Story of the War in South Africa | Page 4

supplies of the British army, which presents in both
men and animals a concentrated mass of life heretofore unknown to the
territory in which it is moving, and where, from previous conditions of
population and development, necessary resources of every kind are
deficient. This {p.013} system constitutes the main chain of
communications, as the term is understood in war; by it chiefly, for
much of the distance wholly, must come all the ammunition, most of
the food, and not improbably at times a good deal of the water drunk
during the dry season, which fortunately, from this point of view, is
also that of cooler weather.
The difficulty of reinforcing railway carriage by any other system of
road transportation is greatly increased by the local horse-sickness,
from which three-fourths of the horses exposed to it die. Reliance for
that purpose, therefore, must be upon the ox-wagon, which for this
reason, and owing to the open level character of the country, has in the
past played a leading part in the South African migrations.
The main and subsidiary railroads thus summarized should, from the
point of view of our subject, be considered as one, contributory to the
advance of the British army over a substantially even country, which
opposes few natural obstacles to such a movement, though here and

there "accidents of {p.014} the ground"--a range of hills, or a dry
river-bed, as at Paardeberg--may facilitate opposition by a military
force. The system receives no further support until Johannesburg is
reached. There the railroad from Durban comes in, and, if its carrying
capacity were adequate, which is doubtful, would enable the chief base
of operations and main line of communications to be shifted to the
nearer locality, retaining the Cape road only as secondary.
The advantage to the British of the line of invasion from Cape Town is
that it crosses the mountains, which separate the coast district from the
inland plateau, at such a distance from the enemy's frontier that it is
impossible for the latter to offer serious resistance before the
comparatively easy rolling country has been reached. It was for this
reason that the decision of the Orange Free State to join in the war,
while it added to the numerical resistance to be encountered by the
British, had for them the compensating advantage that it removed the
necessity of forcing their way over the difficult mountain ranges which
separate Natal from the Transvaal.
With the power of Great Britain to bring into {p.015} the field a great
superiority of numbers, it is at least open to argument that the Free
State, by ceasing to be neutral, relieved the enemy of a difficulty
greater than that which its hostility introduced. It was for these reasons
that the original British plan, as generally understood, was to make the
main invasion along this line. The danger of Ladysmith, it is commonly
and with probability believed, caused the momentary abandonment of
this purpose. Whether the change was at the moment correct in
principle or not, it is evident that Lord Roberts has reverted to the first
intention; a course which enforces its accuracy with all the weight of
his well-earned great renown.
The other railroad system of direct importance to the military
operations of the present war is the single Natal line, from Durban to
Johannesburg and Pretoria, which at Ladysmith throws off a branch to
the westward, crossing the mountains to Bethlehem in the Free State,
and there ends, over sixty miles from the road between Bloemfontein
and Pretoria. The Natal road, having been opened as lately as 1895,

may be considered the {p.016} child of the Gold Fields; prior to the
discovery of which, indeed, there were in the Transvaal neither
products nor consumers enough to give commercial value to a railroad.
The Cape Town line reached Pretoria only in 1892, and it is still
characteristic of all the lines that there is but little local traffic, either
freight or passenger; the roads exist as means whereby the function of
communication, so far discharged by the sea, is prolonged from the
coast to the interior of the continent.
It is not the least noteworthy in the incidents of commercial and
mechanical energy, by which foreign hands have developed the
Transvaal from a poor to a wealthy state, that "all the heavy machinery,
the timber, the corrugated iron with which the works and men's houses
are constructed, and nearly every requirement of work and life, had to
be brought for over three hundred miles upon ox-wagons, the country
itself supplying scarcely anything, and even to this day (1897) wheat
being brought from Australia."[1]
[Footnote 1: Younghusband's "South Africa of To-day." Second
Edition, 1899.]
Regarded {p.017} as a source of supply, especially of military supply,
the demands of which are more urgent than