No provisions of any sort were left within their reach and they lived entirely on what they took by main force from the enemy.
A precarious existence indeed!
Not to know from day to day where the next meal would come from and with appetites sharpened by the healthy, roving, outdoor life they led, no wonder these men uttered imprecations on the heads of those responsible for the systematic devastation of the country and wholesale destruction of food.
The privilege too of stripping their prisoners of their clothes had its disadvantages, for in many cases they swarmed with vermin and had to be boiled before they could be used, while a camp deserted by the English had to be approached warily and with the utmost caution on account of the vermin with which it frequently was infested.
English prisoners were set free (what could the Boers do with them otherwise?), but the traitors caught with them red-handed were shot without mercy—and it was Naudé's duty, as Captain of the Secret Service, to see that these executions were carried out. This was to him the hardest task of all.
"His fallen brothers" he called them, and voice and eye when he spoke of them betrayed compassionate horror and wrath unspeakable.
Armed natives met the same fate, and in a few words he described to his shuddering listeners how it was done, how he informed the doomed man of his fate, how the prisoner pleaded for mercy and offered to join the Boer ranks, how he prayed in despair when he found no mercy, no relenting, how he covered his face or folded his arms, how the shots rang out and he fell down dead.
Scenes such as these were witnessed without number, but the execution of a "fallen brother," when the details were arranged, took place some distance apart, beyond the vision of the burghers who had captured him.
But it was when the subject of the Concentration Camps was broached that the darkest gloom settled over Harmony.
Captain Naudé had a young wife and two children in one of the Camps in Natal, and Mrs. Malan had procured, as a surprise for him, snapshots of his dear ones taken in the Camp. When they were placed in his hands he gazed on them for a long time in silence, finally muttering under his breath, "For this the English must die!" and from that moment he was moody and silent.