mployment of
large numbers of troops continues to be a necessity.... The Boer
party who declared war have quitted the field, and are now urging
those whom they deserted to continue a useless struggle by giving
lying assurances to the ignorant burghers of outside assistance,
and by raising absurdly deceitful hopes that Great Britain has
not sufficient endurance to see the matter through."[257]

[Footnote 257: Cd. 695.]

But it had become evident that some more systematic effort was
required for the capture of the commandos, unless the slow task of
wearing down the Boer resistance was to be almost indefinitely
protracted; and this same month of July, 1901, witnessed the extension
of the blockhouse lines, which proved the turning-point in the
guerilla war. The origin of Lord Kitchener's system of blockhouse
defence is described by him in his despatch of August 8th, 1901.

[Sidenote: The blockhouse system.]

"Experience had shown," he writes, "that the line of defensible
posts, extending across the Orange River Colony, from Jacobsdal
to Ladybrand, constituted a considerable obstacle to the free
movement of the enemies' roving bands, and that the gradual
completion of chains of blockhouses placed at intervals of a
mile, sometimes less, along the Transvaal and Orange River Colony
railways, had obtained for our traffic a comparative security
which it had not previously enjoyed."[258]

[Footnote 258: Cd. 820.]

In July, therefore, Lord Kitchener made arrangements for the
construction of three additional lines of blockhouses. The first ran
from Aliwal North westward, following the course of the Orange River, to
Bethulie, and was continued thence alongside the railway through
Stormberg, Rosmead, Naauwpoort, and De Aar, northward to Kimberley. The
second commenced at Frederickstad and ran northward by the source of the
Mooi River to Breed's Nek in the Magaliesberg, from which point it was
connected with the British garrison at Commando Nek, and thus screened
the western side of the Pretoria and Johannesburg area. The third,
running from Eerste Fabriken in the north, by Springs and Heidelberg,
southward to the Vaal River, protected the same district from attack
upon the east. These new blockhouse lines, Lord Kitchener wrote,
promised to be of much assistance in the future. Not only did they
protect the British communications, and render i