But while the colonial idea of war has ever been a persistent influence upon the tactics of the army of the United States, the troops of King George sailed back to England without an idea that their methods needed mending. Their success against Napoleon was not due to reformed tactics, but because in fighting quality, man for man, they were better than the French, and because they had plenty of allies. Barring the Crimea, the wars of Great Britain since Waterloo have not been against white men until they attacked the Boers. Whatever adaptations of method were made in fighting Asiatic tribesmen, the general tactics of the army in the field seemed to experience no radical change until the world was horrified to see General Buller charging up kopjes against magazine rifles and machine guns in not far from the same formation in which Howe had led his men to slaughter on Bunker Hill. There was a vast difference between those South African frontal attacks at the beginning of the war and the charges up the hill of El Caney and San Juan in Cuba. The American assault was sanguinary enough, and the resistance was more desperate than that offered by the Boers. But had the blue shirts marched up in columns of fours, or swept up in the old-fashioned line of battle of the Civil War, the carnage would have turned to annihilation. They scattered, they abandoned all formation, they crawled, they sprinted from one poor shelter to another; they knew what the Mauser rifle would do, and they adapted their offensive tactics to it. On the other hand, the traditions of Waterloo and Balaklava prevailed at Spion Kop, Colenso, and along the Tugela and Modder rivers. To “get in with cold steel” seemed to be the ruling thought among the officers during the terrible first months of the campaign. [Illustration: Boer fighting men watching a British flanking movement during the battle of Pretoria, while building defenses.]