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 pom-
poms 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; being a remembrance mainly drawn from one chapter of the larger