I add a note (January 12th) from Ventersberg, where we have just arrived.  This has been our last trek, we believe.  Rimington takes command of his regiment, and the corps, like the rest of the Colonial Division, will be paid off.  I have a vision of a great blue steamer with a bow like a cliff bursting her way through the seas on her homeward voyage.  And yet I can scarcely believe it.

Bad news waits us here.  They say the Colony is rising.  Now mark my words.  If we don’t watch it, we shall end by bringing about the very state of things we have been dreading.  There will be a Dutch South African conspiracy, but it will be one of our own making.  We shall have our own treatment of these people to thank for it.  Be sure of this, that for every house up here that is destroyed, three or four in the south are slowly rousing to arms.

You will think, I daresay, that I have been putting the case one-sidedly.  Possibly that is so; but I am putting the side that wants putting.  I am constantly seeing it stated that any measures are justifiable so long as they are likely to end the war.  “Well, but we must end it somehow,” is a common phrase.  That is all rubbish.  We must fight fairly, that’s the first rule of all.  I daresay there may have been individual acts of cruelty or treachery on the part of the Boers, but I am sure that any just and unprejudiced officer will tell you that on the whole they have behaved surprisingly well, and in a way that is really very striking when we consider how undisciplined and individually independent they are.  Let us then, on our side, play the game fairly.  No doubt it is very exasperating to have the thing dragging on in the way it is doing, and the present intangible, elusive warfare is desperately irritating, but there is after all nothing unfair about these tactics of the Boers, nothing illegitimate in any way; they are merely the turning to account of natural advantages; and this being the case, we have no right to lose our tempers and get vicious just because we have taken on a tougher job than we thought for.  Unluckily there seems to be a big party who are prepared to do anything and fight anyhow to get the thing finished.  You will gain nothing by those means.  You will not hasten the end of the war, and you will make its after effects more lasting and hard to deal with.[2]

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 2:  Here is a telegram copied from the Evening Standard of October 16, 1901.  “Addressing the volunteers who have returned from the front, the Governor of Natal this morning said that he could not now refer to the Boers as dogs of war, but rather as yelping, snarling curs.”  As against that take the opinion of Lord Cranborne who has just come back from the front:  “They had fought and they were fighting with some of the bravest, some of the most tenacious, and some of the most admirable troops that the nation had ever had