Professor Barnard and the Isaac Malherbe corporalship September 7, 2009
Posted by Jenny in Boer War, memoir, military history.Tags: Boer War, C.J. Barnard, Deneys Reitz, Isaac Malherbe, J.L. de Villiers, Pieters Hill, Pretoria
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British naval gun at Pieters Hill, Natal
In February 2005 I was fortunate to meet Professor C.J. Barnard in Pretoria. He was the author of a book about Louis Botha and the phase of the Boer War that was fought in Natal from 1899 to 1900. I had been studying papers of Boer fighter Deneys Reitz at the Brenthurst Library in Johannesburg and drove up to meet Professor Barnard. It was my first experience driving in South Africa, and after a bit of confusion in downtown Pretoria, I found the professor’s house.
His modest house, surrounded by a wall and set back from the street, turned out to be stuffed to the brim with the Boer War. The war’s people, its events, all lived in the teeming floor-to-ceiling file cabinets and bookshelves. At Brenthurst, the war had been just one of many subjects—the librarians were probably happier to work with the beautiful illustrated tomes about African flora and fauna—but here I had arrived at an epicenter of Boer War scholarship. So much dedicated reading, searching, striving, thinking had been accomplished by the tall, congenial man who graciously invited me into his sanctum.
We talked about Reitz’s life and the reasons why he hadn’t published his 1903 memoir soon after returning from his post-war exile in Madagascar. Professor Barnard thought that by the time Reitz fully recovered from his malaria, convalescing for many months at the Jan Smuts household, he felt that everyone was tired of the subject. Many others had published their memoirs, and Reitz was inclined to get on with his life. I was interested in Barnard’s simple judgment about the difference between the unpublished memoir and the much-edited version that was published in 1929 under the title of Commando. “The original manuscript had more feeling,” he said.
We talked about the Isaac Malherbe corporalship. This was a group of about 20 young men, a subunit of the Pretoria commando, who had elected the 25-year-old Malherbe to be their leader. Malherbe was much admired by Reitz for his way of instantly determining the place where men were most needed within any conflict and leading his men straight to the danger point, as if by magnetic attraction. Malherbe and the rest of the corporalship, those who had not already been killed or captured at Spion Kop or earlier, were wiped out at Pieters Hill on February 27, 1900, in a massive barrage of artillery followed by a charge of Scots Fusiliers and Dublins with flashing, thrusting bayonets. The air would have been alive with voices, there would have been a great deal of shouting and screaming. By chance (a chain of circumstance involving Reitz’s uncle), the Reitz brothers had not been on that hill, they had not been brushed by the gliding black shadow.
Professor Barnard spoke of the members of the Malherbe corporalship as if he knew each one personally. Barnard knew which ones were members of the Pretoria Rugby Football Club, their ages (all teens and twenties), which ones were married, their occupations. He told me the story of Jan de Villiers, who escaped from a British prison camp in southern India by dressing as an Indian. He made his way by rail and on foot to Pondicherry, which was French territory. Ill in a hospital, de Villiers found himself in a bed next to the captain of a Norwegian ship. The captain took him to Marseilles, and de Villiers eventually returned to South Africa to fulfill his destiny as an engineer in Potchefstroom.
J.L. de Villiers in garb he used to escape prison camp
I later saw a picture of de Villiers posing in the garb he had used to escape the Indian camp. He wears a turban, and he has one of those moustaches that grows straight out to the sides, ending in sharp points that continue the undeviating east-west direction rather than curling up in handlebar style. He has a white tunic and white leggings. He wears what look like Boer shoes that have had the toes cut out to make them look like sandals. He stands on an ornate Victorian-style carpet, and behind him is a photographer’s studio backdrop that has a little bit of everything: waves lapping against a rocky shore, a Grecian urn entwined with ivy, and a cluster of tropical-looking flowers.
Our discussion moved on to the guerilla phase of the war. Barnard thought it important to impress on me that General Botha, commander of Transvaal forces, had a complete plan of battle entered into a notebook that he carried with him at all times. Barnard emphasized this to counter any notion that the Boer campaign had become chaotic and disorganized at that stage. The notebook contained a complete listing of commandos and generals, and Barnard pulled a transcription of it from one of his file cabinets to show me. I was struck by his determination to understand that page of the Boer past, when the weight of the Empire was steadily crushing them, as the working of disciplined and meticulous minds. Having since read the memoirs of De Wet, Viljoen, and others, I am inclined to agree with him.
The professor generously took me out to lunch. Pretoria has changed much in recent years. The metropolitan area is now known by its African name, Tshwane. The large old buildings have colorful encrustations of awnings, tables on the sidewalks, street vendors, and street activity. It is one of the many patterns in which white and black coexist in present-day South Africa: a growth of exuberant black forms of life upon old white structures, like beings thriving on a coral reef. As we walked along, I felt that the tall slender man with silver hair was entirely apart from his surroundings, like a sepia-toned photograph amidst color images. The world described in his file cabinets has become nearly invisible now.
The fork in the gully July 13, 2009
Posted by Jenny in hiking, literature, spy novels, travel.Tags: Boer War, Department of Information, Greenmantle, John Buchan, Mr. Standfast, Scotland, The Three Hostages, Thirty-Nine Steps, World War I
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Stob Ban in the Mamores, one of the peaks probably used as a model by John Buchan
John Buchan, the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, liked to set his characters desperately running across dangerous mountains. He was the best describer of mountain landscape of any novelist I have read. He understood about ridges and gullies, headwalls and scree slopes. And he seemed more interested in places like the boilerplate slabs of the Black Cuillen than, say, the north face of the Eiger or the heights of Everest, which have gotten very overexposed.
I was thinking about Buchan lately because I came across a negative description of him in a history of World War I, The Pity of War by Niall Ferguson. Buchan was apparently very active in churning out propaganda for Britain’s Department of Information. And I can hear a tinny sound in his voice, the note of the propagandist, when I read a work like Greenmantle, published in 1916. The worst problem with Greenmantle is not the references to battle or “looking forward to being in at the finish with Brother Boche.” It’s the characters made out of tinsel: “As she stood with heightened colour, her eyes like stars, her poise like a wild bird’s, I had to confess that she had her own loveliness. She might be a devil, but she was also a queen.” Oh, dear.
I kept myself amused while turning the pages of Greenmantle by testing myself on all the references to the Boer War and the 1914 Maritz Rebellion— for one of the leading characters, Peter Pienaar, is said to have been born in Burgersdorp in the Cape Colony. That’s a good choice—makes Pienaar a British citizen but from a pro-Boer town near the Free State border. Buchan, like many other Englishmen who spent time in South Africa during or soon after the war, seems to have been divided between admiring the veldcraft of the Boers and insisting on the noble cause of the Empire. Pienaar is described as a consummate outdoorsman, but: “When the Boer War started, Peter, like many of the very great hunters, took the British side and did most of our intelligence work in the North Transvaal.” Well, yes, probably because all of the great hunters’ clients would have been wealthy Brits.
Actually, the best part of Greenmantle is the section where Peter Pienaar and Richard Hannay are pretending to be followers of Manie Maritz who are now selling their services to the Germans. And that’s not just because I’m interested in the South African references. It’s because the other thing that Buchan does really well, apart from writing about mountains, is convey the sound of a smart, world-weary traveler who’s been knocking around the globe, in much the same way you find in Somerset Maugham or Graham Greene: “His clothes were of the cut you might expect to get at Lobito Bay…. I talked Portuguese fairly well, and Peter spoke it like a Lourenco Marques bar-keeper, with a lot of Shangaan words to fill up. He started on curacoa, which I reckoned was a new drink to him…” And so on. This stuff is all good and durable, a picture of a long-gone world.
The mountains in Greenmantle are in the wilds of eastern Turkey near Erzerum. I don’t know if Buchan ever spent time there, but he seems to have been less than thoroughly familiar with that region, so he made the mountains look like South African ones, complete with precipitous krantzes. He does better with mountains in Mr. Standfast, where he visits the Black Cuillen of Skye, and in The Three Hostages, where his character Hannay fights it out with the villain in the Scottish highlands.
Glen Nevis from Stob Ban
His place in the highlands is called Machray, and as far as I can figure out, it is a composite of some real places. He names the following mountains: Stob Ban, Stob Coire Easain, Sgurr Mor, and Sgurr Dearg. Two could be in the Mamores, one on Skye, and two elsewhere in western Scotland. (The names seem to be common ones that mean things like “white peak” and “big peak,” and are found more than one place in Scotland.) Sgurr Dearg is famous for the “Inaccessible Pinnacle” that rises from it. (All of the photos in this post are from Wikimedia Commons—places I’d love to go but haven’t been.)
Stob Coire Easain
At the end of The Three Hostages, Richard Hannay is climbing up a gully on the looming, precipiced mountain of “Sgurr Dearg” with the enemy, Medina, coming after him. One of the two, you can easily see, is not going to come out of this alive. Hannay scrambles up the gully, working around “a rather awkward chockstone,” and comes to a fork. The left branch looks hopelessly difficult, and the right seems to offer more handholds. But then Hannay recalls looking at the same gully from a higher ridge, on a previous trip:
I had come to the conclusion that, while the left fork might be climbed, the right was impossible or nearly so, for, modestly as it began, it ran out into a fearsome crack on the face of the cliff, and did not become a chimney again till after a hundred feet of unclimbable rotten granite.
So he goes up the left and manages to claw his way around some obstacles on “an extreme poverty of decent holds.” After various dramatic vicissitudes, Medina tries to follow, but he takes the wrong fork—he goes for the one that starts out looking more doable but that ends on the impossible face. And Medina falls to his death.
What I really like about this episode is that there is no moral symbolism in taking the wrong fork. Buchan is not saying, “Medina took the way that looked easier, and so naturally he ended up failing because it is morally superior to go the harder way.” He is just narrating the way a path in life can have an unpredictable fork. The slant of the propagandist is not evident here, in a place where it would have been easy to throw in some grandiose higher meaning. I don’t mean that the book could have been literal propaganda (The Three Hostages was published in 1924), just that the mindset is sometimes hard to get rid of.
Inaccessible Pinnacle on Sgurr Dearg
The grave of Louis Leipoldt April 7, 2009
Posted by Jenny in Boer War, history, literature.Tags: Boer War, Louis Leipoldt, San art, Pakhuis Pass, Clanwilliam
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After visiting “The Englishman’s Grave,” I continued along the dirt road that steadily uncurled and unscrolled toward Clanwilliam. I was in the Cederberg region of South Africa, investigating about the Boer War.
The road between Calvinia and Clanwilliam
I stopped several times to take pictures of the interesting rock formations. None of the pictures turned out. They are small and dull, while the actual places are huge and luminous. That always seems to happen with my pictures. As I drove along in my tiny car that had no air conditioning, on a day when the temperature was 42 degrees Celsius, or about 107 degrees Fahrenheit, I noticed another small sign along the way. This was something peculiar about my whole trip: I did not seem to read about things in advance—they just loomed up unexpectedly and caught my attention, like things encountered along the winding path of a dream.
This sign said, “The Grave of Louis Leipoldt.” I had no clue who Louis Leipoldt was, and my ignorance remained perfect the day I stopped at his grave, for there was no explanatory marker. But when I think back on it, I am glad that there were no words to disturb the ineffability of the place.
A metal gate stood at the beginning of a short path that led toward a rock overhang on the side of a bluff. The gate seemed old-fashioned, like something one would find on a farm. It was a clangy, swinging-on-the-wind kind of gate, and it displayed within a tidy metal square a name in block letters, on two lines:
C. LOUIS
LEIPOLDT
The lettering style was different in some subtle way from any styles familiar to me as an American: the gate and the sign as a whole had a mysterious and talismanic appearance.
I walked to the overhang, passing close to some of the inventively shaped sandstone boulders that I had been admiring along the road. The rock had a warm color, like living flesh. I approached the grave. It stood on a level rock floor beneath the overhang, which seemed like a cave when I reached it, a distinct space to be entered across a threshold. Above the grave, on the wall of the cave, I made out faded paintings of animals: created by the San, the bushmen. I knew that to be the case even though there was no label.
San art at Louis Leipoldt's grave
Now that I have finally learned a little bit about Louis Leipoldt, I can think of several reasons why it is a good thing that his grave at Pakhuis Pass has no explanatory marker. It is a grave, not an exhibit in a museum; explanatory words would intrude on the perfect silence of the place: it would be hard to find the right words to describe such a complex person.
You can read a little about him here. He has some things to say about the Boer War, as a person caught in the vicious crossfire of loyalties in the Cape Colony around 1901 and 1902, and I will write about his haunting poem “Oom Gert’s Story” in another post.
