seen that it had not been called upon
to make any exceptional effort to sap it of its reserve forces. In
fact, it had simply been marched and countermarched along dusty tracks
at the whim of a superior officer. Yet under this mild usage the
column had arrived back at a base with 25 per cent of its animals
useless and an equal proportion whose days of usefulness were
numbered. The sole reason for this was the fact that the animals had
never been trained to long distances in a trying climate with 20 stone
on their backs. The care of the brigadier or the watchfulness of the
squadron officers availed nothing when the green remount was put to
the twenty-mile test. But you will say, How, if this is really the
case, was it to be avoided? An intelligent anticipation of events
should have told those who started their campaign with the advantage
of the three months' failure of their predecessors what would be the
approximate remount requirements. The British nation would have backed
the demands of this intelligent anticipation, not in thousands, but in
millions, and by so doing would have saved not thousands but millions.
If the original remount depots had been other than "Siberias" for
incompetent officers from the outpost line, or if the recommendations
of the senior cavalry and remount officers had been listened to, we
should have had less of the saddling of raw horses straight from the
train and ship,--less of the stupidity which expected them to do the
work which can only be done by a system of gradual and careful
training and acclimatisation. It is as suicidal and expensive to put
green horses into the field as it is to put untrained men. Yet at this
period of the war we were practising both these expedients, and
wondering why the Burgher was not subjugated, and why the income-tax
steadily increased.

The stories of sinful waste and incompetent groping for a means out of
the tangle do not connect themselves intimately with this history. But
no doubt remains that the system which was at this period in practice
was vicious in the extreme. In a word, the whole of the British mobile
strength in South Africa was directly based on the railway
communication. This gave a column at the utmost a twelve days' lease
of life, which meant that the troops must keep within a six days'
march of the permanent way or starve. This limited the area of
effective operation; and while we were wasting our energy and
horse-flesh against the enemy's