TOPIC:

In the first weeks of the Kimberley Siege, the town’s commander, Colonel Robert George Kekewich, writes to Boer commanders of the forces surrounding him complaining about alleged white flag abuses by the Boers. OVS President Steyn, who is with the besieging force, takes offence at the contents of this letter and responded to the allegations in a November 4, 1899 letter to his ZAR counterpart President Paul Kruger.

The context of the allegations of the white flag abuses is formed by the British need for a plausible explanation for why a military-untrained band of bible bashing bearded men in civilian clothes has managed to administer the British forces some painful and highly embarrassing clips around the ears. The British Jingo tabloids in the UK, but also in Canada, Australia and in South Africa, eagerly lapped up these allegations and managed to install amongst the populace a sentiment that their boys were fighting on a heavily tilted playing field against an unchivalrous, treacherous lot.

On January 19, 1900, Steyn’s letter to Kruger was partly reproduced in the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant (NRC), an influential Dutch newspaper. Although it doesn’t say so, this publication was most likely instigated by W.J. Leyds, the ZAR Government’s representative in Europe. The text of Steyn’s letter in the NRC was subsequently reprinted in the pamphlet shown hereunder. Interestingly, the pamphlet contains an English translation and from that it can be safely concluded that it was meant to be sent to newspapers and individuals in the UK and elsewhere with the obvious objective to set the record straight.

I'm pretty confident the many white flag incidents, which both sides report, did in fact happen. They were numerous and, I think, inevitable. The simplest way to understand this is to walk the battlefields for a few days. What you'll notice is that the firing line is often several miles long, thinly manned, usually discontinuous, and has a zig-zag pattern. On the veld the ground so rough and grass so high that pockets of men inevitably cannot be seen by each other. A group of men who feared being cut off under heavy fire may easily raise the white flag, and then the enemy, when approaching would be fired on from the flanks. This happened on more than one occasion even on Spioenkop summit, which is indeed a very small battlefield. I don't think any of the incidents I've read about were done to deceive. It's like the other controversy, dum-dums, which is based on too little understanding and being too quick to judge and condemn.