an extraordinary intermingling of various units took place in this engagement—­rushed the house.  Two of the Highlanders were shot down but the rest took a speedy revenge.  The thirty-six Boers clubbed their rifles and fought pluckily, but they were crowded together and could do little against our bayonets.  Every man of the thirty-six perished.  “I didn’t like to see it, sir,” said one of the Highlanders to me.  This is, of course, a very different story from the disgraceful tale alluded to above.  None of the Boers in the house were wounded before our men appeared on the scene, and it is clear that the Boer corpses in the river, with stones tied to their ankles, were put there by their own comrades.

Fair-minded and thoughtful men who have followed the events of the present campaign must long ago have come to the conclusion that non-official news must frequently be received with great caution.  Before the war began misrepresentation was rife on both sides, and it has continued ever since.  Mr. Winston Churchill may well call South Africa a “land of lies”.  Various slanders against ourselves have emanated to some extent from the Dutch papers in Cape Colony and the Transvaal, but in a much fuller and more substantial form from the Continental papers, notably the Parisian Press.  On the other hand, our own journalists have not been altogether free from this taint.  Let us take one or two concrete instances, e.g., violation of the white flag, firing on ambulances, the use of “explosive” bullets, looting.  Just after the first reverse at the Tugela, a correspondent wired home that the Boers were “shooting horses and violating all the usages of civilised warfare”.  A man who would write such tomfoolery about horses ought to be kept in Fleet Street, and not sent out as a war correspondent; and as to his sweeping accusations in general, it is worth noticing that he was publicly and severely rebuked by Sir Redvers Buller, who denied his statements, and said that it was dishonourable to malign our brave opponents in this fashion.

As to the vexata quaestio of the white flag, it seems clear that in some instances the Boers have used this symbol of surrender in an absolutely unjustifiable way.  Such a misusage of the flag occurred, for example, at Belmont.[A] But, as a Boer prisoner said to me, there are blackguards in every army, and it is utterly unfair to represent the whole Boer army as composed of these treacherous scoundrels—­who, by the way, in almost every instance have paid the penalty of their treachery with their lives.  Moreover, a white flag—­which is sometimes merely a handkerchief tied to a rifle—­may, in a comparatively undisciplined force like that of our opponents, be easily raised by a combatant on one side of a kopje, without being ordered or being noticed by his officer or the bulk of his comrades.  How easily this may happen can be seen from what occurred amongst our own men at Nicholson’s Nek.  Here the white flag was raised, according to the published