to Cape Colony. The structures that were built were two story stone buildings with mounts on the roof for a machine gun and not one section of railroad track or bridge was destroyed where these “blockhouses” were built and manned. In the later months of 1900, Lord Milner, the British High Commissioner at the Cape suggested constructing a line of these blockhouses away from the railroad out into the veldt, creating an enormous fence with which to corral the evasive Boer commandos and provide a useful supply line out into the barren veldt. Kitchener liked the idea so well that from January of 1901 to the end of the war in May of 1902 they were built at the rate of forty per month. In the end, over eight thousand blockhouses were constructed with an accompaniment of fifty thousand men to stand guard, 7 per house, and curtail the movements of the Boers over a thirty seven hundred mile stretch. The number of troops used by the British for this activity alone is nearly double the estimated thirty thousand Boer troops that were left roaming the veldt. Duty in the Fleming 09blockhouses was typically uneventful and boring, which left ample time to maintain the wires that ran between each house, typically one thousand yards apart, by stringing tin cans and such to them to alert of the hapless Boer who tired to cross between. The final phase of the war was also the time when one of Great Britains more dubious achievements occurred. Kitchener found the need to do something with all of the Boer civilians that were accumulating, and the concentration camps that were devised for the shelter of those whose homes were destroyed would become the most widely publicized of Great Britain’s departure from civilized behavior. The camps were first utilized in March of 1901 and at wars end, close to one hundred thousand Boers would be interred. As the scope of the endeavor to destroy all of the Boer dwellings came to light, it becam...
