British Empire Fighting Boer Farmers: A Scorched Earth Policy Poem by Terence George Craddock

catch phrase it has been said
'all is fair in love and war'
in total war win at all costs

Genghis Khan ordered
all citizens in cities
that did not surrender
to him be put to death

orders all corpses beheaded
to kill survivors playing dead
none can live survivor boast
believes people a plague on land

British Empire fighting
Boer farmers in South Africa
who refused to surrender
use scorched earth policy

burning destroying crops
livestock homes war on farmer
Boer civilians starved to death
30 000 Boer farmhouses

more than 40 towns destroyed

British could not stomach
defeat by Boer Kommandos
British outclassed outmatched
in frontier wars light mobile

commandos easily outrode
outpaced slow-moving columns
snail marching imperial troops
not suited to hot harsh Africa

British forced to rethink warfare
in the rough frontier mountains
fighting Boer republics males
citizens defiant aged 16 and 60

guerrilla war attacks on railway lines
Boers break threaten British supply lines
British invent concentration camps
Boer civilians starved die like flies

David Lloyd-George condemns
British inhumane concentration camps
horrors inflicted on women children
in Empire camps in South Africa

Lloyd-George warns 'A barrier of dead
children's bodies will rise between...
British and Boer races in South Africa.'
Concentration camps in the Boer War

scorched earth policy left Boer women
children homeless 'undesirables'
resistance families fed fewer rations
almost all Boer homesteads burned

30 000 homesteads burned razed
to the ground livestock thousands killed
families are taken against their will
forcibly put on ox wagons open

railway trucks taken to the camps
internment not for safety but to end
resistance war of Boers still fighting
food fed pigsty very poor quality

sanitation deplorable
tents overcrowded
medical assistance
shocking absent...

proud British created
perfect neglect conditions
epidemics typhoid measles
soon slay starved Boer lives

28 000 white people
20 000 black will die
66 black concentration camps
litter the Transvaal and Free State

black camps set up for good reasons
to get black people off the land
to deny Boers source black supplies
forcing black farmers off their land

allowed the British to use black men
as cheap labourers in gold mines
not the same aims as Adolf Hitler's
extermination camps but still state

organized dark stain crime against humanity


Terence George Craddock (Afterglows Echoes Of Starlight)
Copyright © Terence George Craddock