anxious they would be to see it concluded; and it was quite in vain for the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal to argue that the burning of empty kraals would neither do much harm to the Zulus nor good to the English; and that whereas the war had been begun on the ground that it was waged against the Zulu king and not against his nation, such conduct was calculated to alienate from the invaders the whole of the Zulu people, including those who were well disposed to them. Such arguments hardly ever prevail over that passion for wanton destruction and for often quite unnecessary slaughter, which finds a ready and comprehensive shelter under the wing of military exigencies. The assumption, therefore, that savage races are ignorant of all laws of war, or incapable of learning them, would seem to be based rather on our indifference about their customs than on the realities of the case, seeing that the preceding evidence to the contrary results from the most cursory inquiry. But whatever value there may be in our own laws of war, as helping to constitute a real difference between savage and civilised warfare, the best way to spread the blessing of a knowledge of them would clearly be for the more civilised races to adhere to them strictly in all wars waged with their less advanced neighbours. An English commander, for instance, should no more set fire to the capital of Ashantee or Zululand for so paltry a pretext as the display of British power than he would set fire to Paris or Berlin; he should no more have villages or granaries burnt in Africa or Afghanistan than he would in Normandy; and he should no more keep a Zulu envoy or truce-bearer in chains[214] than he would so deal with the bearer of a white flag from a Russian or Italian enemy. The reverse principle, which is yet in vogue, that with barbarians you must or may be barbarous, leads to some curious illustrations of civilised warfare when it comes in conflict with the less civilised races. In one of the Franco-Italian wars of the sixteenth century, more than 2,000 women and children took refuge in a large mountain cavern, and were there suffocated by a party of French soldiers, who set fire to a quantity of wood, straw, and hay, which they stacked at the mouth of the cave; but it was considered so shameful an act, that the Chevalier Bayard had two of the ringleaders hung at the cavern’s mouth.[215] Yet when the French General Pélissier in this century suffocated the unresisting Algerians in their caves, it was even defended as no worse than the shelling of a fortress; and there is evidence that gun-cotton was not unfrequently used to blast the entrance to caves in Zululand in which men, women, and children had hoped to find shelter against an army which professed only to be warring with their king.[216] The following description of the way in which, in the Ashantee war, the English forces obtained native carriers for their transport service is not without its instruction in this respect:--