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
their guns, and, being either unaware of this unauthorised surrender or
completely ignoring it, continued their flight.

I have already spoken of the risks incurred by stretcher-bearers and
ambulance waggons which approach close to the firing line. Wounded men
have told me again and again that the Boers at Magersfontein did not
fire wilfully on our ambulance waggons, except when our troops got
behind them in their retreat. Moreover, excitable people in England, who
greedily swallow any story about such alleged occurrences, have probably
the vaguest idea of what a modern battle-field looks like, and of the
enormous area now covered by military operations. It may be extremely
difficult to see a small white or Red Cross flag a long way off. At
Ladysmith, _e.g._, one of our guns put a shell clean through a Boer
ambulance, and Sir George White, of course, at once sent an apology for
the mistake. If mistakes occur on one side they may occur on the other.
Reuter's agent at Frere Camp reports