With Steyn and De Wet by Philip Pienaar
page 64 of 131 (48%)
page 64 of 131 (48%)
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the latter unflinchingly beat back the tremendous horde of maddened
blacks that flung themselves against the hastily drawn circle of waggons. Does not one old lady still bear the scars of the nineteen stabs she received on that day? Our women are women indeed, and worthy mothers of the race that yet shall people all Africa and rule itself. Do not think I am flying too high. The average Boer family numbers ten children. Boys are in the majority. If at present we have thirty thousand warriors (I am not counting the wasters), it follows that in two generations we shall have three hundred thousand. Taking the proportion then, as now, of ten to one, Britain will have to employ against us in 1940 no less than three million men! And when that time comes, the children of to-day will have the recollection of the concentration camps and of a few other little trifles to strengthen their backbone. The concentration camps! Fit subject for Dante, who in the _Divina Comedia_ portrays as no other can the maddened heart of a father doomed to see his children waste away before his very eyes. There are many relentless Ugolins among the Boers to-day. I firmly believe that a steady process of infanticide was never intended to be the _raison d'ĂȘtre_ of these camps; no civilised nation could deliberately sanction a system cemented with the bones and blood of innocent babes. And the British are a civilised nation. No, the fault does not lie in the system itself, but in its application. It is a humane idea carried out inhumanely, so inhumanely that when the Black Hole of Calcutta is forgotten Englishmen will still hang their heads for shame at the mention of concentration. |
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