of warfare of theirs is so hard to cope with. These men
are uncoerced. Spontaneously and one by one they turn out to fight us as
soon as we show ourselves in their neighbourhood, and all the suffering
we can inflict only serves to harden their resolution.

Yet we certainly inflict a great deal. Boer families usually average up
to a dozen. They stick together, and grow up on their farms, which are
of enormous extent, and which they get to love with the instinctive
force of people who have never seen any other place. Love of family and
love of home are their two ruling affections. The household life of a
big family on a 20,000 acre farm--three and often four generations
represented--is usually uninterrupted for weeks at a time by the sight
of a strange face or a bit of outside news. Their lives are altogether
bound up, in their serene and stolid way, with each other and with their
homes. Anything that breaks up a family is felt by them more grievously
than would be the case with most people; and, in the same way, anything
that severs them from "the land" would be more profoundly felt too. It
amounts to an entire dislocation of their ideas of life.

This must make the war at present very hard to bear. "My dear husband
and child and brothers" are away fighting. One or two of them very
likely killed by this time, or in Ceylon or St. Helena. "And as for the
others who are still in the field, we are in constant terror of hearing
the bad news, which we know, if the war continues, must some day come."
So the family is quite broken up, and now the home is being destroyed
and the occupants carried off, so that altogether the chances of ever
renewing the old life again in the old place seem very remote indeed.

All this should be enough to break Boer hearts, and there is no doubt
they feel it very much. I can recall many scenes and incidents which
show that--scenes which, if you saw them out of your peaceful, natural
life, you would perhaps be never able to forget. But yet, in spite of
all they have to suffer, their determination remains just the same.
Anything like loud lamentations or complaints are almost unheard. They
rise to the occasion, and though naturally a very simple people, who
express openly what they feel, they act now in this crisis with a
constant composure which I have often thought most remarkable.

What supports them and keeps them going is just that spirit of
patriotism which Buller denies the existence of. A