142 A GARDEN DIARY 
weapon in war time. Although the weapon in 
question be his own familiar rifle or fowling- 
piece ; although the spot he proposes to defend 
with it is his own hearth, with his own wife and 
daughters standing beside it, he is liable—legally 
and honourably liable, for that is the whole point 
—to be led away from that hearth, settled com- 
fortably with his back against the nearest wall, 
and then and there uncomplainingly shot, his wife 
and the rest of his family looking on. This I 
am assured, or used to be assured, is the whole 
law and the gospel, as the law and the gospel 
is laid down for military purposes; a law the 
carrying out of which is not only permitted, but 
is the bounden duty of every honourable soldier 
and Christian officer. In no other way, so I have 
always been told, could the protection of the 
civil. population be guaranteed during invasion. 
If a man, merely because the property destroyed 
is his own, were free to pot—we call it nowadays 
to snipe—at the destroyer of that property, what 
in such a case would become, one was asked, of 
the poor defenceless soldiery ? 
So much for the old rule, now for its modern 
application. Bearing all this in mind, I look 
away to South Africa, and what do I see? I 
see a crowd of fighting men, upon hardly one of 
whom—our own regulars and militia of course 
excepted—can I succeed in discovering any of 
the recognisable marks of a soldier. Here and 
