commandant of the staff college, in 1856 in his ‘ Theory of War’. This was followed by the military historian E. B. Hamley in his 1866 work ‘ The Operations of War’ - although Hamley argued that the Jominian system only worked in short campaigns and was not as effective in long drawn out wars. Jomini argued the point of deploying masses onto the decisive point and spent much of his effort on the correct formation and the drilling of troops on marches and when deployed for combat 1 . As will be seen this strategy would fail against highly effective mass fire from modern weapons in the hands of skilled riflemen. Although the artillery and cavalry arms of the British Army learnt from fighting in South Africa it was the infantry that received the most lessons. This was due for the most part because the majority of the infantry in the British Army was present from the early stages of the war in 1899 until the end of the war in 1902. The failures in fighting a very mobile opponent armed with smokeless and magazine fed rifles made the British realise that reform was needed and urgently. 2 The fact that Great Britain had previously fought against the Boer in earlier conflicts should have appraised the Army of the excellent capabilities of the enemy, especially its skills with fire arms and small unit skirmishing. However, there was a complacency in British thinking that treated the Boers with contempt, with British Intelligence publishing a secret report that believed the Boers would only deploy raiders against the British and also assumed that they only had minimal armaments. 3 1 Hew Strachan, European Armies and the Conduct of War , (Abingdon: Routledge, 2001). 2 Great Britain Royal Commision, Report of His Majesty's Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Military Preparations and Other Matters Connected with the War in South Africa , 7 vols (H.M.S.O, 1903), Vol 2. 3 Britain Great, Office War, and Division Intelligence, Military Notes on the Dutch Republics of South Africa , (1899), p 49-52.
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