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Military History – South Africa – Europe – England 19th Century
.Article – Online Historic Information | Military
.Page xiv
the railways to the scene of operations. The distance from Cape Town to Kimberley is some 650
miles (1,045km) and that from Cape Town to Pretoria is over 1,000 miles (1,600km). Durban to
Ladysmith is about 190 miles (305km) up through the hills of southern Natal and Pretoria lies a
further 320 miles (500km) to the north beyond the Drakensberg mountains. Lieutenant-general Lord
Methuen would find himself tied to the railway and was unable to contemplate outflanking
Magersfontein in December 1899. A few days later, Buller would undertake a head-on attack at
Colenso, fearing to endanger his supply lines by leaving the railway for Potgieter’s Drift to the west
to turn the Boer flank before Ladysmith. Another consequence of the long and overloaded supply lines
was Buller’s decision on 6 November 1899 to cut the horses’ rations from the standard 30lb (13.6kg)
to a starvation level of 8lb (3.6kg) of grain, to be supplemented by anything else they could find.
During the course of the war two-thirds of the half-million horses used by the British died.
Although the British had been using the Lee-Metford rifle, which used black powder, for a
decade and the Lee-Enfield, the Mark I*, which was introduced in 1899, and which used smokeless
cordite as a propellant, they had never fought against men using modern high-velocity rifles. Whereas
the Martini-Henry rifle, which had been the standard British infantry weapon and was still carried by
a considerable number of Boers, had a muzzle velocity of 1,350 feet per second, the British LeeEnfield boasted a muzzle velocity of 2,060 feet per second and the Mausers, which had been
imported in great quantities to arm the Boers, had a muzzle velocity of 2,296 feet per second. The
advantages of the new weapons were that they had flatter trajectories and thus had a longer dangerous
zone than ever before, that is, they put a standing man at risk within a greater distance, and that their
point-blank range, the distance the bullet would travel without raising the sights, was longer.
Additional benefits were that their bullets had greater energy and thus the ability to cause more
damage; the elevation need to fire at longer ranges was lessened and thus there was less opportunity
for error; they had magazine feed and thus could fire more quickly; and they used smokeless powder,
making the position of the rifleman difficult or impossible to detect. This is a formidable list of new
characteristics which the Boers were swift to exploit and the British slow to appreciate and counter.
In a manual published in 1901 for the instruction of British soldiers, Philips’s Text Book of
Field Engineering,it was still possible for the author to state that beyond 1,200 yards (1,097m)
infantry fire was a negligible danger and to discuss the effect of infantry fire in terms of troops in
close order and firing volleys section by section, behaviour suited to troops using muzzle-loading
weapons. Individual marksmanship was still not valued in the British army.
The manual reports details of Boer entrenchments, but fails to point out that fire from such
positions takes full advantage of the extended point-blank range of a high-velocity rifle. A standing
man would be in danger practically anywhere up to 600 yards in front of the trench. The Boer fire
with Mausers from trenches at Modder River and Magersfontein would demonstrate this
convincingly.
New to both sides were the American inventions, machine-guns. The Maxim-
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