From patients who come in daily from various parts of the country and various columns we get a general impression of how things are going.  The army seems to be adopting very severe measures to try and end the campaign out of hand, and the papers at home are loudly calling for such measures, I see, and justifying them.  Nevertheless, it is childish to pretend that it is a crime in the Boers to continue fighting, or that they have done anything to disentitle them to the usages of civilised warfare.  The various columns that are now marching about the country are carrying on the work of destruction pretty indiscriminately, and we have burnt and destroyed by now many scores of farms.  Ruin, with great hardship and want, which may ultimately border on starvation, must be the result to many families.  These measures are not likely, I am afraid, to conduce much to the united South Africa we talk so much of and thought we were fighting for.

I had to go myself the other day, at the General’s bidding, to burn a farm near the line of march.  We got to the place, and I gave the inmates, three women and some children, ten minutes to clear their clothes and things out of the house, and my men then fetched bundles of straw and we proceeded to burn it down.  The old grandmother was very angry.  She told me that, though I was making a fine blaze now, it was nothing compared to the flames that I myself should be consumed in hereafter.  Most of them, however, were too miserable to curse.  The women cried and the children stood by holding on to them and looking with large frightened eyes at the burning house.  They won’t forget that sight, I’ll bet a sovereign, not even when they grow up.  We rode away and left them, a forlorn little group, standing among their household goods—­beds, furniture, and gimcracks strewn about the veldt; the crackling of the fire in their ears, and smoke and flame streaming overhead.  The worst moment is when you first come to the house.  The people thought we had called for refreshments, and one of the women went to get milk.  Then we had to tell them that we had come to burn the place down.  I simply didn’t know which way to look.  One of the women’s husbands had been killed at Magersfontein.  There were others, men and boys, away fighting; whether dead or alive they did not know.

I give you this as a sample of what is going on pretty generally.  Our troops are everywhere at work burning and laying waste, and enormous reserves of famine and misery are being laid up for these countries in the future.

How far do you mean to go in this?  Are you going to burn down every house, and turn the whole country into a desert?  I don’t think it can be done.  You can’t carry out the Cromwellian method in the nineteenth century.  Too many people know what is going on, and consciences are too tender.  On the other hand, nothing is so disastrous as that method half carried out.  We can’t exterminate the Dutch or seriously reduce their numbers.  We can do enough to make hatred of England and thirst for revenge the first duty of every Dutchman, and we can’t effectively reduce the numbers of the men who will carry that duty out.  Of course it is not a question of the war only.  It is a question of governing the country afterwards.