the report as it appeared in a German paper:

'When the English on June 6 were attacked by the Boers, they ordered the
women and children to leave the wagons. Placing these in front of the
soldiers, they shot beneath the women's arms upon the approaching Boers.
Eight women and two children fell through the Boers' fire. When the
Boers saw this they stopped firing. Yelling like wild beasts, they broke
through the soldiers' lines, beating to death the Tommies like mad dogs
with the butt ends of their rifles.'

The true circumstances of the action so far as they can be collected are
as follows: Early on June 6 Major Sladen, with 200 mounted infantry, ran
down a Boer convoy of 100 wagons. He took forty-five male prisoners, and
the wagons were full of women and children. He halted his men and waited
for the main British force (De Lisle's) to come up. While he was waiting
he was fiercely attacked by a large body of Boers, five or six hundred,
under De Wet. The British threw themselves into a Kaffir kraal and made
a desperate resistance. The long train of wagons with the women still in
them extended from this village right across the plain, and the Boers
used them as cover in skirmishing up to the village. The result was that
the women and children were under a double fire from either side. One
woman and two children appear to have been hit, though whether by Boer
or Briton it must have been difficult to determine. The convoy and the
prisoners remained eventually in the hands of the British. It will be
seen then that it is as just to say that the Boers used their women as
cover for their advance as the British for their defence. Probably in
the heat of the action both sides thought more of the wagons than of
what was inside them.

These, with one case at Middelburg, where in a night attack of the Boers
one or two inmates of the refugee camp are said to have been
accidentally hit, form the only known instances in the war. And yet so
well known a paper as the German 'Kladderadatsch' is not ashamed to
publish a picture of a ruined farm with dead women strewed round it, and
the male child hanging from the branch of a tree. The 'Kladderadatsch'
has a reputation as a comic paper, but there should be some limits to
its facetiousness.

In his pamphlet on 'Methods of Barbarism,' Mr. Stead has recently
produced a chapter called 'A Glimpse of the Hellish Panorama,' in which
he deals with the evidence at the Spoelstra trial. Spoelstra w