Army experts waited for the results of the use of long-range magazine rifles, smokeless powder, and high explosives, yet trenches and hills defended by men with Mausers were stormed and taken by men with Krag-Jorgensens in their hands in the old-fashioned way--a steady advance and a rushing charge to clinch it. Caney and San Juan Hill were old-fashioned fights with the exception of the fact that men were killed miles in the rear by the straying droves of bullets and never saw an enemy. As in this war the losses did not compare to those of some hand-to-hand conflicts of the Rebellion, and many wounds that in the old days would have proved fatal, thanks to the merciful Mauser, amounted to very little. Perhaps to offer explanation of some strange occurrences of the Cuban war would be disparaging to the Spaniards. Perhaps the least that can be said is that in the main the Dons were shocking poor shots, and they had been so weakened by disease and hunger that they had not much fight left in them when it came to cold steel and clubbed muskets. The great losses in Cuba were from fevers, not from bullets. It is in the conditions and environments that the chief difference lies between the war here and the war over there. And it is from this present conflict that the world will learn. The Philippine war, costly as it was in life and money, was nothing but a series of victories over a half-civilised enemy. The interest in it in America, strange to say, dwindled to little or nothing after the first gunshot in South Africa. Here was a different state of affairs. Cuba (for Puerto Rico was a "walk over") was a country full of dense forests and tangled undergrowth, offering a screen as well as a hindrance to the movements of an army. South Africa is the greatest defensive country in the world, and the Boer is trained by nature and inheritance to make the best of it. Yet it took time to teach some of the English military leaders to adapt themselves to the new conditions--it was hard for them to break away from the traditions of Waterloo and Badajos. The Mauser began to correct the old ideas of warfare in a way that it had failed to do in Cuba. The prophecies in Bloch's remarkable book were fulfilled almost to the letter. Proper scouting in an open country is a dead department of military service. How long did we lie at Modder River without knowing anything of value of the movements of the enemy? A series of kopjes might conceal a few sharpshooters or an army--at a mile's distance scouts were under the fire of an invisible foe. A good shot ensconced between sheltering rocks discounted four men advancing in the open. In Cuba the American troops were harassed by marksmen concealed in tree-tops who often fired upon them from the rear, but the forces opposed to them in front were mostly infantry, and the problem resolved itself into a contest between individual soldiers as fighting units. It was a soldiers' conflict.