A West Pointer with the Boers /

by John Y. Fillmore Blake

In Pretoria, Johannesburg, Bloemfontein or any of the Boer towns, any woman seen walking or riding with an English officer, was marked at once as a mistress or common prostitute. The married officer who had his wife with him, would suffer from this, unless the people knew that the woman was really his lawful wife. In Pretoria, on Skinner Street, several of us were amused late one Sunday afternoon, on seeing an English officer with the rank of captain walking with two Hottentot Kaffir girls, one on each side, and both dressed in white linen and wearing pink stockings and high heeled slippers. These Kaffir girls were about sixteen years old, and he looked supremely happy as he braced his shoulders and passed us by.

Just on the border of the Pretoria township was a very neat Kaffir hut, and one day when we were near it, two of the artillery boys ventured that far, but before reaching the hut, they saw a man in khaki uniform mount a horse and fly. The boys went to the hut, found two Kaffir girls, and the rendezvous of an English officer. They took all his clothing, his top boots, some fine blankets, a revolver and some trifles, and returned to camp. The uniform disclosed that the keeper of the hut and women was a 1st lieutenant. The Kaffir girls told the boys that their master would get the soldiers and come after them, if they did not leave his clothes, etc. Sure enough, next day there came a column, and after a short skirmish it wheeled about and returned to Pretoria.

When the columns were raiding and burning farms in the bush veldt, in many instances they would drag the Boer girls, from sixteen to twenty-three years old, out of the houses, put them on wagons and cart them away, leaving the mother and little children to watch their home burn down and grieve over the fate of the girls. I can prove this to the very hilt, and without any trouble, too. The intention of the officers was to seduce these girls if they could, and if they couldn't, why then to use them anyhow, and I firmly believe that many of those innocent girls were forcibly violated. Where there were no young women, the little boys from seven to ten years old would be dragged from their homes and put in the camps. Many little boys of this age have walked and run miles to get with a commando, to escape being dragged away from their mothers, and many of them, too, have been shot down while trying to fly from English barbarity.

Along the railway lines, wherever you find an English camp, there, too, will you find a Kaffir camp. These Kaffirs were forcibly taken from their kraals on the Boer farms and put near the English camp. The reason given was that they wanted the men to work in the mines, and prevent them from giving information to the Boers. This was merely rot, for the Boers needed no information, as the English were always in plain sight. The truth is that they wanted the Kaffir women for the use of the English soldiers and officers, and to-day you can see half-caste kids by the score about those Kaffir camps. The Kaffirs are a very chaste people, immorality with them being punished by death, and now the Kaffir men who were forcibly taken from their kraals, and have seen their women debauched, hate the English with a bitterness that no pen can adequately describe. Yes, the English officer in the eyes of civilization is a typical gentleman, but as known and believed by the savage Kaffir, he is a brute. English officers, sick in hospital, and those not in hospital, plied their art with the English Red Cross nurses, and over eighty of these had to be sent back to England.

So notorious were the relations between these nurses and the English officers, that the former were known among the enlisted men and the people generally, by a name borrowed from the Veterinary Department, and too utterly vile to be printed.

In reading a little book some time ago, I came upon a passage that reminded me so forcibly both of the English and the ships' officers, that I here quote it. "Oh! if hell has a pit hotter and more intolerable than all the rest, a just God must surely reserve it for the lurking foe, the English officer, the seducer damned." Of course the words, "the English officer," are my insertion, and the space they occupy is most appropriate for them.

So much has been said and written about the English concentration camps, that I will not dwell upon this subject to a great extent, yet I must say something, because I fear that all are not acquainted with these diabolical institutions.

In the first place, I must tell what a concentration camp is. It is a lot of tents, 100 or 200, or possibly 600, all pitched close together on a piece of exposed veldt on the railway line, and surrounded by a net-work of barbed wire. On each of the four sides of the camp is a gate, and at each gate there are two armed men to see that no one escapes. In every tent there is a family. That is, a mother and her children. It matters not what the number of the family may be, that family must live, or rather try to exist, in that one tent. All are closely confined within that net-work of barbed wire, and there they must remain, and subsist on such food as the English officers wish to serve them. To each family is given about one-fourth as much fuel as is necessary, so at least four must club together and cook together, if they do not wish to eat their food in the raw state. Every family is limited in the amount of water to be used, and must take what is given.

ONE OF MILNER'S VICTIMS
A Boer child in the first stage of death from starvation or poison in an English prison-camp. Taken by a young Boer spy in the English prison-camp at Irene, near Pretoria.