The conduct of the war had now reverted to the original plan of an invasion in {p.306} force through the Free State by the great mass of the British army.

To this, all other movements were subsidiary, including those of even such a great corps as that of Buller, upon a line so important as the Natal railroad.

But the central mass under the Commander-in-Chief had momentarily exhausted itself, not in organic vitality but in function power of movement, owing to the excessive strain upon the transport service and the expenditure of animal life in the forced marches and severe privations in the past month under conditions always most trying to unacclimated horses.

The British Assistant Secretary of War said in Parliament that Lord Roberts arrived at Bloemfontein with his horses wholly starved and his men half-starved.

The "wreck of an army," wrote a correspondent present, "lies scattered in and about Bloemfontein." Paralysing as such a condition is under any circumstances it was trebly so in a force which by a sudden rush, a leap rather than a march, had projected itself a hundred miles from any solid base of operations, and had not yet its communications secured.