The tragic fate of Veteran Thomas

Thomas was born of the union of an English mother and a Cape Afrikaander in the late nineteenth century. Brought up by his mother, he had never met his dad who joined the Cape Rebels during the Second South African War (also known as the Boer War). In 1901 a band of Cape Rebels who had fully integrated with the guerilla forces of the Orange Free State and Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek in opposition to an aggressively expanding British Empire, was captured near Hopetown at the edge of the Great Karoo. Tommy’s father was numbered amongst them and, as he was deemed a traitor to the Cape and British cause, was court martialed and executed on the outskirts of the town along the banks of the Orange River. 

Growing up in Cape Town after the Peace of Vereeniging was not easy for a youngster, taunted by English lads for his familial association with the Cape Rebels and the ignominious end his father had met. Likewise, his mother’s English background did not endear Tommy and his siblings to fellows whose Cape Dutch heritage inclined them to despise Imperial Britain for its genocidal scorched earth and concentration camp policies that had decimated the populations of the Boer Republics. Cultural and linguistic ties to these folk who had been bludgeoned into submission by an imperial superpower, turned Afrikaners throughout the region against England and its minions in South Africa. They didn’t take kindly to an Anglicisation policy which was applied as harshly in the colonies of the Cape and Natal as it was in the former Boer Republics now under the heel of Great Britain.

Tommy’s heritage and his difficulties with the stigma attached to both sides of his family were not the only issues he had to contend with. Turn of the century Cape Town where he, his siblings and his mother resided, was buffeted by threats of disease. Bubonic Plague reared its ugly head in Cape Town in 1901 and struck fear into all who lived in the city. A scare of contamination proved unfounded, but not without one of the domestic helpers who had taken care of the children was consigned with the rest of the Cape Town Xhosa community to the outskirts of the city, having been blamed for the outbreak. It was a typical knee-jerk reaction by the Cape Government of the day, but it was another example of bureaucratic overreach that antagonised this hapless segment of the population. 

A change of government in Britain, the granting of self-government to the former Boer Republics and the establishment of the Union of South Africa followed the South African War in rapid succession. It was not long before another war overtook the European powers and Britain would drag her vast Empire into that conflagration. On the face of it, the fledgling Union government was at liberty to opt out of the European War, which later became known as the Great War, and much later acquired a number (First World War) when the world descended into chaos for a second time in another twenty or so years. Nevertheless, to the indignation of the Afrikaner nation, the government of the Union elected to join the British war effort and launch an invasion of German West Africa. There was a short-lived rebellion in 1914 that was quelled by General Botha (the Prime Minister of the Union). In an astute political move, he split the ranks of the Afrikaners by using mainly Afrikaans members of the Union Defence Force to put down a rebellion which had substantial support amongst Boer folk, who had been wronged by the British that had left upwards of twenty-six thousand Boer women and children dead in their wake. German territory was shortly thereafter invaded and occupied, despite Germany having sided with the Boer Republics only a few years earlier. 

A volunteer force was assembled for the invasion of German West Africa (“Namibia” in our age) and later also German East Africa (essentially the country “Tanzania” today). Surprisingly, many of the volunteers were Afrikaners who were progressively dragged into the conflict in Europe during the four years that this “total war” was waged. Some, like Tommy, would find themselves in trenches on Flanders Fields before long. Barely seventeen at the outbreak of hostilities, Thomas lied about his age to recruitment officers of the Allied forces who turned a blind eye to these technicalities. The minimum age for combat forces at the time was nineteen, but many a fellow seeking adventure and excitement eagerly joined up to fight – an escape from the drudgery of life in a far flung corner of Africa in the early twentieth century. Soon they would be disillusioned to find that war was not all it was cracked up to be – it was a matter of “hurry up” and wait – and wait – and wait …. Action would indeed come, and that, too, was not all that glorious. Going over the top of the trenches was fraught with the danger of strafing machine gun fire and imminent death. Tactics advanced by the “Butcher of the Somme” Douglas Haig, were better suited to a by-gone era – before the technological advances with respect to weapons and chemical warfare. Many were led to their death by an unsuitable senior command structure for what was the embryo of modern warfare. 

By the time the Great War sputtered to a conclusion in November 1918 with the Armistice, Tommy had endured the slaughter of Passchendaele in 1917, the muddy, rat infested trenches, and had managed to avoid, simply by a quirk of fate, mustard gas attacks. He had survived more machine gun fire and artillery shells lobbed in his general direction than would have been deemed statistically probable. Yet, by the time the guns fell silent at 11h00 on the 11th November 1918, Thomas still had a pulse – was still breathing and was not shell shocked (PTSD in today’s parlance). He had endured  all of that and emerged alive and relatively unscathed. An unlikely soldier, fighting on the side of an army that had executed his father, against an enemy who had been the erstwhile friend of the forces for whom his dad had fought. All of this he had survived.

Demobilisation took many months. It was a long wait to embark on the massive troop ships for the transport home. In the close confines of ship’s quarters an unseen enemy lurked. Tommy disembarked in Cape Town with a severe bout of ‘flu. Unbeknownst to him, it was the Spanish Influenza (incorrectly named after Spain, the only country at war’s end that was willing to publicly identify the disease – rather than the USA where it had first manifested itself after humans had apparently been afflicted by an avian ‘flu). It was a global public health disaster that followed a man made disaster of global warfare. Both swept relentlessly across the world and caused death on an unprecedented scale. No respecter of persons, it afflicted poor and wealthy, the underdog and the powerful, every race and culture. The Prime Minister of the Union, Louis Botha, caught the “Spanish ‘Flu” and due to his co-morbidities (and ostensibly his obesity) his heart gave up under the strain about a year after his apparent recovery. So many folk in the Union of South Africa succumbed to it that coffins were at one point in short supply. Yet Tommy pulled through and back in good health was employed as a truck driver within a few months of his return to home soil.

Of an evening in 1921 he was driving his truck in pouring rain along the Paarl-Cape Town road when he came across a stranded motorist on the verge of the road that was rapidly degenerating into a quagmire. Having pulled over, he attempted to attach a towing rope to the stranded vehicle in the dim lights of his truck. A huge American hunk of steel that was the typical motor car in those days, approached from the Cape Town side of this narrow strip of road. It collided at full tilt with the stranded vehicle and smashed it into Tommy, pinning him between it and his truck. “Death due to a fractured skull caused by being knocked down by a car,” was the official inquest verdict.

 Tommy who had survived war and pestilence, did not make it out of this horrific motor accident alive. The untimely demise of this Good Samaritan at the age of 23 is an enigma in the quest for meaning in life. The randomness of life and the thread from which it is suspended, leads one to the conclusion that one should plan for a long life, but live in the knowledge that today could be one’s last. As the “Preacher” puts it so aptly in the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes: “Meaningless! Meaningless! Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”  - Or is it?