A Month Of
Rest And Food Would Be Necessary Before They Could Be Ready To Take
The Field Once More.
So the riddle of the Tugela had at last been solved.
Even now, with
all the light which has been shed upon the matter, it is hard to
apportion praise and blame. To the cheerful optimism of Symons must
be laid some of the blame of the original entanglement; but man is
mortal, and he laid down his life for his mistake. White, who had
been but a week in the country, could not, if he would, alter the
main facts of the military situation. He did his best, committed
one or two errors, did brilliantly on one or two points, and
finally conducted the defence with a tenacity and a gallantry which
are above all praise. It did not, fortunately, develop into an
absolutely desperate affair, like Massena's defence of Genoa, but a
few more weeks would have made it a military tragedy. He was
fortunate in the troops whom he commanded - half of them old
soldiers from India - [Footnote: An officer in high command in
Ladysmith has told me, as an illustration of the nerve and
discipline of the troops, that though false alarms in the Boer
trenches were matters of continual occurrence from the beginning to
the end of the siege, there was not one single occasion when the
British outposts made a mistake.] - and exceedingly fortunate in his
officers, French (in the operations before the siege), Archibald
Hunter, Ian Hamilton, Hedworth Lambton, Dick-Cunyngham, Knox, De
Courcy Hamilton, and all the other good men and true who stood (as
long as they could stand) by his side.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 338 of 842
Words from 90380 to 90660
of 225456
