Now as to the inner organisation of the Camps.  The prisoners were allowed to choose a corporal from their midst and also to select a captain for each house.  Over the whole Camp there reigned a Boer Commandant, assisted by a Court of “Heemraden” consisting of exlandrosts and lawyers appointed by the prisoners of war themselves.  Any act of insubordination or inattention to the regulations, sanitary or otherwise, was brought before this court and the guilty party tried and sentenced.  When the latter refused to abide by the judgment of the Boer court he was brought before the Military Commandant, but for this there was very seldom need.

The prisoners of war had permission to correspond with their friends and relatives, and were allowed newspapers and books.  The former, however, were rather too much censored, which fact constituted an annoyance which, with the exertion of a little tact, might easily have been avoided.

As will be seen from the details, the fate of the Boer prisoners of war was not such a bad one after all.  Nor, either, was life in the Concentration Camps, and I have endeavoured to throw some new light on the subject to rebut the old false rumours which, lately, the German Government revived when taxed with harsh treatment of their own prisoners of war, so as to draw comparisons advantageously to themselves.

While adhering to my point, I quite realise that it would be foolish to assert that all the Concentration Camps were organised and administered on the model of the Green Point Camp, where its vicinity to Cape Town allowed the English authorities to control everything that was going on.  In the interior of the country things could not be arranged upon such an excellent scale, but had there not existed such a state of irritation all over the whole of South Africa—­an irritation for which the so-called English loyalists must also share the blame—­matters would not have grown so sadly out of proportion to the truth, painful though the facts were in some cases.

This question of the Camps was admittedly a most difficult one.  It was the result of a method of warfare which was imposed upon England by circumstances, but for which no individual Minister or General was solely responsible.  The matter was brought about by successive steps that turned out to be necessary, though they were deplorable in every respect.  Failing the capture of the Boer commandoes, which was well-nigh impossible, the British troops were driven to strip the country, and stripping the country meant depriving not only the fighting men but also the women and children of the means of subsistence.  Concentration, therefore, followed inevitably, and England found itself burdened with the immense responsibility of feeding, housing and clothing some sixty thousand women and children.