As academic writing goes (this was substantially the same as the author’s doctoral thesis), Spies is pretty readable. Britain was at the time signatory to the Hague Convention, an international statement on ”the customs of war on land”. But its enemies, the Boers, were not. How then to assess the conduct of war? And how to distinguish between fighters and civilians?
Initial attempts to determine the complicity of civilians soon ceased and mere proximity to the scene
of an attack became cause for punishment, for example farm-burning for a radius of up to ten miles in
retribution for attacks on lines of communication.
The death rates in the concentration camps were horrendous: 2 666 in August 1901, 2 752 in the September and 3 205 in the October.
Children suffered especially, with, for example, the death in one month of 345 of the 2 122 children in the Brandfort camp and 205 of the 1 326 in the Sanderton camp.
In all, quite an eye-opener for the historically challenged, particularly those whose interest in Afrikaner history was dimmed by the version dished out to us in the apartheid days.