Deneys Reitz in WWI/ Why take the British side? February 7, 2010
Posted by Jenny in Boer War, World War One, military history.Tags: Deneys Reitz, Francis William Reitz, Jan Smuts, Louis Botha
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Reitz had fought against the British at Spion Kop
This is the second part of a series that starts here.
When the First World War broke out, many Boers sympathized with the Germans more than with the British—even though the consequence of the Boer War (1899-1902) was that they were all now British citizens. Many truly hated “the English” with a vengeance, still dreaming that their independent republics—the Transvaal, the Orange Free State—might somehow be restored to them.
Deneys Reitz had fought the British from the very beginning to the very end of the war, from the age of 17 to 20. Following the Treaty of Vereeniging in June, 1902, he went into exile in Madagascar rather than pledge loyalty to King Edward. Yet, in WWI, he not only fought in Germany’s African colonies with the army of the British-aligned Union of South Africa, he went out of his way to journey as a volunteer all the way to Europe and join the British army on the Western Front. What made him change his thinking?
When Reitz went to Madagascar, he tried to start a business conveying goods by ox cart. But he ran into endless problems. The steep roads through the mountainous jungle weren’t suited to ox convoys. The heavy wagons tumbled off precipitous paths and broke through the planks of rickety bridges. The enterprise became a financial disaster, and he couldn’t pay the wages of his wagon drivers.
Madagascar highland plateau
He was also suffering from severe malaria. Quite often he had to rest in the jungle for days, drenched in sweat, his teeth chattering with fever. Pursued by creditors and wracked by illness, he decided to flee Madagascar. On a strange and delirious journey, aboard a succession of boats that bumped along the African coast, he finally resolved to go home to South Africa, though none of his family were there. His father had gone to Texas—having read admiringly of George Washington successfully fighting the British—and his brothers were scattered far and wide. He was barely alive by the time he got back. When at last he arrived at the Pretoria train station, he collapsed unconscious on the platform. A former comrade, Ben Coetzee, recognized him, and he was taken to the home of his former commando leader, Jan Smuts.
He was back in Pretoria by December 1903, according to information I have obtained from his family, but Reitz seemed later embarrassed at having abandoned his decision to go into exile in a fairly short time. He was vague about the timeframe in his account in Trekking On, and in his third book, No Outspan, he referred to “eking out a precarious existence for some years” in Madagascar. He needn’t have been embarrassed. It was financially and physically impossible for him to stay in Madagascar or to strike out on a new course anywhere else.
Jan Smuts in the Boer War
It took him several years, convalescing at the Smuts household, to fully recover from the malaria. Eventually he took up the study of law, and he left Pretoria in 1908 to start his own practice. During those years in Pretoria, he had contact not only with Smuts but with Louis Botha, who had been Commandant-General of Boer forces during the war. Botha would become the first prime minister of the newly created Union of South Africa in 1910. Smuts and Botha took the stance that South Africa could only move forward in a changing modern world by way of cooperation between citizens of English and Dutch descent. (Blacks were of course invisible in this picture and would remain so for many years.) During the peace talks in 1902, those two had maintained a more conciliatory position than their crusty compatriot Christiaan De Wet. By that final stage in the war, the Boer population was literally starving and many of the women and children had been put in concentration camps. In the face of this reality, the stubbornness of De Wet was something like an impossible, mystical state.
Louis Botha in the Boer War
When Reitz returned from his exile, the malaria became a barrier that separated two parts of his life. From the adventures of war and exile, he didn’t go into a different mode of activity but actually into unconsciousness. Out of this time of shapeless existence, new ideas were able to form.
In looking for the reasons for his change of heart, some might say that in those years he “came under the influence” of Smuts and Botha. But that isn’t really quite right. Of course he listened to what they said, and it’s clear from his writings that he agreed with the substance of it. Yet there was something already in him that predisposed him not to live in the past—not to live out his years wishing the old days of the Boer republics could come back. He’d always been a skeptical person, unsentimental, having no taste for the mystical, the emotional, the hysterical. He risked his life for abstractions like independence, but once he’d made up his mind on any course, his approach became quite practical. He was an interesting combination of things: an idealist with a lot of common sense who was willing to put up the ultimate fight.
# # #
The sheet music shown below is for a song called “Farewell to the Vierkleur,” written by Francis William Reitz, the father of Deneys Reitz and formerly the state secretary of the Transvaal Republic. The Vierkleur was the four-colored flag of the Transvaal. On the occasion of the signing of the Treaty of Vereeniging, F.W. Reitz had ceremoniously buried the Transvaal flag, tears in his eyes. (The illustration shows the Transvaal flag on the right and the Orange Free State flag on the left.)
"Varwel aan de Vierkleur"
Pinnacle Mountain February 3, 2010
Posted by Jenny in hiking.Tags: Pinnacle Mountain, South Carolina mountains, Table Rock State Park
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Looking southwest from Bald Knob on Pinnacle Mountain
When road and trail conditions are bad in North Carolina, what is the solution? South Carolina!
Last fall I climbed Table Rock with a group of friendly hikers based in Brevard. From that experience, I knew that Table Rock, at 3,124 feet, is not actually the highest point in the immediate vicinity, though it hogs most of the attention because of its stunning cliff bands. (It looks like a cousin of Looking Glass Rock. They are both plutons.) The highest point in Table Rock State Park is its neighbor to the west, Pinnacle Mountain (3,425), which is the state’s third highest summit. So, what more obvious hike to do, especially since the park is only an hour away from where I live?
This hike had some unusual themes. I will call them the “false alarm” theme and the “ice bucket” theme.
From the nature center, the trail begins as a paved pathway that winds along Carrick Creek. This very beautiful stream tumbles and glides over one waterfall after another. High water levels brought out the best of the falls, all the extra embroidery and curlicues of the foaming water as it raced over the smooth granite ledges.
Carrick Creek shows off some of its waterfall tricks
I enjoyed the cascades just as much as the waterfalls.
I liked the copper color of the water reflecting the light
Where the pavement stopped and the Carrick Creek trail branched off from the Table Rock trail, I met a man coming the other way. He told me, “I got to the first creek crossing and turned around. The stepping stones were underwater, and boy, that water looked really fast!” I thought to myself, Gee, maybe I should have brought my hiking poles (I’m not usually much of a pole user). I thanked him for the warning and told him I’d take a look, maybe turn around and go by an alternative route.
It was the first instance of the “false alarm theme.” I got to the stream crossing, saw that the stepping stones were about an inch under water, and just walked right across. The depth of the surrounding water was maybe…nine inches? A foot? Mighty Carrick Creek would have had quite a struggle to sweep a human being downstream unless perhaps the human being weighed less than 30 or 40 pounds, which was not the case with my friendly fellow hiker. I continued along and ran into him again at an upper junction. He congratulated me on having made the crossing, and we chatted a few minutes. He told me that he had recently moved into the countryside from Simpsonville, which was just “wall to wall people.” I hadn’t heard of this metropolis before, and when I got home I looked it up in my atlas: pop. 11,700. Hmmm…
I continued along the Pinnacle Mountain trail and did the spur to Mill Creek Falls, which I found a bit disappointing, but I later discovered that I had not actually reached the official lookout point. The trail was covered with a few inches of snow amidst the shady laurels, and I mistakenly thought I had reached the end of it where it came close to the top of the falls.
The falls dropped off here, and I really couldn't see much
I retraced my steps back to the main trail and continued toward Bald Knob. At about 2700 feet, I started running into the “ice bucket” conditions.
This was surprisingly difficult to deal with
It wasn’t snow, it was chunks of ice, just like what comes out of the dispenser down the hall at the motel.
Perfect for chilling a bottle of champagne
I churned my way up through this for a while, my feet slipping and sliding. I had the microspikes in my pack, but I don’t think they would have helped with this. Finally I reached Bald Knob, and had a view over to Table Rock.
Table Rock in the distance
At Bald Knob, I ran into a woman who asked me which way I was going. When I told her I was going to loop around on the Ridge trail and Table Rock trail, she said, “Watch out for ice on that side. Anything that looks wet might be ice, and it’s very slippery.” From my map it looked as though the Ridge trail might be on the shady north side, so I could imagine it might be icy. I continued the climb toward the summit of Pinnacle Mountain. My hike description spoke of a “steep ascension,” which sounded vaguely religious to me, instead of a “steep ascent.” Finally I reached the top, which was adorned with signs warning against trespassing into the Greenville municipal watershed.
The mighty summit of Pinnacle Mountain
I then started my way down, watching vigilantly for the treacherous ice I’d been warned about. I soon realized, however, that the trail did not go across a shady north slope but stayed on the sunny crest of a ridge. “When am I going to start running into this ice?” I kept wondering. Well, I never did encounter anything more than slushy snow. It was the “false alarm” theme again.
It reminded me of an experience I had last year in the Evans Notch area on the New Hampshire-Maine border. As I was going along a ridge and preparing to descend into the valley, I encountered a couple who said, “Be very careful going down the headwall. It’s quite dangerous.” I thanked them and went on, then started to wonder what “headwall” they might be talking about. My trail down was one I hadn’t taken before, so I thought possibly there might be something hazardous in the steep section of the descent. Well, apart from one slightly awkward descent down a steep ledge, there was nothing that posed a problem at all. But it was distracting to wonder, “Did they think I was going a different way? Did they really think this was a ‘headwall’? Was it something about the way I looked…???”
Then, to cap it off, as I neared the junction with the Table Rock trail, I met a hiker who asked me if I’d come around the “front side” of Pinnacle Mountain. When I said yes, he said, “I thought about going that way, but I decided not to. Didn’t want to deal with those stepping stones!” I just barely managed to keep a straight face.
I left the snow behind as I descended the Table Rock trail. As I walked between the giant boulders on the mountain’s south side, a wonderful warm breeze came up. It was a breeze that somehow brought a feeling along with it, hard to describe, something to do with summer evenings and enjoyment and romance. Some combination of things that I haven’t experienced for a long time.
The water looked like topaz above this waterfall
Deneys Reitz in WWI/ Introduction. February 1, 2010
Posted by Jenny in World War One, military history.Tags: Deneys Reitz, Pat Barker, Paul Fussell
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Reitz midway between the Boer War and WWI. Photo courtesy of Conrad Reitz.
This is the introduction to a series. There are two sides to it. One is that quite a few people are familiar with the exploits of Deneys Reitz in the Boer War,* but not so many know about his experiences in the exponentially larger conflict that started twelve years later—and these experiences deserve wider attention. The other side is that I’d like to present an alternative to the way of looking at WWI that has been in fashion for quite a few years.
Many people would agree that the war was caused by a series of errors and misjudgments, and that it was horrifying in the scale of its casualties—around 33 million total on both sides if you include the wounded and prisoners as well as deaths.
Chateau Wood Ypres 1917
It is also easy to be dismayed by the nature of trench warfare on the Western Front, which is the part of the war that Anglo-Americans pay attention to. We have all seen pictures of the duckboards meandering through the bottomless mud, the skeletal trees, the corpses trapped on the barbed wire or rotting in the trenches. These things seem grotesque, and the chain of events that led to the war seems absurd. In the prevalent way of seeing the war, that is where we stop: with the grotesque and the absurd.
Wilfred Owen
Ever since Vietnam, we Americans have seen wars that way. During the Sixties Vonnegut and Heller showed us how to see WWII as grotesque and absurd, in Slaughterhouse Five and Catch-22. We mostly ignore WWI, which left us nearly unscathed, but the British had their war poets and war writers to reread and reinterpret: Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden. Although many of their writings could not accurately be described as “anti-war,” this was the spin that was put on them in the late 20th century. The Anglophile American Paul Fussell wrote about these figures in The Great War and Modern Memory, and the British novelist Pat Barker incorporated Owen and Sassoon in her prize-winning trilogy, Regeneration.
The mood of these late 20th century works is sentimental beneath a brittle shell of irony. The courage of soldiers is presented in order to say that the courage was swallowed up by meaninglessness. We are meant to feel melancholy.
But reading Deneys Reitz on his experiences in WWI is far from a melancholy experience, even though he describes many scenes of death and devastation. His account is down-to-earth, detailed, and sometimes humorous. And it never has a trace of jingoism.
He was a born soldier, and his writing indirectly shows exactly what that means. He exercised individual competence within a broader frame that was under no one’s control. When the juggernaut of WWI finally stopped, the western world was nearly unrecognizable. New states were formed, colonies redistributed, monarchies toppled, republics created, economies wrecked, populations shifted. This to me seems not so much an occasion for the wringing of hands as an example of the geological weight, the astronomical scope, of history.
But how can the experience of one soldier be weighed against the whole war? I’ll come back to this question at the end of the series.
* For a bit of background, click on the “Boer War” and “Transvaal Citizen” page tabs above.
Stretcher bearers, Battle of Thiepval Ridge, September 1916
