globe,
amidst the deserts of North Africa, the hills, plains and tropical
forests of South Africa, the mountains of India, the swamps of Burma,
or the vast regions of Canada. Such expeditions have been more
numerous than the years of the century; each of them has differed from
the other in almost all its conditions. Amongst its employments this
army has had to face, also, the forces of a great Empire and troops
armed and trained by Britain herself. Accordingly, it has happened
that the experience of one campaign has almost invariably been
reversed in the next. To take only recent illustrations, the fighting
which was suitable for dealing with Zulu warriors, moving in compact
formations, heroic savages armed with spears or assegais, was not the
best for meeting a great body of skilled riflemen, mounted on
well-managed horses. Moreover, the necessary accessories of an army,
without which it cannot make war, such as its transport and its
equipment, have had to be changed with the circumstances of each
incident. Just as it has been impossible to preserve throughout all
its parts one uniform pattern, such as is established everywhere by
the nations of the Continent, so it has not been possible to have
ready either the suitable clothing, the most convenient equipment, or
the transport best adapted for the particular campaign which it
happened to be at the moment necessary to undertake. More serious than
this, and more vital in its effect on the contest about to be
described, was the fact that the services thus required continually of
British troops prevented the formation of larger bodies of definite
organisation in which the whole staff, needed to give vitality and
unity to anything more than a battalion or a brigade, was trained
together. For such wars as those in Egypt, or for the earlier wars in
South Africa, in Canada, or in many other countries, it was much more
practical to select for each enterprise the men whose experience
suited them for the particular circumstances, and form staffs as well
as corps of the kind that were needed, both in strength and
composition, for that especial work. This was a very serious
disadvantage, when it came to be necessary to make up a great host, in
which not a certain number of battalions, batteries, and cavalry
regiments had to be employed, but in which ultimately a vast
organisation of 300,000 men, many of whom were entirely new to army
life, had to be brought into the field. It is o