Though Lothar had killed fifty men since then, that was the day he would remember all his life. He always marked it as the day he had become a man.
Lothar was not among those who had thrown his water bottle. Instead, he had shot dead two of the Englishmen as they wriggled forward on their bellies to try and reach the water-bottles. His hatred of the English, learned at the knees of both his mother and his father, had truly be, zun to flower that day and had come into full fruiting in the years that followed.
The English had hunted him and his father like wild animals across the veld. His beloved aunt and three female cousins had died of diphtheria, the white sore throat, in the English concentration camps, but Lothar had made himself believe the story that the English had put fish-hooks in the bread that they fed the Boer women to rip out their throats. It was an English thing, this war on the women and the young girls and the children.
He and his father and his uncles had fought on long otter all hope of victory was gone, the Bitter Enders, they called themselves with pride. When the others, starved to walking skeletons, sick with dysentery and covered with the running ulcerations which they called veld sores, caused by exposure and malnutrition, dressed in their rags and sacking, with only three rounds a piece remaining in their bandoliers, had gone in to surrender to the English at Vereeniging, Petrus De La Rey and his son Lothar had not gone in with them.
Witness my oath, oh Lord of my people, Petrus had stood bareheaded in the veld, with his seventeen-year-old son Lothar beside him. The war against the English will never end. This I swear in your sight, oh Lord God of Israel. Then he had placed the black leather-covered Bible in Lothar's hands and made him swear the same oath.
The war against the English will never end- Lothar had stood beside his father as he cursed the traitors, -he cowards who would no longer fight on, Louis Botha and jannie Smuts, even his own brother Koos De La Rey. You, who would sell your people to the Philistine, may you live all your lives under the English yoke and all burn in hell for ten thousand years. Then the father and the boy had turned their backs and ridden away, towards the vast and land that was the domain of Imperial Germany, and left the others to make peace with England.
Because both father and son were strong, hard workers, both of them endowed with natural shrewdness and courage, because Lothar's mother was a German of good family with excellent connections and some wealth, they had prospered in German South-West Africa.
Petrus De La Rey, Lothar's father, was a self-taught engineer of considerable skill and ingenuity. What he did not know he could improvise: the saying was, 'N Boer maak altyd n plan', a Boer will always make a plan.
Through his wife's connections he obtained the contract to reconstruct the breakwater of Liideritzbucht harbour, and when that was successfully completed, the contract to build the railway line northwards from the Orange river to Windhoek, the capital of German South-West.
He taught Lothar his engineering skills. The boy learned swiftly, and by the age of twenty-one was a full partner in the construction and road-building company of De La Rey and Son.
His mother, Christina De La Rey, selected a pretty blonde German girl of good family and moved her diplomatically into her son's orbit, and they were married before Lothar's twenty-third birthday. She bore Lothar a beautiful blond son on whom he doted.
Then the English intruded upon their lives once more, threatening to plunge the entire world into war by opposing the legitimate ambitions of the German empire.
Lothar and his father had gone to Governor Seitz with an offer to build up, at their own expense, supply dumps in the remote areas of the tcrritory to be used by the German forces to resist the English invasion, which'would surely come from the Union of South Africa, now governed by those traitors and turncoats Smuts and Louis Botha.
There had been a German naval captain in Windhoek at the time; he had quickly recognized the value of the De La Rey offer and prevailed on the governor to accept it.
He had sailed with the father and son along that dreadful littoral that so well deserved the name Skeleton Coast, to select a site for a base from which German naval vessels could refuel and revictual, even after the ports of Lilderitzbucht and Walvis Bay were captured by the Union forces.
They discovered a remote and protected bay three hundred miles north of the tenuous settlements at Walvis Bay and Swakopmund, a site almost impossible to reach overland, for it was guarded by the fiery deserts. They loaded a small coastal steamer with the naval stores sent out to them secretly from Bremerhaven in a German cruise ship. There were 500 tons of fuel oil in 44-gallon drums, engine spares and canned foods, small arms and ammunition, nine-inch naval shells, and fourteen of the long Mark VII acoustic torpedoes, to re-arm the German U- boats if they should ever operate in these southern oceans. These supplies were ferried ashore and buried amongst the towering dunes. The lighters were painted with protective tar and buried with the stores.
This secret supply base was finally established only weeks before the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo and the Kaiser was forced to move against the Serbian revolutionaries to protect the interests of the German empire. immediately France and Britain had seized upon this as a pretext for precipitating the war after which they had been lusting.
Lothar and his father saddled their horses and called out their Hottentot servants, kissed their women and Lothar's son farewell, and rode out on commando against the English and their unionist minions once again. They were six hundred strong, riding under the Boer General Maritz, when they reached the Orange river and built their laager and waited for the moment to strike.
Each day armed men rode in to join them, tough, bearded men, proud, hard fighters with the Mousers slung on their shoulders and the bandoliers of ammunition crisscrossing their wide chests. After each joyous greeting, they gave their news, and it was all good.
The old comrades were flocking to the cry of Commando! Everywhere Boers were repudiating the treacherous peace which Smuts and Botha had negotiated with the English. All the old Boer generals were taking to the field. De Wet was camped at Mushroom Valley, Kemp was a Treurfontein with eight hundred, Beyers and Fourie were all out and had declared for Germany against England.
Smuts and Botha seemed reluctant to precipitate a conflict between Boer and Boer, for the Union forces consisted of seventy percent Dutch-born soldiers. They were begging, wheedling and pleading with the rebels, sending envoys to their camps, prostrating themselves in the attempt to avoid bloodshed, but each day the rebel forces grew stronger and more confident.
Then a message reached them, carried by a horseman riding in great haste across the desert from Windhoek. It was a message from the Kaiser himself, relayed to them by Governor Seitz.
Admiral Graf Von Spee with his squadron of battlecruisers had won a devastating naval battle at Coronel on the
