In the House of Commons on Friday week Mr. Wyndham
made a long statement in reply to Mr. Burdett-Coutts's charges of hospital mismanagement in South Africa. He freely admitted that our sick and wounded had under- gone terrible sufferings, but contended that unprecedented efforts had been made to mitigate the inevitable hardships of war and provide against all contingencies. It was imprac- ticable to take with troops more than a certain number of waggons when a rapid advance was made, yet in spite of this and other drawbacks, the rate of mortality from enteric had not been abnormally high, but compared favourably with the percentage in other campaigns. Mr. Burdett-Coutts, who followed, while adhering to all the statements made in his letter to then-Times, declared that nobody could consent to Lord Roberts's acceptance of the responsibility for the defec- tive hospital arrangements, and ascribed the breakdown to the inelastic nature of the present system. In replying on the whole debate Mr. Balfour stigmatised Mr. Lloyd-George's statement that the lives of the troops had been sacrificed to political exigencies as most discreditable, and charged the Opposition with the desire to extract material for a party fight from the episode. The success of the war turned on the rapidity of Lord Roberts's movements, and if there was one troth more surely learnt than another in military history it was the necessity of bringing war to a rapid conclusion and limiting human suffering by striking rapidly and hard, even though the immediate result might be momentary loss of human life.
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