by private enterprise. The circumstances of the war were
abnormal. From one point of view it was a civil war; from another it
was a rebellion, and from a third it was a war between two rival
military powers, each of whom desired to become supreme in South
Africa. What the military critic has to consider is not so much how
these circumstances arose, or whether they could have been changed or
avoided by any political action on the part of Great Britain, but the
degree in which the conditions imposed by them upon the British Army
must be taken into account in applying the ordinary tests of military
efficiency to the work which it accomplished in this particular
campaign.

[Sidenote: Difficulties of the campaign.]

The nature of the difficulties presented by the vast extent of the
theatre of war, the deficiency of means of communication, the
imperfect cultivation of the land, the sparseness of the population
and their hostility to the British, and the physical and climatic
aspects of South Africa in general, have been broadly indicated in the
passages taken from Lord Roberts's despatches. To pursue the inquiry
further would be to travel beyond the scope of this work. That,
however, there is nothing unusual in the fact that civilian forces,
inspired by love of country and aided by physical conditions
exceptionally favourable to themselves, should be able to offer a
successful resistance to professional soldiers may be seen by a
reference to one of the little wars of the seventeenth century. In the
year 1690 twenty-two thousand French and Savoyard troops were sent by
Louis XIV. to storm the Balsille--a rocky eminence _mutatis mutandis_
the equivalent of a South African kopje--held by 350 Piedmontese
Vaudois. Even so the besieged patriots made good their escape, and,
owing to the sudden change in the politics of Europe brought about by
the accession of William of Orange to the crown of England, actually
concluded an honourable peace with their sovereign, Victor Amadeus of
Savoy, a few days after they had been driven from the Balsille.
Assuming that the British troops employed from first to last in the
South African War were five times as numerous as the forces placed in
the field by the Dutch nationalists--say 450,000 as against 90,000--we
have here a numerical superiority which dwindles into insignificance
beside the magnificent disproportion of the professional troops
required to deal with a civilian force in this sevente