their convoys, wrecked their
trains, helped themselves to horses, clothing, ammunition,
provisions--everything, in fact, that they required for the
continuation of the war. To tell the truth, there was hardly a Mauser
rifle to be found in the possession of the Boers at the end of the
war, they having destroyed the rifles with which they began the war,
for want of Mauser ammunition, and using only the Lee Metfords of the
enemy.

Sickness broke out in the camps--scarlet fever, measles,
whooping-cough, enteric, pneumonia, and a thousand ills brought by
exposure, overcrowding, underfeeding, and untold hardships.

Expectant mothers, tender babes, the aged and infirm, torn from their
homes and herded together under conditions impossible to describe,
exposed to the bitter inclemency of the South African winters and the
scorching, germ-breeding heat of the summer, succumbed in their
thousands, while daily, fresh people, ruddy, healthy, straight from
their wholesome life on the farms, were brought into the infected
camps and left to face sickness and the imminent risk of death.

Over twenty thousand dead women and children stand recorded in the
books of the Burgher Camps Department to-day, as the victims of this
policy of concentration.

Over twenty thousand women and children within two years! While the
total number of fighting men lost on the Boer side, in battle and in
captivity, amounts to four thousand throughout the entire war.

That this appalling result was wholly unlooked for, we do not doubt,
but nothing could be done to prevent the high mortality until many
months after the worst period was over and only the strongest remained
in the camps. It was indeed a case of the survival of the fittest.

Let me briefly relate a tragic event of the war to show what the
people of the camps went through and what little cause for surprise
there is in the unprecedented death-rate.

During the winter of 1901 a blizzard passed over the High Veld, the
site of so many Concentration Camps, in the Balmoral district, and
overtook a young lieutenant, W. St. Clare McLaren, of the First Argyll
and Sutherland Highlanders (the friend and playmate of Hansie's
childhood's years at Heidelberg) with his men.

They were without shelter, their commissariat waggons being some way
ahead, and crept under a tarpaulin for protection from the fierce and
bitterly cold blast.

During that awful night Mr. McLaren took off his overcoat to cover up
t