Boer War.
There is plenty of evidence of good treatment of prisoners on both sides during the Boer War. It is in these days strange to find the German General Staff historian quoted in defence of the British treatment of prisoners. They behaved, he wrote, “as perfect gentlemen towards the prisoners.” “The testimony of a responsible writer of this kind,” says Dr. Spaight, “is more valuable than the catch-penny stories of British inhumanity which flooded the Press of Europe at the time of the war.” “One is surprised to find such a writer as M. Arthur Desjardins lending his authority to back the uninformed newspaper abuse, and ascribing the brutality of the British Army (which he presumes) to the fact that ‘a certain number of its soldiers, accustomed to fighting away from Europe, have not the least notion of the laws and customs of war obtaining among civilised nations’.” (Spaight, l.c., p. 275.) Dr. Spaight’s comments on such outbursts is: “There was a popular demand [in Europe] at the time for denunciation of England, the hotter the better, and the writers were too good journalists not to suit their output to the popular taste.” I will not spoil the rather rich humour of these extracts by any remarks of my own.
Undoubtedly the Boers usually behaved well. Undoubtedly, too, there were some bad lapses. A Free State commandant was, for instance, convicted of putting prisoners in the firing line and driving starving prisoners on foot with a mounted commando. Such things, however, were very far from being the rule. During the guerilla warfare treatment depended entirely on the local commandants. The stripping of prisoners before they were turned adrift was often carried out, “and there is some force in De Wet’s contention that the seizure was justified by the British practice of removing or burning all the clothes left in the farms and even taking the hides out of the tanning tubs and cutting them in pieces.” In some cases starving, unarmed and practically naked men were abandoned far from any white settlement. What is and what is not allowable in war seems so largely a matter of “military necessity” that the layman is reluctant to comment, for, in the last resort, it is only the needlessly barbarous that is condemned in war.