Lord Roberts came, and the Boers tried the same old tricks. It is true that he maintained the same mistaken course of leniency--making war as light as possible for the Boers while they heaped its terrors upon us--but this mischievous, war-prolonging policy was so unvarying from Capetown to Bloemfontein that I always suspected it to have been ordered from home--perhaps by whoever it was that "preferred unmounted men" to catch the De Wets of the veldt. I cannot believe that Lord Roberts fought England's enemies in India in that way, or that he is blamable for that policy in South Africa. He was fooled, however, but not as others had been, nor did he evince the same fondness for being victimised as did certain of his subordinates. From the outset he took all ordinary precautions against treachery and double-dealing, and he was the first general to insist that the coloured native (very often a Boer spy) should be kept under supervision and should be at least as orderly, civil, and well behaved as white men were required to be. It was while we were at Bloemfontein that the Boers presumed too much upon our credulity and trustfulness at last. They did this by the most barefaced and wholesale act of hoaxing ever practised upon a modern army. We sent out our forces, small and large, over the whole southern half of the Free State, distributing Lord Roberts' promise of protection to all who surrendered their arms and signed an agreement to fight us no more. Gaily and trustingly our troops went here and there, and everywhere the people came out to meet them in apparently the same cordial spirit of goodwill. As they handed in their grandfathers' old elephant rifles and whatever other fire-arm curios had been thrown aside in their garrets, they assured us that they were sick of the war, that they had been tricked by Steyn, that they had only fought to prevent the Transvaalers from confiscating their cattle and perhaps to save themselves from being murdered. It was a beautiful spectacle of erring brotherhood repentant--for those who enjoy being played upon and laughed at. Even while the old junk was being brought to the railway we began to hear that wherever, in isolated cases, a man had honestly given up his Mauser and signed the British papers he was being plundered and persecuted by his neighbours, most of whom were still either fighting or awaiting orders to resume hostilities. My printers told me of friends whom they believed to have been shot for failing to take part in the hoax, and for seriously giving up the contest. And at Ladybrand the "friendly" and "repentant" Boers, who had been giving tea and entertainment to General Broadwood to hold his force until the enemy could capture it, fired on him from the very houses in which he had been drinking tea, when he got wind of the trap and slipped away--to Sanna's Post.