If through the incompetence or neglect of his leaders he is called upon to sacrifice himself, he sacrifices himself without a murmur.  If he is compelled to keep himself alive on scanty rations of horseflesh and to wet his parched lips with the trickle of a dwindled and tainted spruit, he believes that his officers have done their best for him.  He is ordered to fall in upon the deck of a burning troopship and to stand at attention while Death inspects the ranks.  He is besieged in a hill fort on the Indian frontier by a horde of fanatics eager to kill or to mutilate him.  He lies wounded on the field of battle from which, after an indecisive engagement, each combatant has retired; and there, scorched by the mid-day sun and starved by the cold of the night, and perhaps also in danger of being burnt alive by a veld fire, he waits without water for the armistice which shall bring up the ambulances.  He returns to his own land where he soon finds that he is not of much account.  After a great war there may be a period of evanescent patronage; or a deed of Dargai, Rorke’s Drift, or Balaklava may have temporarily thrilled the audience into Music Hall enthusiasm; but he is not greatly impressed, and stoically reflects that like the battle, the starvation, and the Field Hospital it is “all in the day’s work” and will soon pass away.

There has probably never been a struggle in which the private soldier more fully earned the gratitude of his country than in the South African War.  The most unfriendly critics in the foreign staff offices have paid tribute to the excellence of the British soldier:  sometimes, however, sneering at him as a mercenary, whom, by a curious perversion of the probabilities, they profess to think unlikely to be as efficient as their own conscripts who are forced into military service; but they never hold him responsible for the ill-success of the war.  Throughout their criticisms there lurks a feeling of pained astonishment that the British “mercenary” proves himself to be as good or even a better soldier than the continental conscript, coupled with a comfortable conviction that Discipline is not well maintained in the British Army.

The final cause of Discipline is the efficient use of arms on the field of battle.  Discipline is the result of an irksome educational process by which a man is taught to submit his wishes, his instincts, and, to a great extent, his personal liberty to the control of one who may be his inferior morally, mentally, and physically.  It has also been cynically defined as the art of making a man more afraid of his own officers than of the enemy.  Its function seems to be the formation of certain military qualities which Patriotism and the Sense of Duty are by themselves believed incapable of creating.  It has always been considered an essential part of a soldier’s training; but this view, though probably correct, is not confirmed by the South African War, in which an undisciplined force held its own for some years against greatly superior numbers of disciplined men.