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No great chivalry or consideration of the feelings of one's opponent there! Here is a poem from the 'Volksstem' on August 26, 1899, weeks before the war, describing the Boer programme. A translation runs thus: 'Then shall our ears with pleasure listen To widow's wail and orphan's cry; And shall we gird, as joyful witness, The death-watch of your villainy.
In its Press campaign the Afrikaner Bond employed several leading Colonial organs the Bloemfontein Express, the Pretoria Volksstem, the Standard and Diggers' News of Johannesburg, and numerous papers of note abroad as well. These were coached, in the usual masterly manner, sophisticating and perverting truth.
Every day we read in the 'Volksstem' probably the most astounding tissue of lies ever presented to the public under the name of a newspaper of Boer victories and of the huge slaughters and shameful flights of the British. However much one might doubt and discount these tales, they made a deep impression. A month's feeding on such literary garbage weakens the constitution of the mind.
'In the Transvaal this was done by the "Volksstem," written by a Hollander and subsidised by Kruger; by the "Rand Post," also written by a Hollander, also subsidised by Paul Kruger; and in the Cape Colony by the "Patriot," which was started by intriguers and rebels to their own Government, at the Paarl a hot-bed of false Africanderism.
The two Boer newspapers, the Pretoria Volksstem and the Johannesburg Standard and Diggers' News, dwelt at length upon every favourable token of foreign assistance, however trifling, and attempted to strengthen hopes which at hardly any time seemed capable of realisation.
In spite of the vindictive urgings of the Hollander newspaper, the Volksstem, few could believe that the death sentence would be carried out and most people recognized that the ebullitions of that organ expressed the feelings of only a few rabid and witless individuals among the Hollanders themselves and were viewed with disgust by the great majority of them.
Often some of the officers used to play rounders in the small yard which we had for exercise. But the rest walked moodily up and down, or lounged over the railings and returned the stares of the occasional passers-by. Later would come the 'Volksstem' permitted by special indulgence with its budget of lies. Sometimes we get a little fillip of excitement.
In the Volksstem it was pointed out as a significant fact that a week before his escape Churchill had drawn from the library Mill's "Essay on Liberty." In England and over all British South Africa the escape created as much interest as it did in Pretoria.
The 'Volksstem' noticed as a significant fact that I had recently become a subscriber to the State Library, and had selected Mill's essay 'On Liberty. It apparently desired to gravely deprecate prisoners having access to such inflammatory literature. The idea will, perhaps, amuse those who have read the work in question.
October and November were months of unrestrained exultation to the Boer party, to judge from letters and articles which appeared in the Standard and Diggers' News, Johannesburg, dated 22nd November, 1899, and in the Pretoria Volksstem, dated 20th November, 1899.
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