en made to exclude it from the firing line. An unfortunate
incident early in the campaign gave our enemies some reason to suspect
us. The facts are these.

At the end of the spring of 1899 some hundreds of thousands of
hollow-headed bullets, made in England, were condemned as
unsatisfactory, not being true to gauge, &c., and were sent to South
Africa for target practice only. A quantity of this ammunition, known as
'Metford Mark IV.,' was sent up to Dundee by order of General Symons for
practice in field firing. As Mark IV. was not for use in a war with
white races all these cartridges were called in as soon as Kruger
declared war, and the officers responsible thought they were every one
returned. By some blundering in the packing at home, however, some of
this Mark IV. must have got mixed up with the ordinary, or Mark II.,
ammunition, and was found on our men by the Boers on October 30.
Accordingly a very careful inspection was ordered, and a few Mark IV.
bullets were found in our men's pouches, and at once removed. Their
presence was purely accidental, and undoubtedly caused by a blunder in
the Ordnance Department long before the war, and it was in consequence
of this that some hollow-headed bullets were fired by the English early
in the war without their knowledge.

What is usually known as the dum-dum bullet is a 'soft-nosed' one: but
the regulation Mark II. is also made at the dum-dum factory, and the
Boers, seeing the dum-dum label on boxes containing the latter,
naturally thought the contents were the soft-nosed, which they were not.

It must be admitted that there was some carelessness in permitting
sporting ammunition ever to get to the front at all. When the Derbyshire
Militia were taken by De Wet at Roodeval, a number of cases of sporting
cartridges were captured by the Boers (the officers had used them for
shooting springbok). My friend, Mr. Langman, who was present, saw the
Boers, in some instances, filling their bandoliers from these cases on
the plausible excuse that they were only using our own ammunition. Such
cartridges should never have been permitted to go up. But in spite of
instances of bungling, the evidence shows that every effort has been
made to keep the war as humane as possible. I am inclined to hope that a
fuller knowledge will show that the same holds good for our enemies, and
that in spite of individual exceptions, they have never systematically
used anything except what one of their num