28 JULY 1906, Page 21

THE "TIMES" HISTORY OF THE WAR IN SOUTH AFRICA.* JUST

a year ago we were indebted to the pen of Mr. Amery, in his third volume of this history, for

what was undoubtedly one of the most thoughtful as well as one of the most disturbing treatises which have ever appeared, not only upon the actual incidents of the South.

African War, but upon the serious defects in our national attitude towards military questions which were the prime cause of the most regrettable of those incidents. The period

dealt with in Vol. III. carried us from the close of the "Black Week" down to Lord Roberts's entry into Bloemfontein—

that is, "from the depth of defeat to perhaps the most signal and complete momeut of triumph in the war "—a grand theme, treated by Mr. Amery in the grand manner which it deserved.

Mr. Basil Williams has a less stirring phase of the operations to describe, and the meed of praise and of blame

which be deals out to those who took part in it is attuned in a

minor key. While Mr. Amery's object was to rouse the nation to a sense of its military unpreparedness, Mr. Williams's chief

hope is that "nothing in this volume will be otherwise than useful to the best interests of the British Army." The aim of both writers is in reality identical : their mode of expressing it is widely different. Nevertheless, Mr. Williams .bas succeeded in producing an impartial and comprehensive, and.

on the whole a wonderfully accurate, history of the complicated operations conducted under Lord Roberts's chief command after the fall of Bloemfontein. Viewed broadly, the period is one of almost continuous success, chequered, however, and marred by disappointments which were quite as unexpected by the country at home as they were by Lord Roberts himself, and by a chronicle of minor disasters many of which were quite unaccountable in themselves. With these disasters Mr. Williams deals tenderly, perhaps mom tenderly than the facts which he recounts would appear to justify, and he is too often inclined to throw the blame for "regrettable incidents" upon Lord Roberts and the Headquarters Staff, instead of assigning it, as Mr. Amery more probably would have done, to the want of initiative, or experience, or pertinacity, or all three in combination, on the part of the subordinate leaders of the various units which met with misfortune. It is no doubt perfectly true that in attempting to control the detailed operations of all the columns in his large army Lord Roberts trusted too little to the initiative of his subordinate leaders.

It is true, also, that there was no organised Staff system at all, and that, in spite of the presence of many extremely competent officers upon it, the collective incapacity and incoherency of action shown by the Headquarters Staff were proportioned to its vast numerical strength. Lord Roberts's own extra- ordinary energy and memory were almost solely taxed for the

details which in any other army would have been left to the Staff, and the result was a confusion, especially in the ordre de bataille, which seriously militated against coherent opera- tions. Nevertheless, from the moment of the capture of Bloemfontein, it became increasingly clear how few of his subordinates had the training or the dash to co-operate, * The "Times" History of the War in South Africa. Vol. IV. By Basil Williams. General Editor, L. S. Amery. London ; Sampson Low, Marston, and Co. [218. net.] without the most minute instructions, in Lord Roberts's general plan. Thus the muddle in front of Dewetsdorp and the failure of the "first De Wet Hunt," to which admirable Chapters are devoted in this volume, were largely attributable —More largely than Mr. Williams has asked us to believe— to a defective system of intelligence, and to the inability or unwillingness of the various column leaders to communi- cate and co-operate with each other. Almost at the very opening of the volume we have the story of Sauna's Post, where out of a total of eighteen hundred men, twelve guns, and ninety-two waggons, one-third of the men were captured, killed, or wounded, while seven guns and eighty-three

waggons fell into De Wet's hands. True, the British at Sauna's Post were dogged by a singular combination of

ill-luck. But the real causes of disaster were the want of rapidity of decision in trying circumstances on the part of the officer commanding the ambushed force, and the seeming inability to grasp the essential conditions of a crisis shown by the commanders of both , the relieving forces from Bloem- fontein. Similarly, though they should never have been put into such a position at all, the actual capitulation of the Irish Yeomanry at Lindley must be laid to the charge of Colonel Spra.gge, who, cavalryman though lie was, showed so little grasp of the weak and strong points of the mounted arm that he actually sat down round his waggons to consume his last day's rations when be knew that a larger force was engaged with the enemy less than ten miles away, and that, up to the very last moment, a line of retreat to Kroonstad, but forty miles distant, was always open to him. If at Sanna's Post a disaster was saved front disgrace by the behaviour of the rank-and-file, their behaviour but accentuated the defective training of their responsible leaders. Lord Roberts would have been the first to realise bow great an advantage accrues to the general who is able to trust his subordinates, but in the circumstances we cannot blame him because he was unable to do so.

What is most admirable, in the face of all these minor disasters, was Lord Roberts's determination to push on rapidly into the heart of the enemy's country. There was, as Mr. Williams reminds us, "an ominous precedent against a dash to the capital in Napoleon's

advance to Moscow Might not the rapid advance now contemplated by Lord Roberts leave the main forces of the enemy untouched, as happened in the Moscow campaign, and in that case would the capture of Pretoria have brought the submission of the Boers any sooner ? Their love of independence might prove stronger than their sense of loss at the capture of their capital. They might even gather round the victorious army encamped there and reduce it to the state of a beleaguered garrison, or if it retreated, deal such fatal blows at its line of communications as to reduce it to the plight of Napoleon's Grand Army."

It has never been sufficiently realised what a risk be under- took in advancing, and how nearly these pessimistic prog- nostications proved true. Mr. Williams makes this abun- dantly clear to us in the chapter which deals with Diamond Hill; not a victory as it has generally been regarded; but respite only in an exceedingly critical situation. At the same time, how nearly the occupation of Pretoria did bring the war to an end has been realised almost less. Indeed, it is practi- cally certain- that had General Buller advanced with less caution in Natal, and then through the Free State by way of Vrede—as Lord Roberts was always asking him, but, with a generosity towards the late commander of the South African Army which was as honourable as it was mistaken, never ordered him to do—the war would have been brought to. its conclusion much sooner after the occupation of Pretoria. No doubt Lord Roberts was inclined to underestimate his enemy, as all soldiers are inclined to underestimate the fighting powers of non-Regular troops. Thus the danger from a partial pacification of the Free State was one to which he was

blind from the very first :— " It may possibly have been due to his almost exclusively Indian experience that he was apt to exaggerate the effect of his

victories Ho was unable to see that the Boers, being essentially a nation of farmers, would regard with comparative equanimity the loss of their towns—largely the resort of races alien to themselves When those towns were gone he persisted in believing that it was contrary to the usages of war for his enemy to remain in arms. Hence his mistaken resolve to treat not as regular combatants but as rebels who requirep punishment rather than defeat a white race defending their homes with a bravery and resource which have rightly won the admiration of the world The almost paternal tenderness of his earlier edicts was succeeded by the Draconian severity of the later."

Accordingly we entered upon the period of farm-burning. This was certainly "the least happy of Lord Roberts's inspirations," and suggests that a like imitation of German methods Will not only fail in securing the submission of a free people, but will goad them to continued, even if hopeless, resistance. Lord Roberts's plan absolutely precluded him from affording pro- tection against their own leaders to the surrendered Boers during the earlier stages of the campaign. He had, there- fore, no right to complain if they were again commandeered to fight whenever these leaders appeared in their midst. He was certainly precipitate in stating that the war was at an

end. Nevertheless, "he had brought it to such a state that if England persisted, her victory was absolutely assured." Lord Roberts averted the possibility of calamity. It is doubtful whether at the time we possessed any other general who could have done so.

We have little space left in which to deal with the many minor excellences of this volume. Mr. Williams has done well to follow Lord Roberta in not allowing the grand issues of the war to be obscured by a mass of detail. But we are glad to find that full credit has been given to three of the most redeeming features in a story of minor disasters; we mean the defence of Mafeking, Wepener, and Eland's River. All of these were in their own way brilliant and admirable feats of arms, and all of them must be placed to the credit of the Colonial irregular forces. At Mafeking, and at Wepener too, the main responsi- bility for the direction of the defence was vested in British Regular officers, as represented by General Baden-Powell and Colonel Cedric Maxwell respectively, and these officers, by their bold spirit of enterprise no less than by their mastery of detail, showed us that the British officer. when he has a free hand still has powers of initiative and resource, which his training on detachment on the wide frontiers of the Ethpire should certainly give him to a degree far beyond -what is attainable in the more scientific but more restricted systems of Continental armies. The gallant defenders of Wepener had indeed one advantage which is offered to few detachments of their size. "They were in the unique position of fighting before a highly critical audience, being almost within sight of a large force of Basutos assembled on the border of their laud, which was out of touch,' and with all their Colonial associations it would never do for the niggers to see them beaten by the Boers." In other words, they were fighting on a 'public stage the amphitheatre of which was filled with the representatives of an alien race who were anxiously waiting to see which of the two white peoples were the better men. The siege of Mafeking, too, in an equally real though less immediate sense, was played on a public stage. It was carried on with the breathless attention of the whole nation focussed upon it. If all battles could be fought as much before the public eye as were the sieges of Mafeking and Wepener, the percentage of heroic actions would be substantially higher than it is.

Mr. Williams has enlarged but little upon the immense amount of disease, suffering, and privation entailed upon all the troops by Lord Roberts's vigorous campaign, and by the exhausting requirements of this scattered war. Presumably, special chapters are to be reserved in the succeeding volumes to deal with the important questions of hospital accommoda- tion and sanitary arrangements. The loss of sixty-nine per thousand men by disease against forty-two per thousand from wounds was the heaviest price which Lord Roberts had to pay for his strategy. He would probably have saved life in the long run if he bad been willing to risk more real fighting, and it is a remarkable fact that during the whole Manchurian War the Japanese lost but 15,300 by disease, against 57,150 from wounds. Our loss by disease with a much smaller army was nearly the same-14,800. The chief lesson handed down to our Army from the Crimea was the vital importance to the efficiency of an army of full rations, good clothing, and good hospitals. It was this preoccupation which caused General Buller to be so slow as to be almost ineffective. Lord Roberts was bold enough to break away from this newer tradition, and to remember Napoleon's dictum that no general ever won a campaign on full rations. Thus, when real warfare gave place to the suppression of guerilla bands it was to his predecessor's wisdom in securing the great trunk lines of communication from the first that Lord Kitchener was enabled to return to full rations and the slow praxes of detaition.

The volume is, like its predecessors, well supplied with excellent maps and plans, together with photographs of the leading protagonists on each side, and it should certainly appeal to every British and, we hope, to every Boer reader also