Daily inter mountain. [volume] (Butte, Mont.) 1881-1901, 1900-03-30
Have Been Grossly Violated
In South Africa.
JULIAN RALPH'S OPINION
Says the Beers Used the White Flag
and Red Cross For Illegal Purposes
"A Severe Arrangement OF the
BurgherS.

London, March 29.-The most serious
Indictment of the Boer methods OF war
fare which has yet appeared In England
comes from Julian Ralph, the American
war correspondent, in a letter from KIM
berley published in this mornings Daily
Mail. 1t is in part as follows:
ut is a war steadily and stealthily
planned by the queens Dutch subjects
and the Dutch republics for fully twenty
wears. For. between four six years
they have been equipped for 1t. They
began purchasing arms and planning
defenses before the Jameson raid. Let
no one fool you with the falsehood about
that. Finally President Kruger begged
President Steyn to declare war three
years before President Steyn consented.
Next rid your mind of the notion that
YOU are crushing two farmer republics.
There is not a farmer in the two cOun-
tries and only me-, the Free State, was
a republic in any way except misnaning.
These people are herders of cattle, sheep
and goats, like the Israelites of old n
the Afridis, Turks and Balkan people of
today. His (the Boer) so-called farms
are as nature made them, merely ranches
of veldt wherein his cattle Craze. Each
one has put up a home but it's surround
ings are almost invariably more repellent
and disorderly than any houses I ever
saw except thecabins of freed slaves in
the United States.
''Their camps and strongholds from
which we have routed them are the filth
lest places I have known men of any sort
to live in, and I have seen red Indian,
Chinese. and Turkish camps, n
the camps of many sorts of black men. AS
to their bravery and honor, I have seen
and heard sufficient to fill a page of the
Daily Mail with accounts Of their cow
ardly and dastardly behavior before I
came to Kimberley. But here I find they
have been guilty of different and orig
inal enormities. Here they killed our
wounded and laid their bodies in a row
after one of the forays out of town. Here
they armed many blacks to fight us show
ing all the world how scandalously frau
dulent were their EXPLANATIONS of horror
at the idea of our employing native In
dian troops.
There has hardly been a battle in
which the Beers have not abused either
the white flag or the Geneva cross. or
both. At SpiOn Kop II people saw them
loading Maxi1ns in ambulances in order
to get them safely away. This we saw
them do at Modder river also, and Kim
berley is where the Beers shelled the
funeral cortege of George l.. Abram. an
American. AT many places they fired
On our ambulances. I saw them do it
at Modder river and saw them fire on
our stretcher bearers in hat battle
time and time again. When we entered
Jacobsdal it looked like a city of DOCTORS.
Every man on the streets wore the Red
Cross bandage on his arms. These We're
the men who had just been shooting al
us from behind garden walls. There was
nothing novel or original about their
seeking the cowardly shelter O f the doc
tors bandage. We have become quite
accustomed to it. We one entered a
Boer laager after a victory and found 81
of these bogus doctors and seven or eight
wounded for their patients. They have
not been content with looting the houses
of the loyalists in the British colonies, but
In Natal in scores of instances they have
smashed into kindling and torn into rib
bons whatever they did not want or could
not carry off. Worse yet, they have foul
ed the walls of the homes Of defenseless
women with obscene writings. They
never know the value of an path or a
promise and have not learned 1t since the
war began"