he and his corps of hungry men had
one day come upon a kraal containing the bodies of over 500 sheep in
an advanced stage of decomposition, with their throats cut or their
heads cleft in two by swords. Too far away from towns or camps to be
driven to some place where they could have been kept for the use of
starving and suffering humanity, they had been slaughtered and left to
rot--anything to prevent their falling into the hands of the Boer
commandos.

No provisions of any sort were left within their reach and they lived
entirely on what they took by main force from the enemy.

A precarious existence indeed!

Not to know from day to day where the next meal would come from and
with appetites sharpened by the healthy, roving, outdoor life they
led, no wonder these men uttered imprecations on the heads of those
responsible for the systematic devastation of the country and
wholesale destruction of food.

The privilege too of stripping their prisoners of their clothes had
its disadvantages, for in many cases they swarmed with vermin and had
to be boiled before they could be used, while a camp deserted by the
English had to be approached warily and with the utmost caution on
account of the vermin with which it frequently was infested.

English prisoners were set free (what could the Boers do with them
otherwise?), but the traitors caught with them red-handed were shot
without mercy--and it was Naude's duty, as Captain of the Secret
Service, to see that these executions were carried out. This was to
him the hardest task of all.

"His fallen brothers" he called them, and voice and eye when he spoke
of them betrayed compassionate horror and wrath unspeakable.

Armed natives met the same fate, and in a few words he described to
his shuddering listeners how it was done, how he informed the doomed
man of his fate, how the prisoner pleaded for mercy and offered to
join the Boer ranks, how he prayed in despair when he found no mercy,
no relenting, how he covered his face or folded his arms, how the
shots rang out and he fell down dead.

Scenes such as these were witnessed without number, but the execution
of a "fallen brother," when the details were arranged, took place some
distance apart, beyond the vision of the burghers who had captured
him.

But it was when the subject of the Concentration Camps was broached
that the darkest gloom settled over Harmony.

Captain Naude had a young wife and two children in one of the