Lessons of the War | Page 7

his movements, but knowing very well what he wants. The
British force at first is divided upon a front of forty miles, each of its
halves looking away from the other, so that there is little attention to
the weak point of such a front, the communication between its parts.
The first event is the cutting of this communication (on the 19th), and
not until the 21st is there an attempt to clear it, and that attempt, though
it leads to a severe blow against the interposing Boer force
(Elandslaagte), is not successful, for the communication has eventually
to be sought on another route behind the direct one. The Boer idea is,
after severing the connection between the British halves, to crush the
weaker Dundee portion; but the execution is imperfect, so that Sir Penn
Symons has the opportunity, which he seizes instantly, to defeat and
drive off one of the columns before the other can assist it. His successor,
General Yule, the heir to his design, is no sooner convinced by this

move to Glencoe that his line of junction with Ladysmith is threatened
with attack by a great superiority than he sets out by the nearest way
still open to him to rejoin the main body. The Ladysmith force covers
this march by a shielding movement (Reitfontein) and the junction of
the two British halves is effected. From Dundee to Ladysmith is forty
miles, and General Joubert unopposed would have covered the distance
in three days. He was before Dundee on Saturday, the 21st, and there
was no sign of him before Ladysmith until Saturday, the 28th, or
Sunday, the 29th. The original division of the British force and the
Battle of Glencoe thus produced a delay of several days in the Boer
advance: more could not have been expected from it. This first
impression ought to be supplemented by a consideration of Sir George
White's peculiarly difficult position, on which I will venture a word or
two.
The Government, by its action in the first half of September, decided
that Sir George White must defend Natal for about five weeks[A] with
sixteen thousand men against the bulk of the Boer army, which was
likely to be double his own force. It was evidently expected that he
should hold his ground near Ladysmith and thereby cover Natal to the
south of the Tugela. This double task was quite disproportionate to his
force. If Ladysmith had been a fortress, secure for a month or two
against assault, and able to take care of itself, the field force using it as
a base could no doubt have covered Natal. But in the absence of a
strong place there were only two ways by which a small force could
delay the Boer invasion. The force might let itself be invested and
thereby hold a proportion of the Boer army, leaving the balance to raid
where it could, or the campaign must be conducted as a retreat from
position to position. For a general with ten thousand men and only two
hundred miles of ground behind him to carry on a retreat in the face of
a force double his own so as to make it last five, weeks and to incur no
disaster would be a creditable achievement. Sir John Moore is thought
to have shown judgment and character by his decision to retreat before
a greatly superior force, commanded it is true by Napoleon himself.
Moore when he decided to retreat was about as far from Corunna as
Dundee is from Durban, and Moore's retreat took nineteen days. He
had the sympathy if not the effective help of the population, and was
thought to have been clever to get out of the trap laid for him. Sir

George White seems to have been expected as a matter of course to
resist the Boer army, to prevent the overrunning of Natal by the Boers,
and to preserve his own force from the beginning of October to the
middle of November.[B] The Government expected the Boers to attack
as soon as they should hear of the calling out of the Reserves, that
being the reason why the Reserves were not called out earlier.
Therefore Sir George White's campaign was timed to last from October
9th to November 15th (December 15th). I conclude that the force to be
given to Sir George White was fixed by Lord Lansdowne at haphazard,
and that the calculations of the military department were put on one
side, this unbusinesslike way of playing with National affairs and with
soldier's lives being veiled from the Secretary of State's mind by the
phrase, "political reasons." But the "political reason" for exposing a
Nation's troops to unreasonable risks and to needless loss must be bad
reason and bad policy. Mr. Wyndham has had