"Methods of Barbarism"

Timaru Herald, Volume LXXIX, Issue 12111, 4 July 1903, Page 1 (Supplement)

"Methods of Barbarism"

IHE STORY OF CRUELTY- CAMP. UNIFORMED IMBECILITY. (By George Griffith in the " Daily Chronicle.") Schombie (Middleburg District), Cape Colony, Feb. 15th, 1903. The' methods of barbarism which I am about to describe were not invented in England or on the Continent. They were deliberately and consistently practised in the above district for a period of, seventeen months, at a co>t of literally unspeakable suffering by helpless animals under the eyes of their owners, who were deprived by law of the power to relieve them, although they had that power in their hands. I do not desire to suggest that in their private capacities and personalities the Imperial officers. concerned are anything but humane and honourable gentlemen. ■ I tun only going to describe what took ! pl£ce with their authority and under their direct jurisdiction. I also want to say that my facts have not been picked up here and there in .the ordinary way of promiscuous news-hunting. They were given to me by a committee of seven gentlemen of established position in the district; "both English and Dutch colonials, everv one of whom has proved his loyalty in the field as well as. by cheerfully borne sacrifices in the cause of Empire. They have all signed my abstract,, and,three of them have revised the full copy and signed a declaration of responsibility, and if necessary would support the .statements made here by their oaths. So now to the story, the worst feature of which is that it is absolutely and pitilessly true. ■. . , The Albert District of Cape Colony is, roughly speaking, included' in a .square formed by the 30th and 32nd parallels of south latitude, and the 25th and 27th meridians of east longitude; For generations it has been recognised as ,the finest horse-raising county in South Africa. When the war broke out it contained some 15,000 horses, mares, and foals of the best colonial stock from the point of view of. practical utility. These animals were located on farms averaging 8000 acres; with a grazing capacity of 200 horses eachthat is to say, a farmer who knew his business would not put more than 2QO hors.es on this area in twelve months. ■ On 'April 10th, 1901, the/order went forth from headquarters that within a fortnight all horses in the district were! to be brought into "Protection Camps," the theoretical, object of which seems to have been to protect the farmer's stock from marauding Boers, and to prevent the enemy Irom getting remounts and spare horses. Subsequently an order of May 19th extended this time to 21 days, in consideration of the distances the animals had in many cases to be brought- They were to oe taken in the first instance to the Remount Department, where the oflioeis in charge:,, of the camp had the right to take all 'trained horses that they considered fit. for .service, and for these they paid from £4 to £5 each,, the then market prices of such animals being from £2O to£2s per head. Those taken were, of course, the pick of the mob. and the valuation was done by those from whose ver.dict no appeal. • But the uninitiated may well ask, .Why did not the fanners refuse such ruinous protection as this and take their horses back to their farms' The convincing 'reply is that so firmly did the military •authorities believe in their theory of protection that they punished non-compliance with it by fine or imprisonment, or both. The farmers, loyalists to a man, submitted to the compulsion under the advice of their lawyers in the certain hope of adequate compensation at the hands', of the Imperial Government, since all this was done" under martial law by its :duly accredited officers. Speaking from the mournful experience of many other parts of the country, I fear it is unnecessary to add that, I up to the time of writing, they have not been paid a shilling, despite the fact that many of the owners of the "protected"

animals have been wholly or partially ruined.

What the " protection" really workeed out at was this. The farms were swept clear of all horses, 'mares and mules,- and, after the remount officers had taken their pick, eight thousand animals were placed in a camp four miles from Burgersdorp, the area of which .was three thousand acres. The veld, poor to begin with, had already been grazed over, and, moreover, had been "trodden out" by the troops.- In short, it was practically bare. Under the very best conditions it would have maintained some'eight hundred sheep for three months. • The results of the almost incredible ignorance which considered it sufficient for the support of ten times that number of horses and mules may well be imagined in far more terrible. detail than I should care to set down in cold print. , The immediate responsibility for the suffering which was the inevitable consequence of this ignorance must fall primarily on the-head of the military commandant then in charge of the district, who is, of course, perfectly well known to his superiors in Pall Mall, since he permitted this almost inconceivable act of inhumanity to be perpetrated in defiance of the warnings of everyone who knew the grazing capacity of the veld. As if this were not brutal enough, no extra forage was permitted to be given to the miserable animals,\ and, worse still, no provisions were made for ail adequate water supply. The condition of the few dams, stamped into mud by thousands : of hoofs, will be better left to the imagination of such a person as one 1 pf the'lleads. of the Veterinary Staff, who at this/tWe delivered himself of the sapient opinion tjia't "colonial horses were no bally good and ought to be shot." Being a military man and an expert in horseflesh, he was, of ignorant of the fact that these same horses were of identical stock'withi those which carried De Wet and his. merry.men so. easily out of reach J of the foreign-mounted British "flying" columns. I

In this casej- as it happened, it would have saved an infinitjv r of inarticulate suffering if they had been shot, and their owners, would have preferred this end for them a thousand times to the ghastly fate which the cruelty or the stupidity of the authorities compelled them to witness and forbade them to relieve. ' ' ' A peculiarly malignant feature of this unreasoning brutality — : really- there is no other adequate term for it 7-7 was the compulsory removal to the camp of the foals and maies with foals at foot, which could not possibly have been of any use to the /fighting' Boers, already. amply supplied with horses, unless they wanted to eat them. Had they been left on the farms they would at least have formed a nucleus from which a fre?h start in stock raising could have been made. But the iron law of this blind military despotism admitted of •no exceptions, and ordinary humanity seems to have been beyond its ken. No exception could be made even in the favour of the weakest and most helpless of. the victims, and so all were,"protected "alike. I may as well say here as/elsewhere; that, so" efficient was the •'protection" that on more than one occasion the Boers went unmolested through the camp and didn't find a single animal worth taking away. , . It was not: long before the tyranny of imbecility began to produce its inevitable results. The animals were in prime condiiion when they, were, brought,, and for about two months the adults lived on such sqanty pasture as they could find—and their pwn fat./ : The foals mostly died of sheer starvation within the first ten days. At the end-of seven or eight weeks the horses, marcs, and mules began to die of starvation and thirst at the rate of from seventy to eighty a day. Their bleached bones and parched hides lie to this day on the bare veldt of Cruelty Camp to witness to this ghastly fact. It should be added that at no time was there any h»c3s- ' sickness in the camp. So far' uniformed imbecility had looked on open eyed, if not open-minded, doubtless wondering why these obstinate colonial beasts actually preferred to die than con-, form to the regulations. Then it seems to have occurred to some one that something ought to be done. The ordinary unofficial person would probably have i;ecognised by this time that a horribly inhuman mistake had been made, and decided to at once send the remnants of the starving creatures back to their farms to be nursed and fed into new health. Certainly anything but official inhumanity would .have dictated such a course, seeing that the most depraved horse-stealer between Delagoa Bay and San Francisco would have scorned to lift such miserable equine wrecks as this woeful " protection " had made them. But what uniformed imbecility really did was to add another five thousand acres of po-verty-stricken veldt %to the desert of Cruelty Camp and confidently await results. As the whole area. 8000 acres, was now capable of maintaining some two hundred horses after a fashion for twelve months, it had not very long to wait. v The ungrateful brutes went on dying just as though official humanity had done nothing for them, and to such awful extremities were the miserable creatures reduced that they actually ate their own excrement. Eye-witnesses have told me in-terms actually piteous in their graphic simplicity how they fell from utter weakness, struggled to their feet again after a rest, only to fall again; how they lifted their heads a (few times, as stricken or starving horses will do, and then obeyed the military mandate aud lay still what time the vultures gathered over them. * Thus perished within reach of plenty which British regulations, blindly carried out by British officers, forbade them to reach, nearly ten thousand animals, all co.untry-bred at an elevation of 4500 feet, and therefore peculiarly fitted for work on the High Veldt. They were deliberately murdered, starved to death by the same hopelessly pig-headed incompetence which was even then scouring the world for horses that cost from £SO to £6O apiece when' landed in South Africa, "end which died like flies in a snowstorm as soon as they were sent into the field. If these offi-cially-tortured and murdered annuals which, be it remembered, were in perfect condition before they came to Cruelty Camp had been bought, even at a compulsory price of £ls a head for those that were fit for training or immediate service, the farmers would have been perfectly content, and, as a,matter of fact, they would even then have received from three to four times as much as they are now, after their ruin, offered.

Many of the mares and foals were, of course, not fit for service, but they were for that very reason useless to the enemy, and the doing of-them to death only adds to the brutality of .the useless act. The ordinary person at Home who has had the pleasure of paying the difference between the useful colonial horses that 'were deliberately starved to death and the useless foreign horse which came out tb lose us chances of victory and then die. may be, pardoned for wondering why even a Chief of Veterinary Staff did not see that it would have been better pervice to the Empire to have used these animals, or even to allow, their owners to employ them for transport, rather than condemn them to the most miserable of deaths.

• Unhappily, too, there -is a taint of dishonesty as'well as the plain stigma of inhumanity on the miserable business. While the animals were starving to death, a civilian colonial official armed with a commission, emanating friiin General French came to the can,ip with authority to take out such as he considered to be still lit for service. For these he received £6 a head on delivery in Steynshuvg- When the horses. yre're accepted, a receipt for £3 was"'•given, payable the q>vner could be found. . It w;as perfectly well known to this official and to the authorities that, in consequence o'f the shortness of notice and the almost total lack of labour, it had been impossible to get, all the animals branded. Moreover, the distances of the farms from the camp were often m> great as to put identification in. time quite out of the question. At this stage of the proceedings the selected cattle were worth from £l2 to £ls a head.

As regards the owners, the official swindle 'worked out this way. Men, who before the issue of the order owned from 3-50 to 25.0 horses, inures, «tnd foals, now

' do not possess a single animal sa,ve what some of them have been able to buy since. They have not received a, penny ol compensation, and, .of course, many—indeed, most of them—are ruined. Ido not wish for a moment to impute any tff the blame for this cruel and dishonest transaction to the gallant General who signed the colonial official's commission. I don't suppose he eveV heard of Cruelty Camp, but this does not exonerate those who did know of its abominations and kept him in ignorance of them. By way ot showing that these gentry were by no means anxious for the stoiy to become public property, I append the following extract from the annual report of the Burgersdorp Chamber of Commerce, issued in April, 1902, which was struck out by the Military Censor/ before it was permitted to be published:— ' - "This report would be incomplete if attention was not called to the serious blow dealt to the horse industry by confining nearly all horses of this and other districts (young and old) in camps wholly inadequate to sustain life.. The mortality among thea starving animals is appalling, and will give a set-back to horse breeding from which it will not recover for many years. This action by the military authorities at headquarters was considered indispensable to prevent the enemy from obtaining remounts, who, it was alleged, annexed colts and fillies of eighteen months old when no others were available." For this the censor substituted the following : " This report would not be complete unless attention were drawn to the serious blow dealt to the horse industry by the military precautious which have been found necessaiy to: prevent equine stock falling into the hands of the enemy." •This, I. think, would be recognised as an almost, perfect specimen of the suppressio veri. It is also a deliberate abuse of the powers of the censorship, since no harm could possibly have come to anybody through the publication of the report, except to those who so callously enforced those, atrocious " precautions." The once lightly-spoken phrase, " loyalty does not pay," has now attained to the dignity of an axiom in South Africa ; and yeb what was the reply of the Albert district farmers to the ruinous tyranny of uniformed imbecility? After the disaster of Stormberg they subscribed each his share out of what was left to him, and, in ii time of famine prices, ran the district hospital practically at their own expense, what time the British taxpayer was being bled of millions in order to maintain the wives and children of the Boers, so that they might continue the war at their greater ease and without inconvenient responsibilities. The • opinions of one of Swift's Houyhnhnms on this subject would b» interesting reading. To what fate, I wonder, wcild a judge and jury of their species condemn those who were responsible fqr the conception and conduct of Cruelty Camp?