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 Chilean coast. The Kaiser had ordered Von Spee to round the Horn and cross the southern Atlantic to blockade and bornbark the South African ports in support of their rebellion against the English and the Unionists.
They stood under the fierce desert sun and cheered and sang, united and sure of their cause, and certain of their victory. They were waiting only for the last of the Boer generals to come in to join them before they marched on Pretoria.
Koos De La Rey, Lothar's uncle, grown old and feeble and indecisive, had still not come in. Lothar's father sent messages to him, urging him to do his duty, but he vacillated, swayed by the treacherous oratory of Jannie Smuts and his misguided love and loyalty for Louis Botha.
Koen Brits was the other Boer leader they were waiting for, that giant of granite, standing six foot six inches tall, who could drink a bottle of fiery Cape Smoke the way a lesser man might quaff a mug of ginger beer, who could lift a trek ox off its feet, spit a stream of tobacco juice a measured twenty paces and with his Mauser hit a running springbok at two hundred paces. They needed him, for a thousand fighting men would follow him when he decided which way to ride.
However, Jannie Smuts sent this remarkable man a message: Call out your commando, Oom Koen, and ride with me. The reply was immediate. Ja my old friend, we are mounted and ready to ride, but who do we fight, Germany or England? So they lost Brits to the Unionists.
Then Koos De La Rey, travelling to a final meeting with Jannie Smuts at which he would make his decision, ran into a police roadblock outside Pretoria and instructed his chauffeur to drive through it. The police marksmen shot him in the head. So they lost De La Rey.
Of course, Jannie Smuts, that cold, crafty devil, had an excuse. He said that the roadblock had been ordered to prevent the escape of the notorious band of bank robbers, the Foster gang, from the area, and that the police had opened fire on a mistaken identity. However, the rebels knew better. Lothar's father had wept openly when they received the news of his brother's murder, and they had known that there was no turning back, no further chance for parley, they would have to carry the land at rifle-point.
The plan was for all the rebel commandos to join up with Maritz on the Orange river, but they had underestimated the new mobility of the forces against them, afforded by the petrol-driven motor car. They had forgotten also that Botha and Smuts had long ago proved themselves the most able of all the Boer generals. When at last they moved, these two moved with the deadly speed of angry mambas.
They caught De Wet at Mushroom Valley and smashed his commando with artillery and machine- guns. There gu were terrible casualties, and De Wet fled into the Kalah ari, pursued by Koen Brits and a motorized column that captured him at Waterburg in the desert.
Then the Unionists swung back and engaged Beyers and his commando near Rustenberg. Once the battle was lost Beyers tried to escape by swimming the flooded Vaal river. His boot-laces became entangled and they found his body three days later on the bank downstream.