the 7th Dragoon Guards, and the other to the effect that they were looking for cattle.  I think if such a case came before you, you would have no doubts about treating them as spies.  Therefore Kritzinger would not have been guilty of murder had he shot them.  I have a far stronger defence, however.  The natives were captured by Wessels.  Kritzinger knew nothing about them, and when these boys were shot he was not present, as he was at another farm at the time.  Wessels left at 10 A.M., Kritzinger arrived there after sunset.  How can he then be responsible for the shooting of these natives when he was not at the farm?  There is not a bit of proof to show that Kritzinger gave the order about the shooting of these boys.  One of the native witnesses says that one of Wessels’ men went in the direction of Voetpad; there is no evidence that he ever reached there.  More than that, witnesses belonging to Kritzinger’s commando state that they saw nothing of Wessels, and that they knew nothing of the shooting of these boys.  At the close of the evidence in chief there was something which looked like implicating Kritzinger, but of that by Van Aswegen there is very little left to-day.  At first the evidence re Mijnhardt was taken, but the Court has ruled that this evidence cannot be accepted.  Now there is the evidence of Boltman.  I do not say that Boltman did not give his evidence fairly, but he must have made a mistake as regards Kritzinger making use of the words he referred to.  McCabe says while he was on the farm nothing of the kind occurred.  If anything had been said he would have heard it.  When McCabe and Maasdorp came back no report was made that Kritzinger had said anything of the kind.  But there was a report made, and McCabe bears it out that something was said by another member of the commando.  I would submit that Boltman mistook the other member of the commando for Kritzinger.  There is no getting over the evidence of McCabe, and he is the person who ought to remember it.  As McCabe says, Kritzinger did not arrive until some hours after the boys had been shot.

“I now come to the second charge—­the charge of the shooting of the boy John Thomas at Tweefontein.  Now, sir, here again the boy was clearly a spy.  He carried two passes similar to those carried by the boys mentioned in the first charge.  He was unarmed.  He was not in uniform.  He was there to spy the movements of the Boers.  Kritzinger would not have been responsible for the shooting of this boy had he shot him.  But here the evidence against him is even weaker than in the first charge.  Here there is no suggestion that the boy was shot by any of Kritzinger’s men.  The evidence shows that the boy was shot by a man serving under Smit.  Smit was an officer with an independent command, and, more than that, he had been longer in service than Kritzinger himself, and was not under Kritzinger.  Here, too, there is no suggestion, as in the first charge, that any