However Unavoidable, The Sight Was
Certainly One To Be Deplored.
To the Boer credit, or discredit, are also to be placed those
repeated train wreckings, which cost the British during this
campaign the lives and limbs of many brave soldiers who were worthy
of some less ignoble fate.
It is true that the laws of war sanction
such enterprises, but there is something indiscriminate in the
results which is repellent to humanity, and which appears to
justify the most energetic measures to prevent them. Women,
children, and sick must all travel by these trains and are exposed
to a common danger, while the assailants enjoy a safety which
renders their exploit a peculiarly inglorious one. Two Boers,
Trichardt and Hindon, the one a youth of twenty-two, the other a
man of British birth, distinguished, or disgraced, themselves by
this unsavoury work upon the Delagoa line, but with the extension
of the blockhouse system the attempts became less successful. There
was one, however, upon the northern line near Naboomspruit which
cost the lives of Lieutenant Best and eight Gordon Highlanders,
while ten were wounded. The party of Gordons continued to resist
after the smash, and were killed or wounded to a man. The painful
incident is brightened by such an example of military virtue, and
by the naive reply of the last survivor, who on being questioned
why he continued to fight until he was shot down, answered with
fine simplicity, 'Because I am a Gordon Highlander.'
Another train disaster of an even more tragic character occurred
near Waterval, fifteen miles north of Pretoria, upon the last day
of August. The explosion of a mine wrecked the train, and a hundred
Boers who lined the banks of the cutting opened fire upon the
derailed carriages. Colonel Vandeleur, an officer of great promise,
was killed and twenty men, chiefly of the West Riding regiment,
were shot. Nurse Page was also among the wounded. It was after this
fatal affair that the regulation of carrying Boer hostages upon the
trains was at last carried out.
It has been already stated that part of Lord Kitchener's policy of
concentration lay in his scheme for gathering the civil population
into camps along the lines of communication. The reasons for this,
both military and humanitarian, were overwhelming. Experience had
proved that the men if left at liberty were liable to be persuaded
or coerced by the fighting Boers into breaking their parole and
rejoining the commandos. As to the women and children, they could
not be left upon the farms in a denuded country. That the Boers in
the field had no doubts as to the good treatment of these people
was shown by the fact that they repeatedly left their families in
the way of the columns so that they might be conveyed to the camps.
Some consternation was caused in England by a report of Miss
Hobhouse, which called public attention to the very high rate of
mortality in some of these camps, but examination showed that this
was not due to anything insanitary in their situation or
arrangement, but to a severe epidemic of measles which had swept
away a large number of the children.
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