: "Let no one place all his
hopes on the outcome of the war. The outcome may make it
more difficult for us to achieve our object."

The campaign gathered momentum as Smuts asked, and re-
ceived, parliamentary authorization to send South African
troops anywhere in the world. Other good auguries followed.
The Legislative Assembly of the former Germany Colony of
South West Africa, ever the trouble center of the continent, de-
cided to seek admission to the British Empire by incorporation
with the Union of South Africa. A week before the elections
South African gold shares boomed in the city of London. The
cause for buoyancy was the general confidence that Smuts
would obtain an overwhelming majority.

The most spectacular feature of the campaign was the com-
petition for the soldiers' vote. It was an utterly fair competi-

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OLD MASTER

tion. The Springbok, the newspaper of the Defence Force,
divided its space equally between pro-government propaganda
and opposition manifestoes. More than 90 per cent of the men
in the South African citizen army voted. They voted in hospi-
tals, between fighter sorties, in one case interrupted by an
enemy bombing raid. Electoral officers under Major W. G.
Geach traveled thousands of miles by air and car. Soldiers in
outlying areas and forlorn desert posts marched long distances
to mail their ballot papers. Bags bulging with ballots came in
from New Delhi and London. The men of the Sixth Armoured
Division left tanks and guns to queue up in long lines before
the voting booths. Special arrangements had been made for
ships plying the seas. A general had been sent to the Mediter-
ranean to arrange the voting among the great number of South
Africans serving in the Royal Navy.

Smuts scored. One hundred and seven of his supporters were
returned or newly elected, as against forty-three Nationalists.
Never since the first Union Parliament had a majority been as
strong and as decisive. Pirow's "New Order" with sixteen fol-
lowers in the old House of Assembly, as well as the Afrikaner
Party, consisting of eight stalwart Hertzogites, under Klaasie
Havenga's leadership, disappeared completely. Choosing
prudence, the better part of valor, the boisterous Ossewa
Brandtvag had "boycotted" democratic elections. Dr. Malan's
mouthpiece, the Bloemfontein Volksblad, took the defeat of
aggressive nationalism stoically. "When General Smuts retires,"
the paper wrote, "we will have to deal with worse jingoes
whose aim will be complete annihilation of the spiritual pos-
session of Afrikanerdom."

South Africa was jubilant. From all over the world came mes-
sages of congratulation. Smuts answered a telegram from Colo-
nel Deneys Reitz with an expression of warmth which he rarely
permits himself: "Thank you, my life's comrade. We now begin
to gather the fruits of long labor/' Then, ever true to style, he
found a few kind words for his enemies: "It was a clean fight.
All sides, even our opponents, fought decently and well, and

442

OLD MASTER

they were decently and well beaten. Perhaps this was my last
struggle. If so, then I will say that the last was the best."

A few days later he condensed this judgment to the phrase:
"The last race of the old horse."

Chapter 35 AT THE HELM

THE OLD MASTER HAD REACHED THE PEAK OF HIS DOMESTIC CA-

reer. But he showed no signs of elation. Serious-minded he
gazed into the time to come. The next five years, the span
of life of his new Parliament and by the same token his own
last lustrum in public life, would be the most difficult ones. He
summed up: Undoubtedly there was a strong upsurge of liberal
thought throughout the country. There was social progress. At
least among the intellectuals a vigorous movement for English
Afrikaans fellowship had set in. But against this advance stood
racial bitterness, deeper than ever before, an immovable block
of intolerance against the colored people, seeds of discontent
among many sections of society, and a certain political lassitude
among his own following. The balance seemed not unfavorable,
but by no means reassuring. Yet Smuts was not disheartened.
He profoundly believes in the good sense of his people. Con-
stant compromises, he is convinced, will lead his nation to a
higher level of life.

He started his march into the new world by reshuffling his
cabinet. A Ministry of Transportation replaced the old Minis-
try of Railways and Harbours; the new office is also in charge
of the administration of road transport, a post-war South Afri-
can merchant marine, and civil aviation which shall greatly
expand. A new Ministry for Welfare and Demobilisation was

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OLD MASTER

established to co-ordinate all social security activities. A Min-
istry of Economic Development, uniting the old Departments
of Commerce and Industry, will pay special attention to open-
ing up the so far unused economic resources of South Africa.
At the same time Smuts created a National Supplies Council
and a new Cabinet Committee on Reconstruction. The Old
Master reserved the chairmanship of both these organizations
for himself.

Even his most faithful followers grumbled. They recognized
that the two more important new ministries Welfare and Eco-
nomic Development were entrusted to the two youngest mem-
bers of the government, Messieurs Lawrence and Waterson,
respectively. Yet, they insisted, the rejuvenation did not go far
enough. Moreover, they protested against Oom Jannie adding
new duties to his already superhuman burden. Their objections
were of no avail. Smuts remains his own jack-of -all- trades. He
trusts his personal friends, but there is no one whom he would
credit with his own supreme wisdom of moderation.

The great reformer has more and more learned to proceed
gradually. He is well aware that the economic and social sys-
tem is changing all over the world. The septuagenarian hails
the change. But he is determined to keep it under control. He
wants prosperity without a boom, industrial expansion without
a mushroom growth of industry, neither state socialism nor lais-
sez faire. "The structure and activities of society are under-
going extensive alterations," he explained. "An increasing
amount of State interference with privately conducted busi-
ness is in evidence in all countries. We in South Africa want to
preserve the system of private enterprise. Yet there must be
certain economic controls to bridge the transition period to
peacetime economy. The wider problems of State's responsibil-
ity will remain, and the government will have to find out by
experience how extensive the controls should be and what form
they should take."

Post-war planning, however, works both ways. While Smuts
was all set for his march into the new world the danger he had
anticipated actually arose: almost unconsciously South Africa

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OLD MASTER

was slipping out of the war. Her shores were no longer threat-
ened by a Japanese attack. The enemy had been driven out
from the black continent. Smuts' "Clear Africa first!" policy was
triumphantly vindicated. Mussolini was done for, and Italy had
unconditionally surrendered. Both events justified Smuts' long
range vision. But now the people at home relaxed. With their
own country out of imminent danger, victory seemed in the
bag. Recruiting declined so steadily that only young men
reaching military age volunteered. Complacency and optimism
began to work for Hitler. When Major-General George Brink,
C.B., D.S.O., was appointed Director General for Demobilisa-
tion, thousands of people simply forgot their war duties. Gen-
eral Brink had to emphasize that his job was only to prepare for
the return of the soldiers after the war. His department, he
stressed, was concerned with problems which would become
acute a year or two hence.

Smuts himself had to bring his people back to reality. He out-
lined the actual war situation: "We are now rapidly approach-
ing that great moment which will open the final phase of the
war in Europe. From now on we possess full freedom of strate-
gic movements across the oceans, and our vastly superior air-
powers enable us to exert decisive air-superiority on all fronts.
With our increasing tempo of bombing most of the great
centers of Germany will, in another twelve months, be in ruins
or nonexistent/' he predicted on the fourth anniversary of the
war. "The Fortress of Europe will disappear physically before
this air onslaught by night and day. Its effect on civilian morale
will be more devastating than its physical effects. But there is
even more than the air blitz to point out the doom of Festung
Europe. Hitler is already falling back upon and using his re-
serves of manpower and material resources. The limits of physi-
cal exhaustion are not so far off. Occupied and satellite coun-
tries are being pumped dry for manpower, raw material, and
food. The suffering subject peoples are writhing and seething
with suppressed or open revolt. The German fighting forces do
not remain unaffected. German U-boat crews and airmen are
no longer fighting up to their old standards. In Germany Himm-

445

OLD MASTER

ler with his Gestapo and S.S. forces had to be put in charge a
sure sign of internal heaving and cracking. Apathy, disillusion,
and despair are beginning to grip the people who see victory
and its conquests going, who have seen Mussolini and Fascism
go, who now see the immense forces of East and West march-
ing toward the Fortress of Europe. The internal agitation is
growing and is all the more dangerous because it is suppressed
and driven underground. Faith in the Fuehrer and belief in the
New Order are vanishing/'

In a mass rally in the City Hall of Johannesburg he added,
three weeks later: "This time there will be no less than uncon-
ditional surrender, though the German armies will fight bitterly
and hard. There is no question of Germany winning this war or
of a stalemate. The war has to be won, and it has to be won on
German soil. There must be nothing like what happened in the
last war, when Germany made an armistice and secured peace
without the foot of a single Allied soldier being set on German
soil. This time it must be unconditional surrender, dictated in
the enemy's capitals, in Berlin and elsewhere."

Is this bitter-ender still the Smuts of Versailles? Certainly he
is. He wants to castigate the Germans, but only in order to for-
give them once more. His great diatribe against Nazism was
coupled with the German people's apology: "The Germans are
a great people. For centuries they have taken a leading part in
most of the lines of European advance. They are not all Nazi
monsters, moral perverts, or devil worshippers infected with the
satanic virus of Hitler. Deep in the heart of that great people
slumbers something which is very precious to our race. What
has happened inside Germany, what has been done to innocent
neighboring people in recent years had sunk deeply, scorch-
ingly into millions of German minds. There is another and a
better Germany that must have passed through hell in witness-
ing the brutal and lawless inhumanity of their people. The
degradation of their people under Hitler and his fellow gang-
sters must be more than decent human nature can stand or bear
for long. A deep revolt is brewing inside Germany which must
be more catastrophic for Hitler and Nazidom than even the

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OLD MASTER

terror of the air by night. Of all the vast forces gathering for
the doom of Hitler not the least will be the fifth column, repre-
senting the revolt in the German soul itself."

It must be truthfully stated that there is so far no evidence
of any revolt in the German soul itself, nor have Smuts' mil-
lions of scorched German minds in any recognizable way pro-
tested against what was happening inside Germany and what
has been done to innocent neighboring people. In fact, the
"decent, human nature" of the Germans did stand and bear the
"degradation" of their people long enough, precisely ten years,
without bursting out. But such trifling objections would not
occur to the old warrior without hatred.

His house-cleaning most efficiently done, Smuts went on
leave, and once more plunged into history. His private airplane,
a four-engined American machine, took him to Cairo, the half-
way house. He spent two busy days in conferences with military
and political leaders, and witnessed a parade by an armored
division. While the tanks rolled slowly past, he himself stood on
the turret of a General Sherman, with one foot resting on the
75 mm. gun. Gravely he saluted each unit. To the Springboks
and the Rhodesian troops of the Sixth South African Armoured
Division he said: "I am convinced that the hardest, the blood-
iest battles of the war still lie ahead. You must return not only
with victory, but with peace in your hands!"

Another scene: the harbor of Alexandria. Smuts, flanked by
Admiral Sir John Cunningham and General Sir Henry Maitland
Wilson, standing on the bridge of a captured Italian battleship.
Silently, with tight lips, the deeply furrowed face blank and
without discernible expression, the Old Master surveys the long
rows of surrendered Italian vessels. The fall of Fascist Italy, so
impressively demonstrated in this show, was the reward of his
long exertions, his personal triumph He does not care to speak
about it.

An airplane of the R.A.F. Transport Command, escorted by
ten Spitfires, picked up Field Marshal Smuts in Cairo, and
brought him to an airfield in the Home Counties. His recep-

447

OLD MASTER

tion was quick and informal. There was no time to exchange
speeches. Smuts did not even stop at the brownstone mansion
which serves him as his London quarters. The War Cabinet
was already in session. This time he joined the Inner War
Cabinet not, as during his previous visit in London, as a guest
of honor, but as a full-fledged member. Mr. Churchill explained
that he and Mr. Eden would be much abroad in the weeks
and months to come. Would Field Marshal Smuts preside over
the Council? And so the self-styled "simple landman from South
Africa" stepped, temporarily, into Winston Churchill's shoes.

He is occupied with grand strategy and post-war reconstruc-
tion. Most of his work must be kept secret. Only one of his off-
the-record activities during his stay in London may safely be
revealed. While planning a new world Smuts did not forget
his old friends, the Jews. Dr. Chaim Weizman, chemist of
world fame and leader of the Zionist movement, had for months
been anxiously waiting for a meeting with Mr. Churchill. It
did not take the Old Master more than two or three days to
bring about this palaver. The three participants left it in high,
good spirits.

Returning to Cape Town, to open the new House of Assem-
bly, Smuts made his habitual stop in Cairo. By one of those
coincidences which great men rarely escape, the historic Cairo
conference had just begun. The Old Master was not of the
conference, but very much in it. Mr. Churchill consulted his
veteran adviser between almost every pourparler. Less spec-
tacular, but no less significant was the first personal meeting
between President Roosevelt and Field Marshal Smuts. The
two statesmen had frequently talked over the transatlantic
telephone. Now they met face to face.

"We two old Dutchmen got along splendidly!" Smuts chuckled
afterwards. Embracing his new, old friend with a positively
tender look, the President remarked to the press: "No com-
ment!" In fact, Oom Jannie had used the opportunity to drive
home his point once more. He had pressed for an equitable
solution of the Palestine problem.

Smuts has the privilege of speaking with frankness opinions

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OLD MASTER

no other responsible statesman could possibly utter. On October
19, 1943, Smuts delivered his already historic speech in the
battered, blackened and blitzed Guildhall. Surrounded by the
most eminent men of the Empire, he stood in his familiar atti-
tude: his right hand pressed against his hip, his left turning the
pages of his carefully prepared manuscript, his eyes, behind
horn-rimmed spectacles, fixed upon his text. He spoke of the
second front in the making.

Suddenly he turned from the manuscript, took off his glasses,
waved them, and declared, laying stress on every word: "In
the assault upon Hitler's Europe the United States will un-
doubtedly take a leading part perhaps the leading part. In
spite of her already great contribution her role in the war has
been principally what it was originally intended to be: the
arsenal of democracy. Her industrial effort has been prodigious,
and is still moving to an almost incredible peak. But in view
of the intense and prolonged strain and the excessive demands
upon the British Commonwealth, American manpower has been
rightly looked upon as our grand strategic reserve in the West
for the final moves in this war. While, therefore, every ally will
go all out to bring about the final climax, the United States,
latest and freshest and most potent newcomer into the field,
may have to play the decisive part in the concluding act of the
great war drama."

A month later Smuts addressed the British Empire Society.
His theme was the state of the world immediately after the end
of the war. 'There will still be dark days ahead," he predicted.
"Humanity will be disrupted, and the world milling round in
suffering and disruption such as it has never known before.
We will see greater changes than have happened in hundreds
of years. We will see a temper in the world which is entirely
new and very dangerous. There is today more hatred running
through the actions of the aggressors, more human ill will and
ill feeling than probably has been the case for hundreds of
years." After this gloomy introduction, however, Smuts ex-
pressed his staunch confidence that the United Nations would
win the peace as well as the war. "In this task," he ended, "the

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OLD MASTER

British Empire and its system of democracy will play an out-
standing role. Our unwritten way of life, this common under-
standing which is the soul of our group, has seen us through.
I think, in that way, perhaps, we can make an enormous con-
tribution to the future of the world/'

In the evening of his life the evolution of the once fiery Boer
guerrilla fighter to the father of the British Commonwealth is
fulfilled. He cares for and worries over the future of Britain.
"She will emerge from the war with a glory and an honor and
a prestige such as perhaps no nation enjoyed," he told the
Empire Parliamentary Association in an off-the-record speech
which was only belatedly published. "But economically she
will be impoverished. This country has held nothing back.
There is nothing left in the till."

Smuts foresees that ultimate peace will come very slowly,
perhaps so slowly as never to make possible any general peace
conference at all, but only a comprehensive armistice that
would permit a long process of working out solutions. For this
long time, at least, America, Britain and Russia will hold world
power, and must retain leadership. Significantly the Old Master
has omitted China in speaking of the "trinity" of world powers.
He believed, although he never said so in plain words, that
nothing in China's record put her on equal basis with Amer-
ica, Britain, and Russia. But he recently changed his mind on
this point, deciding to recognize China's inherent importance,
her heroic resistance against Japan, and her new leadership in
Asia. Moreover, it appears to be Smuts' conviction that France
has disappeared as a great power in Europe. "If she ever re-
turns, it will be a hard pull for her to emerge again. A nation
that has been overtaken by a catastrophe such as France has
suffered, reaching to the roots of her nationhood, will not easily
resume her old place again. We may talk about her as a great
power, but talking won't help her much. France has gone and
will be gone in our day, and perhaps for many a day."

Thus three of Europe's five big powers are done for: France
at least for any predictable time, Germany, and Italy. "The
Japanese Empire will also go the way of all flesh. Therefore

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OLD MASTER

any check or balance restraining Russia in the East will have
disappeared. Russia will be dominant in Asia, and she will be
the mistress of the European continent. She will be in a posi-
tion of power unique in European history. Then you have the
United States, the other great world power, with enormous as-
sets, with resources and potentialities beyond measure. Against
the vast resources of the Soviet Union and the United States
Britain may find herself in a position of unequal partnership,
I am afraid. And I should not like to see an unequal part-
nership/'

His advice was that Britain should "cease to be an island.
Should we not work together intimately," he continued, "with
these small democracies in Western Europe which by them-
selves may be lost as they are lost today and may become lost
again? Surely they must feel that their place is with the British
member of the great trinity. Their way of life is with Great
Britain, their outlook and their future is with Great Britain
and the world-wide British system. ... I utter no dogmatic
conclusions," Smuts added with his habitual caution. "I have
no set ideas. I am simply giving you the lines of thought that
run in my mind when I survey the new situation facing us in
the world."

Once more Smuts had expressed what the average English-
man thought, but the average British statesman is not supposed
to say. Wholeheartedly, the most directly concerned parties
agreed with him. The Minister for Colonies of the exiled Bel-
gian Government immediately took up the cue. His country
would certainly welcome such a proposition. Dr. Van Kleffens,
Dutch Foreign Minister, also expressed his approval. He only
attached one demand: Great Britain should not disarm imme-
diately after the war.

Some critics accused Smuts of reviving the balance-of -power
bogey. He did not shirk the accusation. The old philosopher,
the stargazer and humanist, concluded with the pregnant
words: "The greatest lesson to come out of this war is the
value of power. Peace not backed by power remains a dream."

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OLD MASTER

Chapter 36 VISION OF THE FUTURE

STILL IN THE THICK OF THE FIGHT, AND YET ALREADY A MYTH,

Jan Christian Smuts knows well that the trouble will begin
when the war ends. "What worries me is not what is going to
happen during this war, but what will happen after the war
when we have to live together in this country," he told a depu-
tation of Loyalist women in Pretoria. "We must build up the
spirit of reconciliation/' he tried to stifle his own worries. "Keep
quiet, keep the peace, and do not try to down those who do
not agree with you."

It is his keynote. He applies it to his own divided South
Africa, to the relations between color and race, this central
problem of Africa and, ever more, one of the central problems
of the world, and to the links between nations, groups of na-
tions, continents, and hemispheres.

Unity, or Holism, as he calls it, was his lifelong aim. The les-
son of the war, particularly the gruelling lessons South Africa
has had to learn, has only confirmed his belief in co-operation,
patience, and tolerance. "My government has exercised the
greatest tolerance in the face of almost unbearable provoca-
tion, yet the country achieved a war effort practically unsur-
passed in the world," he insists, looking back on the hard and
stony road he has had to tread in these last years. "We have a
complex and difficult country. There is no young country in the
world where the problem of government is more difficult. We
have a divided people. But it will not always remain so. The
time is coming although I shall not see it when this will be
a united people, and there will be a united national will. We
have not yet reached that stage. All our work has been done
not by a united people we have not had that gracious blessing
here in South Africa. It had to be done with a hopelessly di-
vided people, against an opposition which did not merely dis-
sent passively, but was violently active. It has been done

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OLD MASTER

through patience and tolerance, mostly on the part of the gov-
ernment. The provocation was sometimes almost more than
human nature could bear but we bore it. We have been pa-
tient, forbearing, long-suffering, trying, like a wise doctor, to
probe into the disease. Personally, I have always been filled
with love for my own people. If they have sometimes talked
too strongly, and looked upon me as an enemy I have not done
the same.

"Political life in South Africa is a lesson in patience. I myself
have been impatient, and most of my life I have hustled and
pushed on to secure what I thought was the good of the coun-
try. But more and more in the long vista that lies behind I
have learned that you must be patient. Tolerance and patience
are the things we have to learn. We have an obstinate and
wrong-headed people fighting for their own obstinate wrong-
headedness as if it were the law of heaven. I am sure that the
tolerance the government has shown to those who differed so
violently will have its effects in the future that the people of
South Africa will be prepared to make much more allowance
for the other man's point of view than they have done in the
past."

The visionary Smuts never forgets his realism. He knows
what human nature wants: good jobs and profitable business.
"Our ultimate aim is to provide fruitful employment, housing,
and the necessities of life, including food and clothing, for our
whole community of all races and colors. We are now taking
the longest stride ever taken toward that greater industrial
future that surely awaits the country. At last we have learned
the lesson that we cannot afford to waste our human resources,
and that there is no place in this young country with its rich
assets for unemployment and similar uneconomic waste. And
when this greater industrial South Africa arises after the war
we may also hope to see many of our present political slogans
and war cries fall into a merciful oblivion.

"We have a human situation as difficult and complex as any-
where in the world. We shall only progress and make a success
out of this country if we can succeed in establishing harmony

453

OLD MASTER

and balance. I am sometimes afraid that conditions are work-
ing up for a clash if we are not careful. Our human society is
stratified in various racial and cultural layers, and there is more
and more a feeling of strain that fills me with some anxiety for
the future. I see growing indications of it from day to day, from
year to year. It is today worse than it was a generation ago;
and so I am afraid it is worsening all the time. And yet all our
human material is so good.

"I am very much afraid that we are not handling our colored
population, especially our natives, in the best and most sympa-
thetic way. A temper and outlook is arising among them which
in the end may lead not to co-operation between us all, but
just to the contrary/'

It is one of the greater proofs of Smuts' courage that he
frankly speaks about the native question, taboo in South Af-
rica. His own record concerning his country's central problem
is chequered, a fact not speaking against his consistency but
demonstrating the intellectual and ethical development of a
long and rich life. Although since his early youth on excellent
personal terms with natives, still in his middle age he believed
in strict segregation of white and black. He did not propound
white superiority, though frequently stating that he was deter-
mined to keep South Africa a white man's country, but he was
convinced that the natives were happier in their reservations
and kraals, under their own tribal chiefs, living their own way
of life, than as an urban proletariat, which was, indeed, their
only alternative. On the other hand, the rise of the individual
native should not be hampered. "Equality for all civilized peo-
ple!" had been Cecil Rhodes' prescription for Africa's headache
number one, and, like many of the colossus' "thoughts," Smuts
accepted this one, too, as gospel truth.

Rhodes was long resting in peace, when Smuts recognized
that the issue of the contacts between various colors and civi-
lizations was destined to become a dominant problem of the
twentieth century. The Native Representation Act and the Na-
tive Lands Act of 1936 were largely based on Smuts' ideas.
"What is wanted in Africa," he said, introducing the bills, "is

454

OLD MASTER

a wise, farsighted native policy. For there is much that is good
in the African, and which ought to be preserved and devel-
oped. The negro and the negroid Bantu form a distinct human
type which the world would be poorer without. This type has
some wonderful characteristics. It has largely remained a child-
type, with a child's psychology and outlook. A child-like human
cannot be a bad human. Perhaps as a direct result of this tem-
perament the African is the only happy human I have come
across. No other race is so easily satisfied, so good-tempered,
so carefree. A race which could survive the immemorial prac-
tice of the witch doctor and the slave trader, and yet preserve
its inherent simplicity and sweetness of disposition must have
some very fine moral qualities. The African easily forgets past
troubles, and does not anticipate future troubles. This happy-
go-lucky disposition is a great asset, but it also has its draw-
backs."

Smuts' native policy consisted in carrying out a scheme of
gradual development, the establishment of schools and even
colleges, with a large measure of co-operation by the natives
themselves, but always maintaining a superior, if friendly, atti-
tude. He called it trusteeship, and believed that it was the only
basis on which a happy relation between Afrikaners and Afri-
cans could be obtained. "It has far-reaching implications in re-
gard to education, health, and housing of the natives, which
call for much greater efforts than hitherto," he explained dur-
ing the present war. "Good relations between South African
troops and natives from various parts of the country whom the
war had brought together, are a happy augury." Yet he recog-
nized the almost insurmountable difficulties of the problem.
"Always, since the dawn of history, the race relation was the
most difficult field in the whole range of human activities. Here
in South Africa this old, primordial race feeling is complicated
by another strong factor: fear. The whites are a small minority
in regard to the dimensions of this continent an insignificant
minority actuated by motives of fear. In the twentieth century
the race feeling became strongly intensified. Nazism was held
to be the apotheosis of race. In Central Europe race has be-

455

OLD MASTER

come not only an idea, but a creed. In the Nazi ideology race
is God. The preaching of that doctrine has spread all over the
world. We in South Africa felt the effects of it particularly
strongly. The idea of the master race appealed to the fear mo-
tive. Some Afrikaners believe if they do not retain complete
mastery over Africans, they would be endangered.

"We tried to go round this fear by adopting segregation, by
keeping whites and Africans apart. The results have been dis-
appointing," he criticized his own policy of a few years before.
"Our hopes that whites and blacks would live happily together
were not realized. But now isolation has gone, and I am afraid
segregation, too, has fallen on evil days/'

In January 1942, Smuts took the last step forward: "Segre-
gation is dead," he proclaimed. Instantly he introduced admin-
istrative recognition of Native Trade-Unions. He demanded
higher wages and better opportunities for natives. Bantus
should share in old-age pensions, and the fact should be rec-
ognized that natives were now permanent urban dwellers. They
needed better housing, and particularly better food. "I cannot
allow the health of the Bantu people to deteriorate because
maize (corn) remains their staple diet," he told the Senate. "In
our own interest it is essential to raise the standards of living
among natives. Increased wages will do the trick; they would
also stimulate the consumption of our own products."

Smuts' volte-face in the native question is not quite com-
plete. South African natives have not yet the vote. In Parlia-
ment they are represented by three white members appointed
by the government. This measure of precaution seemed neces-
sary due to the Communist agitation which strongly appealed
to at least the urbanized colored people of South Africa.
Whether Stalin's dissolution of the Comintern will stop red
propaganda in the bush and in the mines is a matter of con-
jecture. Smuts, for his part, does not trust anyone but himself.
He makes his own radio propaganda among the natives. Three
times a week man and beast in the bush are startled by an in-
visible voice. "This is Lukasa calling. You will now hear the
news in Bemba, Chinyanja, Lozi, and Tonga. . . . The Bwana

456

OLD MASTER

Mkubwa's (great masters, the term the Germans applied to
themselves in their colonial days) forces have received another
beating. Their sea-alligators and fire-spitting crocodiles are rap-
idly being destroyed/' As soon as the bush negroes have learned
their lessons the sea-alligators and fire-spitting crocodiles will
be called U-boats, and "the Bwana Mkubwa's forces" Jerries.

The color problem in South Africa is by no means confined
to the natives. There is the huge colony of Indians, most of
whom sabotage the war effort. Smuts has no love for them.
When a number of rich Indian merchants complained that they
were unable to purchase real estate in Durban where they
already form half the population the Old Master advised them
instead to invest their surplus cash in war bonds.

Finally there remain five thousand Chinese, sons and grand-
sons of the indentured labor on the Rand. Fighting them,
Smuts had come into power. He never forgets a debt of grati-
tude. He recognizes that their descendants form an exception-
ally law-abiding, frugal, industrial community, who do not even
complain about a series of restrictive laws restraining their
economic rights.

Ever since his speech in Kimberley, delivered in 1895, which
had been his true baptism of fire in politics, Smuts dreamed
Cecil Rhodes' plan "from Cape to Cairo." He greatly enlarged
it. Smuts means the real thing: the whole black continent.

For almost four decades his English friends did not see eye
to eye with him. The native question stood between them. A
White Paper, issued in London in 1923, and still valid, declared
paramountcy of the Africans' natives' interest the bedrock of
British policy in Africa. The official policy of the Union, how-
ever, clung to the color bar and "trusteeship." In later years,
and primarily through the war, in which English and South
African troops have fought in exemplary comradeship with
colored and colonial units, both policies have moved closer
toward each other.

Smuts repeatedly assured that his plan of the United States
of Africa was a matter of economic interest and concern, not

457

OLD MASTER

competing with each other to the paths of peace and ordered
progress, and arranging its relations with the (Jefeated Axis
states, who should, at first, not be members of the association.
This new world society would follow positive and construc-
tive policies for the future, and not concern itself particularly
with penal or revengeful action toward old enemies. And in
this way, Smuts hopes, the world may forget its bitter wrongs.
"First and foremost we shall be called upon to put our own
house in our own democratic circle in order," Smuts concludes
his vision of the new world, "and ensure as far as possible
against the sort of dangers which have now twice overwhelmed
us in one generation. Leave the rest to time, to the workings of
ordinary prudence and sympathy and reviving generosity. Do
not let us attempt more than is wisely possible for the imme-
diate future after the war. Time is a great force, a great healer,
and a great builder. Let us leave it its place and its function
in our vision of the future."

The Old Master will certainly occupy a seat of honor at the
peace conference. He has rendered the cause of humanity
tremendous service during the war. Perhaps he will have an
opportunity of rendering even greater service when the war is
over. When there will be deep, almost mortal wounds to heal,
and gigantic tasks of reconstruction to fulfill, the world will
need his wise, tolerant, farseeing statesmanship, his philosophic
understanding of human nature, his unparalleled experience,
and his dauntless faith.

The Old Master does not advertise his faith. But once, in the
worst crisis of the war, he told his people: "I do not see the
man of Munich. I see the man of Galilee." And throughout his
blessed life, he has lived the Lord's word: "Love thine enemy."

460

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bell, F. W., "General Hertzog," Fortnightly Review, New York,

1924.
Benson, A. C., The Happy Warrior, Cambridge University Press,

1917.

Buchan, John, The African Colony, W. Blackwood and Sons, Edin-
burgh, 1903.

, The Pilgrim's Way, Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1940.

Churchill, Winston, From London to Ladysmith via Pretoria, Long-
mans, Green & Co.
Colvin, Ian Duncan, The Life of Jameson, E. Arnold & Co., London,

1922.
De Wet, Christiaan R. 5 Three Years' War, Charles Scribner's Sons,

1902.
Doke, J. J., An Indian Patriot in South Africa, G. A. Natesan & Co.,

Madras.
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, The Great Boer War, New York, McClure,

Phillips & Co., 1900.
Engelenburg, F. V., General Louis Botha, London, G. G. Harrap &

Co., 1929.
Fitzpatrick, Sir Percy, The Transvaal from Within, W. Heinemann &

Co., London, 1899.
Garvin, J. L., The Life of Joseph Chamberlain, Maomillan & Co.,

London.

Headlam, Cecil ed., The Milner Papers, Cassell, 1931.
House, E. M., Seymour, C., What Really Happened in Paris, Charles

Scribner's Sons, 1921.
Iwan-Mueller, E. B., Lord Milner and South Africa, W. Heinemann

& Co., London, 1902.

Levi, N., Jan Smuts, Longmans, Green & Co., 1917.

461

OLD MASTER

Millin, Sarah G., Cecil Rhodes, Harper & Brothers, 1933.

, General Smuts, Little Brown & Co., 1936.

, The South Africans, Boni & Liveright, 1927.

Neame, L. E., General Hertzog, Hurst, London, 1930.

, Some South African Politicians, Capetown, Maskew Miller

Ltd.

Nicolson, Harold, Peacemaking 1919, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1933.
Phillips, Sir Lionel, Some Reminiscences, London, Hutchinson &

Co., 1924.

Reitz, F. W., A Century of Wrong, Transvaal Government Publica-
tion, Pretoria, 1899.
Sampson, P. J., The Capture of De Wet, E. Arnold & Co., London,

1915.
Simpson, J. S. M., South Africa Fights, Hodder & Stoughton Ltd.,

London, 1941.
Smuts, Jan Christian, Holism and Evolution, The Macmillan Co.,

1926.

, Plans for a Better World, Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., London.

Trollope, Anthony ed., P. Haworth, South Africa, Longmans, Green

& Co., 1939.
The Cape Times, Forum (South African Newsmagazine).

462

INDEX

Abercorn, Duke, 277

Africa. See South Africa

Afrikander Bond, 27, 32, 36, 42, 44,

49, 60, 193, 289
Afrikander movement, 49, 66, 74-78,

81, 128, 140, 167, 172, 186, 188,

224, 297, 305, 357, 372, 391
Air force, 266-270, 353, 356, 378-407,

413, 426

Albert, King of Belgium, 262
Alberts, Colonel, 226
Allenby, Lord, 263
Allied Army, 262-355, 403, 416-459
American Expeditionary Force, 414
Anti-Semitism, 126, 210, 324, 329-370,

395, 409
Armaments, 84-86, 206, 212, 338, 351-

360, 376, 386, 424-428
Auchinleck, General Sir Claude, 422
Austria, rape of, 336, 346
Aviation, 265-267, 336, 353-356, 401,

413

Bailey, Sir Abe, 145, 318-321, 350
Bechuanaland, 51, 57
Belgrave, Lord, 77, 82
Beyers, General Christiaan, 116, 141,
149, 184, 193, 203, 209, 215-218,
222-228, 236-239
Blackshirts, 334, 344, 348
Blaine, Colonel C. H., 354
Bloemfontein, 27, 77, 83, 86, 97, 115,
130, 142, 172, 194, 208, 234,
249, 317, 358, 376, 380, 408
Bodenstein, Dr., 334, 340
Boers

abodes of, 18
accepting bribes, 54
armaments for, 84-88
demands of, 50, 125-128

education of, 22, 57, 150

fanning, 123-126, 168, 206, 286

government of, 17, 26, 70-96, 112

hospitality of, 18

internal strife, 247-250, 291-303, 335

lawmakers, 53

looting of, 225

nationalism of, 26, 48, 60, 189-196,

213-248, 271
Nazism among, 336-350
radical, 13, 24, 199
reconstruction of, 121-135, 244
repatriated, 125-127
self-government of, 112-115, 146,

148-210

Three Years' War, 91-103
Transvaal, 18-28, 48, 50-63, 70, 90,

104-119, 146, 171
union with Britons, 140-177
War, 46-48, 50, 91-110, 137, 149,
169, 172, 191, 210, 213, 223, 329,
354, 362, 391
Bohle, Ernst Wilhelm, 331
Borckenhagen, 27

Botha, General Louis, 54, 88, 95, 97,
101-104, 116, 120, 125-131, 136,
141-145, 149, 165-168, 176, 181,
187-191, 197, 207, 222, 231, 240-
250, 282, 285, 320, 361
Bourgeois, Lon, 272
Bourne, H. R. M., 224
Bovenplaats, 12, 14, 28
Bower, Sir Graham, 46
Brand, Sir John, 49
Brett- Young, Francois, 252
Brink, Major-General George, 445
British
air force, 266-270, 353, 356, 378-

407, 413, 426, 477
blitz on, 375, 387, 413, 449

463

INDEX

British-Continued

cabinet, 259-289, 312, 345, 351,

365, 426, 431, 449
campaigns, 97-103, 242, 250-265,

329-370

capture Johannesburg, 101
colonial expansion, 41, 60-67, 126
commonwealth, 334-370, 391, 410,

449, 459

cooperation, 132-152, 164
Defence Force, 213-253, 354, 365,

419, 431-455
fomenting trouble against, 64, 74,

80, 86, 89, 248, 347
gains, 97-103, 242, 250-277
House of Lords, 422
Imperial Conference, 293, 305, 311,

325-330
loans, 166, 364
mine owners, 124-153
Natal, 23, 25, 75, 87, 90, 112, 119,

156, 177, 288

navy, 185, 264, 338, 347, 364, 390
peace offer, 115-120, 172, 269-283
power menaced, 47, 74-96, 222-239,

329-347

prisoners of war, 277
proposals, 112-120, 272
R.A.F., 266, 353-356, 407, 413, 426,

477

reconstruction, 121-135
retribution, 126-130, 166, 364
sea power, 262, 264, 364
South African League, 72, 184, 225-

262, 329-347
suzerainty, 50, 52, 80
trade, 60, 292, 310, 348
Transvaal settlers, 52, 60-67, 126
troop ships, 364
Union with South America, 140,

163, 168-177, 245-347
War Cabinet, 181, 259-289, 338,

430
war with, 90-103, 105, 222-259,

264, 347-457

Brits, Colonel, 219-221, 235
Brockenhagen, Carl, 60
Buchan, John, 123
Burgers, President, 21-25
Butler, Sir William, 87
Buxton, Lord, 260
Byron, Colonel, 185

Campbell-Bannerman, 118, 147-149
Cape Colony
British administration in, 15, 144-

152
Dutch fanners in, 12, 27, 104, 123-

126, 129, 134, 169
education in, 31-37
Jameson Raid in, 45-48, 59, 64, 183,

289

self-government of, 17, 26, 49
unrest in, 72-76, 92, 107, 271
Cape Town

description of, 15
farming, 13, 151, 168
government of, 16-20, 183
legislation, 175-178, 186
politics, 17, 43, 62, 104, 128, 182-

186, 341

wine growing, 13

Carnegie Commission of Inquiry, 330
Casablanca, 389
Cecil, Lord Robert, 272-274
Celhers, Colonel-Commander, 226,

397, 418

Centenary Celebration, 335
Central Powers' surrender, 268
Cetewayo, King of the Zulus, 23
Chamber of Mines, 53, 296-298, 316
Chamberlain, Joseph, 45, 75, 84-88,

103, 114, 130, 159, 362
Chinese coolie, 72, 133, 135-148, 160
Christian National Education Move-
ment, 150

Churchill, Winston, 98-103, 119, 148,
262, 266, 329, 367, 371, 409, 423-
450

Classens, Commander, 226
Collyer, General J. J., 354
Colored problem, 23, 27, 51, 60, 99,

124, 178, 257-259, 271, 377
Connaught, Duke of, 180
Conradie, Dr. G. E., 338
Cotzee, Major Ben, 226
Creswell, Major Frederick H. P., 135,
179, 190, 204, 244, 250, 292, 296,
306-314, 411

Crew, Colonel Sir Charles, 141
Cronje, General Piet, 58, 97
Cullinan, diamond, 164-168
Cunningham, Lt.-General Alan, 389,

413

Cunningham, Sir John, 447
Cunningham, Sir Thomas, 276

464

INDEX

Curzon, Prime Minister Viscount, 263 Fischer, Abraham, 77, 80, 186

Dakins, Sir Clinton, 138

Dawson, Geoffrey, 123

Defence Force, 183, 193, 213-216,

224-234, 237-253, 354, 365, 419,

431
Defence Plan, 184, 193, 213-216, 224-

234, 254, 365
De la Rev, General Christian, 88, 93,

103-105, 113, 116, 120, 127, 132,

140, 169, 193, 210-218, 223
Derby, Lord, 52
De Souza, 99

De Valera, Eamon, 294-296
De Villiers, Bruckner, 336
De Vilhers Roos, Tielman Johannes,

187, 192, 226, 246, 260, 291, 298-

300, 312-315, 317, 396, 423
De Vries, Catherina Petronella (mother

of Smuts), 15, 28
De Wet, General Christiaan, 93, 96,

104, 106, 116, 120, 128, 194, 221-

239, 246
Diamond mines, 16, 27, 36, 43, 53,

63, 95, 124, 134-140, 145, 151,

165, 291

Dill, Sir John, 401
Diverge, Chief of Gestapo, 333
Dmowski, Roman, 272
Dopper sect, 24

Duncan, Sir Patrick, 123, 293, 414
Durnford, Colonel A. W., 23
Dutch farmers, 12, 27, 104, 123-126,

129, 134, 169
politics, 17, 27, 41-58, 60, 64, 71-

96, 141-197, 243-245, 291-303
Reformed Church, 21, 69, 128, 150,

192, 221, 245, 298, 326, 333, 371,

380, 392, 407

Du Toit, Commandant S. P., 234
Du Toit, Reverend J. S., 383
Dynamite controversies, 53, 72-74

Eden, Anthony, 401

Education, 22, 57, 124, 150, 171, 180

Edward VII, King, 112, 165, 180

Eighth Army, 347-440

Electoral campaign, 177-187

Elgin, Lord, 148

Farrar, Sir George, 151, 166-168, 198
Ferguson, Bob, 70

Fitzpatrick, Sir Percy, 71, 76, 166-168
Foch, General, 282
Foreign Relations Committee, 272
Fourie, Japie, 227, 238-240
France, collapse of, 374
Franchises, 56-58, 80, 89
Fraser, Lt.-Governor, 114, 231
Free Staters. See Orange Free State
French, General Lord, 107, 111

Gadow, J. W., 336

Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, 153-

165

Garvin, 322
Geneva, 335, 373
George V, King, 294, 310
George VI, King, 405, 431
German

agents, 206-211, 332-370

arming South Africa, 85-92, 210-
220

barbarity, 178, 217, 240, 257-263,
358

blitz, 374

clemency for, 266-275, 280-283

conspiracy, 208-226

driven out, 240

expansion, 269, 331

fl oggmg, 257

industry, 331-340

infiltration, 47, 55, 58, 85-90

in the Transvaal, 47, 55, 58, 85

intrigue, 206-211, 332-440

invasion, 207-257, 329-447

Nazism, 313-447

propaganda, 206-211, 332

protectorate, 85

reparations, 273-275

successes, 374

terrorism, 256-258, 332-370

trading with, 243, 311

U-boat menace, 264, 355, 416, 426,
435-438, 445

war with, 210-325, 347-457
Gibbs, Sir Philip, 322
Gladstone, Gov.-General Lord, 28, 48,

118, 196

Goebbels, Dr., 92, 343
Gold industry, 101, 124-145, 194-200,

214, 244, 286, 297

Goold-Adams, Lt.-Gov. Major, 114,
144

465

INDEX

Gorringe, Colonel, 107

Grant, Baron, 52

Greene, Sir Conyngham, 72-74, 89,

163
Greyshirts, 334

Hamilton, General Ian, 113

Hanbury-Williams, Colonel, 77

Hatherley Distillery, 53

Hatzfeld, Fuerst, 85

Haushofer, Dr., 331

Haw-Haw, Lord, 342

Hay, Adelbert S., 99

Hertzog, Advocate Albert, 340

Hertzog, James Barry Munnik, 33, 94,
114-119, 143, 170, 176-196, 199-
203, 207, 215-221, 229, 239, 250-
269, 287-296, 306-322, 334, 337-
347, 358-361, 418, 429

Het Volk, 132, 140, 149, 179

Hirschfelder, 333

Hirsekorn, Dr., 339

Hitler, Adolf, 317-447

Hobhouse, Miss, 105, 133, 136

Hofmeyr, J. H., 32, 42, 49, 320, 351

Holland, rape of, 362

Holm, Eric, 342

Hopley, Major, 179

House, Colonel, 273

Hymans, M., 273

Imperial Conference, 293, 305, 311,

325-330
Imperial War Cabinet, 181, 259-286,

338, 430, 448

India, 89-91, 135, 153-163, 178
Insurrection, 221-225
Ireland, 294-296

Jagger, J. W., 293

Jameson Raid, 45, 46, 48, 59, 64, 183,

289
Jameson, Sir Starr, 43, 45, 51, 57, 85,

171, 176, 180-185, 289
Japan, 292-294, 369, 416-420, 428,

445

Johannesburg

British soldiers in, 100, 121-135, 364
Chamber of Mines, 53, 296, 316
child mortality in, 63
conflict in, 42-48, 53, 56, 96, 195-
200, 247-250, 291-303, 348, 373
education in, 57, 373

fall of, 101

fortifying, 86

gold mines in, 101, 124-145, 194-

200, 214, 244, 286, 297
high treason in, 74
industry in, 27, 36, 43, 124, 145,

194-200, 244
Kruger's rule in, 42, 56-73, 104,

134, 151

labor trouble in, 194-205, 286-303
mining in, 95, 124, 134-140, 194-

200, 244

monopolies in, 53-61, 72
settlement in, 63
strikes in, 196-207, 209, 291-303
taxation, 48

thriving city of, 63, 122-126
uitlanders in, 38, 48-61, 63, 71, 74-

77, 115, 126
upheaval in, 206-210
Jones, Bishop of Cape Town, 15

{ordaan, Colonel, 235-237
oubert, General Piet, 54, 88, 90, 94,
99, 152, 216, 226, 229

Kaffrarian Watchman, 62

Kafirs, 12-15, 58, 96, 99, 124, 134,

197, 210, 219, 246, 291, 301-

305, 313, 335
Keena, U. S. Minister, 416
Kemp, General, 113, 222, 226, 240,

271, 361, 368
Kerr, Philip, 123, 171
Kunberley diamond mines, 27, 36, 43,

53, 63, 95, 184
Kitchener, 96, 105, 107, 111-122, 127,

146

Koo, Chinese Minister Wellington, 273
Kotz6, Chief Justice, 66, 380
Kramarsch, Dr., 273
Krause, Dr., 64, 101
Krige, Sibylla Margareta, 35, 45, 61,
63, 414
Sir Gideon, 62
Kruger, Johannes Paulus, 24, 38, 42,

45, 47-59, 62-73, 77-90, 101, 104-

107, 114, 134, 151, 329, 357, 362
Kun, Bela, 275-280

Laas, Col. J. C. C., 383-388

Labor trouble, 133-144, 194-205, 244,

286-303, 348
Labouchere, 88

466

INDEX

Land Bank, 165-171
Lawrence, Harry G., 336, 385, 444
League of Germans Abroad, 331
League of Nations, 268-283, 285, 314,

459

Leeper, Allen, 275
Leitner, Dr., 334, 357
Lend-Lease Act, 405
Lenin, 271-275

Leuchars, Col. Sir George, 186
Levi, Nathan, 224
Leyds, Dr., 47, 55, 61, 64, 67, 72-74,

85, 87, 105, 362
Liebenberg, General, 221
Lindsay, Henry, 166
Liquor traffic, 53, 70
Lloyd George, 119, 148, 261-267, 274,

280-283, 294, 432-435
Louw, 62

Luckhoff, Rev. Wilhelm, 381
Lusitania, 243
Luttig, J. C., 17
Lyttleton, General, 127, 413

Majuba Hill, defeat of English at, 28,

48, 50, 78, 82, 118
Malan, Daniel Frangois, 30, 192, 246,

251, 298, 303, 326, 336, 345, 358-

363, 376, 385, 391, 408-411, 418,

428

Malet, Sir Edward, 84
Maritz, Colonel "Mannie," 108, 209,

216-220, 229, 240, 338
Marlborough, Duke of, 103
Maraues, Lourenco, 335, 380, 386
Marshall, Baron, 85
Marvell, Andrew, 50
Masaryk, 279
Matabeleland, 44, 51, 71
Memman, 62
Methuen, Lord, 127
Middleburg proposals, 115-120
Milner, Sir Alfred, 48, 59-64, 72-84,

87-90, 104, 113-122, 125-128,

132, 135, 141, 146, 158, 171, 263-

265, 272, 293, 301, 415
Mining industry, 27, 36, 43, 53, 63,

95, 124, 134-145, 151, 291, 301-

316, 365, 386
Minorities, protection of, 273-277,

283, 325, 329-370
Molento, Prime Minister of Cape

Colony, 17

Monopolies, 53-56, 72-74, 80, 95

dynamite, 53, 72-74

liquor, 53, 70

mines, 57, 95

transport, 56
Munich, 337, 351, 460
Mussolini, 335, 353-356, '407, 425, 445

Natal, 18, 20, 23, 25, 75, 87, 90, 112,
119, 156, 177, 228, 333, 427

National Convention, 176

National Supplies Control Board, 348,
444

Naval superiority, 178, 185, 264, 338,
347, 355

Nazism, 296, 313, 329^51

Netherlands, fall of, 363

Nicolson, 275

Orange Free State, 20, 27, 48, 77, 93,
97, 104, 114, 144, 170-176, 179-

182, 194, 203, 216, 221, 234, 249,
324, 361, 380, 408

Orenstein, Dr. A. J., 365, 407
Orlando of Italy, 273
Ossewa Brandwag, 381-402, 412, 423,
429

Pamleve", Paul, 262

Palestine, 263, 285, 314, 457

Peace proposals, 73, 112-120. 125,
172, 269-283, 452-460

Pearl Harbor treachery, 416

Permanent Court of International Jus-
tice, 273

Peruvian peddlers, 19

Phillips, Sir Lionel, 152, 168-171, 180,

183, 195-197, 296

Pienaar, Brigadier-General Dan, 354,

397, 424

Pirow, Dr Hans, 360
Pirow, Herr Oswald, 246, 313, 336-
338, 351, 354, 359-362, 381, 397,
409, 417
Political parties

Bolshevist, 271, 280, 291, 410

Coalition, 320, 326

Communist, 245, 292, 299, 410, 456

Conservative, 144-147

Dopper, 56

Labor, 179-181, 192, 208, 244, 272,

296-317, 326, 346
Liberal, 78, 118, 140-149

467

INDEX

Political parties Continued

Loyalist, 209-220, 226-239, 411
Nationalist, 204-208, 243-248, 304,
309, 320, 336-347, 364-377, 421,
428

Nazism, 329-437
Progressive, 58, 145-148, 166-169,

179

Radical, 199-205, 208, 298
Republican, 66-78, 86, 109, 145,

330, 412

South African, 188-194, 216
Unionist, 179-207, 248-253, 292,

304, 329, 339-346, 351
Political unrest, 26, 47-50, 53-58, 64-

100, 145-249, 286-353
Popcock, M. P., 351-353
Pretoria, 23, 25, 27, 42, 55, 61, 68, 72-

96, 154, 372, 452
civil administration in, 127
fortification of, 87
looting in, 102
mining in, 354
political unrest in, 71-90, 187-196,

208, 222, 341
Three Years' War, 91-103
university, 180, 372, 379
war clouds in, 73-96, 214-242, 335,

348
Pretoria Volktem, 68

Quinn, Hon. J. W., 239

Racial relations, 14, 15, 23, 48, 51, 81,

99, 126, 172, 178-186, 298, 324,

329-370

R.A.F., 266, 353-356, 407, 413, 447
Rand, The, 132-142, 176, 194, 199-

203, 243-245, 271, 296-298, 304,

329, 348, 386, 419, 426
Rebellion, 222-239, 291-303, 396
Reconstruction period, 121-132, 244,

444

Reitz, Deneys, 203
Reitz, F. W., 72, 89, 91
Repatriation, 125-135
Revolution, 31, 221-239, 267, 302
Rhodes, Cecil John
arrival, 16, 36, 60
campaigner, 37, 42-45, 58, 95, 171
Cape Parliament, 27, 42, 49, 62,

183, 289, 305, 313
death of, 96

influence of, 37, 43-49, 60-64, 76,
92, 178, 193, 246, 305, 313, 457
Kimberley mine owner, 43, 95
united self-governing Africa, 42, 47

Ribbentrop, 343

Roberts, Lord, 95-98, 103

Robertson, 264

Robinson, Sir Hercules, 78

Rommel, Field Marshal, 406, 419, 427,
430

Roosevelt, President, 389, 405, 431

Royston, Colonel, 228

Rustenberg, 31

Rutkowksy, Miss, 333

Salisbury, Lord, 85-87

Schacht, Dr., 333

Schalk-Burger, 77, 112, 114

Schreiner, Olive, 43

Secocoeni, 23

Seitz, Governor, 217, 242

Selborne, Lord, 146, 171

Self-governing states, 37, 42, 142, 148,

151, 295

Shelton, Colonel, 109
Shepstone, Sir Theophilus, 18, 23, 25
Slavery

abohtion of, 27, 148

treatise on, 34, 71
Smartt, Sir Thomas, 185, 249, 288
Smith-Domen, General, 250
Smuts, General Tobias, 233
Smuts, Hon. Jacobus Abraham, 13-17,

28-30, 37, 43, 109
Smuts, Jan Christian

agriculturist, 151, 168, 307, 334

air lord, 266-270, 352-357

anti-British, 60, 74, 81, 89, 94-109

apprenticeship of, 29

at Cambridge, 38

at Victoria College, 31-37

barrister, 40, 61, 120, 128

birth of, 16

cabinet member, 152-186, 289-365

characteristics of, 29-32, 40, 65, 69-
82, 97, 105, 134, 223, 248, 251,
443

childhood of, 65, 223, 389

children of, 65, 223, 389

Churchill and, 119, 148

crusader, 89-112, 269-277, 283, 325,

329-370
defeat of, 107, 307, 315

468

INDEX

Smuts, Jan Christian Continued
English influence, 34-45, 61, 64,

143-425 ,

escape of, 103, 108
father of, 12-15, 28, 37, 43, 109
Field Marshal, 31
Gandhi and, 153, 160-164
General, 30, 65, 97, 108, 203-249,

406
German clemency asked, 269-277,

283, 325, 336
guilt of, 283
health of, 16, 110, 251-255, 305,

370

Hertzog against, 188, 271
honors won, 38, 40
Imperial General, 251-280
in Afrikander Movement, 49, 66,

77, 128, 140, 167, 172
in defence force, 183, 193, 213-253,

354, 365, 419, 431
in Ireland, 294-297
in Parliament, 152, 165-303, 311-

330

in Pretoria, 68-76, 89, 94-103, 128
journalist, 41, 45, 61, 65, 92, 171
Kruger's influence on, 45-93, 151
leader, 104-132, 203-249, 406-457
marriage of, 63
memory feats of, 30-32
Minister of Defence, 347
mother of, 15, 28
orator, 44, 62, 131, 144, 189, 204,

370, 402
peace plans of, 73, 120, 172, 269-

283

philosopher, 143
political leanings of, 45, 60-62, 68-

76, 92, 152-277
pro-British, 132-453
publicity, 137, 177
Rhodes' influence on, 36, 43, 45-

62, 76, 92, 178, 193, 246, 305,

313, 324, 457
soldier, 104-110, 143-452
state attorney, 68-103
strategist, 89, 105, 252, 263
sympathies, 80-109, 132-260, 267-

270, 329
war strife, 169-194, 208-250, 276-

325, 347-456
wife of, 35, 105, 129, 223, 287, 387,

414

writings of, 33, 39, 41-45, 61
South Africa

abolition of slavery in, 27
agriculture in, 123-126, 168, 206-

210, 286, 293, 361
air force in, 356, 378-407, 413, 426,

477
anti-British attitude in, 51, 60, 64-

78, 102-114, 179, 206
armed forces in, 85, 141, 196-259,

280-325, 347-457
Boer nationalism in, 26, 48, 60, 271,

329

bombed, 386
British in, 23-27, 41, 52, 60, 76,

103-135, 240-265, 347-356
broadcasting in, 356
colored problem in, 23, 27, 51, 60,

178, 257-259, 271, 377
conquest in, 242-258
conspiracy in, 210-223
crises in, 85, 141, 196-220, 259
development of, 121-135, 141
diamond rush in, 16, 27, 63
Dopper Party in, 56
economic problem in, 195-205, 296-

303
education in, 22, 57, 150, 171, 181,

373

epidemics in, 206, 253
Free Staters of, 27, 49, 76, 93, 104,

114-116
Germans muscling in, 47, 55, 58,

84-87, 178, 206-255, 331-447
guerrilla warfare in, 106, 189
House of Assembly, 30
immigration in, 182-187
industrial, 27, 36, 42, 53, 95, 124,

134, 355
irrigation of, 207
Jameson Raid, 45-48, 59, 64
Johannesburg. See Johannesburg
labor trouble in, 134-137, 194-205,

244, 286-303, 348
League, 72, 184, 225-262, 338
mining in, 27, 36, 43, 53, 63, 95,

124, 134, 145, 244, 355
monopolies in, 53-58, 70-74, 80
native treatment in, 99, 126, 178,

257

navy, 178
Nazism in, 329-447

469

INDEX

South Africa Continued
political unrest in, 26, 47-58, 64,

71-96, 141, 148-239
racial relations in, 15, 23, 48, 51,

81, 99, 126, 172, 186, 298, 325
rebellion in, 222-239, 396
reconstruction of, 121-132, 244, 444
refugee government in, 106
Republic, 23, 27, 50, 52, 73-75, 81,

88, 91, 118-122, 146, 158, 226
revolution in, 31, 221-230, 302
self-governing states of, 37, 42, 142,

148, 151, 295
slavery in, 27, 34, 71, 148
smuggling in, 54
strikes in, 195-205, 291-303
taxation in, 54, 181, 297
Three Years' War in, 46, 91-103
trade, 292

Transvaal. See Transvaal
treaties, 52, 115-121, 126, 131, 268-

285, 314, 446, 459
Union of, 11, 33, 42, 47, 60, 142,
163, 168-199, 245-249, 282, 286-
347
United States of, 42, 47, 146, 305,

457
unrest in, 53-58, 64-90, 286, 291-

303
war in, 26, 48, 91-103, 188-259,

276-347, 377-406, 419, 424
Soviet Russia, 299, 409, 424, 431, 451
Spies, 206-211, 832
Stallard, Colonel, 328, 351
Stellenbosch, 31-37, 39, 61-65, 94,

377
Steyn, President of the Free State, 77,

79, 94, 106, 112-115, 234
Stiller, Counsellor, 348
Stoffberg, T. C, 29-31
Strikers, 194-205, 291, 297-303
Sudeten crisis, 336-339
Suez Canal, 13

Table Mountain, 11, 220, 331, 422
Tariffs, 54, 169, 310
Taxation, 54, 181, 207, 297
TChaka, Lion of the Zulus, 252
Tedder, Air Marshal A. W., 413
Theophilus, Sir, 23
Theunissen, Gert Hendrik, 372
Three Years' War, 46, 91-103
Tobruk, fall of, 418-426

Transvaal, The

agriculture in, 12, 25, 123-126, 129,

134, 169, 361
annexation of, 25, 104
armaments in, 84-86, 228
as a republic, 23, 27, 48-52, 67
Boers in, 18-28, 48, 50-63, 70, 91-

109, 112-116, 146
British settlers in, 52, 60-67, 126
collapse of, 17, 101-104, 157
compensation to, 125
conflict in, 23, 27, 42, 47, 60-67
corruption in, 53-61, 70
defeat of English in, 27
delegation, 80
Dutch bigotry in, 54-60, 64
economic development of, 122-131
education in, 22, 57, 150, 171, 180
English relations with, 50, 52, 60,

72-100, 104-132, 145-276
executive council in, 89
financial status of, 21, 25, 56, 133-

137

fomentation in, 64, 91-120
franchises in, 56-58, 80, 88
Gandhi in, 153-163
German infiltration, 47, 55, 58, 85-

90, 178, 206-255, 331
independence of, 82
industry in, 27, 36, 43, 53, 95, 124,

134

invasion of, 23

Jameson Raid in, 45-48, 59, 64
Kruger's rule in, 45-93, 107
labor shortage in, 134-137, 148
land bank in, 165-171
legislation in, 48-58, 60, 66, 132,

170, 305

loans to, 166, 364
military service in, 71
monopolies in, 53-58, 80
nationalism in, 26, 42, 48, 169
parliament in, 152, 165-167
payment to, 119

peace proposals in, 112-120, 125
politics in, 24, 47, 58, 144-177, 189,

317

progress in, 49, 95, 124, 134
reconstruction in, 121-135, 158
reformers in, 71
revenues of, 48-54
slave labor in, 71
surrendering parts of, 117

470

INDEX

Transvaal, The-Continued

tariffs in, 54, 169, 310

trading in, 20, 26

uitlanders in, 48-63, 71-79, 115,
126, 398

United Party of, 360

unrest in, 26, 48-100

war in, 91-113
Treaty of

Hay-Paunceforte, 268

League of Nations, 268-285, 314,
459

of 1894, 52

of Vereemging, 115-121, 126, 131

of Versailles, 269-283, 446

U-boat menace, 264, 355, 416, 426,

435-438, 445
Uitlanders, 38, 48-61, 63, 71, 74-79,

115, 126, 398

enfranchisement to, 79, 88, 115
Union Cabinet, 177-187, 193-197, 245-

249, 282, 286-347, 379, 388, 416
Union Jack, 28, 44, 211, 214, 227,

276, 305, 310
Union of South Africa, 11, 33, 42, 47,

60, 142, 163, 168-187, 182, 184,

225, 242-260, 282, 286-293, 313,

346, 372, 416, 459
Union's Defence Force. See Defence

Force
Uys, Captain, 237

Van de Venter, General Sir Jacobus,

108, 226

Van der B?l, Dr., 355
Van Huyssteem, P. H., 380
Van Kleffens, Dr., 451
Van Rensburg, Advocate Hans, 192,

210-211, 240, 394-396, 412
Van Ryneveld, Sir Pierre, 354, 389
Vereemging Union, 115-121, 126, 131,

193, 260, 270, 328, 398
Versailles Treaty, 269-283, 446

Victoria College, 31-37

Victoria, Queen of England, 76, 77,

86

Volksbode, De, 42
Volksraad, Republican Parliament, 24,

49, 53, 57, 66-68, 70-72, 78, 83,

86-88, 101, 109, 145
Voortrekker, 13, 19, 21, 24, 27, 51,

335, 358, 372, 395, 400, 411
Von Herff, German Consul, 85
Von Lettow-Vorbeck, General, 252-

256

Vorster, Rev. Jacobus Daniel, 379
Voss, Kate, 342

Wales, Prince of, 45, 103, 309

War clouds, 73-96, 169-194, 208-250,

276-325, 347, 407-453
War Priorities Committee, 265
Waterson, S. F., 422, 444
Wavell, Sir Archibald, 401
Weichardt, 334
Weizman, Dr. Chaim, 448
Welfare and Economic Development,

444

Western Front, 262
Weston, Frank, 256
White Paper, 457
Wilhelm II, 59, 85, 105, 178, 203,

209, 213, 225, 252, 331
Wilhelmina, Queen, 363, 435
Wilson, President Woodrow, 262, 268-

274, 280-283, 288
Winant, Ambassador, 431
Wine industry, 14
Wolmarans, 77
Wood, Sir Evelyn, 28
World War I, 105, 108, 164, 178, 205,

210-267, 276, 325, 407, 423
World War II, 347-453

Young Afrikander Movement.
Afrikander Movement

Zapp, Manfred, 332

See

471

K

s

S3

127946