31. Turning to a Dark New Tactic
Greatly outnumbered, the Boers avoided pitched battles and relied instead on hit and run tactics and guerrilla warfare. That caused the British no end of trouble. In late 1900, Herbert Kitchener was given command of the British effort, and he proceeded to defeat the guerrillas by depriving them of the civilian support upon which they relied. The British adopted a scorched earth policy of burning down Boer farms and homesteads, killing their livestock, poisoning their wells, destroying their crops, and salting their fields.
The British also adopted a new and ominous innovation that had recently been introduced by the Spanish while suppressing guerrillas in their Cuban colony: concentration camps. Tens of thousands of Boer civilians, mostly women and children, were forcibly gathered from the countryside, to be interned, or “concentrated”, in vast camps behind barbed wire.
