of February he was able to break through to the city of Ladysmith and relieved it of its siege thereby denying the Boers an opportunity to drive to the sea and gain access to an active port from which they could resupply. Mafeking, the last Cape Colony city to remain under siege was finally reached on the 17th of May when reinforcements arrived scattering the attacking Boers. The British forces were then able to focus their combined capabilities on a steady advance that took Johannesburg on the 31st of May and promptly moved on to Pretoria, the capital of the South African Republic on the 5th of June. At this point it seemed that the war was nearly over but the Boers, in their small commandos, became the elusive menace to the British forces. There were vast stretches of land in the veldt, or prairies, to the west of Pretoria and the scrub grasses that Boer horses lived well Fleming 07on would not support the horses and other livestock the British brought in from overseas. Water proved to be a scarcity also making extended treks extremely trying and limited the distant areas that could be covered by the British patrols. The Boers had largely overcome all of these tribulations and they roamed the veldt in their small commando groups concentrating their destructive efforts on supply and communication lines as had been agreed upon at their council of war meeting in Kroonstad on March 17th, 1900.It was the Boers elusiveness and Great Britains overwhelming desire to end the conflict that the third and final phase came to be. In November of 1900, Kitchener called for the beginning of a scorched earth policy that would involve the complete annihilation of any structures that could prove useful to the Boers and the subsequent collection of all displaced civilians into hastily constructed and poorly planned concentration camps. There would be around thirty thousand homes and farms razed by fire or dynamite and the partial to complete des...
