er
assaulted, nor did the inhabitants often see their enemy in any force.

During the same calendar week as Magersfontein, there occurred two
other reverses--at Stormberg, December 10, and at Colenso, December
15--which made this the black week of the war for the British arms.
These misfortunes, though chargeable in {p.169} part to faulty
dispositions upon the ground, and in part to the chapter of those
accidents which have always to be allowed for in war, serve more
especially to illustrate the embarrassments attendant upon the
division of a force into two or more parts out of reach for mutual
support, and neither one in decisively preponderant strength to the
enemy to whom it is opposed. This disadvantage is greatest to the
offensive, because to the defensive falls the privilege of increasing
power by choice of position and by fortifying. It was in this dilemma
that the British, in consequence of the abandonment of their original
concentrative plan of advance through the Free State, and the adoption
of two or more lines of operation, found themselves over their whole
front; from Colenso on the east, through Sterkstrom and Naauwport, to
the Modder River. The result throughout was--if not paralysis--at
least a cessation of movement, after the reverses above mentioned,
except in the brilliant and useful, but in scale minor, operations of
General French upon their left centre, about Naauwport and Colesberg.

In {p.170} the centre and east of the border district between Cape
Colony and the Free State--from Naauwport to Stormberg and beyond--the
position now was and continued to be especially critical, because most
exposed. Had the Boer forces there been handled with definiteness of
aim and concentration of effort in aggressive movement, serious
disaster could scarcely have been averted. But direction seems to have
been largely in the hands of the Free State farmers of the locality,
whose aptitudes and leading carried them little above the level of
irregular partisan troops. These are invaluable for their own
purposes, but those purposes are distinctly subsidiary to war on the
great scale, and by themselves alone do not decide campaigns. It is
impossible not to be struck with the general similarity of motive, and
of action, in the Boer operations from November to January in Cape
Colony, from Stormberg to Dordrecht and thence to the Basuto boundary,
and the dashing but militarily abortive raids to the rear of Lord
Roberts'