The relations of the dead men asked for the bodies, but were refused; an order having been given that they should be buried under the gallows.[66] So came to an end the day of Slachter's Nek--the worst day's work for England that up to recent times has yet been done in South Africa. Certainly the Governor was within the letter of the law. Technically speaking, nations have recognized that any body of persons strong enough to resist by force the mastership over any strip of the earth's surface and over the individuals inhabiting it, may, if these individuals oppose the will of the stronger, be termed rebels, and if they seek to resist by force be hanged. But there are other modes of regarding life than the technical. England, without the consent of these men, had taken over their land nine years before--a land which they and their fathers, and not the Dutch Government or the East India Company, had won from the wilderness and peopled. They were a small section of the population, and they had taken no single life in all their uprising (it has not even been stated that the shots fired by Bezuidenhout and his wife grazed any of the Hottentots!) [66] Some persons going to visit the grave found the hand of one of the dead men, supposed to be that of Theunis de Klerk, protruding from the earth with the finger pointing right upward. It was taken to indicate that the men had been buried alive. But there is no reason necessarily to believe this. The soldiers had probably thrown only a thin layer of earth over the bodies, which being buried immediately while still warm, the muscles had probably contracted after death and forced the hand out with the rigid finger. Had Lord Charles Somerset exercised his prerogative and extended mercy to these five men, he would have done more to consolidate the English rule in South Africa than, had he been able to introduce two hundred thousand men, he would have been able to effect. In the lives of English soldiers alone, England has probably paid at the rate of over a thousand a head for each man hanged; and if she could that day have purchased the necks of those five Boers at ten millions each, they would have been cheaply bought. It is a curious property of blood shed on the scaffold for political offences that it does not dry up. Blood falling on the battlefield sinks into the earth; it may take a generation, or it may take two, or more, for it wholly to disappear, but it is marvellous how the memory of even the most bloody conflict, between equally armed foes, does, as generations pass, fade.