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".
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