There is a lot of inaccurate conflating of Boer and WW1 experiences / conditions in some earlier posts. The poor showing of the British Army in South Africa (in the first year of the conflict at any rate) came from a large variety of causes. To take a few: an army still wedded to set-piece Napoleonic Wars tactics against a very mobile enemy; an army that hadn't fought a real war for some time, but had fought lots of colonial skirmishes and police actions using far superior weaponry against natives; underrating Boer militia training, skills and tactics and their leadership standards - the 'simple farmers' attitude which an earlier post still uses IIRC; failure to see the importance of mounted infantry in S Africa's conditions (as opposed to traditional cavalry); overrating the destructive power of modern weaponry, especially the killing radius / power of artillery projectiles, but failing to notice the other side might have the same strengths, potentially more so.
On the man v man issue, one Boer War historian describes the Boers as 'people of the Book and the rifle'. The first gave enormous psychological strengths and religious / mental support for the perceived rightness of their cause; the latter came from the fact that many Boers lived with their service rifle and used it for practical purposes as frontier farmers on a daily basis to protect herds, shoot for the pot and so on. Their range and windage estimating skills were far better than those of the average soldier in any European army. The nearest equivalent elsewhere would be in North America and its frontiersmen. As they used their rifles in such ways and in such frequency, they knew all about the importance of an accurate zero. The British fielded troops with set-piece rifle range experience - and very limited at that as ammunition expenditure / wear & tear on barrels was highly restricted for simple cost reasons with a national Treasury that resented every pound spent on training and equipment. The Long-Lee came out of South Africa with a reputation as proving far inferior to the Mauser '95. Recent research says 'no' to that as apart from the users' skills, the British Army was re-equipping at the time and large numbers of brand new and never tested rifles were issued. Inexcusably, most had their sights misaligned and they shot off to one side. This was later (much later) understood and corrected, but meant that many Tommies were at a huge disadvantage in any engagement at 200 yards or more in the first year of the war.
The British Army took some valuable lessons from this conflict, but appeared to ignore, or at least underrate, many others before WW1. It took on board the need for much improved musketry skills and the need to fund them. This was great as long as we didn't enter a war involving larger armies than the small highly professional one that was created between the two conflicts. (And Britain shouldn't ever have entered WW1 on the basis of its own geopolitical and military policies. Involvement in European land wars wasn't just shunned - it was regarded by all classes of society with horror. The Royal Navy was there to be the primary UK defence force and global forced-projector - people agreed to higher taxes pre WW1 to fund the revolutionary new 'Dreadnought' class of capital warships, but the flip side of the 'deal' was no, not ever, involvement in a European land war.)
Despite the widely held perception of this being of a guerrilla hit and run type conflict, there were a considerable number of 'traditional' battles in the opening year such as the Modder and Tulega River battles in which empire infantry forces attacked entrenched Boers on river lines over open country. Both infantry and cavalry were simply massacred by a combination of heavy and accurate magazine rifle fire and limited but very well used machineguns, plus (German trained and often manned) field artillery and a few 'pom-pom' type automatic crewed weapons. The Boers either instinctively knew about how much deep / well prepared trenches and even limited barbed wire barriers stopped attacking forces, or someone such as the Germans so advised them. Whilst military men and armchair experts gloried in the strengthening of the power of the assault from weapons and explosives developments, they totally failed to perceive how these developments actually increased defensive power by a considerably larger factor making open country mass assaults on favourable and well prepared defensive positions held by well trained and highly motivated defenders near suicidal. This lesson was probably missed as the initial set battle phase was replaced by what became much more of a colonial policing anti-guerrilla war. The Germans presumably took more note given the disparity between them and us in 1914 in the number of machineguns and ammunition units in infantry units' T,O,&Es in August 1914. (The real lesson here wasn't the Boer War, it was the later Japan / Russia war which saw a major European nation humbled by a small emerging Asian nation. All the pointers to how powerful defensive weapons and tactics and the growing power of artillery had become were there to see, but it seems we learned the naval lessons not the ground fighting tactical ones perhaps because they were masked by the ultimate Japanese success in the attack gained by a combination of iron discipline and willingness to accept astronomic casualties that no western soldiers or nations would accept.)
On the man v man issue, one Boer War historian describes the Boers as 'people of the Book and the rifle'. The first gave enormous psychological strengths and religious / mental support for the perceived rightness of their cause; the latter came from the fact that many Boers lived with their service rifle and used it for practical purposes as frontier farmers on a daily basis to protect herds, shoot for the pot and so on. Their range and windage estimating skills were far better than those of the average soldier in any European army. The nearest equivalent elsewhere would be in North America and its frontiersmen. As they used their rifles in such ways and in such frequency, they knew all about the importance of an accurate zero. The British fielded troops with set-piece rifle range experience - and very limited at that as ammunition expenditure / wear & tear on barrels was highly restricted for simple cost reasons with a national Treasury that resented every pound spent on training and equipment. The Long-Lee came out of South Africa with a reputation as proving far inferior to the Mauser '95. Recent research says 'no' to that as apart from the users' skills, the British Army was re-equipping at the time and large numbers of brand new and never tested rifles were issued. Inexcusably, most had their sights misaligned and they shot off to one side. This was later (much later) understood and corrected, but meant that many Tommies were at a huge disadvantage in any engagement at 200 yards or more in the first year of the war.
The British Army took some valuable lessons from this conflict, but appeared to ignore, or at least underrate, many others before WW1. It took on board the need for much improved musketry skills and the need to fund them. This was great as long as we didn't enter a war involving larger armies than the small highly professional one that was created between the two conflicts. (And Britain shouldn't ever have entered WW1 on the basis of its own geopolitical and military policies. Involvement in European land wars wasn't just shunned - it was regarded by all classes of society with horror. The Royal Navy was there to be the primary UK defence force and global forced-projector - people agreed to higher taxes pre WW1 to fund the revolutionary new 'Dreadnought' class of capital warships, but the flip side of the 'deal' was no, not ever, involvement in a European land war.)
Despite the widely held perception of this being of a guerrilla hit and run type conflict, there were a considerable number of 'traditional' battles in the opening year such as the Modder and Tulega River battles in which empire infantry forces attacked entrenched Boers on river lines over open country. Both infantry and cavalry were simply massacred by a combination of heavy and accurate magazine rifle fire and limited but very well used machineguns, plus (German trained and often manned) field artillery and a few 'pom-pom' type automatic crewed weapons. The Boers either instinctively knew about how much deep / well prepared trenches and even limited barbed wire barriers stopped attacking forces, or someone such as the Germans so advised them. Whilst military men and armchair experts gloried in the strengthening of the power of the assault from weapons and explosives developments, they totally failed to perceive how these developments actually increased defensive power by a considerably larger factor making open country mass assaults on favourable and well prepared defensive positions held by well trained and highly motivated defenders near suicidal. This lesson was probably missed as the initial set battle phase was replaced by what became much more of a colonial policing anti-guerrilla war. The Germans presumably took more note given the disparity between them and us in 1914 in the number of machineguns and ammunition units in infantry units' T,O,&Es in August 1914. (The real lesson here wasn't the Boer War, it was the later Japan / Russia war which saw a major European nation humbled by a small emerging Asian nation. All the pointers to how powerful defensive weapons and tactics and the growing power of artillery had become were there to see, but it seems we learned the naval lessons not the ground fighting tactical ones perhaps because they were masked by the ultimate Japanese success in the attack gained by a combination of iron discipline and willingness to accept astronomic casualties that no western soldiers or nations would accept.)
