Swazis, all of whom have blood-feuds with the Boers. It
is very certain that the Boers would have had no such compunctions, for
when in 1857 the Transvaalers had a quarrel with the Free State we have
Paul Botha's evidence for the fact that they intrigued with a Kaffir
chief to attack their kinsmen from the rear. Botha says:

'I have particular knowledge of this matter, because I took part in the
commando which our Government sent to meet the Transvaal forces. The
dispute was eventually amicably settled, but, incredible as it may seem,
the Transvaal had actually sent five persons, headed by the notorious
Karel Geere, to Moshesh, the Basuto chief, to prevail upon him to attack
_us_, their kinsmen, in the rear! I was one of the patrol that captured
Geere and his companions, some of whom I got to know subsequently, and
who revealed to me the whole dastardly plot.'

This will give some idea as to what we might have had to expect had
native sympathy gone the other way. In the letter already quoted,
written by Snyman to his brother, he asserts that Kruger told him that
he relied upon the assistance of the Swazis and Zulus. As it was,
however, beyond allowing natives to defend their own lives and property
when attacked, as in the case of the Baralongs at Mafeking, and the
Kaffirs in the Transkei, we have only employed Kaffirs in the pages of
the continental cartoons.

As teamsters, servants, guides, and scouts the Kaffirs were, however,
essential to us, and realising this the Boers, when the war began to go
against them, tried to terrorise them into deserting us by killing them
without mercy whenever they could in any way connect them with the
British. How many hundreds were done to death in this fashion it is
impossible to compute. After a British defeat no mercy was shown to the
drivers of the wagons and the native servants. Boer commandos covered
their tracks by putting to death every Kaffir who might give
information. Sometimes they killed even the children. Thus Lord
Kitchener, in his report, narrates a case where a British column hard
upon the track of a Boer commando found four little Kaffir boys with
their brains dashed out in the kraal which the Boers had just evacuated.

A case which particularly touched the feelings of the British people was
that of Esau, the coloured blacksmith, who was a man of intelligence and
education, living as a loyal British subject in the British town of
Calvinia. There was no possible ca