ON THE HEELS OF DE WET.*

JUSTICE has already been done in these columns to the admin. able papers which compose this volume. They lose nothing by being collected from the pages of the venerable magazine which honours, and is honoured by, the name of Blackwood. Whatever of freshness and truth was in them as single sketches, and there was much of both, they retain as a con. secutive narrative. They are realistic, not with the immobile realism of a photograph, but with that singular vividness with which movement, and even noise, are crowded upon the imagination as if by recollection, though the reader may never have seen the movement or heard the sound. This is a gift peculiar to writing and oratory, and it need be no whit lessened because these arts are unpolished. The "Intelligence Officer" makes no pretence to literary finish, nor to rhetorical either, though he deals much in rhetoric. What he has to say he says in the bluntest, directest fashion, but his words, like the bullet from a modern rifle, fly straighter to their target for the very reason that they are undiverted by the " windage " of the stylist. The book is racy, picturesque, exceedingly clever, and invariably good-humoured. But there is satire and sadness in it, painful instruction, and damnatory evidence against men and systems. These things, which struck the magazine-reader as being but casual grumbles, the inevitable and amusing bubbles which rise and burst upon the surface of human nature when it is near boiling-point, appear here in book form as an indictment as uncomfortable as it is unanswerable. "I have been," said Lord Chesterfield, speaking of society, "behind the scenes, and have seen all the coarse pulleys and dirty ropes which exhibit and move the gaudy machine." The reader after accompanying the "Intelligence Officer" behind the scenes of the society of mobile columns and amongst the mechanism of the cumber- some, pretentious traps which endeavoured so vainly to enclose De Wet, may well echo the sigh of the blast; Peer, and like him "have no wish to repeat the nauseous dose." To the fool or the foreigner there will be nothing but entertainment in the book, for it is a bright story, brightly told. The late Mr. Henty himself wrote no more absorbing tales of adventure, nor had Russell a happier knack of painting a situation of war by the dialogues of warriors in the field. But of all the candid volumes which have appeared on the war, none will leave a nastier taste in the mouth of the thinking man who is also a Briton,—for it records a failure, an unmitigated failure, with British columns numerous, eager, and well equipped, with lakhs of British bullion, with British lives not a few, upon one side of the commemorative medal ; and on the other a boorish guerilla general elbowing his way through mobs of thoughtless, cheering Englishmen to mobs of delighted foreigners, whose loud cheers for the Dutchman were but so many loud sneers at his late antagonists. Illusion about the Boer War is already a Hydra, Time is the only Hercules who can lop its many heads. The "Intelligence Officer" lops a few; but so generous is the temperament of the British public that it is odds that those will but grow again the shearing of which robs not a friend, but an enemy,

Loudon: W.

Ds Wit. By the Intelligence Officer. fag

of some of his honour and much of his glory. He half doubts what few Boers would ever grant at all, the brilliance of De Wet's military genius :—

-It ass been pointed out earlier in this narrative how often de Wet has owed his freedom to the leaning of the law of chances in his favour. Times without number a sequence of extraordinary circumstances has conspired to defeat the best laid plans which have been made to enmesh him. It is not intended to deny that the man was possessed of a peculiar genius which constantly of itself freed him from the dangers to which he was exposed. But beyond this there were instances, not so rare as the world would balieve, when his genius failed him, and it was upon these occa- sions that Providence stepped in and furnished a balance against which it was impossible for human endeavour to prevail."

The author supplies elsewhere and passim the nature of the "Providence" which threw in weight when De Wet was near kicking the beam. It was the "brass hats," the "electro- plated figureheads," the "Mount Nelsons," the "drays of merchandise," it was often—low be it spoken—no dens ex maeltind, but dens machinae, Lord Kitchener himself !

Lord Kitchener, to judge by his neglect of them in the scattering of honours, had apparently no great notion of Intelligence Officers. It is plain that this particular "Intel- ligence Officer" has no greater notion of the capacity of him of Khartoum to organise the capture of De Wet than of that of the latter to contrive escape. And though his criticisms of Lord Kitchener's conduct of the complicated chase are more inferential than direct, they are clear, and were not unshared by the Army. It is apparently his opinion that, apart from the ponderosity of the plans them- selves, Lord Kitchener attempted to do what Napoleon invariably refrained from doing, to manipulate distant operations himself instead of merely laying down their broad lines and allowing the leaders on the spot to work them out, to modify, or even to draw them differently if occasion demanded. The telegraph and the heliograph have rendered

this form of interference almost irresistible, because so easy, to an anxious Commander-in-Chief, but their evils are suffi- ciently manifested by the undoubted fact that more than one otherwise conscientious column leader was in the habit of attempting deliberately to lose touch with them both ! And

all column leaders were not conscientious. It will be with more than half regret that soldiers will see here recorded in inexpungeable print some of the chicaneries to call by an un-English word traits which have rarely appertained to English officers—their own knowledge of which they hoped the world would never share. Yet the "Intelligence Officer" is to be thanked for exposing them. He does so bitterly but not ruthlessly; had he labelled with names the " men " referred to in the following passages, something more than shame would now be filling more than one decorated bosom :—

"Men who proverbially take every opportunity of sacrificing the main issue to pursue some subsidiary policy. Men whom de

Wet loves, and whom he plays with, decoys and bluffs Choosing a country in which an enemy as sagacious as the Boers would never operate, these men are careful not to leave the security it affords The third reason is just as deplorable. It is the passive resistance evinced between column commanders who are called upon to co-operate. These leaders instead of sinking all differences in one common object, work rather as if they were employed in a business competition."

If all this were not true it would be but fustian, and of a cruel and scandalous type. But is there a soldier of any South African experience who can say it is not true P Lord Kitchener was not always well served; but we think that the "Intelligence Officer" is astray in his reasons. "Why is this ? "

he asks. "Ask of the man in Pretoria with his hand on the tiller. Is not centralisation the cause of it all ?" No; a bad system may produce bad workmen, but it need not make them dishonest. The fault lay deeper, in the cutthroat jealousy of young commanders pulled suddenly from obscurity into the blaze of a great man's favour, who, hoping to shine alone as planets, crept cautiously across the sky of war not even as uselessly, as briefly brilliant, as a cloud of shooting stars, for fearing extinction, they dared not the speed which makes a meteor glow. Much of Lord Kitchener's strength lies in his choice of young men ; but a law of military human nature still stronger paralysed many of his prodigies in South Africa, as it had paralysed Junot, Marmont, and Victor in the Peninsula. It is that a great commander's best subordinates are rarely good, and still more rarely unselfish, commanders

L'Youth was once considered the greatest crime of a public inan ; it would seem that we to-day are in danger of regarding it as the only virtue. The "Intelligence Officer" himself has but little toleration for age—for age, that is, exceeding that cf his hero, "the Brigadier "—just as he is somewhat inclined to cavil at smartness of dress because the Brigadier is untidy. The reviewer must join issue with him on passages such as the following :— "The so-called experience of seniority—which too often in this war has spelled incompetence or unsoldierly timidity—has been able to subjugate the wiser counsels of the junior, and crush out of his action that fire and energy of purpose which alone could have brought success."

This is mere bivouac-fire talk, than which in all the realms of articulate speech there is nothing more futile. How wearying it became during the long months! " Ah ! if only X. was in command, we should be in Ladysmith in three days!" Lo ! in six months, behold X. lord of a column, and havering before a problem of infinitely less difficulty, with his late advocate grumbling more than ever over the evening bully- beef. Purely destructive criticism is worse than useless. The evil, if it be an evil, of seniority is inseparable from every business in the world in which order plays a part; and in South Africa no small portion of the disorder of the column work was due to the non-recognition by juniors of the advan- tage of one man, preferably the eldest, requiring the adoption of his out of a dozen conflicting opinions. The eldest was not always right; he was often wrong, for the Boer War gave little scope for the exercise of military learning and experi- ence. But to the reviewer's own knowledge he did not by any means always insist on his opinion, and success did not always attend the conception of the junior to whom he had deferred. The "Intelligence Officer" will have many opportunities afforded by the demand for new editions of his excellent book of amending certain passages therein. We hope that, remem. bering the age of the great soldier to whom the salvation of British honour and empire in South Africa was due, he will moderate some of his scorn for the counsels of the old men, and refrain from an iconoclasm so blind as to have led him to approve an indefensible falsehood by a junior because he was a junior to a senior because he was a senior (p. 171).

This, we think, is the only fault in this notable volume Exception could perhaps be taken to the occasional buffoonery and invariable floridness of the sayings of "the Brigadier," were it not that all who recognise the latter under his thin disguise will perceive the exactness of his reporter. The book is a veritable anthology of the flowers of speech of the strenuous soldier who is its hero, and it says much for the military fame of the latter that, unlike another Thersites of a general officer, he will be remembered more for the feats of his arms than of his tongue. We will not eviscerate the book of the many word-pictures of life on the veld, some humorous, some pathetic, some beautiful, which are scattered through its pages. They are good enough to make the reader wish that the " Intelligence Officer" had remembered that controversialism, though inherent in the artistic tem- perament, is not the most valuable portion of it. A man who can make us smell the Karroo, shiver before a veld rain-storm, or dream under the stars of a South African night adds nothing to his triumph by forcing us to frown over a grievance, or fume over that foolish creature, the derision of every Staff in the Army but the Headquarters Staff, the "De Wet expert." But all this was part of the author's design, and frown and fume we must, for the blows tell, and many of them were needed. The "Intelligence Officer's" un- doubted success is all the greater because it is scored from the relation of a complete and dismal failure. May we hint, again, that he who can make failure not only interesting but fascinating has surely that within him with which to show us how to prevent its recurrence; in other words, that the destroyer of false gods owes it to the world to set up the true!