and defenceless were being shelled. These considerations no doubt
influenced Sir George White yesterday when he sent a message to General
Joubert asking that non-combatants with sick and wounded might be
allowed to leave Ladysmith without molestation. It must have been
bitterly humiliating for a soldier in command of ten or twelve thousand
British troops, who have been twice victorious in battle, to feel that
one reverse had resulted in making him a suitor for so much favour at
the hands of an adversary. Whether the request ought ever to have been
made or not, to say nothing of whether we ought to have been in the
abject position of having to make it, is a question about which most
civilians are at variance with the military authorities, seeing that the
answer was a foregone conclusion. Its exact purport we do not know yet,
but it amounted to a flat refusal, as most of us had foreseen, and was
accompanied by alternative proposals which placed Joubert in the
position of a potential conqueror--dictating terms, and our acceptance
of these cannot be read by the Boers in any other light than as an
admission of weakness or pusillanimity. Of course we know that it means
nothing of the kind, but simply that Sir George White would not expose
sick and wounded, with helpless women, children, and non-combatants
generally, to the possible horrors of a prolonged bombardment. So long
as they remained in town he would be righting with one hand tied,
because he could not in that case place batteries in certain
advantageous positions without the risk of drawing fire from Boer guns
on Ladysmith and its civilian inhabitants. Whether this state of things
has been mended much by Sir George White's acceptance of Boer conditions
and Ladysmith's practical repudiation of them may well be doubted. As
the matter is generally understood, General Joubert, while declining to
grant Sir George's request, consented that a neutral camp for sick,
wounded, and non-combatants should be formed at Intombi Spruit, five
miles out on the railway line to Colenso, and practically within the