history of the great European conflicts was established as the leading
authority. The occupation of the populous places and the control of the
means of access to them, which seemed to present few difficulties, meant
the end of the war and the subsequent negotiations as to the amount of
the indemnity or other penalty to be paid by the defeated.

But not only were the necessary preliminary successes deferred far
beyond the expected time of their accomplishment--Bloemfontein was not
occupied until five months, nor Pretoria until eight months had rolled
by since that October dawn when the Boers crossed the frontier into
Natal--but the prospect of the end of the War soon began to recede into
the perspective of infinity: and even now, after an interval of some
years since the peace of Vereeniging, when, like the proportions of some
huge edifice which can be truly comprehended only by the observer who
views it from a distance, the various incidents and phases of the War
begin to assume their relative importance, the difficulty of discovering
some guiding principle which shall reconcile the Great Boer War with
other wars is as great as ever.

Sometimes a cause can be found _a posteriori_ by groping in the dim and
deceptive light cast by an effect: or a process of exhaustion and
elimination may be set up in which the qualities common to each side are
cancelled and the result attributed to the credit balance which will
appear under one of the accounts. We saw for some months a gallant and
well equipped if somewhat amorphous British Army impotently
endeavouring, though in superior numbers, to make headway against an
aggregation of Boer commandos, and checked at various points on an arc
drawn wholly in British territory and extending in a circuit of over 500
miles from Ladysmith in Northern Natal through Stormberg and Colesberg
to Kimberley and Mafeking; and at each extremity of the arc was a