Dink Morrison Analysis

Burning out civilian families was not what ordinary soldiers had signed up for and it troubled many of them. Canadian artillery Lieutenant E.W.B. “Dinky” Morrison, who had observed the deadly difference in the Canadian and British use of cover was one: We moved from valley to valley ‘lifting’ cattle and sheep, burning, looting and turning the women and children to sit and cry beside the ruins of their once beautiful farmsteads. Some of Morrison’s British allies experienced a similar distaste. An officer wrote: The worst moment is when you first come to the house. The people thought we had called for refreshments, and one of them went to get milk. Then we had to tell them we had come to burn the place down…We rode away and left them, a forlorn little group, standing among their household goods—beds, furniture, and gimcracks strewn about the veldt; the crackling

Whatever her appearance, there was no questioning her persistence and sense of justice. She founded a group called the South African Women and Children’s Distress Fund and went to South Africa with two carloads of supplies for Kitchener and Milner’s internees. Through family connections, she arranged a meeting with Milner and persuaded him to let her tour the camps. That was Milner’s mistake. What she saw made her become, among other things, the journalist that the many war correspondents present were not. She flooded English newspapers with her accounts. Some refused to print them, but enough did to make the camps an international scandal. She spoke at public meetings. She wrote to family members. She was also a particularly dangerous journalist because through those same family connections she had the ear of prominent politicians. They included David Lloyd George, who would be prime minister during the Great War and who already opposed the South African venture. Thanks to her, people heard the truth about the