his troops to secure the defeat of the Boers
who are opposing Sir William Gatacre, and then to cross the Orange
River with three divisions and deal a blow against the Boer army that is
now between the Riet River and Kimberley. This plan of beating in detail
the Boer forces in the western theatre of war, if carried out so as to
lead in each case to a crushing defeat of the Boers, would be the
prelude to a collision between the main Boer army and a British force
its superior in every respect. The first certain evidence that some such
idea is at the foundation of the new operations may be hailed as the
beginning of victory. For the present it is enough to know that the
departure of Lord Roberts from Cape Town augurs the opening of an
energetic campaign with that unity of direction in a strong hand which
is the first element of success in war.

A COMMANDER

_February 15th_, 1900

In war, as in other great enterprises, the first element of success is
unity of direction in a strong hand. The reason is that whenever the
co-operation of large numbers is involved the needful concentration of
purpose can be supplied only by the head man, the leader or director.
Concentration of purpose means in war the arrangement in due perspective
of all the various objectives, the selection of the most important of
them, the distribution of forces according to the importance of the
blows to be delivered, of which some one is always decisive. To the
decisive point, then, the bulk of the forces are directed, and at other
points small forces are left to make shift as well as they can, unless,
indeed, there is a superabundance of force--not a common phenomenon.

The same principle of concentration prescribes that action when once
begun should, at any rate at the decisive point, be sudden, rapid, and
continuous. These fundamental ideas are illustrated by the practice of
all the great commanders, and there is perhaps no better definition of a
great commander than one whose action illustrates the simple principles
of war. Lord Roberts is once more revealing to his countrymen the nature
of these principles. The tangled mass of the war has suddenly become
simplified, and there is clearness where there was confusion.

The Commander-in-Chief reached Cape Town on January 10th, and found
large forces dispersed over a front of two or three hundred miles, the
reinforcements at sea, and the transport still in a state very like
confusion. By Febr