I wish to lay special stress on these two misrepresentations, because both have been also made by our own General Staff. In a review of my previous book, whose general fairness and courtesy I gladly recognize, the _Monthly Notes_ of July, 1910, took exactly the same erroneous points, and, for the rest, adopted the strange course of ruling out all the remarkable South African charges with the rifle by quietly assuming that they would have been done better with the sword or lance. He takes as an example the action of Bakenlaagte, and convinces himself that Cavalry "as ably led" would, by sticking persistently to their saddles, have done better with the steel than the Boers who inflicted such terrible punishment with their rifles upon Benson's brave and seasoned troops. This is an unintentional slur not only upon Benson's men but upon our Cavalry, who, on the reviewer's assumption, ought certainly to have inflicted similar punishment upon the Boers on scores of occasions where the tactical conditions were approximately the same as those at Bakenlaagte. The reviewer arbitrarily begins his imaginary parallel at the moment at which Botha's final charge started, and pictures the steel-trained troops already in full career like the fire-trained troops who actually made the charge. War is not so easy as all that. He ignores the characteristically clever fire-tactics which for hours before had been leading up to the requisite situation, and forgets that steel-trained troops would never have had the skill or insight to produce and utilize that situation. Moreover, their training Manual not only does not contemplate, but renders prohibitive any such instantaneous transition from fire to shock as would have been required. But the reviewer surpasses himself when, having triumphantly brought his steel-trained troops through the preparatory phase and the charging phase (with the incidental riding down and capture of several detached bodies of men), he pictures them confronted with the objective ultimately charged--namely, Benson's rearguard of guns and riflemen on Gun Hill. These men had had just time to rally, and were lined out on a long ridge in open order and in splendid fighting fettle. Their fire hitherto had been masked by the rearmost sections of their own men, who were galloping in with the Boers at their heels. What the Boers now did was to fling themselves from their ponies, by instinct, in the dead ground below the ridge, and to charge up it on foot, where after a brief and desperate encounter they exterminated Benson's heroic rearguard and captured the guns. This action the reviewer regards as clumsy and dilatory. His Lancers, disdaining to dismount, would have ridden up the hill--painfully vulnerable targets for the rifles on the ridge--and, arrived on the top, would either have gone riding about among the scattered defenders trying to impale with lances or reach with swords riflemen who would have laughed in their