IT is too widely believed in this country that their

experi- ences in South Africa have given our soldiers an incontestable right to be regarded as the only Army who have any knowledge of modern warfare, and it is even urged that the armies which have seen no fighting on a big scale since the Franco-Prussian War, and more particularly the German Army, can no longer claim to be the tactical and strategical experts of Europe. Comfortable assurances of this kind will be rudely shaken by a perusal of the masterly critique of the earlier operations of the war which has recently been issued from Berlin. If the competence of the Great General Staff of the German Army needs any rehabilitation, the publication of the two pamphlets. which have just been translated by Colonel Waters goes far to maintain the German Staff in their old position as the premier body of scientific soldiers in the world.

The Report that lies before us is easily the most soldierly book that has yet appeared upon the South African War- Terse, well written, and couched in the fairest and most moderate terms, without any trace of that overbearing assumption of superiority which is generally supposed to stamp the utterances of individual German officers, this short. volume of two hundred and seventy pages eclipses any of our English treatises on military subjects, and reads us a lesson upon our own claims to efficiency in the art of war which is. even more startling than that hammered into us by the scathing comments of the Royal Commission. The Report is. divided into two parts, the first dealing with the operations. prior to the arrival of Lord Roberts, the second with the opening stages of the veteran Field-Marshal's campaign down to the surrender of Cronje. The first three chapters are- introductory, and contain a survey of the theatre of war and of the tactics of the British Army. The rest of the book centres round Colenso, Magersfontein, the relief of Kimberley, and Paardeberg, and the lucid and illuminating accounts of these operations are followed in each case by a chapter of comments containing what are probably the best things in the volume. Colonel Waters's translation, however, omits two chapters on Poplar Grove and Driefontein. The account of the last-named action in the German original is highly instructive, as it is held that this was the first battle in which the experience of past mistakes was really put to account, and we are accordingly at a loss to explain the omission.

In the introductory chapters we note the undoubtedly true • The German Official Account of the South African War. Authorised Translation by Colonel W. H. H. Waters, 13.A., C.V.O. With Maps and Illus- trations. London : John Murray. [15e. net. but novel assertion that, over and above the peculiarities of the theatre of war and of the enemy, the climatic influences of South Africa had a marked effect upon men no less than upon horses, so much so that it is boldly stated that " troops newly arrived in South Africa retain only a fraction of the efficiency they would possess in Europe," wherein " lies one explanation of the fact that the Boer Militia was, for so long a period, able

to oppose successfully the trained English troops." The evil effects of our numerous savage wars, and especially of the Soudan Campaign, are well brought out in chap. 3 :—

" Much as they demanded from the troops in the way of exertions, great as were the difficulties of the War Office adminis- tration which they involved, they had also this great disad- vantage, that they were prejudicial to the understanding of war on a large scale. Troops forget the proportion of losses which they must suffer nowadays, if a serious attack is to be pushed home. Small losses were described as being serious, and public opinion measured the capacity of a General by the size of his casualty list."

We are reminded, moreover, of the grave consequences en- tailed under old conditions, with laws that practically pro- hibited training elsewhere than on Government property, by the impossibility of holding manoeuvres on a large scale. Corps or divisions, when trained together at all, were not trained in peace-time with the identical units and under the identical generals that they would serve with in war.

The consequence was that every force landed in South Africa was a scratch team, commanded by generals who were quite unknown to their subordinates, and in some notable instances even unaccustomed to the control of a large force. In short, "the Army was trained for detachment warfare, but not for a great battle. It was not recognised that unity of direction, the

combined action of the three arms in the fight, and the ruthless employment of the last man can alone ensure success in war." Similarly, want of sufficient facilities for combined training in anything but shock action rendered it difficult for the cavalry to understand the tactics of the other arms, gave it hardly any experience of the use of the carbine in dismounted work, and led to an incapacity for reconnaissance work which was one of the gravest defects of our operations. Faulty recon- naissance is justly held, among other things, to have led to General Buller's neglect to occupy Hlangwane Hill before he attacked at Colenso, and to have been the main cause of the disaster at Magersfontein ; while the apparent inability of our mounted troops to understand the duties of a "contact squadron" enabled De Wet to effect his celebrated capture of the great convoy at Waterval, and gave Cronje twice over an admirable opportunity for escaping from the fate that overtook him at Paardeberg.

We are unable within the limits of this article to deal with the bulk of scholarly criticism with which the volume abounds, and must consequently confine ourselves to the most in- structive development of the argument, which in stern German logic traces all the gravest errors of the war to those two cardinal blemishes,—the futile previous training of our Army, and the disastrous influence of half-a-century of savage warfare. It is held that the initial checks suffered in the early morning, at Magersfontein and Colenso alike, with what are stigmatised as their " trifling losses," need only have been temporary checks, and were no bar to the winning of a signal victory as the day wore on. At Magers- fontein, after the failure of Lord Methuen's carefully laid plans for the storming of the trenches by the Highland Brigade, it is urged that a resolute advance by the Guards Brigade upon the right flank of the enemy's position would have succeeded. It is pointed out that the Reports of the Boers themselves "leave no room whatever for doubting" this, and that, as it was, until reinforcements arrived it required all the energy of the Boer leaders to keep their men in the half-completed trenches. But " the idea that an attack might turn the tide of battle seems to have vanished from the minds of the divisional Staff, although more than half the force had not yet been in action. The cavalry advance had caused the firing on the right to become hotter, but this circumstance only induced Lord Methuen to order the Guards to move forward in an easterly direction so as to meet the turning movement by means of a kind of defensive flank." On the battle of Coleus() we merely quote the following remarkable passage :— 0 The causes of the English want of success are first of all to

be sought in the lack of sufficient force of character in the

General in command General Buller imagined that the Boers did not intend to make a stand at Colenso, but on becoming conscious that he had been mistaken in his conception of the enemy's intentions, and not having sufficient breadth of mind to grasp the altered situation, he thrust Clery aside, and inter- posed by taking the matter into his own hands. He hurried to the batteries Self-confidence and deliberate reflection had vanished; he was no longer the loader but merely a fellow- combatant, no longer the General but only the battery commander. The physically brave man had succumbed morally to the impres-

sions of the battlefield He was not clear whether the guns ceased firing from want of ammunition or whether they were completely crushed and nobody was near to explain to him that to hold out is easier than to go back under a

hostile fire His elasticity failed him. He gave way because he believed there was nothing else to be done Orders to retreat were issued, but it was the General and not his gallant force that was defeated."

We understand that in the German Manoeuvres great pains are taken to prolong an engagement beyond the crisis; in our own, on the other hand, the " Cease fire !" sounds directly the main forces are in touch. One cannot help believing that it is partly to the unreality of our Manoeuvres that the failure of Lord Methuen and General Buller at the turning-point of the battle may in a large measure be attributed. But above all, the traditions of the comparatively bloodless victories of the previous fifty years had deprived all our leaders of that ruthless joy of battle and truculent determination to win which, as Kinglake tells us, is the only possible attitude of the successful soldier.

Like many of their predecessors, these Generals were of an anxious temperament,—gallant enough when acting under precise orders, but unable to arrive at a stern conclusion when left to form their own resolutions. This unwillingness to shed the blood of other men is apparent in no one more than in Lord Roberts himself. We have before noted in these pages the striking fact, which does not escape the critical German eye, that Lord Roberts always preferred to out-manoeuvre his enemy rather than to fight him :- " With the fruitless but by no means especially ()esti), attacks at Paardeberg there began to spread a nervousness of suffering loss and of making an attack which bore bad fruit far beyond the limits of South Africa, while one substantial reason for the long duration of the war was undoubtedly the timorous avoidance of striking any crushing blow at the Boers."

While loud in the praises of the gallant Field-Marshal and of his eminence as a strategist, the German Staff assert that

all the evidence goes to prove that Lord Roberts in his first advance never contemplated anything more than the almost bloodless relief of Kimberley, and that the capture of Cronje was an afterthought prompted by the amazing inaction of that leader. However this may be, it is, in the present writer's opinion, worth consideration whether the later stages of the campaign, and Lord Roberts's constant orders to attack " if this be possible without heavy loss," do not largely explain the fact that the war was not ended with the capture of Pretoria.

It will be clear from the above summary that the heads of the German Army are by no means convinced by our South African experiences that rapid-firing rifles, and the smokeless powder which makes an invisible enemy, have rendered the attack impossible. In their comments on Magersfontein they state that " this action seems to prove one thing at any rate, namely, that the pessimistic views which were expressed after the war with respect to the difficulty of attacking troops armed with modern firearms have been very con- siderably exaggerated." In fact, the volume as a whole may be not unjustly regarded as a treatise on the attack, supple- mented by a demonstration of the imperative need for training and organisation. If regarded as an essay in military polemics, it may even be held to have been written in sup- port of all the theories which are dear to the heart of the German soldier, and as a declaration to the world that the German Army has nothing to learn from South Africa. But even if we admit this, it is still an open question whether the Germans are not, after all, in the right.

The German original appears to have been accurately translated by Colonel Waters into good English, and though traces of the involved German style remain, the lucid argu- ments of the original stand out with laudable transparency. The publication of the remaining chapters of this account

will be awaited with interest, the more so by us in England because it was not till after Paardeberg that the Auxiliary

Forces from home and from the Colonies began to take any very active part in the fighting. We shall be interested to learn what is the verdict of our impartial critics upon the value of such troops. It is more than likely that, as they represent a phenomenon which is utterly incomprehensible to the well-ordered German mind, they will meet with the same scant appreciation as has been meted out in this volume to the Boer " Militia." At the same time, it should be remem- bered that, our Regular Army being what it is, it is only in a properly organised Home Army of Auxiliary troops that we can ever hope to fulfil the German ideal of a large unit of all arms trained together in peace, and commanded by officers at home who will lead it as a complete organisation to war.

We have noted as of special importance the criticisms of Lord Roberts's conduct of the war conveyed by the General Staff ; but though we regard them to be worthy of serious consideration, we must not for a moment be held to endorse them in every respect. We hold now, as we held at the time, that, on military as well as on moral grounds, Lord Roberts's generalship must be regarded as one of the greatest achievements in the history of war. We are glad to note that the General Staff give Lord Roberts full credit for his spendid equanimity in times of peril and perplexity. No man ever possessed in a higher degree the mem aqua in arduis.