judgment and character by his decision to retreat before a greatly
superior force, commanded it is true by Napoleon himself. Moore when he
decided to retreat was about as far from Corunna as Dundee is from
Durban, and Moore's retreat took nineteen days. He had the sympathy if
not the effective help of the population, and was thought to have been
clever to get out of the trap laid for him. Sir George White seems to
have been expected as a matter of course to resist the Boer army, to
prevent the overrunning of Natal by the Boers, and to preserve his own
force from the beginning of October to the middle of November.[B] The
Government expected the Boers to attack as soon as they should hear of
the calling out of the Reserves, that being the reason why the Reserves
were not called out earlier. Therefore Sir George White's campaign was
timed to last from October 9th to November 15th (December 15th). I
conclude that the force to be given to Sir George White was fixed by
Lord Lansdowne at haphazard, and that the calculations of the military
department were put on one side, this unbusinesslike way of playing with
National affairs and with soldier's lives being veiled from the
Secretary of State's mind by the phrase, "political reasons." But the
"political reason" for exposing a Nation's troops to unreasonable risks
and to needless loss must be bad reason and bad policy. Mr. Wyndham has
had the courage to assert that there was no haphazard, that his chief
knew quite well what he was doing, and that "the policy which the
Government adopted was deliberately adopted with the fullest knowledge
of possible consequences." If these words in Mr. Wyndham's speech of
October 20th mean anything, they mean that Lord Lansdowne and Mr.
Wyndham intended Sir George White to be left for a month to fight
against double his number of Boers; that they looked calmly forward to
the terrible losses and all the risks inseparable from such conditions.
That being the case, it seems to me that it is Mr. Wyndham's duty, and
if he fails, Lord Lansdowne's duty, to tell the country plainly whether