The Visitors (20 page)

Frankfort Garrison,

Orange Free State

3 November 1900

Dear Charlotte and Adeliza,

I would love to hear your news, yet have received no letters from you for months. How is life in Kent? I am glad to say I did finally receive your packages which all came together, with chocolate and socks, sweaters and sleeping caps. I am afraid it is summer here now and getting hotter by the day, so they won’t be so useful as yet. But perhaps I will be here next winter, who knows? And I can use them at night. Thank you for those lovely handkerchiefs embroidered by you, Liza, which I have ruined by blowing my nose on them, but that is their purpose, after all. Thank you all very much for your kindness.

I write from the Frankfort garrison. We are stationed here for the next few weeks at least. It is a cut-off place subject to constant raids by Boer commandos, which affords a bit of excitement. The only other fun is the arrival of supplies. Every month or so a British column of wagons comes to bring us newspapers, clothes and extra kit, ammunition, rations and post. Some men go off with the column that delivers to us, and some of the column’s number are left behind here in their place. So there is always feverish anticipation about who will stay and who will go. So far, I have been chosen to stay here all the while. I am quite glad, as it has meant I remain not far from Camp Irene and have awaited my chance to visit there. I have to tell you something now that may shock you, may even sicken you. I am in two minds whether to tell you the real truth about all this, as you are ladies and not used to such things. But I feel that people in England should know exactly what is going on. So I hope you will forgive me. Remember my silly horror stories I would tell by the fire? This is a true one that is all the more horrible for being real.

A few days ago, our patrol picked up a group of wandering Boer women and children. Wallis and I were ordered to take them over to Camp Irene. They were exhausted, very hungry and some of the children were ill. One woman had a scrawny newborn babe, clearly born out on the veldt. The whole group were in a state. Their skin was thick with grime and their clothes were ragged, their dresses tied up with string. They wore gloves and veldschoens (Boer shoes) made from raw sheepskin. Not at all like Maria’s clean white apron and her son’s shining hair, as I remember it, despite having lived on commando for weeks. But these women had lived alone without protection or supplies. Maybe we would all look a little like this if we had lived wild for many months. These seemed to be a lower class of Boers, with some shoddy ideas about cleanliness and health. One child had a revolting skin rash which looked very angry and its mother had placed upon it a poultice made of cow dung, which she swore was the best remedy. We were allowed only to give them some basic rations and then get them on to the train. We told them they could be seen at the hospital at the camp. But they wept and shouted at us, saying they would never go into the camp hospital, as it was staffed by the English who can never be trusted. They were in a sorry state the whole journey and I did what I could by getting them water. Wallis treated them largely with disdain. I had quiet words with him at one point, when he shouted at a Boer child who never stopped crying. But Wallis is sick at heart of this war and the Boers in particular. He blames them for declaring war in the first place and for it dragging on this long. Sometimes he takes it out on them. He is a good man, Wallis, a good friend. I understand him. But I feel a little differently.

When we arrived at the camp, we saw the women in and they were taken away. The train moved on and we knew the next one coming back was several hours’ wait. Wallis was all for getting out of there and waiting at Irene station. But I told him I wanted to find Maria. He didn’t approve and told me so, saying some things I won’t repeat about her and Boer women in general. I believe he is trying to protect me somehow but I was having none of it and he stalked off alone. I asked a guard about the whereabouts of Mrs Uitenweerde and her son. Records were checked and I was directed to a group of conical tents not far from the hospital. I saw the women we had brought involved in a great argument outside it – a brick building, well-built, with several marquees beyond it for patients; two nurses and a doctor were trying to persuade the women to bring their sick children in to care for them, but they shook their heads and held on to their children ferociously. They would not go in there. ‘We would rather die,’ cried one woman.

I found the place easily, as the camp was laid out with military straightness in rows of thirty tents, each tent and row given their own number. This may sound orderly, but the tents were pitched very close together on rocky and stony ground, while the pathways between them were littered with rubbish. I stood outside the bell-shaped tent, not knowing how to announce my arrival, as I could not knock on canvas. I called out her full name. Eventually a flap opened and I saw a face. It was a thin, drawn face with dark shadows beneath the eyes, an older woman. I asked her if Mrs Uitenweerde was in that tent. A warm stink of bodies came from within, which made me cover my nose. The woman said, ‘It is me.’ She stepped out and stood before me. To see this skinny thing, so bedraggled and brought so low, to compare it with the feisty young woman I had met only two months ago, made me sick to my stomach. She looked as if she had aged ten years.

‘Maria,’ I said and stood there like an idiot. Despite her weak state, she stood straight and pushed out her chin as she always had. She asked me if I had brought her anything. I had to say no, and felt a fool. Why had I not brought her food or something, anything? My only excuse is that I knew nothing of the conditions in that camp, not until that day. She asked me why I had come then, so I explained about the women and said I had to go soon, but I wanted to check up on her and see how she was doing.

‘Are you treated well?’ I asked, knowing as I spoke what an insult it was to ask this ghost of a woman, who had dwindled to half her size in a matter of weeks.

‘Come with me,’ she said. She poked her head back in the tent, and spoke in her own language, perhaps telling someone to watch Jurie while she was gone. I asked after his health and she just shrugged. She walked slowly beside me and showed me around the camp, telling me everything she had been through since I saw her last.

I asked about family she had here, the reason she had come to this camp. She told me that before she arrived, there had been a fire in one of the tents which had spread to a number of others and her cousin had been caught in the fire and died of his injuries. She said that people were usually in a bad way when they arrived, as many were taken there by force and allowed to bring no provisions. Khakis burned all the Boers’ things before they left, their clothes and bedding, even their own tents which most Boers have, being used to the trekking life. And some British soldiers encouraged the local Kaffirs to loot the house first and take part in its destruction. Some came with only the clothes they stood up in and some were even forced to march barefoot all the way. Some women had been captured after days of trying to escape and came with untreated gunshot wounds.

I knew many women did not choose to enter these camps, but surely it was safer for them to come here than to stay alone out on the veldt, prey to roaming Hottentots while their husbands were away, and with no food or supplies?

Maria said this was untrue, that they had plenty of food on their farms, and knew how to use a gun and protect themselves. She believed the camps were set up to protect the men who had surrendered without a fight – the ‘Hands-uppers’ as they are called here – from Boer revenge. It was never to protect the women. ‘How can you think it is safer to come to this place?’ She gestured towards a row of tents and pulled back the flap of the first one for me. Inside, the ground was quite covered with children, lying top-to-toe like sardines. They were groaning, sleeping fitfully, some weeping and calling for their mothers. Maria said, ‘They are waiting to die.’ I asked what was wrong with them. She explained that there was a measles epidemic, and typhus too. But some were dying from exposure, from the cold nights out on the veldt in the flimsy tents. There is hardly any wood for fuel and the children freeze at night. Some had developed pneumonia and hacking coughs that killed them. Some simply died of diarrhoea.

I told her I’d seen the Boer women we’d brought refuse to go into hospital. Why would they do that, when their children were so sick? Perhaps if they did such illness as this could be prevented. I explained to her how dirty those women were and about their strange remedies.

Maria again looked at me as if I were the greatest fool on earth. ‘How can anyone keep clean in these conditions? We are given no soap with our rations, the water supply is limited and polluted and there are no bath-houses. The ground outside the latrines is fouled with s--t. Our tents are pitched on dusty ground and packed with twelve people at least. The rain beats down in the constant storms and floods the tent and we must sleep with no bedding, no beds, in the wet mud. They say some camps have only four in a tent, with ovens for baking and public baths, but we have none of that here. Almost every child who goes into that hospital comes out a corpse. The nurses may seem nice, there may be better food there, but disease is so rife here, and no one trusts the English doctor. There is one doctor here, just one, for thousands of inmates. There are funerals every day and most of the dead are little children. Some die of starvation.’

‘You are so thin,’ I said. ‘I was a fool not to bring food.’ I apologised and said I would send her some as soon as I returned to the garrison.

She told me the rations were minimal. Those women whose husbands are away fighting are treated worst of all. They are even given half-rations. ‘I’m lucky my husband is dead,’ she said grimly. ‘On Mondays I get a few pounds of Australian flour, crawling with weevils; a few ounces of coffee, which tastes mostly of acorns and maize. A few ounces of sugar which is black and tastes as if it were the scum skimmed off the sugar boiler. And half an ounce of rough salt. Twice a week I am given a pound of mutton so lean it looks like dog, half-rotten and almost inedible. There are no vegetables or fruit or eggs or decent meat. And no milk for the children or even the babies. Only the sick children receive condensed milk, and that is watered down and often sour. See. The milk shed.’

We had reached a small hut, which let off a foul smell. I did not want to enter it, but put my head through the door and saw empty churns lying on their sides on the filthy floor, crawling with black flies. The bad smell from the shed mingled with a new smell, a worse one, soon a stench as we walked on. The path was stained with black puddles and as I looked up, I saw a trench in the ground on the side of which crouched dozens of children, smiling and holding little bowls in their hands, all gazing down into the trench, which was strewn with lumps of animal intestines, covered in flies. Two men were holding a scrawny sheep stretched across the hole, and one took a big knife and slit its throat, not enough to kill it, but so the blood drained out. The children nearby jumped down and held their bowls beneath the flow, catching the blood and laughing. I thought I would vomit as I watched them stumble back to the tents with their bowls, their cheeks smeared with blood. One was lugging a whole bucketful and another carried the sheep’s head, which had been severed once the blood had slowed to a trickle.

I stared at her expression. I was right, it seemed to say, and you were wrong. You should have let me go. You should never have brought me to this place. I turned away, as I could not bear to look at that face any longer.

‘Come,’ she said simply and took my arm, led me as if I were the one who needed assistance. ‘Do you believe me now? These camps were set up to kill us all.’

I had to stop her there. ‘This is not true,’ I said. No Englishman could even think such a thing. From what I’d seen, I guessed much more likely was bad organisation, no forward thinking, a total lack of understanding of what is required to service a camp of this size.

She told me the man in charge was called Scholtz and everyone hated him, even the staff, that he was a Boer who supported the British. He was rude, rough and petty-minded. Women would rather suffer than go to him and ask for help, to endure his insults and heartless refusals. I said I would report all of this to my superiors back at my garrison. ‘If you like,’ she murmured, as if the idea of help was beyond possibility. But mostly I think she was just exhausted by our walk. We had now circled back to her tent. She stood before it, tired and wan, looking past me across the tops of the tents.

‘There’s something else,’ she said. ‘Someone is bothering me.’ She explained that a guard at the camp would come to her tent at all hours of the day and night, calling her to come and walk with him, even to do chores for him. He would watch her while she did them and tell her how pretty she was. ‘He brings us little bits of food, or a candle and matches, other small things we need, but never enough. He tries to put his arms about me and I tell him no. But he is getting more rough with me and wants to take me back to his tent. I keep saying no. You do believe me?’

I said of course, and asked for his name, telling her I would sort it out. I said she shouldn’t worry any more, that I would speak to this man, report him too. And that I would send her food and supplies for her son, but that if either of them were ill they must go to the hospital, please. She nodded at all of this, but again, that look in her eyes as if it were all a fiction, a story of help that was a dream and would never happen. When I took my leave of her, she lifted the flap of her tent and inside, baking in the heat of that summer day, I could see a dozen bodies lying packed together. Jurie slept in the middle, his bones sticking out, so thin was he. The heat inside was suffocating, the sun beating down through the thin canvas on to that sorry scene, with no furniture, flies crawling up the hot canvas, and slops of matter emptied on the floor and beside the tent.