Lord Kitchener, speaking at the Cutlers' Feast at Sheffield on
Tuesday, made an excellent five-minutes speech on the war. As for the calumnious charges against the British troops, they had been repudiated, not only by the people of this country and the Colonies, but by the civilian population of South Africa, in whose midst the fighting took place. Every case of serious crime by a soldier from the beginning of 1900 had come before him, with the result that his opinion of the British soldier, already high, was far higher now that he knew how our men behaved in circumstances of great temptation. War must always be a source of terrible suffering, but he could not hold with those who, misconceiving what humanity in war really was, advocated a form of kid-glove warfare. It was the manifest duty of every commander to use every effort in his power within the recognised rules of warfare to bring hostilities as rapidly as possible to a successful end.
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