AMID the green copies of the Everyday Man’s Encyclopedia, a woven tapestry of two perched birds, and eight Winston Churchill biographies spilling out of an overcrowded bookshelf, a portrait of Reuben John Du Toit hangs on the wall.
“He took quite an active part in WWI,” Jos, his son, explains
“As a stretcher holder in the medical division, he was right in the thick of things.”
Wednesday marked the 100th anniversary of the start of what was, at the time and until the advent of World War II, known as the Great War. Over 230 000 South Africans fought in it.
“He once wrote in his diary from the war about when a soldier manning a machine gun was knocked out, and he had to take over fire,” Jos recalls. The diary has since been lost, but the legacy of Reuben and the Du Toit family lives on.
Sitting in his study, Jos pores over an album of his family history with death notices, newspaper advertisements, short biographies and the soft black ink of old photos spilling from its edges.
Hidden among the piles of paper are two faded yellow photos of Reuben, stern faced in his WWI uniform.
“He looked quite good back then,” Jos says, smiling.
South Africa entered the war on the side of the Allied Forces on September 8, 1914, just a month-and-a-half after the fighting had begun.
After raising a brigade of four infantry battalions from the Cape, Natal, Orange Free State, Transvaal and Rhodesia, the South African troops shipped first to Alexandria, Egypt and then to Marseilles, France.
Included in the brigade were the Cape Town Highlanders, a regiment comprised solely of Cape Town residents.
“He tried to join the Cape Town Highlanders in 1914 before finishing matric,” Jos says. “But they rejected him because he didn’t have his father’s permission. My grandfather finally allowed him to join in 1915 when he was 18.”
The Highlanders were best known for their part in the attack on Delville Wood which began on July 15, 1916 as part of Sir Douglas Haig’s infamous “great push” on the Somme to end the war. Little more than 3 000 men from the South African 1st Infantry Brigade were tasked with taking Delville Wood “at all costs” from the 7 000 Germans ensconced in the wood.
The fighting in Delville Wood has been described as one of the fiercest in the war, which left the landscape littered with masses of trees turned into wooden stumps from artillery fire.
By the time the fighting ended on September 3, 80 percent of the South African soldiers were killed, wounded or missing with only 750 survivors of the 3 433 soldiers deployed. Du Toit himself was wounded in an ear on July 18.
“It’s pretty shocking to think he wasn’t even 19 when he fought in that battle.”
Years after his father returned to Cape Town, Jos followed the family tradition at the age of 17, joining the South African Naval forces in WWII.
He now walks around his compound in Gordon’s Bay with a wooden cane stained a mosaic of deep mahogany and light, unfinished wood in hand.
Reflecting on his father’s legacy almost a century after he fought in Delville Wood, Jos penned a short poem. The final stanza reads:
“Too late to mourn the days long past // Sad legacy of Nicholas the last // But for the love of God and man // Let us do better if we can.”
Jos has two children, one in Switzerland, one in France about 260km from where his grandfather fought.