[Footnote 143: Major-Generals Lyttelton and Hart no longer
had under their command the whole of the battalions which had
composed their brigades at Aldershot.]

[Sidenote: Yet serious enough. Sir Redvers goes to Natal without a
staff.]

Nevertheless, as regards staff arrangements, serious inconvenience was
for the moment inevitable. Sir F. Forestier-Walker, although appointed
officially to the post of General Officer Commanding the lines of
communication, had, through some oversight in London, not been given
the full staff, as prescribed by the regulations, for an officer
performing those onerous duties, and had been forced to improvise
assistants from such special service officers as he could lay hands
on. There was from the outset, therefore, a shortage of staff.
Officers were, moreover, urgently required for the development of
local troops and for censorship duties. The original Headquarter staff
had been calculated on the hypothesis that the whole of the
expeditionary corps would operate in the western theatre of war, Sir
George White being responsible for the Natal command. The
rearrangement carried out by Sir R. Buller created in Natal a second
field army. For this no Headquarter staff was available, without
robbing the Cape of needed men. He therefore kept with him only his
personal staff during his temporary absence in Natal, and issued
orders there through the divisional staff of General Clery. He decided
to leave the rest of the Headquarter staff at Cape Town to supervise
the disembarkation of the reinforcements from England and their
formation into a field army.

[Sidenote: Help from the fleet.]

The reports of the fighting during the opening phases of the war had
shown that our difficulties were mainly due to three causes--the
superior numbers of the enemy, their greater mobility, and the longer
range of their guns. In the operations he was now about to undertake,
Sir Redvers hoped partially to make good these deficiencies by
borrowing ships' guns from the Navy and by locally raising mounted
men. The Naval Commander-in-Chief had already lent one contingent,
under Commander A. P. Ethelston, R.N., to garrison Stormberg. Another
such contingent, under Captain the Hon. H. Lambton, R.N., was in
Ladysmith, and, at the request of Sir R. Buller, Captain Percy Scott,
R.N., in H.M.S. _Terrible_, had been despatched to Durban to arrange
the land defences of that port. Rear-Admiral Harris, wi