, had been allowed to go up, wrote
me that he had visited my house and found it looted, that all that was
of value had been taken or destroyed; that my desk had been forced open
and broken up, and its contents set on fire in the centre of the room,
so that the roof was blackened over the pile of burnt papers. He added
that there was little in the remnants of paper of which I could make any
use, but that he had gathered and stored the fragments till such time
as I might be allowed to come and see them. I thus knew my book had been
destroyed.

Some months later in the war when confined in a little up-country
hamlet, many hundreds of miles from the coast and from Johannesburg;
with the brunt of the war at that time breaking around us, de Wet having
crossed the Orange River and being said to have been within a few miles
of us, and the British columns moving hither and thither, I was living
in a little house on the outskirts of the village, in a single room,
with a stretcher and two packing-cases as furniture, and with my little
dog for company. Thirty-six armed African natives were set to guard
night and day at the doors and windows of the house; and I was only
allowed to go out during certain hours in the middle of the day to fetch
water from the fountain, or to buy what I needed, and I was allowed to
receive no books, newspapers or magazines. A high barbed wire fence,
guarded by armed natives, surrounded the village, through which it would
have been death to try to escape. All day the pompoms from the armoured
trains, that paraded on the railway line nine miles distant, could be
heard at intervals; and at night the talk of the armed natives as they
pressed against the windows, and the tramp of the watch with the endless
"Who goes there?" as they walked round the wire fence through the long,
dark hours, when one was allowed neither to light a candle nor strike
a match. When a conflict was fought near by, the dying and wounded were
brought in; three men belonging to our little village were led out to
execution; death sentences were read in our little market-place; our
prison was filled with our fellow-countrymen; and we did not know
from hour to hour what the next would bring to any of us. Under these
conditions I felt it necessary I should resolutely force my thought at
times from the horror of the world around me, to dwell on some abstract
question, and it was under these circumstances that this little book was
written; b