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 letter of an officer
present, by a subaltern, without the knowledge and against the wishes of
the officer in command. The officer who raised the flag may quite
well--we do not know the circumstances accurately--have wished to save
the lives of the men immediately round him, or may have been unable to
see what was happening elsewhere on the kopje, and so have imagined that
he and his men alone were left.

Something very similar to this appears to have happened at Dundee. A
body of Boers standing together raised a white flag when our men
approached and were duly taken prisoners, but the rest of their commando
were, according to Boer accounts, already engaged in retreating with