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The British army of 1899 was ill equipped both mentally and materially to deal with such antagonist as the Boers. True, the officers and men had seen far more active service than most of their Continental counterparts, but it was all largely irrelevant to the conditions of a major campaign against a skilled and determined enemy armed with modern weapons. Not only this but the “small wars” which the British army were almost constantly involved in throughout the late nineteenth century tended to make both officers and men not only complacent, but also rather arrogant in the face of what they considered to be a handful of rustic Dutch farmers who could soon be brought to heel by well disciplined regulars.[1]

The British infantry had already had a taste of what to expect during the First Boer War of 1880-1881, in which they had once again demonstrated that their bravery was matched by their stupidity in not adapting to modern tactics. At Majuba Hill on 26^th February 1881 the Gordon Highlanders had been overwhelmed by Boer rifle fire, which should have made glaringly obvious that things were not as they were set down in the British infantry manuals. That nothing had been done to remedy these defects in 1899 is shown by the way that General White’s force was caught at Nicholsons Nek (29^th October 1899), where the British infantry followed exactly the same tactical pattern that had cost them so dear at Majuba.[2] Even after this disaster some British commanders still tried to dismiss their own shortcomings, and attempted to place all the onus on the way in which the enemy fought, ‘This has not been a successful day. As a matter of fact we were so greatly outnumbered that it would have been impossible for us to hope for success in the open field against a mounted and mobile force. But we have anyway made them show their numbers and guns.’[3] Statements like this go to prove how little had been learnt from such exponents of mounted warfare as General Nathan Bedford Forrest, and General Joe Wheeler, both of whom used very similar tactics to those employed by the Boers back in the American Civil War. Likewise the wrong assumption that the Boer could not advance in the open, on foot because he had no training to do so, was to totally misunderstand the fact that they had no need to, for the simple reason that they preferred to entrench and let the enemy use its own aggressive training to try and dislodge them, with all of the consequences that this entailed trying to ‘go-in with the bayonet.’[4] The well constructed Boer trenches at the Modder River (28^th November 1899), over four miles long, and dug and concealed on the “forward” bank of the river, together with others rising in tiers towards the crest of the hills beyond, portended things to come in 1914-1918.[5]  The British commander, Lord Methuen, was convinced that the Boers would not make a stand at the Modder, and chose to ignore some large white stones that had been placed as range markers for the Boer artillery, as well as playing down reports that there were large numbers of enemy to his front, turning to one of his officers he remarked, ‘I tell you they are not here’, to which the latter replied, ‘They are sitting uncommonly tight if they are sir.’[6]

To be fair to Methuen the blame should not all be heaped on his shoulders, and a great deal of finger pointing should be levelled at the British Army Intelligence Service, which, together with very poor reconnaissance by the cavalry, furnished commanders with out-of-date maps and insufficient probing and information gathering.[7] Thus the same thing was to happen over and over again with disastrous results during the first months of the war. The British infantry became pinned down without much cover, under the boiling sun, without an enemy in sight or the means of retreat, and Methuen’s “Pyrrhic” victory was only due to the fact that the Boers were content to retire to even stronger positions further back, than to any tactical supremacy shown by the British commander.[8]

If the British infantry had to learn the lessons of modern warfare the hard way, the British cavalry were also in for a shock when it came to putting the spit and polish of her classic cavalry methods into practice on the plains of South Africa. The cavalry officer class, perhaps above all others within the British army, were particularly slow at learning from the lessons of their own campaigns, to say nothing of not studying anything of the mounted tactics of the American Civil war. Even with the more enlightened writings of George Henderson and Colonel George Denison, both of whom understood the changes that had occurred in cavalry organisation and tactics as a result of the American experience, the majority of the cavalry officer class considered that they could learn nothing from a war in which there had been no cavalry charges at Gettysburg because the mounted forces available were not disciplined enough to engage in one, and that nothing much could be done with volunteer horsemen who preferred the pistol and carbine to the sabre.[9] The fact that the regular British cavalry regiments had the carbine thrust upon them did not go down well owing to the extra weight, and they were reluctant to relinquish the lance which if anything was even more of an inconvenience, and this outdated weapon was still in service up until 1917 awaiting the chance to be used in the pursuit of a beaten foe![10]

In 1888 there had been steps taken by the War Department in ordering many of the County battalions to form detachments of mounted infantry because it was easier and quicker to train infantrymen to a basic standard of horsemanship than to try and retrain a regular cavalryman, who not only resented the task in the first place, but also had the full support of his colonel in not wasting his talent on such unnecessary gimmicks.[11] It was only after yet another blunder at Bloemfontain where General Broadwood was ambushed in April 1900, that the skills of the British mounted infantry, together with the aid of their better-trained New Zealand allies, began to dawn on a few cavalry commanders, but even this did not stop some, like General French, from criticising the fact that these units were crippling the army, especially the regular cavalry and the artillery.[12]

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