284 Field-Marshal Earl Roberts [March 23, 



comings of the Regular Army were not the sole nor the main cause 

 of our lamentable experiences in the first phase of the War ; nor 

 were the deficiencies in the training and aptitude of the Professional 

 Forces the principal cause of the conflict dragging on for nearly three 

 years at an utterly disproportionate cost in casualties from disease, in 

 general suffering and hardship, and also in the enormous expenditure 

 of money by which our national finances have been permanently 

 burdened. To some contributory extent this was undoubtedly due to 

 the inefficiency of preparation in our Regular Army, but it was due 

 to a main and decisive extent to having no Reserve of sufficiently 

 trained men to fall back upon. 



What were the conditions of the South African War ? It is 

 needless to repeat that the war was waged at a distance of six or seven 

 thousand miles from what was, and is, the true military base of our 

 Empire — the mother country. That was a factor involving great 

 difficulties of transport, and which interfered for a long time with 

 the rapid organisation of our movements. But these six thousand 

 miles of sea having been covered and the men disembarked, I want 

 you to picture to yourselves the situation and follow in imagination 

 the movements of the troops. 



The theatre of war was of unparalleled extent, and, for all purposes 

 of a campaign between civilised races, of equally unparalleled barren- 

 ness, I might almost say, emptiness ; for the country itself afforded 

 next to nothing in the shape of supplies. The vast business of trans- 

 port thus involved had to be worked, for the greater part of the way, 

 over a single track of railway more than a thousand miles long, pass- 

 ing through desolate regions, and vulnerable at every point. It was 

 the vital artery of our operations : a block on it or a break in it meant 

 starvation for our troops. The region through which it passed was 

 traversed at will by a hostile and elusive population, and by antagonists 

 offering scarcely any fixed points to be struck at, and, though rela- 

 tively few in numbers, perhaps the most mobile enemy which has 

 ever appeared in modern war. It was not enough to scatter their 

 organisation to pieces unless it was possible to crush the fragments to 

 powder. When a commando had been broken up, it appeared again 

 shortly afterwards in some other part of the country. At the same 

 time, wherever the railways extended, this most elusive of foes had a 

 fixed objective against which to operate. The tradition of the British 

 Army had been mainly an Infantry tradition, but in order to cope 

 with the ubiquitous Boer, an enormous mounted force had to be im- 

 provised out of men who for the most part had never before been on 

 a horse's back, and in the end it was found necessary to sweep the 

 whole of South Africa into an immense military net, extending over 

 a tract of country as large as France and Germany put together. 

 Now, as all who took part in the War will readily admit, in face of 

 conditions to which no anny in the world could have accommodated 

 itself — to say the least — without considerable difficulty, there were 



