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Show j DeWet's Book on the Boer War ! i I j London, ,,, i.'.Had not so many j ur inn-hois proved ts; to their J j 'Wn '":'ils- Kngland. as the great Bis- ! I 'trek f.,r. told, would have found her j 1 klvn" S"ut" Africa" That 'is the! 1 j'1" ' f General Dcwet's book, en- ; I "Three Years' Wa-." j I ht , 1'ei-haps the most remarkable j 1 that Xnr' most remarkable leader I I 'con "ly n''','nt var has produced. The I ovuh,'' SImI''y-told tale of the extra- j I out ,Hml'ai?:n is- marked through- 1 ! baiV'lsh lh'' lara' of truth. The ! t '-ss 'he narrative only serves la?sa "K "Uo Pt,''k'nK relief the fiery j fill'v n's in whitn a. strong man liter- ren,.,, Ults uut his soul in pathetic j taki, or, biUei" denunciation. In thus rj'-v.-cf he public into his confidence, j 1 v-ith vS nothing of the glamour : round" exploits in the field sur. h one- n ln ""'ticising, he spares i S fcmw r an3 Briton come equally 1 Do, ash- I ! iriiis-h1, deplar,s that whatever the 1 l Ieople may have to say In dis credit to General Buller, he had to operate op-erate against stronger positions than any other British general. Throughout Through-out the work the Boer general has but slight praise for Lord Roberts, and little lit-tle more for Lord Kitchener. General Knox is almost the only British general gen-eral who seems to have struck Dewet as a commander with real military I genius. Of "Tommy Atkins" Dewet has many ' kindly things to say, and he declares that "the British were far from being bad shots." The comparative immunity j of the Boers from harm, Dewet con-j con-j stantly and most fervently attributes j to the interposition of God. "If any reader." he says, "is eager to know j how it was I kept out of the enemy's ; hands I can only answer, although I i may not be understood, that I as.vibe jit to nothing else than this, it was not God's will that'l should fall into their I hands. Let these who rejoice at my 1 miraculous escapes give all the praise to God." Nevertheless, the book teems with accounts ac-counts of the military and other strategies strat-egies by which Dewet outwitted his pursuers. " Frequently he '.recounts cases of desertion and panic among his own men when his entreaties and sjamboking were all of no avail. D;1-wet D;1-wet pays a tribute to General Cronje for his bravery, but declares that he lost at Paardeberg only on account of his fatal obstinacy in refusing to leave the laager, as he was advised to do by General Botha and by. the writer himself. Regarding his own forces, Dewet writes: . j "It was far easier to fight against the great English army than against ; treachery among my own people, and i an iron will was required to fight j against both. Once, if only our orders had been carried out a little more strictly and if only the most elementary elemen-tary rules of strategy had been observed ob-served in our efforts to break the British Brit-ish lines of communication,- Lord Roberts Rob-erts and his thousands of troops would have found themselves' shut' up in Pretoria, Pre-toria, where they would have perished of hunger. It was not the skill of their commander in chief that saved them." Of the blockhouses Dewet is frankly contemptuous. "The blockhouse policy," poli-cy," he says, "might equally well have been called the policy of the blockhead." block-head." The writer emphatically defends de-fends the right to blow up railroad lines and trains as the usage of war, and he declares that he never missed an opportunity to do so. The so-called war against women and the misuse of the white flag by the British are sternly denounced by the Boer general, who says: "That such direct and indirect murder should have been committed . against defenseless women and children is a thing I should have staked my head could never have happened in a war waged by the civilized civil-ized English nation; and yet it happened." |