Note 86 — Chapter XXV
Reading edition
Much controversy has arisen as to the promise which the Boer commandant made, when the police force surrendered, that the lives of its leaders should be spared. Whatever might have happened immediately after the surrender, they would in any case not have been put to death in cold blood at Pretoria, for that would have been a blunder, which a man so astute and so far from cruel as the President would not have committed.