The Boers—England’s Record of Infamy.—The success in causing the surrender of the Boers by exterminating their women and children by slow starvation and disease is the incentive which prompted the British nation to violate international law by stopping the shipment of non-contraband goods, Red Cross supplies and milk for babies, to Germany and contiguous countries. The number of deaths (in the Boer concentration camps) during the month of September, 1901, was 1,964 children and 328 women. There were then 54,326 children and 38,022 women under Kitchener’s tender care. The “Daily News” on November9, 1901, said: “The truth is that the death rate in the camps is incomparably worse than anything Africa or Asia can show. There is nothing to match it even in the mortality figures of the Indian famines, where cholera and other epidemics have to be contended with.” “Reynold’s Newspaper” (London) of October20, 1901, spoke of “the women and children perishing like flies from confinement, fever, bad food, pestilential stinks and lack of nursing in these awful death traps,” with a rate of 383 per 1,000. The “Sydney Bulletin” said: “The authority granted by Lord Roberts to Red Cross nurses to attend our camps has been withdrawn.” The English wanted the women and children to perish for want of Red Cross supplies, as in the case of Germany. President Steyn of the Orange Free State, in a letter of protest to Lord Kitchener, dated August, 1901, among other things said:

Your Excellency’s troops have not hesitated to turn their artillery on these defenseless women and children to capture them when they were fleeing with their wagons or alone, whilst your troops knew that they were only women and children, as happened only recently at Graspan on the 6th of June near Reitz, where a women and children laager was taken and recaptured by us, whilst your Excellency’s troops took refuge behind the women; and when reinforcements came they fired with artillery and small arms on that woman laager. I can mention hundreds of cases of this kind.

On December16, 1913, the Boers, in the presence of immense throngs, dedicated a monument at Blomfontein with the following inscription:

This Monument is Erected by the Boers of South Africa in memory of
26,663 WOMEN AND CHILDREN
who died in the Concentration Camps during the War 1900-1902

No better evidence can be desired than is contained in a speech which the present British Premier, Lloyd George, made in1901, charging that the English army had burned villages, swept away the cattle, burned thousands of tons of grain, destroyed all agricultural implements, all of the mills, the irrigation works, and left the territory a blackened, devastated wilderness. Then the women and children were herded, in winter, in thin, leaky tents, surrounded by barbed wire fences, where thousands died of unnecessary privations. He said:

Is there any ground for the reproach flung at us by the civilized world that, having failed to crush the men, we have now taken to killing babies?