TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE SENSE OF PROPORTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS.
But though we may see Lord Methuen's defeat in its true proportions, and though, in spite of the accusations that may be brought against us in regard to our "invincible optimism," we intend to do our best to prevent the public exaggerating its significance, we are perfectly prepared to admit that the incident shows that our generals have not yet learnt fully the lessons of the war, and that the disaster was one which could have been avoided, and ought to have been avoided. • As far as we can judge from the accounts yet received, the disaster was due to the old cause,—to our matching our immobility against Boer mobility. As long as we send columns encumbered with guns and endless waggons straying across the veld, so long will they be at the mercy of swarms of well. mounted men who can act without baggage, and who are able to concentrate rapidly in force at a given point, and at that point to outnumber our men by three or four to one. It is all very well to say that we ought to scout better, but those who try to explain the disaster by want of scouting are, we believe, on the wrong tack. We venture to predict that it will be shown that all that was possible in the way of scout- ing was done, and, as we see, done in vain. Consider for a moment what it means to protect by scouting a, train of ox- waggons and mule-waggons and guns which is perhaps stretched out for four or five miles. To guard effectually such a serpent from surprise you must have a cavalry screen at the rear, in front, and on each flank. But these guards on the front, rear, and flanks are no good unless they are a mile, or often unless they are two miles, away from the body to be protected. But to safeguard a five-mile-long serpent this may mean that the protecting guards and scouts will have to be spread over a piece of country some eight miles long by four miles broad. Now Lord Methuon had with him about eight hundred mounted men.. Suppose that he was able to use all these men, which, however, is not likely, and that he spread them out over the whole of this district. What sort of protection would they afford to his slow-moving serpent of impedimenta? Clearly very little. He would have to choose between drawing in his guards and spreading them so thin as to be well nigh useless. In either ease he would be liable to a sudden spear-thrust in the side by a body of Boers who had concentrated unseen on his flank. Perhaps it will be asked,—Do we mean to suggest by these remarks that British columns are not to move for fear of the hornet swarms of the enemy, and that scouting is im- possible? Assuredly not. What we mean is that as THE want of the sense of proportion in judging of things military which is to be found in most men's minds was never shown more conspicuously than in the reception of the news of Lord Methuen's reverse. That the reverse was humiliating and annoying in a high degree we no more deny than we deny the pathos of the personal misfortune to a soldier of such courage and single-hearted devotion to public duty as Lord Methuen.—Whatever the verdict of history on his strategic ability, he will always remain as an example of all the moral qualities of soldier- ship at their highest.—But to be indignant that Delarey should have been allowed such a triumph is a very different thing from talking about the cutting up of a body of some twelve hundred men as if it were a national disaster of the first magnitude. The incident is a painful one, but if we were engaged in war on the grand scale the breaking up of such o. small command, and the loss by death or capture of about four hundred men, would be seen to be a matter of no great moment. No doubt the loss of even a small body of men may occasionally be of great moment owing to some special circumstance,—to their holding, for example, the key of some strategic position. Here, however, it cannot be pretended that we lose more than the men actually lost. Delarey is no better off, and we very little worse off, than before. Nothing is changed ; there are only so many Englishmen the less. That may sound a brutal way of putting it, but if we have, as we ought to have, a business as well as a humane side to our heads, that is how we ought to look at Lord Methuen's defeat. long as we drag vast trains of waggons and guns about the veld we shall always be liable to disaster ; because no scouting on a scale possible by an ordinary column can protect a military serpent five miles long. In sour view, we had better stop the movement of columns such as Lord Methuen's appears to have been till we can organise them upon a more mobile, and so less exposed, basis. If we are to fight the Boers effectually, we must follow their system of lighting. If we cannot do that, we had better give up the attempt to fight them altogether. But of course we shall not give up the attempt. Therefore we must copy their way of moving,—that is, we must "move light," and dispense with ox-waggons, and if we use carts, use only carts so light that they will go wherever a pack-horse can go. We shall be told that this is impossible, that the British soldier and the British general must have certain necessaries, that necessaries mean waggons, that waggons for necessaries mean more waggons to carry food and fodder for the oxen and drivers of the first waggons, that all these waggons require infantry to guard them, that the infantry and waggons require guns to guard them, that guns require more waggons to carry ammunition, and that the horses who drag them and the guns will want still more waggons to carry food and fodder. That all sounds perfectly reasonable and inevitable. We answer it all by saying that what the Boers can do the British can do. No doubt it is extremely difficult to get generals and men accustomed to necessary comforts to do without them—as diffi- cult, say, as to get a British nurse travelling abroad not to take heavy boxes of extra luggage — but still the thing can be done. If the soldiers cannot, and will not, by themselves make our columns mobile bodies of mounted men and not unwieldy boa-constrictors, then we hold that the civilians on whom the ultimate responsibility and authority must _ rest should see to it. But we do not for a moment believe that there can be any such necessity. There are hundreds of men among our younger officers who could and would, if they were given a free hand, move as the Boers move. Unless and until this is done, and we make it a rule never to send out serpent columns in dangerous districts, we shall continue to be at the mercy of men like Delarey. We all talk of Delarey as if he were a kind of heaven-sent genius, a sort of supernatural creature against whose marvellous genius mere humanity could not hope to struggle. Yet in reality it is we ourselves, not Delany, who are the cause of disasters like that of Lord Methuen. We give Delarey the opportunity. He merely avails him- self of it. It is easy enough to see this if we only turn the matter round. Suppose it was the habit of the Boers to stray about the • veld in compact bodies of twelve hundred strong, encumbered with miles and miles of waggons, and that it was always well known when these bodies started and where they were going. If we possessed plenty of mounted men scattered about in posts along the line of route, we should think very poorly of our- selves if we could not every now and then sweep down upon one of these slow-moving serpents, break its back, and send the whole organisation to confusion and. ruin. The thing would be both natural and easy, and we should attribute our victory to the folly and fatuity of the Boers rather than to our own astonishing genius for war. Yet when we give Delarey the same sort of opportunity and he takes it, we talk as if Delarey had shown a wisdom and prescience quite superhuman. In truth, he has only acted as any man of common-sense would act. He breaks our artificial snakes, but he could not do it if we did not make them, or if we made hard-backed centipedes or scorpions instead.
We note that there is a great outcry that more reinforcements should be sent to South Africa. We do not object, because while the war goes on it is a great school of arms, and the more men who are passed through it the better ; but at the same time we cannot refrain from expressing our belief that what is wanted just now is not more troops, but that a better use should be made of those on the spot. By all means let the troops have plenty of horses, and by horses we mean horses in condition, horses fit to go ; but we can- not believe that two hundred and fifty thousand men are not enough to deal with Delarey, Botha, and De Wet. As to the men being stale, we do not believe it in the sense in which the accusation is made.. Men who have nothing to do but to sit in blockhouses may be stale, but give them work and they will soon recover condition. Soldiers, in our humble view, ought to be mobile, not sedentary. How- ever, we admit that the weight of expert military opinion is dead against us. The sedentary soldier, indeed, has become a sort of military idol against whom it is con- sidered blasphemy to speak.
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