SOMEWHERE SOUTH OF SUEZ

by

Douglas Reed

published: 1950

Home Page of Douglas Reed Books

Part One

New Lands For Old

Chapter:01 02

Part Two

South African Year

Chapter:01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Part Three

Before The Millenium

Chapter:01 02 03 04 05 06

Part Four

... The Caravan Goes On

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Postscript

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*

To

H.M.S. AMETHYST

July 1949

*

PART ONE

NEW LANDS FOR OLD

Chapter One

LONDON LEAVETAKING

I had toiled all day, clearing up forgotten odds and ends, and now stood in the empty house among my bags packed for Africa, while a northbound train carried the others from me. Big Ben had long chimed midnight. It was time to go. I looked round the deserted rooms, thinking that to leave a home still warm with family life is to die a little. It was not right to go away from a place that liked us, and that we liked, so well. I went once more through the house, where now only the dust and shadow of a happy year remained.

It was one of the years that followed the second of the twentieth-century wars. London all around was unkempt, cheerless and underfed. My native city was not allowed to revive freely after its long ordeal, but was held by official decrees in an artificial twilight of troubled frustration. Our Chelsea year was therefore one of present discomfort and ominous prospect, yet for the family in that tiny house it was an unforgettably happy time, because its members were happy in each other and because London, in this purgatory, was so lovely.

God disposes, no matter what man may ordain. The enforced dilapidation of old London only enhanced its grace and beauty. Wren's churches, once hemmed in by the thrusting, elbowing, tiptoeing buildings of the City, now, as ruined shells, rode free and high like fine frigates in the razed area round St. Paul's. Bumbles might dim the very lights of London, but this gave greater brilliance to the red, amber and green disks at the street-crossings; these made carnival in the blue dusk and enchanted the homeward walks of a London family from Hyde Park, through Sloane Street, to the little house. The drab drapes of privation and disrepair lent fresh colour and importance to small human things that spoke of London's brave past, of its strength and endurance, and of the hope of a brighter future. We loved them all, during our Chelsea year: the artists who sold pictures in the King's Road and the pleasant cafés with striped awnings which men back from the war opened there; the Guardsmen who on summer afternoons played cricket by the great barracks, where anti-aircraft guns pointed minatory fingers at dangers past or to come: the Chelsea Pensioners, in red or black frock-coats, who contentedly watched the game while the bomb-holes in their historic home, next door, were slowly mended. Beyond, tugs and barges plied on the Thames, and children played in Battersea Park in the shadow of the great power-station which the bombers never could destroy. If ever we had a little petrol the five of us, packed into an aged two-seater, drove to old Putney Bridge, and Wimbledon and Richmond, turning again towards London Town in that bejewelled twilight which made it, so battered and tattered, a fairy city still.

I was enchanted by this beauty of grey London in 1947. I felt a sadness in it and wondered if this were born of suffering endured and would pass, or if it were premonitory. I sometimes think that cities do become fey and, unless this was only in the eye of the beholder, I believed I saw in the Nineteen-Thirties a wistful, twilight loveliness in ancient cities over which great tribulation hung, like Vienna, Dresden and Cologne; today they are razed or sunken in sad oblivion, captive or half-free. I felt it in Prague and in Paris before the German invasions. To me the very stones of those cities, the air in their streets, the looks and voices of their people, joined in a symphony of presentiment.

With such memories in mind I looked at the loveliness of London, as the decisive second half of the fateful twentieth century approached, and hoped that when the final balance of this stupendous hundred years was struck it might still stand, sturdy as ever, while the hopes of men revived around it; it has a simple faith and a rocklike staunchness which may outlast the century's concluding storms. Under the spell of its beauty we passed as happy a year as five people were ever likely to know and from empty rooms I now looked back on this twelvemonth and scanned its ups and downs. Laughter around the table at Christmas, on birthdays, on Guy Fawkes Day. Dire anxiety for a baby and heartfelt gratitude when the danger passed. Great delight in unexpected parcels from Canada and Australia, New Zealand and South Africa; had we not been kept short of food we could not have known the joy of those feasts. The cruellest winter in memory, when Londoners were forbidden to warm themselves, and the loveliest summer we ever knew. The joy of finding a sitter-in who enabled us to have a rare evening out, and the added zest this lent to a modest dinner at the little club near Hyde Park Corner, to a new play by Noel Coward, and to the homeward stroll together beneath the trees of St. James's Park to Knightsbridge, the last look at sleeping babes, the footsteps in the quiet street as we fell asleep....

Now the lovely year was gone as wine from a pitcher. I felt the life fading from the house, like the light from a failing lamp. I wondered how I could have been foolish enough to disperse a happy family. Could I by incantation have resummoned them all, restored babes to cots, hubbub to quiet rooms, books to shelves, clothes to pegs, I would have done this. But there was no turning back now.

A man is usually two men. One of his selves belongs to his family and the other to his calling. If he is a sailor, or a roving journalist in this Gadarene century, that is bad for him and for his family. Before 1939, when I returned to England because the new war was at hand, my life was one of constant movement. Now my writer's blood was stagnant from eight years pent in my native island, and the gyves of this inaction had eaten deep grooves of impatience into my soul. In eight years I felt traveller's air against my face only during five brief escapes, or escapades: a journey to Paris before the German invasion, a cruise along the Channel with a naval convoy, a mad excursion to the Isle of Man (which I made to feel a ship's planks beneath my feet again, and because it was the only place outside his shores which an islander might reach in wartime), a visit to Normandy and a dash to Dublin.

Now one of my two selves longed to stay and the other desperately needed to get out into the great world-again, to see what was going on and who was behind what was going on. I thought that the great Plan, of imprisoning all men, everywhere, within their lands or islands, would continue during the coming half-century, and that the next decade or two might offer the last respite before the final showdown, when freedom would either return to the world or be banished for a long and dark time. This might be my last chance to sniff the air of liberty, to go like a freeman about the lovely world. Eight years of energy were stored in me like a compressed spring. Now it was released, and I was off like a bullet.

I opened the front door, put my baggage on the top step, and with a heavy heart closed the door; behind it lay a happy year and in front of it the future stretched as obscure as the night itself, which was pitch dark. I am not often abroad after midnight and did not know, until this moment, that the street lights of London were actually put out at that hour. I expected little light, in a time of such lunatic edicts, but not no light at all. The street could never have been darker during the war's blackout. This was a blow, for I had to find my way, afoot and laden with baggage, to the Airways Terminus at Victoria.

The baggage consisted of a large and a small suitcase, my typewriter, a briefcase and a fifth item typical of the traveller who stood on that doorstep and felt for the street with his foot. At the last moment of clearing-up, I found in a drawer, to my great remorse, a file of papers about Palestine lent to me for perusal by a neighbour who spent many years in that country. I could not think how to restore these to their owner at such a time: my aeroplane was to leave in two hours. Finally I resolved, as the only possible way of delivering them, to leave them on his doorstep in a parcel. The ransacked house contained neither string nor paper, but after long search I found a derelict baby's cot-cover and a mysterious dressing-gown girdle, of unknown ownership. I wrapped the papers in the plush cot-cover and tied the bundle with the silken cord.

Now I gathered all these belongings, carrying some in my hands and clutching others to me with my upper arms, while the heavy bundle dangled from a free finger by a loop in the cord. Thus laden, I set out on my first major journey in the Nineteen-Forties (it was to take me to many parts of Africa and of North America, and to I do not yet know where). I wished as I toiled blindly along that the watching world might by some device of television see how an English traveller set out on far travels in the third year of his first Socialist Government.

The night was damp and foggy, and so dark that I could hardly find my neighbour's house, though it lay near and round a corner. When I did discover it, by touch, I groped until I discovered the door-handle, to which I tied the odd-looking parcel. Much later I learned that it was still there when my surprised neighbour opened his door next morning. He disapproves of the Zionist invasion of Palestine and of the complicity of great powers in it, for he clings to old-fashioned notions about the wrongness of unprovoked aggression on weak and harmless peoples. He has often stated these opinions publicly. When he saw, attached to his door-handle, something wrapped in blue plush and tied with a white cord, he suspected a visit of vengeance from the Stern Gang, and sent for the police. The ceremony of opening my parcel was performed with respect.

Little thinking what excitement I was bequeathing, I staggered on, groping for another door, for I had a second call to pay in these difficult circumstances: I wished to drop the key of our bereaved house through the letter-box of a house-agent in Sloane Street. In the governmental gloom I could not be sure of the door, and eventually chose the wrong one. I still wonder what the maiden lady thought who found a strange key on her doormat in the morning, with a note implicitly inviting her to call and let herself in at a given address.

I never looked forward to carrying my baggage to Victoria in the small hours, but did not foresee just how arduous this would prove. For some reason, heavy suitcases are heavier and more awkward to carry in darkness than in light, and by the time I reached what I thought must be an open place, and probably Sloane Square, I feared I should miss my aeroplane. Then, suddenly, the usual heaven-sent London taxicab appeared and stopped; the driver saw my bowed and laden form in his headlights and invited me to jump in if I were going to the Airways Terminus.

Thankfully I entered a gloomy interior containing two invisible beings who seemed to be cursing each other in Polish and enjoying it. In this way I came once more, after many years, to a journey's beginning, and reflected that much was changed for the worse in the lot of an English traveller since I passed that way before, in 1939.

Chapter Two

'PASSENGERS FOR JOHANNESBURG ...'

For the last time for many a day I ate the food of the British islander at this period. Paste sandwich, tomato sandwich, lettuce sandwich: the much-lampooned railway-station sandwich of yore was a feast compared with these poor morsels, which under glass cupolas waited sadly for the coming and the parting guest. Those sandwiches, the few starved-looking publications in the bookstall, the slabs of chocolate (only to be had against 'points'), the dreary morning and the thought of my family, and English folk everywhere, leading this bread-and-skilly existence, exasperated me, and I was glad when a voice called 'Passengers for Johannesburg'.

There was still one delay before embarkation. Those about to fly had first to pass through a shed in which men stood at pedestal desks. These officials were new; they were not there in 1939, when a man to examine passports was held to be enough. Like the sad sandwiches and the rationed chocolate, they represented the achievements of a new era and a new régime. They were concerned to know what cash law-abiding travellers carried, and thus were imitations of the 'foreign-currency police' I first knew in Hitler's Germany. I was expecting to see them, because I had read that the Minister for Civil Aviation was recruiting 'a substantial force of security police for airport duty' and from experience I knew that the business of security police is not to ensure the citizen's security, but to diminish it, until at last it disappears. The daily news of the years which have passed since I made that journey has shown that these new airport police have not been able to hinder the big operators in surreptitiously removing large sums of cash, and even military aircraft, from England. They will, however, have a precise note of the small sums taken abroad by travellers who have gone on modest and lawful errands, including the two pounds in Portuguese pesos which I took to Lisbon.

I was not a gun-runner, political agent or currency-smuggler, and found many obstacles put in the way of my professional undertakings. For instance, I resolved to go to Africa by British aeroplane, wishing, at a time of such constant lamentation about our 'dollar shortage', to pay my passage money to a British line. At Airways House, however, was another type of new official, and he demurred. He did not say: 'We won't take you, because the Government does not want bona fide travellers to go abroad.' He said courteously: 'It would be much simpler if you could go to the Ministry of Information and get priority.' (He spoke the word as if it were made of Turkish delight.)

'No!' I said. 'I've been fighting priority all my life, first under the Tories, with their old school tie, then under Hitler and now under this régime of Communist-propelled Socialism, no offence meant and none taken, I'm sure. When can you give me a seat, without your precious priority?'

'Well, we're booked up a long way ahead,' he said. 'Of course, if you could get priority....'

'You know I can book a passage at once with an American, Dutch or other foreign company,' I said. He nodded. 'Well, then, will you give me a seat or not?'

He shifted uneasily. I saw he wore an R.A.F. tie and felt sorry for him; I wondered what he privately thought when he read ministerial speeches about the dollar shortage. I left him and called on an American airline. They offered me early passage from Lisbon to Johannesburg and a seat in a British machine from London to Lisbon. Thus my money for the Lisbon to Johannesburg flight went to the Americans, and also, I suppose, a commission on my journey by British aircraft from London to Lisbon. I met many people who, having lawful occasions abroad, were forced in this way to use foreign services and thus aggravate the 'shortage' of foreign currency which was used to justify privations in England. The Lynskey Report and other matters which have appeared in the news since then have shown the type of traveller who often receives favoured treatment under the system of 'priorities'. To watch it rear its head in England made me sadder than most because I had seen, in many countries, to what evil results it leads.

I took my seat and soon London was pirouetting beneath. I sat in a British aeroplane, my ticket bought at an American counter; after all the trumpetings, this was what Planning meant. Soon London fell behind and the Home Counties began to slip by. My life has been full of leavetakings; they began in 1914 and have never since ceased for long. I can hardly count now how often in thirty-five years I have looked back at England falling astern and wondered whether I would see it again. Below the wing, now, the coast appeared, and a town with two piers.

What memories Brighton held for me! Pierrots on the sands, when the century was young and had not yet unveiled its satanic features. Hospital in the first war. A brief visit, and an astonishing glimpse of prosperity and unconcern, between the wars. Bombs falling while a baby was being born there, in the second war. Loud-speakers announcing the invasion of Normandy. Flying-bombs trudgeoning overhead to London while a second baby was being born there. No bombs when the third was born, but instead, a bitter winter, deep snow, icebound roads and the Shinwell blackout to imperil the midnight drive to London that saved her week-old life....

How will they all fare in the second fifty years, I thought, looking down at Brighton? Picturing the perils they survived in their cradles, I yet found that I did not ask myself: 'Will they be killed in a new war?' but 'Will there be life for them to live, when they are full grown?' I do not know how far a man is entitled to wish future things for his children, but if I were to wish mine what I wish myself it would be, not security, but the dignity of liberty and a freeman's adventurous span of years. The diminishing beauty of life, more than any prospect of violent death, is to me the dark lesson of the first fifty years and the menace of the second fifty.

Then Brighton was gone, and with Brighton such thoughts, and suddenly we came down out of cloud to Bordeaux, where were bomb debris and an airport restaurant full of good food, fruit and wine for those with 'currency' to buy. The people wore the countenance of hope deferred, which the French, I believe, have carried since the revolution of 1790. I watched while two sardonic Frenchmen in a corner cynically ate a large sole each, and then two great entrecôte steaks, with a mound of golden fried potatoes on each occasion. The French have for more than a hundred and fifty years been unable to extricate themselves from the morass into which they, first of all European peoples, were flung, but they still eat well.

To fly after eight years is the next best thing to a first flight and, with England but two hours behind me, I felt anew the old invigoration of new scenes and experiences. I liked the Viking in which I travelled. It had good leg room and large windows. I would have liked to go to South Africa in it and next day, when I transferred to the more famous Clipper, found this less comfortable. Around me were wealthy South Africans returning from America and Europe, English families going to settle in South Africa, and a few passengers bound for intermediate places. Among this company were a friendly and talkative woman who quickly struck acquaintance with nearly all aboard, and a silent middle-aged lady with white hair and a good, unravaged skin who sat quietly in her place and spoke to none. In an eventful life I have seen nothing so curious as the meeting of these two. It appears to me the perfect comedy, performed by two strangers who were thrown together in a flying-machine over Spain.

The voluble lady may have been provoked to find a woman aboard with whom she seemed unlikely to exchange a word (for the other sat like a statue in her place). Suddenly, after sending inquisitive glances across, the first woman jumped up, went to the other, and said: 'You're beautiful.'

If women dream, I suppose their happiest vision must be that a stranger should one day accost them and say: 'Forgive me, but I cannot help myself. I must tell you how beautiful you are!' Now this fantastic and lovely thing happened to a woman who was not even young, and was stone deaf (for so she proved)! Could fate play a more spiteful prank? Chosen from all women in the world to receive this delightful tribute, she could not hear it! Politeness, however, bade her pretend that she wanted to know what was said, while zeal forbade the other woman to desist, so that the impulsive one tried to drown the noise of two engines, which drove us through the air at about two hundred miles an hour, and stood there shouting louder and ever louder, 'You're beautiful ... I say you're beautiful ... YOU'RE BEAUTIFUL! ...' To this day (unless someone later enlightened her), the deaf lady does not know what she missed.

Spain slipped by, with the bright blue sea breaking on its golden coasts and the peasants scratching a hard living from the thin soil on the mountainsides and the bull-rings lying alongside the towns. We flew over Portugal, I caught a glimpse of the Tagus, the wheels touched down and then I was again a travelling writer in a foreign country in peace-time. Immediately I was in trouble.

As my journey was from one part of the 'sterling area' to another, I needed enough 'foreign currency' for the expenses of one night in Lisbon. For this purpose I had through my bank applied, in the manner of a Christian slave at some Babylonian court, for some Portuguese pesos. Knowing the pitfalls of foreign travel I asked for eight pounds, a small amount which yet contained a modest margin to cover accidents. The anonymous department of practical jokers which administers these regulations granted me two pounds. This was its way of saying: 'We wish to help you to as much trouble as possible during your journey: always at your disservice....'

On landing at Lisbon I was required to pay two pounds 'city tax'. This left me nothing to pay for a night's hotel, food, tips and taxicabs. Fortunately, among my fellow passengers was one of those Englishmen who at the crack of doom will with quiet urbanity treat the event as unimportant and unexciting. He had come in quest of orders for steel, which he was prevented from manufacturing and delivering by some other department of practical jokers. He already had many outstanding orders, booked on earlier visits, and hoped in course of years to be allowed to begin fulfilling them. He was entitled to this hope because his country's government, though it felt that the steel industry was too efficient and prosperous to be left alone, had not then taken actual steps for its ruination. Since then its 'nationalization' has been decreed and this admirable man will presumably end his days flying to Portugal to collect orders for steel which his governors at home will not let him supply, and this occupation will be most typical of the twentieth century.

He was my saviour. The Portuguese were so grateful to him for accepting their non-fulfillable orders that he had important friends. One of these, hearing from him of my plight, at once paid my city tax. He thus left me my £2 worth of pesos to pay my way in Lisbon, and probably made all three of us guilty of some grave offence, high reason or the like. He seemed surprised when I mentioned repayment (I knew no way of making it). The return of his money probably appeared to him as novel a notion as the delivery of his steel. Perhaps either would have upset the delicate balance on which the trade and commerce between nations rests in these enlightened times.

By strange chance I was never before in Portugal, and Lisbon suddenly reminded me that I was in one of the last untouched corners of the Europe I loved. Here was an old city unscathed, with the strata of the generations plain to see in stone and statue. Not many such remain in Europe; most are half-ruined or enslaved. Lisbon was once a small ship among the stately cities of the old continent. Now that so many were sunk it seemed bigger and more significant.

I am not young enough in my calling to think the Portuguese hold themselves lucky in their lot. They have many plaints, which I had no time to study, but they still enjoyed many things which others lacked. After the eight drab years the colour of life in Lisbon dazzled me, so that I almost needed to shade my eyes. The native hues of England are soft and gentle, not brilliant. The background is grey, green and brown; it is lovely, but needs the touch of warmth and colour here and there to keep it from becoming drear. Give a man a good house, a good fire in the grate and good food in the belly, good clothes to wear and a good holiday from the great cities, and it is a gay country. Take away these things, forbid a man to warm himself, eat his fill, buy a new suit, escape from bricks and mortar, and only the grey background remains. The chapfallen governors of England after the second war systematically drained off these colours from life.

I felt now like a man who came from a cave into bright sunlight. I left London on winter's eve and found myself in apparent midsummer. Wide boulevards ran between flowers and palms; fountains played and peasant women, carrying great baskets on their heads, went beneath a warm blue sky; through an old town of fine houses and squares busy streets ran down to a broad river where ships lay. These brilliant native colours of a friendly climate and fortunate situation were the background to a picture of abundance and animation. People with full bellies are undoubtedly brisker in mien, gait and manner. If they are bound somewhither they look glad to be going there, and if they only stroll seem actively happy to be strolling. The Englishman abroad, at that period in his island's story, felt like the waif in a famous advertisement, who with wistful bliss sniffs through an open window the odours from a well-fed man's table. I thought of the workhouse fare at home and of the occasional 'concessions' of an ounce of margarine or of sweets, for which the British islander was coming to return thanks in his parlour.

God bless the Minister 'of' Food,
He keeps us hungry for our good,

God bless the Squire and his relations
And keep us in our proper stations.

Looking back next morning, as the Clipper rose above Lisbon into a lime-coloured sky, I thought of all the peoples and towns and tongues, the spires and towers and gables I knew, and hoped I might yet one day return to Europe, which now fell away astern, like England the day before. Among the gravest consequences of the second war was this: that the writer of Somewhere South of Suez was cut off from his especial field of toil. I spent twenty years studying Europe and would gladly have ended my days as a wandering writer among its varied peoples. This was something passing the love of women. I loved to come into some old town in France or Poland, Germany or Bohemia, Hungary or Austria or Slovakia, to seek a modest lodging, remain as long as fancy ruled, and for a brief time to become part of its life, while remaining one apart. To be the guest at every feast and the onlooker at every spectacle; to stand aside and see the good in men who call each other evil; to watch the charlatans and cheapjacks in the public places and learn their tricks; constantly to come on fresh and delightful things which to those rooted in a place have become dully familiar: these are rare and piquant enjoyments, hardly to be found on the path of any other calling.

But the bisection of Europe, and all the bans, left me like a fiddler bereft of his fiddle. I needed to travel, and to write, and so I now went first to Africa. Looking back, I saw the south-westernmost tip of Europe fade into the mists. Au revoir to all that, I hoped. We hung in a blue haze somewhere between Europe and Africa, suspended on waves of vibrant sound. Our slender, shining craft was a thing of beauty, from without. Inside it looked like a cramped saloon car in a train. Some fifty people sat in pairs, facing forward, divided by a central aisle. So they would sit for an afternoon, a night, a day and most of another night. Below them the lion would rend its prey, the monkeys swing on ropes, the snake slither through the grass, the witch-doctor smell out his victim. Inside their glittering capsule, insulated against tropic heat, these voyagers would pass obliviously overhead and at their destination be met by limousines, the replicas of those which brought them to the airport at their start.

Air travel, in its present stage, is dull. Here fifty people crossed Africa by night and day, and that is still a great experience. Only half of them had small portholes, and many of these were blinded by wings or engines. Few could see out of the vehicle in which they travelled. But for three landings and rare peeps from portholes temporarily deserted by other passengers, I should have crossed Africa from tip to tip without seeing it until I landed at its southern extremity. If large windows cannot be fitted, then passenger aircraft would more suitably be made of some transparent substance. However, my fellow-passengers seemed content to be borne unseeing across a continent. They sat upright, looking at the head of the passenger in front, or tilted themselves by a lever into a half-recumbent position.

At last I caught a glimpse of Africa, and of the Canaries to starboard, through a borrowed porthole. There lay the curving coast as I remembered it in my school atlases; the blue sea broke against it in a white and lacy border. What man born in the heyday of Rider Haggard could suppress a thrill at this first sight? Not I; I should have come to Africa long before, had not Europe kept a writer so busy during the roaring Thirties. Now we drove down the coast, flying a little inland and always lower, until the eye could almost count the sands of the desert.

The great African desert is a startling thing. Even from the security of an aeroplane the feeling of menace is tangible. Red, angry, brutal and threatening, it is the naked face of nature risen in rebellion against man. It was not always desert. Carvings found in parts of it accessible only to a well-equipped expedition provided with camels show that it was once well-watered land teeming with giraffes, ostriches, gazelles and even cattle, but no camels! Africa, beneath the improvident touch of man has been drying up for centuries. Those who see the result in Northern Africa, and wonder how it came about, may read the answer to the riddle in Southern Africa, where rains sweep the over-grazed topsoil away by the ton, exposing the menacing rock. The southern deserts are spreading; the warning to man, be wise or begone, is plain.

The quick dusk came down. A sickle moon and a silver star glistened in the western sky, like some Sultan's banner planted on the dark rampart of the night. Out to starboard a ship spoke to us in bright flashes of light. Then the moon went down, the night grew misty and black and we were fifty white folk flying through space in an argent bullet above the most mysterious of the continents. Tilting our chairs we reclined like favourites in a harem; but we were less beautiful. We were as gods in our indifferent acceptance of marvels, but we were not elegant or urbane. Hardly anything remained for us to conquer or discover and we could accomplish more by pressing a button than Leonardo da Vinci or Francis Drake achieved in a lifetime, but did we know as much as our fathers of faith and honour? Below, dessicating Africa inscrutably watched us pass. We flicked cigarette ash and wriggled ourselves into more comfortable attitudes; beneath, lambent green eyes glowed in the night.

'Fasten your belts', said a red-lettered sign, weights pressed on my eardrums, wheels gently bumped on ground, the noise of engines ceased, the door opened and I got out. A bright airport light played on the upturned face of a man who held steps, on its blubbery lips, rough-hewn jaw, great cheekbones and mahogany skin. The primeval face of Africa greeted the white man in his machine.

Nowadays you drop from the night sky and dine in Africa as casually as you might turn from an evening stroll into a Soho restaurant, and the few Europeans, wherever the traveller alights, have stamped the marks of their several nationhoods clearly on these remote settlements. Dakar's shabby little airport restaurant might have been by the Eiffel Tower, for all the African night, noises, heat and black waiters. In a corner a woman, exquisitely chic and soignée, sat with a French official. Food and cooking were French, each table had its bottle of wine, and the bread, served by the yard, was that which only Frenchmen bake.

Then on again, from this corner of Paris. I was weary, but cannot sleep in trains or aeroplanes. I idly watched the 'air-hostess' make her charges comfortable for the night. She was pretty and of slightly peevish mien, as any girl might be who has to worry about a hair-do-and-facial from New York to Johannesburg and back once a fortnight. The air-hostess is the most important thing in air-travel; that, at any rate, is implicit in the advertisements, which usually show a very large and beautiful air-hostess in the foreground and a very small aeroplane in the background. I feel, however, that she is a mistake. What this cramped form of travel needs is a buxom and motherly stewardess who will help you to be sick, if that is your pleasure, and who is thinking about her boy, not about her boy friend. Many air-hostesses may themselves be the victims of those misleading advertisements. They may picture themselves (in a delightfully becoming uniform) roaming the skies of the world, Meeting Such Interesting People, and (if I am not too cynical) eventually marrying one of these, a man with an air of romantic melancholy and mystery. In the event they find themselves for ever trotting up and down a narrow gangway or sitting in their back-seats: any interesting people aboard are too sunken in gloom to notice the new hair-style and the attentive one is a Cypriot bagman from Brooklyn; make-up is a bother during a trans-African flight; and if a really thrilling man appears he stares from his porthole as in a trance and absent-mindedly gets out in the central Congo at midnight, never to be seen again. Thus these charming creatures often wear an expression which seems to say that a girl's life is full of disappointments and they might as well have tried Hollywood, it couldn't have been duller than this....

The dawn, and Accra. Anyway, the dawn; Accra must be far from the airport, for I could see no sign of it, or of a coast, or of gold. Propped on leaden limbs I saw with bleary eyes only a few airport sheds and huts and thin bush around. Yet this was England, as Dakar was France. I saw no white man (this was dawn), but the spick and span uniforms of Native soldiers and officials said: 'This is British territory.' Also, little white posts, freshly painted, with rope or chain suspended between them, guarded nothing in particular against who knew what. Little buckets, of sand or water, stood here and there. I recognized a familiar air of preparation and expectation. When I went to the lavatory, where I met a praying mantis at its devotions, I saw on the wall a typewritten 'Inventory of Contents', though these were hardly rare or costly enough to deserve the honour of listing and public proclamation.

These were the authentic touches of a hand I knew. This was Camberley or Aldershot, awaiting The General; those neat uniforms, that cleanly swept parade-ground (I mean, airport), those freshly painted posts and buckets dressed-by-the-right, the list of contents....

This was not a conscious piece of reasoning (I was hardly conscious myself at such an hour after such a night); it was the mechanical deduction of a trained journalist's mind. It was correct. I found a Native official reading the morning newspaper and this said Field-Marshal Montgomery was due to land at Accra that day, in the course of an African tour!

I took my first daylight look at Africa, and it was an illuminating one. The Gold Coast long counted as the white man's grave, a hot and hopeless place where the white man went down and the black man never rose, but whether it ever deserved this ill-renown I do not know. Today I repeatedly meet people, in many countries, who speak with great enthusiasm of Accra and its beaches and long to go there, so that I intend myself to explore it one day. Anyway, I did not expect to find there up-to-the-minute Native newspapers and the evidence of lively Native politics. Yet the newspaper which my Native official read, while his white masters slept, was written and printed by Natives and already distributed by dawn! Its views were keenly on the heels of the news, which was the impending arrival of Field-Marshal Montgomery; it reminded him that, long before the British withdrawal from India, Indian officers had received the King's commission and served with white ones. This meant, I judged: 'Now do the same in Africa, and then depart.' I thought the world would grow dangerously small for the European man if he were to leave Africa, too, and felt he ought to stay there, for his own good and that of its peoples. This was the matter which most interested me in Africa.

With sorrow I met once more in Accra the Mother-Hubbard-like fare of my native island. I do not know whether under the Colonial Office system orders from Whitehall go out to all the Colonies saying that paste sandwiches are the utmost that must be offered to transcontinental travellers, or whether zealous colonial officials think to please superiors in London by reproducing in far-flung outposts the fare which the British islander now accepts as his due at King's Cross station. Anyway, when I met these miserly scraps again, all unexpectedly, at Accra airport, I said, 'Mr. Strachey, I presume,' and turned away.

After Dakar, untidy and well-fed, and Accra, tidy and ill-fed, I was not surprised to find Leopoldville a busy, bustling little Brussels on the equator, with a fine airport and a thriving modern restaurant, a meal at which (fortunately for the currencyless British traveller) was included in the fare. The Belgians should be more numerous; they know the secret of living well in all conditions. They are also among the most successful, and probably are the most successful of the European countries in Africa, particularly in their handling of the African Native in the towns and in industry.

In Leopoldville I had time, in the full noon of an equatorial day, for a first leisurely look at the land which long had fascinated me from afar. Attractive buildings were going up, everybody was busy and everybody looked happy because he was busy. There were colours between the high clouds in the sky as if a rainbow had broken up and strewn its fragments around. There were new roads and new white houses, with cool awnings and blinds. On all sides raw bush crept up, and through it and along the roads moved women with babies on their backs and baskets on their heads. They were so many, all moving at a uniform step and pace, that it was as if the country were covered with conveyor-belts, in human shape. They passed with superb grace; had I been Buddha, sitting at this roadside, I would have been content to contemplate, not my own navel, but this almost hypnotic movement of the burden-carriers, which was like that of statues walking amid the shimmer of heat.

Their pace never varied, despite the load on their heads, the baby behind and the bare feet on stony ground. When they passed each other it was like the passing of ships. They did not stare or glare or stop to gossip, as they might have done in Kensington High Street. They drew near, met and drew apart again like dark swans on a timeless stream. There was much beauty in this pageant of toll beneath the coloured sky. Whence, I wondered, came the humble dignity and pride that these moving figures expressed: from simple poverty, from heavy labour, from the humility of lowliness, from primitive darkness, or from what? Would they lose it if they became prosperous, employers of others, liberated, enlightened? And if so, why?

The aeroplane started again and flew deep into another night, through thick white vapours, over invisible mountains and deserts that violently disquieted the air, so that the roaring silver missile was thrown up and down and about and the queasy were sick. I could not sleep and, being so high above the earth, fell to thinking about it as a globe with continents sketched on it, and about the changing shape of the world as I have seen it in these thirty-five years and foresee it in the future.

What is the world, I thought, and what are continents? It has four continents, not five: that is, four great land masses detached by water from other continents. Europe is not, geographically, a continent. It is a tiny western fragment of Asia, and rose to the courtesy rank of continent only by virtue of its especial, supreme achievement: Christian civilization. Its peoples were those most responsive to the apostles from Arabia who brought news of the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. The acceptance of those teachings produced a common spirit among its peoples, even when they fought each other, which led them to a state of civilization, far from complete but higher than the planet ever knew before. They so far outpaced all other peoples of the earth that the petty part of it which they inhabited came to be called, wrongly, a continent. Before that it was an unimportant region somewhere north of Babylon.

Through the second twentieth-century war, I thought, looking back, the masses of Asia, organized in two powerful political forces born in the first war, returned to and engulfed half of Europe. If that process continued, the end of the decisive century might bring the end of the fiction that 'Europe' was a separate continent; the area and period of Christian civilization would be wiped out and something new appear in its place.

This was the great question which I expected to see answered between the years 1950 and 2000. I could not, however, persuade myself to believe, as so many believed, that it would be answered by the military result of a third war, because the second war brought the Asiatics half way into Europe and showed that the proclaimed causes and the military results of the twentieth-century wars have nothing to do with the political results. These are arranged behind the scenes. The two Asiatic movements which arose in the first war and reaped the victory of the second one were Soviet Communism and Political Zionism. Their conquests, however, were not achieved by arms, but by the skilful application of a new science: that of gaining and exerting power through the men in charge of great affairs in all countries. To see the shape of the future, it was necessary to realize that the advance of Soviet Communism to the centre of Europe was enabled and approved by the leaders of Britain and America at conferences, held while the fighting continued, which were kept secret from the public masses. It was necessary to realize also that the Zionist invasion of Palestine, which in my opinion was but the prelude to much larger events in that part of the world, was similarly promoted and made possible by the leaders of Britain and America. This process, or these processes (for Communism and Zionism moved hand in hand from their emergence in 1917 on) began in the first war. Neither the Communist occupation of half Europe nor the Zionist annexation of Palestine was ever proclaimed among the aims of the second war, but these results of it vastly transcended all others achieved. The ostensible aims of the war were in fact hardly achieved anywhere at all, for even those countries which were 'liberated' were required to submit to a new international agency, for the nonce called The United Nations, in which these secret influences were clearly likely to be paramount; they were proved so at the outset in the matter of Palestine.

If the process were carried to its conclusion in the second half of the century (and I felt sure for myself that the attempt would be made) then its aims, I thought, would be three:

(1) To complete the destruction and enslavement of Europe, possibly under pretext of saving and liberating it, as in 1939-45; (2) to complete the expulsion of Europeans from Asia and from other footholds oversea; (3) to complete the reversal of the story of the last 1950 years by setting up a new pagan empire, probably based on Palestine and New York.

These aims might conceivably be accomplished without a third world war (though not without the use of force) if the new international agency could be made servile to them and powerful enough to enforce them. Failing that, I thought the twentieth century would probably see its third war, with these ulterior aims. What I could not believe, in the light of the two wars and their results, was that a new war, declared at the outset to be one between 'East and West' or 'Capitalism and Communism' or 'Freedom and Despotism' or 'Democracy and Dictatorship', would be allowed to lead to the liberation of Europe and the resurrection of Christian liberty there. That could only happen if there were a much livelier public awakening to the facts of the second war than seemed likely.

In any or every event, however, I expected Africa to become of major importance during the next fifty years. In the case of war it would be the white man's right flank against the Asiatics, even if he again found, when he had beaten them, that his victory had been turned into his defeat in New York and London, Tel Aviv and Moscow. He would have to turn to Africa for food, and possibly for manpower. Even apart from war, now that India and the Far East were closing their doors against him, he would need an outlet, in a shrinking world, for his energy and population. If Europe and the white man were to survive, he would need Africa for the next century at least. After that Canada, Australia and New Zealand would be big enough to take a full share in the guardianship of European civilization.

I had with me a population map of Africa. The white-inhabited area was marked in red. It amounted only to a thin coastal strip on the southernmost tip of the huge continent, and a few small blobs inland. A map of Normandy, showing the position of the invading armies a few days after the landings of June 1944, would have looked much the same. The European occupation of Africa was but a foothold, after three hundred years. Would the bridgehead be established and the interior occupied, or would the intruders be swept into the sea? In the twentieth century they had a new foe to reckon with: the powerful agitation of the Asiatics among the black men.

From a distance I had judged that the outcome in Africa depended chiefly on South Africa, which is the only part of Africa with a substantial, though still small, white population. In South Africa were some two and a half million white people and eight million Natives; in Africa as a whole were about five million whites and one hundred and fifty million Natives. South Africa was clearly the place to begin an African journey....

'Please fasten your belts.' I borrowed a porthole and saw jewels flash out against the dark velvet of the night, diamonds and rubies and emeralds, a great scintillating heap: Johannesburg. I made ready to land and took leave of a friendly fellow-passenger, a South African, who knew of me and offered to lend me a car, an offer which I thankfully accepted in the spirit in which it was made. It enabled me to shorten the period of strangeness and to find my bearings quickly in a land different from any I knew. This token of goodwill, made before I even set foot on South African earth, was the first of innumerable others. I never knew anywhere such hospitality and helpfulness as I met there, from South Africans of British stock and from many Afrikaners, while I always received courtesy from those Afrikaners whose inveterate dislike of my country disables them from offering friendship to any Englishman.

The wheels touched down and I looked at my watch. Three days and nights were gone since I locked the door of the little house in Chelsea. I wondered when I should again see those who filled my thoughts. In the twentieth century you never can tell. It was likely to be a long separation at the best, and physical distance makes such a separation seem even longer.

Documents, questions, delays, a bus ride through dark, mysterious places into a sleeping city. I found myself at length, with my belongings again clutched in all my hands and arms, decanted in the small hours among tall buildings in a town where I knew not a soul. I had in my pocket, however, another token of goodwill: a letter offering me the hospitality of the Rand Club. Where might it be and how should I get to it at this hour? Before the airport bus could melt into the night I asked the driver, who nodded a casual head towards a doorway opposite.

'Glory be,' I said, and with the sleeplessness of three nights in my eyes and legs I staggered towards it.

PART TWO

SOUTH AFRICAN YEAR

Chapter One

FEET OF GOLD

In Johannesburg, again, I blinked in the radiance of full shop windows by day and of bright lights by night. I believe the lights, at least, have now returned to my native island, but when I left it was dark and I am still unused to brilliant illumination, though for two years twinkling city twilights and gleaming harbour fronts have gladdened my eyes in Africa and America. 'Let there be light' was a divine command and the British Ministers of the years after 1945, when they cut the people's light and heat, as well as their food and clothing, to my mind acted as the instruments of a malignant purpose, whether they knew it or not.

I soon found in South Africa (and later in America) that, though there was light, the tentacles of this world-wide design had reached the land, like all others in the world today. Opposing political parties, as in England, when they successively came to office showed that they all followed the master principle: that there were 'shortages' which demanded 'controls'; that these necessitated growing armies of unproductively employed officials who clamoured for the producing masses to work harder and harder for the prospect of less and less. The shadow of the servile State approached even this fortunate land, as I subsequently found it creeping towards the wealthiest one of all: America.

The root shortage, as in many countries, from which all the other shortages and controls and threats of new trammels sprang, was that of 'dollars'; by the financial legerdemain of the last thirty years nearly all governments today pretend to assess the wealth or poverty of their countries, not in terms of their own pounds, francs, marks or whatnot, but in the currency of the United States. How could this strait jacket possibly be laid on South Africa, one of the greatest gold-producing countries of the world? It only needed to sell its gold freely to be immune from such constraints. But like other lands it was held in the toils of this octopus-like system of the twentieth century. By chance, through landing in Johannesburg, I came to the best place to study the working of this fantastic mechanism of world-power.

Johannesburg is not South African as Cape Town and Durban, Bloemfontein and Pretoria, Fort Elizabeth and East London are South African, any more than New York (as I later found) is American as Washington, Richmond and Boston are American. It is a city apart. Fifty years ago, when the Boers were invading Natal from the Transvaal and the British were coming up from the coast to meet them, Johannesburg was but a few houses and shacks. The struggle seemed clearly to be between Cape Town and Durban on the coast, for the British, and Bloemfontein and Pretoria, the inland strongholds of the Republics to which the trekking Dutch farmers from the Cape withdrew, for the Boers.

Far in the rear lay a shanty-town which was to become larger and more powerful than any of them. Johannesburg has the gold, control of which seems to be the master-switch in the powerhouse of world politics today. While the gods smile, the victory in South Africa does not lie with Cape Town and Durban, as seemed the case in 1901, or with Pretoria and Bloemfontein, as looks to be the case in 1950. The true victor, until the great plan of the twentieth century is completed or finally fails, appears to be Johannesburg. A cartoonist once aptly summed up the situation by depicting a Boer and a British South African quarrelling over the ownership of a cow while a smiling Zionist milked it.

Here in Johannesburg begins the master-process of the twentieth century, which appears to me to operate above the comprehension of republican farmer and colonizing Britisher alike. Here the gold is taken from the earth which is then sent to America and reburied, retaining even in its second entombment some magic property which enables it to vitalize or withhold loans and credit operations, to selected political ends, all over the globe. So marvellous a mineral is gold that, the deeper you inter it, the more potent it is. Here in Johannesburg are born martial aid and Marshall Aid, lend-lease and UNRRA, gifts of arms and money alike to the Soviet State and its satellites and to those who may be called on to oppose them. (I noted with delight a report from Washington, dated July 16th, 1948, that 'pressure will be brought to bear on countries which show reluctance to accept Marshall Plan loans'.) So subtle and yet simple is this process that even the country which supplies the gold which is the basis of credit, may be denied credit if its government is disliked by the guardians of the gold at its re-interment. Thus, South Africa itself, when it elected in 1948 a government which was disliked by some quarters in New York, was promptly and repeatedly told that it could not hope for 'a loan' until this government mended its ways or a new one were returned. As all South African Governments (and as far as I know all governments) are members of an International Monetary Fund which dictates the price of gold, escape from this thrall through the free marketing of gold was closed, and the 'shortages' immediately began. The gold continues to flow, as if it were a river beyond the control of man, to its tomb in Kentucky, and the political operations everywhere to be directed from the power-unit it operates there. Another great hoard is accumulating in the dark interior of the Soviet Empire. This appears to me to be the reality of world-power in the twentieth century, operating through or despite all parties, politicians and governments everywhere. A man need but learn who controls the use of the gold to know the secrets of this century.

In Johannesburg he may see where the political rainbows begin. Around the city are great dumps, the size of Durham slag-heaps but of different colour. They are usually grey, sometimes with a yellow tinge, and to the newcomer may appear dull; but some hold that they are lovely in sunset or moonlight and to the visitor of future times may appear as exciting as the Pyramids. These little mountains are made of the waste matter from the gold-mines. They are the dross: the gold is on its way to Fort Knox, there to supply arms to Stalin or deny them to Chiang Kai-shek, accord recognition to Tito or withhold it from Franco, strengthen Israel or weaken Egypt. To watch this mysterious movement of gold at its source is a memorable experience for time's traveller. Here he sees something vastly more mighty than turbines or jet-propulsion, something only less omnipotent, indeed, than God. In the city built on gold the jewellers' shops, like those of London and New York, have little gold to sell. It is all going or has gone to Fort Knox, or is hidden in Asiatic Russia. During one recent year that buried gold increased by about £500,000,000, which is equal to all the gold produced anywhere in the world (outside darkest Russia) for two and a half years. In the next ten years nearly all the monetary gold in the world will at the present rate go there. While men in streets waste talk on atomic bombs, they ignore the real source of world-fission: that amassed and buried and potent gold.

Johannesburg in some ways reminded me of Berlin in the Nineteen-Twenties (later I discovered its spiritual affinities with New York). This was partly due to the large and recent Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe, which has made a deep imprint on the city's life, as it has in New York and did formerly in Berlin. The effect on politics was similar, too; politicians, municipal and national, felt moved to support Political Zionism in order to obtain election, and the Johannesburg seats were thought, at that time, to tip the balance in Parliament. It is an invigorating, busy place, where something exciting seems always round the corner. It stands six thousand feet high and during storms the thunder crashes on the rooftops of the multiplying high buildings as if some gargantuan trap-drummer rub-a-dub-dubbed there. Such an altitude places exceptional strains and stresses on the human organism, and adds something to the tension which other matters combine to create.

It is a jostling, acquisitive, absorbing place by day, where the old-clothes-man from Kovno may become a millionaire almost overnight. In it great financial projects are always hatching, and some huge embezzlement, violent crime or lurid official scandal is often under interminable legal in-investigation. Of these affairs Johannesburgers habitually tell each other, 'You see, nothing will happen,' and they are frequently right. Like Chicago and Los Angeles in America, Johannesburg in South Africa appears to approach a state of lawlessness; officials who are tempted to show zeal in upholding the law sometimes complain of mysterious intimidations and relegations, and of the 'framed' accusation, 'pinned' on the zealot.

Like Berlin twenty years ago and New York today, Johannesburg is well supplied with Communist and Zionist book-shops, literature, newspapers, films and talk. Its night-clubs, too, reminded me of Berlin; in one I felt I was back at the Haus Vaterland and almost expected to see the mechanical thunderstorm on the Rhine. To the traveller fresh from London, where motorists were driven from the roads by every means short of machine-guns, the number of its American cars was astonishing. They were like whales with great chromium grins, seeming to grow ever bigger, and a good friend told me that South Africans of modest means, if they are in monetary straits, will sell their shirts rather than default on payments for the car. This is natural, for in a country of such distances life becomes sorely restricted without one.

Their number and bulk produced a parking problem similar, again, to that of New York. When Johannesburg was taking shape 'corner stands' were much sought and therefore most valuable, so that its builders compressed as many streets into the area as possible, and intersected them frequently. In this, too, Johannesburg stands apart. In most other South African towns the streets were made wide enough for an ox-wagon with eight yoke of oxen to turn in them) so that they are nearly broad enough for even a 1950 Mammalac to revolve in. By using a midget, skin-tight car of the kind made in Italy the Johannesburger might save himself much tribulation, but he likes large and glittering things, and would rather toil round his city in vain search of a place to put his supercharged, supergrinning Mammalac than use a baby car.

The days are invigorating in Johannesburg. By night the tension descends. The Johannesburger, after his hard day's pursuit of gain, golf-balls or parking-room, is denied the oldest and simplest of the townsman's pleasures: a stroll with his wife, sweetheart or friend. The dazzling streets are almost empty an hour after dusk. (In this Johannesburg is not different from other South African cities; it is general.) The white man cannot safely go about at night, with or without his womenfolk. At dusk the more dangerous characters among the town-spoiled Natives, and some outcast whites as well, come out from their dens. The urban police forces are weak. Figures for highway robbery are high and would be higher if white people went more numerously abroad at night.

Thus the Johannesburger at night steps into his car and from it into club, restaurant, picture-theatre or concert. (As in many parts of America the theatres have all been turned into cinemas, so that he rarely has the chance to see live plays.) When he returns home a dim figure at his gate rises from a soapbox-seat to salute him; this is his private Native guard, hired to protect his household. 'We are living in a state of siege,' a friend told me. In the cities of white South Africa, after nightfall, the white man withdraws into his home and yields the town to the dark man. Tenancy of the country does not appear to have been made into secure freehold yet.

I expected when I went to South Africa to find new things to write about, and welcomed this. For a man who lived among them from 1914 to 1939 the political feuds and obsessions of Europe, and the deterioration they foreseeably led to, were mournful things and I was glad to put them behind me, as I thought, for a spell. I was not more than a few days in South Africa when I realized, with surprise and sorrow, that distance from the turbulent centre, abundance, sunshine, prosperity, spaciousness, unscathedness, liberty and a splendid country made the white man no happier. I found there (and later in America, too) festering resentments akin to those of Europe, and other troubles besides. Among this small white population, insecurely encamped amid dark masses on the southern tip of Africa, grudges and fears persisted. I met no man who did not speak, sooner or later, of the Boer's hostility to the British or of the menace of the Native.

For third parties, international aspirants to world power who sought to raise the dark man against the white one, and to divide the white men among themselves, South Africa was a land of opportunity.

Every traveller to South Africa will encounter this same experience. The thing is not to be ignored, because those he meets talk of little else; he cannot close his mind to it even if he would. I thought at first that matters of relatively small importance, in the great scheme of things, were being given exaggerated importance in their own land. Gradually I came to realize that they were affairs of life and death, ultimately, for the white man in Africa generally, not only for those immediately concerned.

In Johannesburg I watched the dark man of few words on whom the white men spent many words, the man to whom they left the streets at night, to whom they felt superior but about whom they felt uneasy. At his present stage of development he is a queer fellow, this African who goes to the zoo on Saturday afternoons to gaze open mouthed at lions and tigers, which he has never seen but often heard about. He will tell his employer that his entire tribe is dying, to gain an advance of pay with which to buy a guitar, and then will be blissful, strumming eternally on one note. He apes the white man, whom he dislikes, and, strutting importantly in weird rags from the slopshop, makes himself a living caricature of his master, like the monkey on the barrel-organ. He is only in degree less of an intruder than the white man. The true 'Natives' of South Africa were the Bushmen and Hottentots of the Cape, whom the early Dutch settlers exterminated as thoroughly as the Americans the Red Indian. The 'Natives' of today came to these parts from Northern and Central Africa, and then were conquered by the white newcomer.

They come to Johannesburg as mine-workers or as odd-job-men of all kinds, in the second case often illicitly. The Native miners are under supervision and are kept in touch with their tribes, chiefs and headmen, their wives and families. But Johannesburg is full of the others, the 'lost ones' of Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country, who have forgotten their kraal, put on a white man's cast-off shirt and trousers, and belong to no society but that of the shacks and shebeens. No man knows how many they are, whence they come, what they do, or how they live. In a country where the dark man outnumbers the white by four to one, they are a growing and incalculable black proletariat. They live in holes and corners, often on open ground where harassed authority either allows them to put up shacks of corrugated iron, plywood and tin, or closes an impotent eye when they do this without permission.

Such shanty-towns as Moroka and Alexandra are rife with disease and the danger of epidemics, and yet the people in them are much less unhealthy and miserable than the inexperienced visitor would expect. They are used to living rough. Moreover, these conditions are in a large part produced by the Native's determination to come into the white man's cities. A hundred years after the industrial revolution in England, South Africa is passing through a similar phase. In England the hungry smallholder or the squatter expelled by the enclosing squire was driven to the factory towns and their slums. So it is, to some extent, in South Africa. The Native Reserves are too small to support the great Native population; the Native must earn money to pay his tax; these two factors join to drive him, like last century's Englishman, towards the factories which are springing up around the cities. But that does not explain why Natives from far outside South Africa's borders pour into Johannesburg.

They are not forced or invited to come. The city lights call in the Congo as in rural Ireland or Wales. The dark man wants to see the white man's town, to earn a few coins, to buy enchanting things in the white man's bazaars. One day he disappears from the kraal and travels perhaps hundreds of miles through scrub and bush. He slips across the frontier and soon another lost one joins Johannesburg's dark legion. These men forget their native land, their people, the laws and customs they once obeyed. They become almost as rootless as the Negroes of America. From the ranks of the white men one welcoming hand is extended to them, in the spirit in which Mephisto gave his to Faust over a good bargain (but these men have never heard of Faust). The Communist Party courts them, tells them the white man hates them and they must hate the white man and drive him one day into the sea. The driving-power of the Communist Party is supplied, as in other countries, by men from Eastern Europe, or the children of such. The newcomer thought himself lucky, perhaps, to put behind him the dullness of village life and come to the city. He was not aggrieved, but now white men tell him how badly treated he is.

Compared with the lost ones herded in the shanty-towns (which, by the way, are not worse than places I once saw in Moscow) the Native mine-workers are happy. They are well fed and paid more than a miner in the Soviet State, and as much as miners in France or England were receiving forty years ago. Moreover, they are not lost; they are still part of their peoples. The mining companies take care of them from the kraal to the kraal, returning them there, time-served, with enough money to buy a cow to acquire another wife. Their health is looked after. The ebon statue I saw beneath a shower in a mining-compound, the man who lazily let his body sway to the beat of a rumba from the loudspeaker there, the other who made himself a xylophone-like instrument from old tobacco tins and sheep's membrane - all these were more fortunate men than the outcasts of Moroka. They still knew where they belonged.

Nevertheless, their servitude to the disruptive forces of the twentieth century seems as plain as that of the waifs in the shanty-towns. These last are the black revolutionary mass in training which, if the instigators could contrive it, would one day be turned against the white man in Africa; the Communist Party by all account currently helps smuggle fresh bands of 'lost ones' into Johannesburg to increase the overcrowding. The Native miners are the slaves of the gold which appears to be used to promote the revolution of destruction from the upper level, the seat of power. At the flash-point these two explosive schemes (the use of the revolutionary mass and the use of gold) seem to me to meet in a common purpose of destruction. That looks like the plain lesson of the Soviet Revolution in 1917 and of the extension of the Soviet area to the middle of Europe in 1945; in both cases gold, not mobs, played the chief part.

In South Africa, as in other lands and later in America, I had this feeling of some powerful, hidden force using the troubles of men and the treasures of the earth as instruments in a supreme plan. 'The gospel of gold and the philosophy of power'; the words, strangely, are from a character of Oscar Wilde. General Smuts, when he was Prime Minister of South Africa, once told a visitor from London, I am sure there is some hidden pressure behind all the worries of Europe, America and Russia.' He did not explain, and I cannot guess, exactly what he meant, but to me the signs of this 'hidden pressure' seemed in few places so clear as in the gold-mines and the shanty-towns of Johannesburg. I wondered vaguely, as I looked at the yellow dumps, whether gold carries in it some inherent curse, which comes into play when it is largely amassed or evilly used. I wondered this again, later, when I saw the derelict 'ghost towns' from the old gold-rush days in America, and considered the ultimate fate of some of the great fortunes accumulated around them.

In due course I fared further on my way. I drove past Alexandra and took with me a vivid last glimpse of Johannesburg. On some rough ground between shanty-town and main road a huge Native stood poised in the taut attitude of muscular exertion. Silhouetted thus against the sky, he made a striking figure of primitive man challenging civilization. He was not naked, however, his hand held no spear, and at his feet, towards which he gazed, lay no stricken foe or slain beast. He wore ragged European clothes, he wielded a golf club, and his eyes were fixed on a little white ball.

If there is a moral in that I do not know it, unless it is that the white man and the dark one, for better or for worse, now share the same lands and have to find some way of living together.

Chapter Two

FIFTY-FIFTY?

Johannesburg was a kaleidoscope made of little brightly coloured pieces of Manhattan Island and Tel Aviv and an earlier Berlin, of Wall Street and Lombard Street, of Petticoat Lane and Dahlem, of Beverly Hills and Harlem, of Basutoland and Swaziland and Zululand. It was a jewel by night and a gimcrack by day. The feeling of the mining-camp was still in its clubs, where men's feet, you felt, instinctively sought the brass rail when it was no longer there, and prodigal thousands were spent on an annual Ladies' Night.

How old Paul Kruger, brooding on his stoep at Pretoria, must have hated it, I thought. Like William Cobbett in the last century and Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton in this, he presciently distrusted and feared the twentieth century. Johannesburg was alien corn in the vineyard he loved. With feelings rather similar to his an English yeoman might have looked from his house to the stockbroker's castle rising across the fields.

But escape is not the answer and I sometimes think that the good God keeps a suitable reproof, stern or mild, for any who seek to evade the challenge of his mysterious ways. Johannesburg was a warning promptly given to those who once called themselves Boers (or farmers) and today name themselves Afrikaners, or racial republicans (they are not Dutch, for they have much other blood and are separated by centuries from the Netherlands). In 1838 they wanted, like the famous film actress of a later day, to be alone; or, like the crooner of the Nineteen-Forties, to

leave the world behind and go and find,
A spot that's known to God alone,
just a spot to call our own....

They much resembled the Americans of last century. After those colonists cast off British government, many of them disliked their own governments and moved westward, over the mountains, to be alone. The story of that moving frontier was the story of America until those trekkers reached the other coast and no more empty, governmentless spaces remained.

The Boers set out into the unknown interior, skirted the mountain wall of Basutoland and took the lands which they might call their own: the Orange Republic and the Transvaal one. The Natives were driven out or allowed to remain only as share-cropping farmhands. The Boers were alone at last, and around their two capitals, Bloemfontein and Pretoria, arose tiny white republics which an eminent English traveller, Lord Bryce, judged to be 'ideal commonwealths' when he visited them in 1895. But is an idyllic seclusion truly the simple justice the Boers held it to be in a world where Jesus of Nazareth could not obtain justice? Is it even possible? There are not enough Transvaals or South Sea Islands for all.

The way of the Transvaaler was to be hard, for the land was barely wrested from the Natives when gold was found on the Rand, and no further from Pretoria than Haywards Heath is from London Johannesburg began to rise towards (and in the Boer's opinion to cry to) Heaven. Instead of going by, the world squatted on his doorstep. Pretoria filled with strange faces and figures, with Fagins and Artful Dodgers, with smart financiers and hungry concessionaires, all smoking and drinking and bribing; in fact, it was like a priority-hunt in London in 1950.

President Kruger, in his massive frock-coat and top-hat, smoked his pipe and loathed it. He was the symbol of political power in this conquered land. Now a new symbol of political power, in the Transvaal, in all South Africa, throughout the world, took shape next-door. The republican dreams of the old century were dying. The new Caesar, Mammon, was come. It might put on the mask of republicanism for its own ends, but would be the cruellest emperor of all. The Voortrekkers were come a long way; and now this cuckoo in the nest!

I thought of those things as I drove towards Pretoria. The Transvaal reminded me a little of Prussia and a Prussian officer I once knew. He spoke of 'these cold, hard acres' as something which must be known if the Prussian soul were to be understood. Such lands may mould the minds of the men who inhabit them; the cold Prussian acre may help to generate that periodic Teutonic fury. The great spaces of the Transvaal in the arid season may help heat the brooding grievances of many a backveld farmer.

My earliest memories were of British soldiers riding out from St. John's Wood barracks to go to the South African war, but when I went there myself fifty years later I had almost forgotten it. I found, however, that its memory flourished like the green bay tree. The young Afrikaners sang 'Sarie Marais' as often and fervently as if it were just beginning. Who was Sarie Marais? Why, who were Madelon, Püppchen, Bluebell, Sari Maritza, Lili Marlen'? None of them existed, but their names meant home and warm lips to fighting-men at many times and in many lands. Sarie Marais, to judge by her name, had Boer and French and perhaps other blood. Anyway, she waited 'in the old Transvaal' for her soldier boy, just as Dolly Gray waited for hers. The British soldier sang about Dolly Gray when the fight was on, the young Afrikaner about Sarie Marais fifty years later. It was the symptom of a fever as old as antiquity, which, if it is not reduced by the timely treatment of wise leaders, may become dangerous.

The memory of the two great wars has not left a deep imprint on the minds of men in South Africa (where at least a quarter of the white population dissociated itself from them both) or, as I later found, on those of men in America. The Anglo-Boer war, in South Africa, and the North-South war in America, are vivid, living realities. In America masses of people, in their souls, are still fighting the war between the States and still do not clearly know which side they are on. For some reason not easy to decide, those two wars between white men fighting in new countries oversea have left deep scars of bitterness. I sometimes wondered if the dark background ('the treatment of slaves') against which both were fought might be the reason. Even that does not clearly explain the thing, for in America I was told by a good judge that if compensation had been paid for slaves, who were at that time legally acquired property, no war need have been fought. In South Africa compensation was paid, but this did not diminish the enduring Boer resentment which exploded in the later wars. All men of goodwill whom I met in both countries agreed that these were two of the most unfortunate wars in history 'and should never have been fought'. If the white man's place in the world were to shrink and collapse, they would lie at the beginning of the process, for the matters at issue are ideal for exploitation by interested third parties.

I reached the end of the grim brown veld and saw Pretoria before me. Its name and situation were South African history. It was called after a Voortrekker, as Durban was after a British Governor, and stands at the end of the Great Trek. Here is a city plainly built by men with the Christian and European heritage in their blood; every cock would crow if that were denied. Pretoria is, consciously or unconsciously, an answer to Johannesburg, rather as Washington is to New York. It is a place of fine buildings, wide streets, pleasant homes and gardens, of a leisurely way of life. Neither great wealth nor obtrusive bad taste has invaded it; its industries are made for Pretoria, not Pretoria for the industries. If bluebells grew on trees, they would look very much like the jacarandas of Pretoria; the carpets which these spread on the roadways are of nearly the same colour as those of English woods in spring. To Pretoria Winston Churchill was brought a prisoner and well treated, and hence he gallantly escaped. Here Oom Paul sat on his stoep and was conquered. I found his house and realized that I was making pilgrimage to it. I could no longer imagine that, even as a child and even in wartime, I ever felt anything but respect for this dour peasant-president.

Pretoria today is the central point of one of the most significant dramas of our time. There will be decided whether white men are capable or incapable of brotherhood among themselves, and probably whether the white man will stay in or vanish from Africa. The old Boer capital is crowned by the superb Union Building designed by an Englishman, Sir Herbert Baker, who was discovered by another Englishman, detested of the Boers, Cecil Rhodes. It is as if the genius of one race set a diadem on the genius of another, for it is the symbol of union after disunity. It is as if the gods wished to set up, somewhere in the racked -and riven world, a monument to the things men might achieve by welding old enmities into a common purpose, and founding a nation on that. Fifty years ago the Transvaal was ravaged by war (I once read, with surprise, a statement of General Smuts that the ruination there was even greater than anywhere in Europe during the two world wars). The Union Building, surmounting prosperous and handsome Pretoria, proclaims that making peace can be more heroic than making war, that the Great Trek led through disunity to unity. It expresses the ideal of Kipling who, when he edited The Friend at Bloemfontein during that war, wrote

Later shall rise a People, sane and great,
Forged by strong fires, by equal war made one,
Telling old battles over without hate,
Not least his name shall pass from sire to son.

Fifty years after the words were written, their opposite has happened. The Union Building is the promise of what might be, but might yet be the tomb of what might have been. Not far away the Voortrekker Memorial was erected. Another fine work, it could have been the complement of the Union Building, a monument to the achievements of one of the races now united in a nation. At its consecration in 1949, on the fiftieth anniversary of the South African war, however, all emphasis was laid on past resentments and disunity, and little was left undone to wound the feelings of British South Africans, although they had contributed largely to the memorial. The celebrations were held almost exclusively in Afrikaans and for many weeks bitter speeches about the long-dead war, the need for a republic, the abolition of the Union Jack as a twin flag and much more embittered the air. Prominent Afrikaners declared that intermarriage between the two races must cease and that antagonism between them 'must always exist'.

The Voortrekker Memorial could have been given the meaning that the long trek ultimately led to reconciliation, as expressed by the Union Building. The other meaning was deliberately chosen and the memorial set up as a denial of the Union Building and not an assent. Unity in South Africa was in fact first destroyed by the Great Trek; the clear challenge thrown down by these festivities was that the Great Trek went on, and had not ended in or at union. The whole future of the white man in South Africa and Africa was thrown afresh into the balance.

The British South African, I found, usually feels a deep respect for the Afrikaner and the achievements of his fathers. As an outside onlooker, I felt great admiration for both breeds. They are of the best European stock and in unity would now be on the verge of founding a nation of the first quality, one of Suid Afrikaners and of South Africans. Their achievements are great, they are physically fine (the Afrikaners outstandingly so), make excellent soldiers and in sport excel. The British South Africans, though they are little over a million and play games only at weekends, produce cricketers and tennis players of the highest class. The Afrikaners, who are not much more numerous, are the best rugby footballers in the world; the sight of a sixteen-stone Afrikaner covering a hundred yards of rugby field, in about ten and a half seconds is one to remember.

I have had good friends of both races, before I ever saw South Africa, and treasure the memory particularly of an Afrikaner pilot with whom I flew in the first war, and of Colonel Denys Reitz, whom I knew in London during the second one. Could the Boers who fought in the South African war have lived longer, unity would be safe; the bitterness of today is fostered by elderly men who were too young to fight or by younger ones who were not then born. Colonel Reitz, as an emissary of surrender in British hands, wrote, 'The British, with all their faults, are a generous nation, and not only on the man-of-war, but throughout the time that we were among them, there was no word said that could hurt our feelings or offend our pride, although they knew we were on an errand of defeat.' Mr. Winston Churchill, as a Boer prisoner, wrote: 'The Boers were the most good-natured enemy I have ever fought against in the four Continents where I have seen active service.' That war was in fact the last chivalrous one of this century and its story abounds in heartening instances of soldierly generosity on both sides; the contrast between the spirit in which it was fought and that in which today's politically poisoned legends about it are spread by men who had no part in it is part of the general deterioration of this century. The affair has left the field of fact and entered that of propagandist agitation, which knows no hedges.

A book about South Africa, by Mr. G.H. Calpin, bore the title There are no South Africans. I thought the present truth might be differently put. There is a nation on the verge of foundation and on the brink of destruction, and the decision is yet to come. The quarrel seemed to me to be in its essence more between Afrikaners than between Afrikaners and British. The British turn the cheek of native patience to all rebuffs and injuries, and might continue to do so, but if they were relegated to a place of inferiority no white nation could be built in South Africa, for the Afrikaner's numbers are too small to hold this place alone, in overweening pride against all others. The saddest plight is that of those Afrikaners (they probably amount to between thirty and forty per cent of the whole Afrikaner population) who want to build a united nation and who see the future dark and threatened by this feud. It spreads a spiritual gloom throughout the land.

For my part the only fault I felt able to find with the white folk of this splendid country was that they were too few: too few to assure the survival of the white man in South Africa or in Africa. The feud, artificially kept alive, hinders the increase of the population either by intermarriage or by immigration. These obdurate men who, as they themselves proclaimed, 'had forgotten nothing' (even if what they remembered was outside their own experience) were by the mid-century near to gaining a sway over all the Afrikaners as complete as that which the Nazis gained over all Germans, or the East European Zionists over all Jewry, and the plight of the remainder was as difficult. These men were building up a mystic legend round the ox-wagon, the beard and the Voortrekkers comparable with that which the Nazis built up round Frederick the Great and his grenadiers. They denied and wished to wash out the British share in building South Africa, to erase all its symbols one by one and to declare a republic, not of reconciliation but of resentment perpetuated. Once more they wished to be alone, but not this time in the Orange Free State and the Transvaal; they wished to return to the Cape and Natal and rule over the whole, that is, to reverse the story of 150 years. That was not all: they expected to expand, to incorporate the formerly German South-West Africa and the three British Protectorates of Basutoland, Swaziland and Bechuanaland, thus enlarging to an area nearly that of Europe. This was a large ambition for a united nation (it was also the vision of Cecil Rhodes) and looked hopeless for a small republic of mutually resentful racial groups.

When I first saw South Africa in 1947, and during the year I remained, the power of this highly organized section of unforgetting and unforgiving Afrikaners was great and clearly growing, and feelings either of abnormal anticipation or gloomy foreboding were general throughout the country. When I returned in 1949 the picture was darker, and the chances of preserving unity were lessening. A great drawback about a policy based exclusively on past resentments is that you cannot check it when the grievances have disappeared. The bone of contention is yours, but your supporters will not on that account embrace the other contender. They have come to love contention more than the bone. This is the danger in South Africa today.

The irreconcilable Afrikaner's ill-will, through this process, has grown in proportion to the tokens of goodwill showered on him. Thus Mr. Winston Churchill, marching towards Pretoria in 1900, wrote that: 'the British flag must be firmly planted in Bloemfontein and Pretoria', the capitals of the two Republics later defeated. By 1906 the British Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, immediately upon his election restored self-government to the Republics. This was supposed so conclusively to establish amity that in 1910 the former foes (the two British colonies and the two Boer Republics) joined in the great Union. The next result was that in 1914 a Boer General and Prime Minister, General Botha, brought the Union into the first war.

Another Boer General, however, General Hertzog, was still unappeased and opposed this. That continuing resentment was surprisingly large appeared when he was elected Prime Minister after that war. He, too, was convinced in time; returning from London in 1931 with the Statute of Westminster, which made the Dominions sovereignly independent (thereafter their only link with the British Crown was their own wish to remain connected, and power to break away was theirs), he said there was no further freedom that South Africa or the Afrikaner could aspire to.

He again opposed South Africa's entry into the second war and was repudiated by the South African Parliament, so that the country entered it under a third Boer General, General Smuts. When I came to South Africa in 1947 I soon felt that his prestige in South Africa was not as great as the outer world thought it to be. The reputations of public men outside their own countries in the last thirty years have often depended on their attitude towards Zionism, which in my experience is astonishingly powerful among the world's newspapers. General Smuts, like Mr. Winston Churchill, was from the first war a leading supporter of Zionism, which inside South Africa counted for little, save among Zionists. This, however, had little to do with his defeat in 1948; that was due to the appeal of the old cry: 'Away with the Englishman, his King, his Empire; we want to be alone.'

With General Smuts's defeat the supply of Anglo-Boer war generals ended, and the old resentments reached a higher level than ever before when affairs passed into the hands of men who had not fought in it. The whole edifice of union was threatened, and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, could he have surveyed them, might have been surprised and saddened by the results of Liberalism's master-stroke: conciliation towards the defeated Boers. That is not to say that a thing prompted by a good motive must not be done because its results are bad; nevertheless, Liberalism stands condemned more by the events of today in South Africa than any of its other effects, which seem to amount only to the dissipating of a patrimony and the begetting of abortions, Socialism, Communism and the servile World State.

The new Prime Minister (Dr. Malan) and all his colleagues were Afrikaners. For the first time since Union the Cabinet contained no British South African. During the time that followed a week seldom passed without some speech or act aimed at wounding the feelings of nearly half the population. The Afrikaner Nationalists, however, had not a clear majority, and achieved one only by coalescing with a small, more moderate party (the Afrikaner Party), the leader of which, Mr. Havenga, spoke the language of statesmanship. 'To build the future on mere dissatisfaction is risky; the government, therefore should solve the great problems confronting the country in a manner that the broad mass of the people can support ... Freedom under the Republics could not have been greater than that enjoyed today by sovereign, independent, united South Africa.'

Such counsel was merely irritating to men who had ridden to importance on the horse of old resentments. They appeared to live self-enclosed in grudges about matters they had known only as infants or not at all, and were somewhat remote from all else. No living current of feeling remained between them and Holland; for instance, in 1940 a section of Afrikaner Nationalists condoned or applauded Hitler's cheap triumph over that ancestral 'small nation' of the Boers, apparently because it worsened the British plight. In 1948 they were genuinely surprised that the Netherlands still remembered this and did not welcome emissaries associated, justly or unjustly, with such sentiments of 1940.

The Nationalist Afrikaner victory of 1948 was a fascinating political event, technically considered. It was the victory, achieved by thirty years of hard work, of an organization with one dominant aim: to sever the British connection. This was the Broderbond, a band of brothers formed in 1918 of which General Hertzog said in 1935: 'We now have to do with a secret political society accessible to and existing only for Afrikaans-speaking members, the moving spirits of which are out to govern South Africa over the heads of the English-speaking people among us and who are out to raise Afrikaans-speaking Afrikanerdom to domination in South Africa, ignoring the rights and claims of the English-speaking section of our population.'

In 1944 General Smuts said that the Broderbond had 2500 members in key places (that is, among politicians, priests of the Dutch Reformed Church, which plays a part in South African politics similar to that of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland, university professors, government officials, officers, editors and teachers), and that 'dreadful things could happen in our country if it were not fought and its stranglehold on public life broken'. In 1948 the constitution of the Broderbond became public. It stated: 'Let us bear in mind that the main point is for Afrikanerdom to reach its ultimate goal of dominance in South Africa. Brothers, our solution for South Africa's troubles is that the Afrikaner Broderbond must rule South Africa.'

In May 1948 the Broderbond triumphed. The new Prime Minister, the majority of his ministers and of the members of his party were members of it. An uncertain future opened for South Africa, and the visitor could feel a deep spiritual distress in a country which, from afar, seemed to have everything to make it the envy of less happier lands. What the Broderbond desired to do was known, and its members made their resolve to do it plain at every opportunity. The only restraints on them were the fragility of their majority, public discussion of their actions and any sobering influence which the more prudent Afrikaners might exert. As to the fragile majority, they set about to enlarge it to a point where it would give them invulnerable power. Though South-West Africa was not officially annexed or incorporated, South-West African seats were added to the Cape Parliament, and the Nationalists confidently expected to win most of these from German voters, because they had opposed both European wars. German political leaders in South-West Africa appealed to all Germans there to vote for the Afrikaner Nationalists at the next election, stating that the German vote, if thus cast, was enough to ensure the continuation of Afrikaner Nationalist government. It appeared, therefore, that the ultimate decision in such matters as the proclamation of a Republic and the progressive elimination of the British South Africans from the joint patrimony might lie in the gift of the small German population, which might thus be able to pursue its own vengefulness through the vengefulness of others. A move was also made to restrict the Cape Coloured People's right to vote, not because they were coloured, but because they habitually voted against the Afrikaner Nationalists.

In 1900 Mr. Winston Churchill, campaigning through Natal, mentioned the title of a brochure written by Colonel Denys Reitz, A Century of Wrong, and wrote: 'God send us now a century of right.' By 1950, after a half-century of propitiation, the Afrikaner Nationalist, now ruler of the land, appeared to feel he had endured another half-century of wrong, and chief among his objections to 'Slim Jannie' was probably General Smuts's question, on the score of British magnanimity, 'Has such a miracle of trust and generosity ever happened before?' Only worse than that remark was his own representative's declaration, after the announcement of the Statute of Westminster, that 'When the present Status Bill is passed by Parliament South Africa will be freer than Paul Kruger's Transvaal.'

A greater injury than stealing a man's purse or honour is to steal his grievances. If I judge him fairly, the Boer of the predominant type that gained power in 1948 is not happy without his injuries. He curries them each evening for supper, and broods on stoeps in lonely places. His blood is mainly Dutch and German and mixes well with that of the Scots; he is a dour man. He dislikes to talk of anything but politics. He has dignity, simplicity and strength and commands the respectful liking of Englishmen, but he does not like to be liked. Until 1906, when the British righted the wrongs on their side of the previous century's ledger, he counted as a Christian soldier, who fought, and fought well, for his small people's liberty and independence. Perhaps the British understood that and him better than any others in the world could understand. But by 1950 he was no longer a Christian soldier; he was in the grip of a pagan nationalism, and bent now on subjugating others, not on liberating himself. The men he followed did not desire merely to wipe out the last trace of defeat, but to reverse the result of an old war, put themselves in the position of victor, impose the penalties of defeat on those who had won by relegating them to an inferior status and obliterating their symbols.

History shows few examples of a small number of determined men clinging so obstinately to an idea. The case of the Zionists is not analogous, for they are many times as numerous and powerful in all the capitals of the world. This section of the small Boer nation which lived only to see the British ousted from South Africa bred in its early manhood sons more fanatical than itself, whom it could not check when it reached a gentler spirit in old age.

Anthony Trollope, on holiday from Barchester, in South Africa in the 1870s wrote (of the 1850s): 'Already had risen the idea that the Dutch might oust the English from the continent, not by force of arms, but by republican sentiment ... The idea is grand, but such ideas depend on their success for their vindication. When unsuccessful they seem to have been foolish thoughts, bags of gas and wind, and are held to be proof of the incompetency of the men who hold them for any useful public action.' By 1950, a hundred years later, the grand idea came much nearer to success than ever seemed possible. Trollope could not imagine that by the middle of the next century no British soldier would remain in South Africa, that the Transvaal with its gold and the Orange Republic with its diamonds would have been handed back, that the Union Jack would be almost gone, that Pretoria would be the seat of South African government or that an Afrikaner Governor-General would bow to an all-Afrikaner government at Cape Town, that the basis of all this would be voluntary relinquishment by Britain and that the rest would have been achieved through the single-minded pursuit of an ambition by political means, or that the exclusive Afrikaner Republic would be at the door.

The Boers, by 1950, had shown what remarkable results can be obtained by the skilful use of political weapons. They had accomplished as much as could have been attained through a successful war, and entered into possession of a very fine realm, in the making of which they took an essential but not the major part. The moment was come to say 'No' when their host, destiny, proffered the bottle and said, 'A little more? One for the road?' It is the moment when statesmen say No and politicians say Yes; the twentieth century has seen hardly any statesmen since 1914. The Nationalist Afrikaners, or at all events the Broderbond said Yes. The prospect opened of a third crisis like those of 1914 and 1939, and the issue, I thought, depended more on those Afrikaners who wanted unity than on the British South Africans. On the issue, again, depended the future of the white man in Africa, for if he could not stay in South Africa he was unlikely to remain in the other, hotter places where his kind are much fewer. The white men were far from numerous in South Africa itself, and this white bridgehead might eventually collapse if the white men on the beaches spent their years and strength in dispute with each other.

The traveller in South Africa finds all Europeans there, Afrikaner and Briton, preoccupied with problems, so diverse in different places and so complex in all, that after listening to the great argument about them he might think: 'Here is something which only God can now put right, not man, and He is surely preparing his millstones.' Of all the many opinions I heard, however, one seemed to me likely to be right: that there is in truth only one problem, and that if it were solved the others might disappear as the white ants vanish when the burrow of their huge, slug-like and spawn-laden empress is exposed. It is that of the small white population, which is caused by the political feud. Had South Africa ten million Europeans, instead of two and a half, the problem of 'white survival' might fade away, and with it the other problems, which in fact are all vari-coloured facets of this central problem. The inferiority of numbers makes the white man fear the prolific darker man among whom he lives and hesitate to help this man's advance, so that he puts himself in a light which he himself dislikes. Equality of numbers, and a movement towards superiority, would establish South Africa as a white man's country, the cornerstone of a great continent of boundless prospect. The Afrikaner does not admit that. He believes immigration would swamp his Afrikanerdom, which he is resolved to make supreme. He is right to the extent that it would make the exclusive Afrikaner Republic impossible, but I met no sober judge who thought South Africa could long survive in that form; the splendid future, all agreed, was only open to a united nation.

The Nationalist Afrikaner victory of 1948 was an immediate deterrent to immigration. The other States of the Commonwealth, formerly apathetic about immigration, actively encouraged it after the lessons of the second twentieth-century war. Canada, Australia and New Zealand set about to increase their European population and welcomed British settlers foremost. The Nationalist Afrikaner took the other road. I do not presume to suggest that British immigration alone could produce the greater numbers which South Africa needs. White immigration from anywhere in Northern Europe would be as good, but it is difficult to see from what other quarter sufficient numbers could come, and I believe the Nationalist Afrikaner is in fact opposed to large-scale immigration from any direction, fearing the submergence of dominant Afrikanerdom.

Only one other force in South Africa (as in England) is equally hostile to immigration (or emigration), namely, the Communist Party. Its newspapers in England constantly attack the treatment of British immigrants in South Africa: its newspapers in South Africa attack the British as imperialists and 'jingoes'. If the white man were as numerous as the dark one it would lose its only appealing street-corner cry: that the great majority of South Africa's inhabitants is denied all rights and opportunity. The Nationalist Afrikaner does not see what Trollope saw seventy years ago, long before the appearance of an international party of revolution with branches in every country:

'At present the Native is altogether excluded from the franchise. But the embargo is of its nature too arbitrary - and, nevertheless, would not be strong enough for safety were there adventurous white politicians in the Colony striving to acquire a parliamentary majority and parliamentary power by bringing the Zulus to the poll.' (South Africa, Chapman & Hall, 1879.)

The adventurous white politicians have appeared and are active in all countries, fanning the disputes of white men and the grievances of dark ones for their own end, the servile World State. The Nationalist Afrikaner, a rare white man among multiplying dark ones, still sits on the stoep of his homestead among the gum trees, with six thousand flat acres around, nursing ancient rancours and spiting the times. 'Do not let us put our small handful against the world,' once said General Smuts, 'you have a great country, a great continent with great mineral resources ... You will not be allowed to remain in Naboth's vineyard ... in a state of isolation you will always be in danger ... We have received a position of equality and freedom, not only among the other States of the Empire but among the other nations of the world. Shall we now throw away all these advantages to get back to our old antheap? It is dangerous, it paralyses a people, to live in the past.' Wise words, even though General Smuts, by some strange twist of reasoning, thought it good for the East European Zionists to live in an even more remote past, and one not even theirs.

I came away from Pretoria, over which the shadow hung of old animosities, of the approaching celebrations of the fifty-year-old war, of the declaration of a racial republic. It darkened the Union Building, which seemed the symbol of a unique work of peacemaking in a world that otherwise knows only how to make war. Pretoria is one of the Union's two capitals. Parliament sits at Cape Town, the Government offices are in Pretoria. That is as if Westminster were at Land's End and Whitehall at John o' Groats. The ministries and the foreign missions have to keep a great store of boxes and crates, in which all the files and papers are packed in January, when politicians and parliamentarians, diplomats and documents, disappear to Cape Town, reappearing thence in the mid-year. I heard many arguments, of time and toil and cost, against this unusual though picturesque arrangement, but many in favour could be offered. The twin capitals were the basis of the whole edifice of fifty-fifty on which the Union was built and grew. Over them as yet fly both flags, on State occasions. In them two languages are spoken and officially recognized.

The spirit of union, however, was low in the town that lay at the foot of the great building. A deep division rent the land and on either side of it were unhappy people, or unsure ones; some who wanted to intermarry and mingle with those on the other side and were hindered, others who had mixed and now found their homes riven and others again who stayed encamped on one side of the gulf and thought to find happiness in looking bitterly across it. Hatred, like absinthe and opium, brings the passing illusion of bliss.

A disconcerting undertone, which I knew well from days in a distracted Europe, ran through life in this distant and pleasant place. I drove away from it hoping as an onlooker that the Union Building might yet fulfil its promise. I began a long journey through a land of infinite possibility, trammelled only by old grudges, which attached themselves to all life like the grey beards of the Spanish Moss to the live oaks of Louisiana. I discovered a quality in the air and light of South Africa, a magic in its colours, which entranced me, so that later, when I was far away, I longed to return.

Chapter Three

NATAL THE BELEAGUERED

A hundred miles out of Johannesburg mountains rose beneath the spacious sky and I began to feel the presence of two influences which may help shape the white man here: loneliness and remoteness. Even this road, possibly the busiest of all, has gaps of fifty miles between dorps (the word means village but connotes also spiritual isolation). On a run equal in length to that from London to Brighton you may see hardly a habitation or creature. If you have a breakdown the next driver who passes will stop, help if he can or carry a message to Nextdorp, and send back aid. This friendly helpfulness on the road is a warming thing, and I missed it later in America, where such succour is rare (I was puzzled by that until an American friend told me that it is held unwise to stop for either hitch-hikers or drivers apparently in trouble).

These unpeopled gaps along the road may signify that inland South Africa, after one hundred years, is not yet a white man's country. The white man has built little settlements far apart and strung wire between them to stake his claim to the land, but he has not closely populated or intensively cultivated it, or harnessed the rainfall. The small white population is a fundamental weakness, however little South Africans today may like the thought. Plenty of white people in the world would gladly live on less than six thousand acres apiece. If they are debarred, the multiplying masses of Natives and Indians will press harder on the fences. The lonely traveller may see a few human beings, but probably Natives, who do not understand him. If he loses his way, he will soon realize how few the white men are in the land. On these roads the only sound is the occasional whoosh-swish of the white man flashing by, separate from all around him in his wheeled, enamelled capsule. He roars past and is gone; behind him the dust settles, the pop-eyed piccanin returns to his play, the grim mountains look down; Africa thinks it over.

'Civilization has barely touched Africa at a few selected points,' wrote General Smuts, 'and in the course of the ages the contacts of Africa with civilization have never been permanent or long-lived. After a casual acquaintance with her sister continents she has always shaken herself free and returned to her wild ways. Her spirit has been alien and aloof from that of the rest of the world and her charm continues uncontaminated by the conventions of civilization. The European invasion which began in more recent years has to some extent affected her peoples ... but in her heart of hearts she is and remains wild and unaffected by the invading influences.' (Foreword to The Low Veld, Col. J. Stevenson Hamilton, Cassell, 1929.) On this far journey I felt that Africa was weighing the white man in the balance and saying: 'Well, I never was conquered yet. And you, little man, do you think to do it with two and a half million souls?'

When I told people in the Transvaal that I was going to Natal they showed grief. 'Natal!' they said. 'Durban! But my dear fellow, Natal is just not South Africa. And the Natal British - they are like nothing else on earth. Don't waste your time; get out among the ordinary people.' When they heard that I was to stay at a small place called Nottingham Road they were still more pained. 'What, stay at Not-at-home Road!' they exclaimed. 'Then why did you leave Kensington?'

In many countries I have met the city which 'is not South Africa' (or France, or England, or America); the only ones, in respect of which the phrase seemed to have clear truth and meaning, were Johannesburg and New York. As to the enchanting class of 'ordinary people' or 'just folks', in whom all wisdom and virtue reside, I have found them nowhere and doubt their existence. In this case the disparagements of Natal only caused me to approach it with greater curiosity, and it was an exciting moment when I saw before me at the roadside the notice: Natal.

It is a lovely name, and the world seems to have been a lovelier place four hundred and fifty years ago, when Vasco da Gama sailed the seas and, discovering new land one Christmas Day, called it Natal in honour of that Nativity. Men had great faith and confidence then and these still ring in the names they gave to the places they found. Were Natal discovered today it might be named Unonia. As I drove into it I wondered idly if Rupert Brooke, had he lived a hundred years later, would have ever been moved to write.

If I should die, think only this of me,
That there's some corner of a foreign land
That is for ever UNO.

From 'A Little Boy Called Taps', I thought, to the Buttered Crumpet! I had in spirit travelled this road before. The names I came to now were imprinted on my earliest memories. Down this road the invading Boers rode into Natal and up it came the British, Mr. Churchill with them, the two meeting in their hardest battles before besieged Ladysmith. I stopped the car, got out and looked up and down that historic road. Mr. Churchill came up it praying for 'a decisive victory ... which would plant the British flag firmly in Pretoria and Bloemfontein'. The Boers drove down it praying for a decisive victory which would carry their quadricolour to Cape Town and Durban.

Where are the decisive victories of yesteryear? The British won theirs and handed it back, like a sword rendered to a gallant enemy. The Boers thereafter, by the arts of politics, won theirs. But who has lost and who has won in this caucus race? Behind the contestants, fifty years ago, appeared other, shadowy, unarmed invaders bent on profiting by the wars of others. I said that a thin red coastal strip denotes the only part of South Africa, and Africa, effectively colonized and populated by Europeans. But since 1900 another colour, brown, has been overprinted on this red area in Natal, and especially in Durban; without firing a shot the Indian has occupied substantial areas of the old Colony. At the other end of the road the decisive victory, for the present, is that of Johannesburg, a main power-station in the process of gold-manipulation which clearly dominates our century. The last laugh is not with either Boer or Briton.

I started again and drove slowly, revelling in the colour of this land. A widow-bird rose and struggled across the road in front of me. Its dress was black and its tail so long and heavy that it could scarcely keep in the air; it looked just like an unhappy lady borne down by the weight of her woes and her weeds. I should think it is the most aptly named bird in creation.

And just round the next corner was another lady, Lady Smith herself, whose husband, Harrismith, is at the other end of the turning on the right. The world was good when a young Spanish girl could give shelter to a young English officer, prosaically called Smith, during the Napoleonic wars in Spain, and end her days as the wife of the Governor of the Cape, so much loved by all that two South African towns were named after the pair. What memories her name brought back now to a Londoner born in the Nineties! My father kicked his top hat through city streets at the relief of Ladysmith and Mafeking.

The little town has a hallowed air. I had not known that the dust of old wars is so fragrant, or the gentle spirit of brave men so tangible in the place where they died. In South Africa I gained a deep respect for the British soldier who fought all over this hard country for a hundred years. What a staunch man he must have been, what hardships he must have endured, and what obstacles have overcome. He was not held in much regard in his time. Only those who could do nothing better (was the general feeling) would join the Army. I think he was even called a mercenary, on account of his daily shilling! The conscript of today has a big task if he is to equal that man. I looked down the little street and pictured the Dublin Fusiliers, in honour of their especial ordeals and bravery, leading in the relief column nearly fifty years ago, and Winston Churchill riding with the staff.

There is a little church in Ladysmith which, no matter what might happen in the world, will ever be a corner of a foreign field ... The vicar, though I could not find him, was a brother of Field-Marshal Montgomery. On the other side of the main street was a large café-cinema, where, although the hour was early, those melancholy girls called usherettes stood about in trousers. Hollywood was come to Ladysmith; for this relief much thanks.

I went on, to Colenso. This was a journey back through time. The battlefield lies hard by the road, as I remembered it in the picture-books of my childhood. Caton Woodville's drawing of 'Lieutenant Roberts saving the guns at Colenso' is clearly before my eyes still, and I knew the pitiful, open field, without any cover, and the hill from which the Boers poured down their fire, before I saw them. I recall that I was sad for Bobs, V.C., and his son, V.C. Now, as I looked at the son's grave, I felt no trace of that childish sorrow, only a reverent gratitude. The little battlefield is as it was that day. No Imperial Commissioners have collected and removed the dead. They lie where they fell, among the Wait-A-Bit bushes (a thorn with spikes longer than they seem, which arrest the unwary stranger as neatly as a button-holing acquaintance), marked by simple monuments, rough stones and barbed wire. Over them lies the brooding stillness of Africa, which the traveller feels everywhere in 'white South Africa' outside a few High Streets. The feeling of an old battle is lively in the air. I saw Roberts and his gunners sweating and straining, the horses rearing and showing the whites of their eyes, the puffs of smoke from the hill; I heard the bullets whine above and between them, and the dull thud of impact....

Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

I am The Prologue ... Ring up the curtain.

I drove along it slowly, looking for a certain place. 'A few hundred yards from Frere Station': this might be the very railway cutting. I got out, looking for some memorial, but found none. Then, beside a dead tree, I stumbled across a rough gravestone with a legend traced on it in cartridge cases: 'Here lieth the remains of those who were killed in the armoured train, November 15th, 1899. Erected by the Border Regiment in memory of our comrades of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers.'

So this was the very spot where the most famous and baffling figure in the tragi-comedy of this century made his first great entrance in its Prologue. Here Winston Churchill appeared on the great historical highway which still stretches into the mists of the future. Here, after just failing to free the armoured train from the boulder with which it was neatly ambushed, he was captured by the Boers. Elbowing his way impatiently into the twentieth century, he looked that day much as he looks now, fifty years later. I judge so, at least, from the description of an old burgher, Frans Changuion, who was among his captors, 'he had the appearance of a great fat schoolboy'. The words are not chosen to flatter, but the enigmatic man of the second world war is recognizable in them (they were recorded by Peter Quain in the Natal Daily News, October 7th, 1948).

Many people still in Durban (I later found) remember the day when Mr. Churchill, escaped, returned there, was carried shoulder high from the point and spoke from the steps of the City Hall. 'Only one possibility is excluded,' he then wrote, 'an inconclusive peace.' Ah, these jests of time and history! Not far away young Jan Smuts, at the head of his commando, similarly hoped for a conclusive victory. At either end of the historical road were these two men, whom enviable and splendid careers awaited in the twentieth century. There, as they appear in the Prologue, they may be considered: Christian patriots both. To my mind the greatest riddle of the time is the support which both these men gave to the cause of Political Zionism, from which, as I believe, great tribulations will spring in the next half-century. My conjecture is that these two famous men, and many others of their generation from President Wilson to President Roosevelt, from Lord Balfour and Mr. Lloyd George to Mr. Baldwin, took up that cause in good faith and goodwill and never realized that a long spoon is needed at such suppers.

I wondered why no memorial stood at the place of Mr. Churchill's capture. Later I learned why. In 1946 the Historical Monuments Commission of South Africa decided to put up a commemorative plaque there, but Boer objections were raised and it changed its mind. The Afrikaner does indeed lay down old grudges like wine, rolling them over his tongue after many years with the gusto of a connoisseur. (In Durban, however, a private resident set up a bas-relief to commemorate the speech from the steps of the old City Hall.)

I drove on from the scene of the armoured train's ambush. I had felt from the moment of leaving the Transvaal that I might be in a different country, for in each township and dorp I noticed a new colour in the pattern, another kind of squalor in squalid corners and other smells in smelly ones. Briefly, Indians were everywhere. Each part of South Africa has its peculiar problem inside the greater problem, and this is Natal's particular one. It has nearly all the Indians because the Cape, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State virtually debar them, leaving Natal, which imported them, to lie alone in the bed it made. I stayed a happy while at Nottingham Road and then went on through the mist-belt, past a fine school that might have been Rugby and another that looked like Roedean, and came one lovely morning over a hillcrest to see Durban below me and the blue Indian Ocean beyond. It was the fulfilment of a boyhood dream.

Through a lucky mishap, Glück im Unglück, I spent much longer in Durban and Natal than I expected that day and think this one of the happiest periods of my life. The polychrome human scene and the climate delighted me, while this coast, the white man's southernmost front line, must be among the loveliest in the world, marked by the four fine citadels of Durban, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and East London, guarded in the rear by the inland strongholds of Pretoria, Bloemfontein, Grahamstown and Stellenbosch. In unity, a resplendent future should fill the empty spaces of the land between and the dubious gaps of the political prospect.

Natal has for forty years been given the part of him who gets slapped among the provinces of South Africa. It has nearly all the Indians and more of the Natives than any other. It is the one of the four where (a heritage of British rule) the most substantial proportion of the land, about half, is reserved 'for the Native. It has no single representative in the present Union Government and bit by bit is being elbowed out of control of its own affairs. Its flag was once the Union Jack and it still retains this as one of two, but is constantly threatened with the abolition even of that, wh