ommissariat officers, and it was in
the offices of Colonels Ward and Stoneman as much as in the trenches and
sangars of Caesar's Camp that the siege was won.

Buller, like White, had to take the situation as he found it. It is well
known that his own belief was that the line of the Tugela was the
true defence of Natal. When he reached Africa, Ladysmith was already
beleaguered, and he, with his troops, had to abandon the scheme of
direct invasion and to hurry to extricate White's division. Whether they
might not have been more rapidly extricated by keeping to the original
plan is a question which will long furnish an excellent subject for
military debate. Had Buller in November known that Ladysmith was capable
of holding out until March, is it conceivable that he, with his whole
army corps and as many more troops as he cared to summon from England,
would not have made such an advance in four months through the Free
State as would necessitate the abandonment of the sieges both of
Kimberley and of Ladysmith? If the Boers persisted in these sieges they
could not possibly place more than 20,000 men on the Orange River to
face 60, 000 whom Buller could have had there by the first week in
December. Methuen's force, French's force, Gatacre's force, and the
Natal force, with the exception of garrisons for Pietermaritzburg and
Durban, would have assembled, with a reserve of another sixty thousand
men in the colony or on the sea ready to fill the gaps in his advance.
Moving over a flat country with plenty of flanking room, it is probable
that he would have been in Bloemfontein by Christmas and at the Vaal
River late in January. What could the Boers do then? They might remain
before Ladysmith, and learn that their capital and their gold mines had
been taken in their absence. Or they might abandon the siege and trek
back to defend their own homes. This, as it appears to a civilian
critic, would have been the least expensive means of fighting them; but
after all the strain had to come somewhere, and the long struggle of
Ladysmith may have meant a more certain and complete collapse in the
future. At least, by the plan actually adopted we saved Natal from total
devastation, and that must count against a great deal.

Having taken his line, Buller set about his task in a slow, deliberate,
but pertinacious fashion. It cannot be denied, however, that the
pertinacity was largely due to the stiffening counsel of Roberts and the
soldierly fi