and were puzzled to read in
the _Times_ that only a few desperadoes remained in the field just at
the time that two commandoes were invading the Colony, another raiding
Natal, a garrison and two guns captured at Dewetsdorp, and the line
blown up in ten different places. The continuance of the war must strike
you as a renewal, but there was never a lull really.

People who think the war can be ended by farm-burning, &c., mistake the
Boer temper. I scarcely know how to convey to you any idea of the
spirit of determination that exists among them all, women and even
children as well as men. The other day I picked up at a farmhouse a
short characteristic form of prayer, written out evidently by the wife
in a child's copybook, ending thus: "Forgive me all my sins for the sake
of your Son Jesus Christ, in whom I put all my trust for days of sorrow
and pain. And bring back my dear husband and child and brothers, and
give us our land back again, which we paid for with blood from the
beginning." Simple enough as you see, and no particular cant about it,
but very much in earnest. At another farm a small girl interrupted her
preparation for departure to play indignantly their national anthem at
us on an old piano. We were carting the people off. It was raining hard
and blowing--a miserable, hurried home-leaving; ransacked house, muddy
soldiers, a distracted mother saving one or two trifles and pushing
along her children to the ox-waggon outside, and this poor little wretch
in the midst of it all pulling herself together to strum a final
defiance. One smiled, but it was rather dramatic all the same, and
exactly like a picture. These are straws, but one could multiply them
with incidents from every farm we go to. Their talk is invariably, and
without so far a single exception, to the same effect--"We will never
give in, and God sooner or later will see us through."

And then I see a speech of Buller's explaining that the war is being
carried on by a few mercenaries and coerced men, and that it is in no
sense a patriotic war. He is emphatic on this point and his audience
cheer him. One realises the difficulty of getting you to understand. The
breaking up of the big commandoes and the change to guerilla tactics, in
which every man fights on his own account, shows in a way there is no
mistaking that it is the personal wish of each man to fight out the
quarrel to the last. It is just because they are so individually keen
that this sort