Marching in this way they spread themselves out over the country, “eating everything that comes in their way—wheat (if sufficiently young and tender), maize (even if strong and old), corn, sugar-cane, linseed, alfalfa (lucerne), pasture of all kinds, vegetables of all kinds (tomatoes and celery), and all garden produce, potatoes (ordinary and sweet), the leaves and sometimes even the bark of the trees, causing their ruin. The fruit, of course, is lost for the season. Orange, willow, poplar, palm, banana, peach, pear, plum, vine, acacia, roses, etc., are stripped,” but not “the gum and paradise trees, which seem to be poisonous to them. They make everything ‘clean bare’; sometimes they will enter houses, and eat the very clothes and curtains at the windows.”[20] They will even eat the wool off the backs of the sheep, and “last stage of all that ends this strange, eventful history,” on a pressing occasion they will eat one another. Continuing his interesting account—the graphic and convincing one of an eye-witness— Dr. Munro tells us that “when these hoppers and jumpers (_voetgangers_, as the Boers call them) are on the march, they sometimes appear so determined and bent on the fearful execution of their work, that they resemble and have got the name of ‘an army on the march.’ They move in open file, and carry themselves in a proud, haughty way, with heads high up and fixed. It is beautiful and interesting to see them on the march, if we only divest ourselves for the moment of the idea of their devastating object.”[20] And again, “The whole of the company begin to walk at the same time, as if by order; the head is kept erect, and the neck is as if stiffened. They go straight on, irrespective of danger,”[20] and are deterred, as is well known, by hardly any obstacle. “The sight of this army is a very impressive one, and once seen will never be forgotten. In some respects it is an awful sight; the spectacle strikes you with pity and sorrow to see at once before you that the toil and the labour for the season, or, indeed, the year, is lost.”[20] “It is in this marching stage,” continues Dr. Munro, “that the _voetgangers_ do enormous damage and eat every edible thing in their path, and completely destroy the work of the husbandman. They are not content with levying toll merely, but they will have all, and will leave nothing behind but desolation. They are therefore unlike the flying company of locusts, which only levy toll here and there, but these, when they pass, leave nothing.”