Letter: The British Army camps were not genocide machines

JAN MORRIS, who has written extensively about the Empire, is wrong to describe Rudyard Kipling's "Recessional" as a response to British "hubris" about the Boer War. The poem was written in 1897, two years before the war started, to counter the complacency and triumphalism displayed on Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. Though Kipling clearly saw the faults of British organisation and tactics during the Boer War, and admired and respected some Boer fighters, he was a fervent supporter of the war who thought the repressive measures against Boer civilians didn't go far enough. Anyone who thinks he was soft on this issue should read his story A Sahib's War.

DANNY KARLIN

Oxford