The Covenant

  Detleef would surely have married Maria Steyn not long afterward, except that Reverend Brongersma came to the farm with news that carried him off to wholly new adventures in education: ‘I have the most exciting development to discuss with you, Detleef. Some time ago I wrote to a group of professors at Stellenbosch, telling them two things: that you were good at studies and unusually good at rugby. They want you to come there to pursue your studies.’

  ‘What studies?’

  ‘I would say philosophy and the sciences. And it would please me greatly if you found it in your heart to enter the ministry. You have a strong character, Detleef, and I think you could be of notable service to the Lord.’

  ‘But who will tend the farm?’

  ‘Piet Krause and Johanna. I’ve spoken to them.’

  ‘He can’t live here and teach in Venloo.’

  ‘Recent events have spoiled him, Detleef. He no longer wants to be a teacher.’

  ‘He won’t be very good at farming.’

  ‘No, but he’ll look after the place till you get back. And then we’ll see what happens.’ He paused and rubbed his chin. ‘You know, Piet is a remarkable man. He could move in any direction if God ever shows him the right one.’ He laughed. ‘You have found your path.’

  ‘And what is it?’

  ‘To get an education. To serve God and your society.’

  It was a long journey in miles from Vrymeer to Stellenbosch, a much greater one in mental and moral significance, for this quiet town with tall trees and white buildings had become a beautiful and seductive educational center like Cambridge in England, or Siena in Italy, or Princeton in America, a town set apart to remind citizens of how splendid colleges and libraries and museums could be. It was an Afrikaans-speaking place, heavily tinged with religious fervor, but also imbued with an intense speculation about the nature of politics in South Africa, and its professors were some of the most astute men in the nation.

  At first Detleef was merely a big, bumbling oaf from the country, forced to compete with the sharper minds of lads who had matured in places like Pretoria, Bloemfontein and Cape Town, but when he settled down in the home of a clergyman’s widow and navigated his first term of advanced trigonometry, beginning philosophy and the history of Holland in the golden century, all of which he fumbled rather badly, he found his sea legs, as it were, and proceeded firmly into his second set of courses, in which he began to display the solid learning he had mastered in the good school at Venloo.

  He was especially attracted by his older professors, those men of learning, some from the university at Leiden, some from Oxford, who saw their nation as it actually was, a mix of cultures striving to achieve a central tendency, and he found to his astonishment that two of the classes he enjoyed most were taught by Englishmen, in English. But he appreciated them as he might an especially provocative class in Latin; these men were dealing in historic materials that were long since dead, and if they did so brilliantly, they did so nevertheless with a sense of the mortuary, and he knew it.

  The men who exerted the deepest influence were the younger professors who discussed contemporary values, the future of South Africa, its current crises. There were no courses in such subjects, but the better professors knew how to slip relevant teaching into their lectures. In 1916, for example, there was much discussion of how the war in Europe would terminate, with some professors still convinced that Germany would win, but conceding that her victory would not mean much constructively to South Africa, which would face a new set of problems. One man warned: ‘I cannot see Germany surrendering Lourenço Marques to us when she conquers it from Portugal. It will be her port, not ours, and indeed, she may drive a harder bargain for its use than the Portuguese did.’ Hardly a day passed but what some challenging idea was extruded, sometimes painfully, always cautiously, and his mind expanded with this new aspect of learning.

  Living in the house of a predikant’s widow, and buttressed by constant pressure from Reverend Brongersma back in Venloo, it was natural that Detleef should fall into the orbit of the professors of religion, and they quickly saw in this able young man a likely prospect for the pulpit. He was inherently devout and well informed on Biblical matters; both his father and the old general had taught him from the time-scarred Bible, and the predikants of Venloo had been a virile lot, preaching a durable version of the Old Testament, while Barend Brongersma had introduced him to the subtleties of the New, so that by the end of his first year it was generally assumed that he would be heading for the ministry.

  As had been the case for the past hundred years, one of the most influential voices in the Dutch Reformed clergy at Stellenbosch was a Scotsman, a devotee of John Knox named Alexander McKinnon, whose ancestors had been Dutch-speaking Afrikaners since 1813. It was he who introduced Detleef to the persuasive teachings of the conservative prime minister of Holland, Abraham Kuyper, who had promulgated new theories on the relationship between church and state. It was from McKinnon that Detleef first gleaned an appreciation of the fact that South Africa might soon have to evolve new patterns for contracts between the races. On this subject McKinnon was most conservative, going back to a strong Calvinism to support his contention that races, like people, were foreordained to either salvation or damnation: ‘Obviously, the Bantu are the children of Ham, as the Bible explains.’ Detleef noticed that like most cultured people these days, he avoided the pejorative word Kaffir, using instead the curious word Bantu, which more accurately was the name of a language, not that of a tribe or nation. ‘Obviously, the Bantu as a group cannot be among the elect, although individual Bantu can become highly educated and just as favored of God as the finest Afrikaner. Individuals can be saved, but the race as a whole is certainly condemned.’

  But in the latter part of his first year at Stellenbosch all such matters faded into insignificance, for the university discovered that in Detleef they had a natural-born rugby player, and in a nation increasingly mad about sports, this attribute superseded all others. He was a thick-necked block of granite, tested in real battle, and extremely quick in adjusting to the movements of the enemy. He played forward, and in the scrum his shoulders disrupted the opposition, breaking holes in their line, while his feet were unusually nimble at hooking the ball or sending it forward. He was a stubborn chunk of aggression who could absorb punishment without flinching, and as such, he was invaluable.

  The Stellenbosch fifteen were known as the Maties because of their strong sense of fraternity; they were a formidable combination, capable of playing the best regional teams, but their special delight came in defeating the Ikeys of Cape Town, so-called because that university admitted a goodly number of Jews, who were not exactly welcomed at Stellenbosch. Any Maties-Ikeys game was apt to be exciting, and in the first one Detleef played, he excelled. From then on he was accepted as a member of the Afrikaner group that specialized in sports, and by virtue of this he traveled to many parts of the country, playing against the men who would later occupy positions of leadership, for in South Africa there was no passport to preferment more effective than membership on the Stellenbosch rugby team.

  These were the years when the game was dominated by one sensational family, the Morkels, and sometimes Detleef would go up against a team that fielded six players with that name, or seven. Twenty-two Morkels were playing in this decade: brothers, cousins, unrelated solitaries, all of them stout lads. Detleef knew it was going to be a strong game whenever he bent over in the scrum and found himself facing two or three of these rugged types. Once, the four biggest men facing him in the tight confrontations were Morkels, and he left that game, as he told his coach, ‘as if I had slipped by accident into a threshing machine.’ He was not surprised when an entrepreneur announced plans to invade Europe with a team composed only of Morkels; it would be formidable.

  It was as a rugby player that Detleef finished his first year at Stellenbosch, and it was principally because of this reputation that he attracted the attention of the Van Doorns who operated the f
amous vineyards at Trianon. One afternoon, to the house in which he boarded, a Bantu came bearing an invitation to Detleef van Doorn to take dinner that evening with his Trianon cousins. It was the day after a game in which five horrible Morkels had run up and down his spine, so he was not exactly lively, but he had heard so much about Trianon that he accepted, and rode out to the winery.

  Like many before him, he gaped when he approached the western entrance and saw for the first time those enchanting arms reaching out and the pristine façade of the main house waiting to welcome him. The war years had been good to Trianon; General Buller had paid top prices for its premier wine and other officers did the same for the lesser blends, so that the Van Doorns had sold their entire pressings for European prices without having had to pay freightage to get the bottles to that market. In all respects the place had been improved, and now looked pretty much as it would through the twentieth century.

  On the stoep, resting on one of the tiled benches built two centuries earlier by Paul de Pré, waited Coenraad van Doorn, head of the establishment, who had extended a similar welcome to Jakob in 1899, on the eve of the Boer War. He was heavier now, a man in his late forties, and his manner was even more affable, for life had been exceedingly good. He loved sports and was proud to have a member of his family, even one so remotely associated as Detleef, playing well at Stellenbosch.

  ‘So this is the hero I’ve been reading about, the Matie who sweeps them aside!’ Extending both hands, he drew Detleef up to the stoep and in through the front door. In the wide hallway between the rooms Detleef saw for the first time the Van Doorn daughter, Clara, nineteen years old and so pretty she caused him to gasp. Her face was beautifully oval, with cheekbones just a bit too wide, and framed by carefully brushed amber hair worn in a kind of Dutch-boy bob. She smiled warmly as she stepped forward to greet her distant cousin, and said, ‘We are so happy to see such a rugby player in our home.’

  At dinner her two older brothers, Dick and Gerrit, who had by now graduated from Stellenbosch, asked a barrage of questions about the university and their chances of beating the Ikeys again, and the evening proved to be one of the most pleasant Detleef had ever spent. It was fortunate that it was occurring at the end of his first year, because by now his success at rugby had transformed him from an awkward country lad into a self-confident university man, quiet-spoken and interesting. When talk turned to the war in Europe, he repeated some of the things he had heard in class, predicting a German victory in Europe but no significant change in the countries bordering South Africa.

  ‘What I feel precisely,’ the older Van Doorn said, and as Clara walked with Detleef to the automobile that would take him back to his lodgings she said, ‘You’ve been learning something at the university. Come back and share your knowledge with us.’ He started to protest that he really knew very little, but she halted him: ‘No! My brothers went to Stellenbosch and they learned precious little.’ It was as if she rode in the car with him back to town, so vivid was his recollection of her lovely bearing.

  He spent two weeks trying to invent some excuse for returning to Trianon, and then one night the driver was there again with a note: ‘Dr. Pretorius of Paarl is coming to dinner and would like to meet you. Clara.’ It was the beginning of a thrilling experience, for Pretorius was active on a committee agitating to have Afrikaans accepted as the legal equivalent of Dutch and he was excitable about the matter: ‘Acts of Parliament must be printed in Afrikaans. Our major newspapers should convert to it immediately. I’ve been speaking with our leading clergymen. I want our Bible to be in our language.’

  ‘Are they ready for that?’

  ‘No. In that quarter I receive much opposition. But consider. For three centuries in the late Middle Ages people spoke one language and read their Bible in Latin. That had to change.’

  ‘The Catholic church still conducts its Masses in Latin.’

  ‘That will change, too. The day will come when your daughter here is married by a predikant reading the service from an Afrikaans Bible.’

  ‘You think so soon?’ Mrs. van Doorn asked. ‘I’m afraid you’ll be an old maid, Clara, if you wait for that.’ Clara did not blush, but Detleef did.

  After one agitated flight of speech, Dr. Pretorius looked about the room as though to command close attention, then said in a softer voice, ‘I want to speed the acceptance of our true language because it can become the chief agency in uniting the Afrikaners of this land and inspiring them to wrest the government from the English.’

  ‘We have the numbers already,’ Coenraad pointed out.

  ‘But without a central soul, numbers are nothing. And what is the soul of a people? Its language. With Afrikaans we can capture this nation.’

  At a subsequent meeting, at which he especially wanted Detleef to be present, Pretorius faced up to the accusation, launched by Coenraad, that Afrikaans was a second-class peasant language: ‘Exactly, and that’s why its vitality is assured. It will be precisely like English. And why is that language so effective?’

  Each listener offered some reason: ‘No declension of nouns.’ ‘Few subjunctive verbs.’ ‘Strict word order, which assures meaning.’ ‘A lot of quick short words to indicate case.’ ‘A simplified spelling.’

  Clara said, ‘And if English spots a good word in another language, it takes it … with no apologies.’

  At each idea, Dr. Pretorius nodded approvingly, then asked permission to read from the work of a distinguished Danish scholar who was exploring this subject: ‘He is Dr. Otto Jespersen, world-famous authority, and he says, “The English language is signalized by order and consistency … Simplification is the rule.” And here he makes a point which relates specifically to our new Afrikaans: “Whenever I think of English and compare it with other languages, it seems to me positively and expressly masculine. It is the language of a grown-up man and has very little childish or feminine about it.” ’

  He asked Clara to pass out slips of paper, and when they all had pencils he directed them to write this sentence in English: We ourselves often took our dogs with us. ‘Four pronouns to express the first person plural. Now see what happens when we write the same sentence in Afrikaans: Ons onsself het dikwelf ons honde saam met ons geneem. One word—ons—to convey all those meanings.’

  ‘But isn’t the English more precise?’

  ‘It is indeed. Just as the Latin forms agricola, by the farmer, agricolae, to the farmer, are more precise than the farmer. But we refuse to bother with such niceties. Prepositions are so much simpler. One word for farmer. Sixty prepositions to define relationships.’

  From another pocket he produced a handful of sheets on which verses from Matthew, Chapter 6, had been printed in English:

  9. Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.

  10. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.

  11. Give us this day our daily bread.

  12. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

  He pointed out how relatively simple this was, and how direct. He then asked the Van Doorns to study other sheets of paper, where the same verses appeared in the Old Dutch of their 1630 Amsterdam Bible.

  9. Onse Vader die daer zijt inde Hemelen: uwen name worde geheylict.

  10. Drijckje kome. Uwen wille ghejchiede op der Aerden gelijck inden Hemel.

  11. Gheeft ons heden ons daghelijcks broodt.

  12. Ende vergheeft ons onse schulden. Gelijch wy oock vergheven onsen schuldenaren.

  He read this aloud twice, stressing the beauty of the flowing Dutch they had learned as children and still used when reciting their prayers. He obviously cherished the rhythms of this version, but indicated that it would be better when translated into Afrikaans, of which he gave a sample:

  9. Onse Vader wat in die hemele is, laat u Naam geheilig word;

  10. laat u konindryk kom; lat u wil geskied, soos in de hemel net so op die aarde;

  11. gee ons vandag ons daaglikse brood;

  12.
en vergeef ons ons skulde, soos ons ook ons skuldenaars vergewe …

  ‘Ah!’ he cried triumphantly. ‘How excellent!’ And he went over the new translation, line by line, indicating its superiority: ‘See how much simpler the Afrikaans is, how purified of old encrustations. This is to be the language of the future, believe me.’

  When the two older Van Doorns protested that they did not want their Bible tampered with, he said bluntly, ‘The generation that is forty years old when the change comes will know an agony of the soul. After that we will be a new people.’ When Coenraad tried to voice another doubt, he said abruptly, ‘Remember, if John Calvin were alive today, he would be using a Bible in Afrikaans.’

  Detleef, back in his room, balanced the two versions of a word he loved: The old Nachtmaal becomes the new Nagmaal. I don’t like it. The mystery of night is lost. And for the first time he sensed that many great good things of ancient virtue might be lost during a normal lifetime: the women he had loved so much in the concentration camp, the sturdy virtues of General de Groot. He stared at the night and could not sleep, but as dawn broke he thought: It’s my duty to save the good old things.

  While Detleef was enjoying these varied experiences, the young men of the Saltwood families were pursuing their studies in a much grimmer classroom. Near the city of Amiens and east of the great battle site of St. Quentin was a hunting preserve known as d’Ellville Wood, and both the Allies and the Germans realized that this grove of trees would prove crucial in the tremendous Battle of the Somme.

  The German high command issued the order, ‘D’Ellville shall be taken, regardless of cost,’ at exactly the time when the Allied command said, ‘The wood must be held at any cost.’ A titanic battle to the death had become inescapable.