The effect of the Sanna’s Post defeat was increased by the fact that only four days later (on April 4th) a second even more deplorable disaster befell our troops.  This was the surrender of five companies of infantry, two of them mounted, at Reddersberg.  So many surrenders of small bodies of troops had occurred during the course of the war that the public, remembering how seldom the word ‘surrender’ had ever been heard in our endless succession of European wars, had become very restive upon the subject, and were sometimes inclined to question whether this new and humiliating fact did not imply some deterioration of our spirit.  The fear was natural, and yet nothing could be more unjust to this the most splendid army which has ever marched under the red-crossed flag.  The fact was new because the conditions were new, and it was inherent in those conditions.  In that country of huge distances small bodies must be detached, for the amount of space covered by the large bodies was not sufficient for all military purposes.  In reconnoitring, in distributing proclamations, in collecting arms, in overawing outlying districts, weak columns must be used.  Very often these columns must contain infantry soldiers, as the demands upon the cavalry were excessive.  Such bodies, moving through a hilly country with which they were unfamiliar, were always liable to be surrounded by a mobile enemy.  Once surrounded the length of their resistance was limited by three things:  their cartridges, their water, and their food.  When they had all three, as at Wepener or Mafeking, they could hold out indefinitely.  When one or other was wanting, as at Reddersberg or Nicholson’s Nek, their position was impossible.  They could not break away, for how can men on foot break away from horsemen?  Hence those repeated humiliations, which did little or nothing to impede the course of the war, and which were really to be accepted as one of the inevitable prices which we had to pay for the conditions under which the war was fought.  Numbers, discipline, and resources were with us.  Mobility, distances, nature of the country, insecurity of supplies, were with them.  We need not take it to heart therefore if it happened, with all these forces acting against them, that our soldiers found themselves sometimes in a position whence neither wisdom nor valour could rescue them.  To travel through that country, fashioned above all others for defensive warfare, with trench and fort of superhuman size and strength, barring every path, one marvels how it was that such incidents were not more frequent and more serious.  It is deplorable that the white flag should ever have waved over a company of British troops, but the man who is censorious upon the subject has never travelled in South Africa.