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This long book is the first-fruits of more than twenty years’ thought and research and meditation. The work of which They Seek a Country is part suggested itself to me originally at the beginning of 1916 when I became, by sheer chance, a humble member of the British Expeditionary Force in East Africa. We were sailing north from Durban to Mombasa in the liner Armadale Castle, which had been stripped of most of its contents (with the exception of its livestock) and had become a cruiser. During that voyage, I found myself seated in the officers’ mess—or ward-room, as it was then called—between a brother-officer of the R.A.M.C., my friend Robert Dolbey, and a Boer cavalryman, Major Brink, who later, I believe, became Chief-of-Staff to the Union Defence Force.

Both of them had fought in the Boer War, on different sides. When they discovered this, they immediately began talking across me, recalling the various engagements at which they had been present, the terrain of these remembered fights and the mistakes which had been made by the leaders on either side. The strange form of this comradeship-in-arms and the friendliness of the discussion appealed strongly to my novelist’s imagination. It was, indeed, a remarkable thing that these two men, who only fifteen years before, had been devoted to a mutual destruction, should be sailing northward to fight side by side in a savage land against a common enemy; and the spectacle set me thinking on the miracle by which, in so short a time, that hazardous experiment, the Union of South Africa, had justified the political vision that conceived it. On H.M.S. Armadale Castle, at that moment, there were, probably a thousand men, Afrikanders of Dutch and English origin, united not only by the ideals they had volunteered to defend, but also by a personal comradeship in which the bitter memories of racial and political conflict had been forgotten. This grey ship, with its cargo of men of both races, many of whom would never return, appeared to me symbolical of that miracle. I was witnessing, it seemed to me, the Birth of a Nation.

An impressive theme—and one which not merely challenged me as an artist but appealed to me as a man who had already given a great part of his heart to South Africa. General Smuts has declared that I am, by nature, an “African”; and even as I write these words, the nostalgia I feel for that fierce and lovely continent, almost persuades me that he is right. All through the East African campaign, which may someday be realized as one of the most heroic achievements of the Great War, my mind continued to dwell on this subject. When the war was over, I returned to South Africa and spent a year there, saturating myself in the “atmosphere” of the country and absorbing as much of its history as my mind could hold.

Yet, when I began to plan the work in detail, I felt so doubtful of my knowledge and of my powers that I shrank from writing it. For seventeen years, during which I produced the long series of Mercian novels, I continued to brood over a mass of rebellious material which I still found it impossible to see in perspective and with the detachment that I deemed necessary for the treatment of such a huge theme. At last, in 1937, twenty-one years after the birth of the idea, I made a final pilgrimage in which I followed the Voortrekkers step by step from the Cape to the Limpopo; and in the following year I began the composition of this, the first movement of what I had begun to think of as my “African Symphony.”

Every book that a serious artist writes is, in some degree, an Act of Faith; and this book (or series of books), the most ambitious I have ever attempted, is, for what it is worth, my own contribution to a cause in which I believe most fervently: the Unity of the South African People. The subject is one which bristles with thorns as fiercely as the scrub of the Low Veld. At every step one is compelled to “wait-a-bit.” The whole history of South Africa is beset with tangles and thickets of distrust, misunderstanding, prejudice, and (reasonably) bitter memories—so densely that, at times, it is difficult to see the wood for the trees. But I have tried to drive a straight path through these impediments; to maintain an open mind and to understand, as well as an alien may, the conflicting motives which have confused—and sometimes stained with the blood of honest men—this page of history, keeping always in view, however discouraged and bewildered, the great end towards which South Africa is gradually and inevitably moving, the high destiny of the land and the folk which, after my own, I love best on earth.

I have tried, and am still trying, to be fair. If I fail, as most likely I may, it will not be for want of good will. That is why, in this preface, I want to express my profound gratitude for the encouragement I have received from hundreds of correspondents in South Africa, irrespective of race and politics, whose letters have fortified me in the performance of this perilous task by suggesting that a mere work of fiction, written by an outsider, may, perhaps, after all, contribute a little towards a better understanding between Dutch and English Afrikanders. I am grateful, above all, to my old chief, friend and comrade-in-arms, General Smuts, who has declared his approval of the work of one of his former subalterns.

In this part of the ambitious scheme, indeed, my task qua historical novelist (as Rhodes would have put it) has been fairly easy, for the period is so remote that none of the protagonists are alive. In the second volume, The City of Gold, I have had to deal with matters more contentious, including the Jameson Raid, which put back the clock twenty years. In the third volume, as yet unwritten, I shall have to deal with the Second Boer War, and with such embarrassing subjects as Concentration Camps. That is a formidable prospect from which bolder men than myself might well shrink; but, even if I fail in the task I have set myself, I know I shall never regret the twenty years of study and thought I have devoted to it; for I still believe in the greatness of South Africa’s destiny, and hold an unshaken faith in the future of the land and the people I love.