THE WAR AND THE BOERS.

Manawatu Standard, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 6696, 15 May 1900, Page 3

THE WAR AND THE BOERS.

A SCATHING INDICTMENT,

Mr Julian Ealph, the London Daily Mail's war correspondent, writes to that journal on the war and the Boers as tollows — "It is a^war steadily and stealthly planned by the Queen's Dutch subjects and the Dutch republics for fully 20 years. For between four and six years they have been equipped for it. They began purchasing arms and planning defences before the the Jameson raid. "President Kruger begged President Steyn to declare war three weeks before President Steyn consented. "Bid your mind of the notion that you are crushing out two farmer Republics. There is not a farmer in the two countries, and only one, the Free State, was a Republic in any way except misnaming. These people" are herders of cattle, sheep, and goats, like the Israelites of old and the Afridis, Turks, and Balkan peoples of to-day. His (the Boer's) so-called farms are as nature made them, merely reaches of veldt, whereon his cattle graze. On each one he has put up a home, but its surroundings are almost invariably more repellant and disorderly than any houses I ever saw, except the cabins of the freed slaves in the United States. " Their camps and strongholds from -which we have routed them are the filthiest places I have known men of any sort toJive in, and I have seen Red Indian, Chinese, and Turkish camps,, and the camps of many sorts of black men. "As to their bravery and honour, I have seen and heard sufficient to fill a page of the Daily Mail with accounts of their cowardly and dastardly behaviour before I came to Kimberley. But here 1 find they have been guilty of different and original enormorities. Here they killed our wounded and laid their bodies "■""■fas. a row after one of the forays out of town..^ Here they ai-med many blacks to fight against us, showing all the world how scandalously fraudulent were their exclamations ot horror at our employing native Indian troops. " There has hardly been a battle in which the Boers have not abused either the white flag or the Geneva Cross, or both.

"At Spionkop our people saw them loading Maxims in ambulances in order to get them safely away. This we saw them do at the Modder River also, and Kimberley is where the Boers shelled the funeral cortege of George L. Abraham, an American. "At many places they fired on our ambulances. I saw them do it at the Modder Eiver, and saw them fire on our stretcher-bearers in that battle time and time again. " When we entered Jacobsdal it looked like a city of doctors. Every man in the streets wore the Red Cross bandage on his arm. These were the men who had just been shooting us from behind garden walls. " There was nothing novel or original about their seeking their cowardly shelter of the doctor's badge. We have become quite accustomed to it. We entered a Boer laager after a victory and found 27 of these bogus doctors and seven or eight wounded for their patients. " They have not been content with looting the houses of the loyalists in the British colonies, but in Natal in scores of instances they have smashed into kindlings and torn into ribbons whatever they did not want or could not carry off. Worse yet, they have fouled the walls of the homes of defenceless women with obscene writings.

" They never know the value of an oath or promise, and have not learned it since the war began."