They are four: (1) That the "Boer commandos dispersed to the four winds when pressed, and reunited again some days or weeks later hundreds of miles from the scene of their last encounter." This curious little summary of the war shows to what almost incredible lengths of self-delusion a belief in the _arme blanche_ will carry otherwise well-balanced minds--minds, too, of active, able men like Sir John French, who have actually been immersed in the events under discussion. One fails at first to see the smallest causal relation between the phenomena of the war as he sets them forth and the combat value of the lance and sword, but the implied argument must be this: that these weapons could not be given a fair trial in combat because there was no combat, or, rather, only combat enough to cause the hundred casualties and prisoners for which, by the recorded facts, the lance and sword were accountable. We figure a bloodless war, in which at the mere glimpse of a khaki uniform the enemy fled for "hundreds of miles"--at such lightning speed, moreover, that one of the chief traditional functions of the _arme blanche_, pursuit, was wholly in abeyance. Who would gather that there had been a "black week"; that Botha and Meyer held the Tugela heights for four months against forces between three and four times their superior in strength; that Ladysmith (where there were four Cavalry regiments) was besieged for four months, Kimberley for the same period, and Mafeking for seven months; that for at least nine months no "dispersion" took place even remotely resembling that vaguely sketched by Sir John French; and that during the whole course of the war no tactical dispersion took place which would conceivably affect the efficacy of the lance and sword as weapons of combat? A mere statement of the fact that the net rate of Boer retreat, even during the purely partisan warfare of 1901-02, was almost invariably that of ox-waggons (two miles an hour on the average), that until the last year of the war the Boers were generally accompanied by artillery, and that from the beginning of the war to the end not a single waggon or a single gun was ever captured through the agency, direct or indirect, of the lance and sword, shatters the hypothesis that these weapons had any appreciable combat value. But that is only the negative side of the argument. We have to deal with a mass of plain, positive facts in favour of the rifle as an aggressive weapon for mounted troops. The Boer rifle caused us 29,000 casualties, over 40 guns and 10,000 men taken in action--losses which, to say the least, are evidence that some stiff fighting took place; for men who, when "pressed," run for "hundreds of miles" cannot take prisoners and guns.