of troops which could manœuvre as swiftly as could their active enemy, and above all, he had at once struck his blow in the right direction. He is open to the criticism that he did not complete his task. Influenced by his desire to save the lives of his men, and probably also by his experience of the effect of turning movements on Asiatics, he continually manœuvred the Boers out of their positions, and rarely brought them to battle. Possibly he underrated the stubbornness of the Boer character, and attached too much importance to the occupation of their towns. If so, he was not alone in holding such opinions; and though he left to Kitchener a legacy far more burdensome than he had anticipated, the issue, when he handed over the command in South Africa, was never in doubt as it had been when he took it up.
His period of service as commander-in-chief of the British army was disappointing. He reached England with an unrivalled reputation, and the public, which the events of the War had at last made aware of the defects of the British military system and training, expected great things from him. In his own special sphere of training troops for war Roberts certainly effected important reforms, and under him a new spirit of keenness and earnestness pervaded the army. A service dress was introduced, and shooting and field-training became of greater importance than pipe-clay and ceremonial, but his endeavours to reform the military system were ineffective. He found himself confronted with an intricate organization, with which, owing to his long service in India, he was little acquainted. As commander-in-chief he had no organized general staff to support him, and he did not know how to set about getting one.
The royal commission on the South African War (1903) pointed out the anomalies in the position of the commander-in-chief, and its report was followed in the autumn of 1903 by the appointment of a commission, under the chairmanship of Viscount Esher, on the organization of the War Office. This commission recommended the abolition of the office of commander-in-chief and the creation of an Army Council. Its findings were accepted by Mr. Balfour's government, and in February 1904 Lord Roberts left the War Office. He continued for a time to be a member of the Committee of Imperial Defence which Mr. Balfour had instituted, but he found himself in disagreement with the government's policy of defence, and in an article in the Nineteenth Century (December 1904) he advocated national service for home defence. In November 1905 he resigned, and for the next ten years devoted himself to the cause of national service, becoming in 1905 president of the National Service League. Mr. Balfour's government having been succeeded in 1905 by that of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Mr. (afterwards Viscount) Haldane, the new minister for war, brought in important measures of army reform which included the formation of the territorial force and the officers' training corps; but Lord Roberts, while agreeing that these were great steps forward, insisted on their inadequacy. The weakness of his own scheme was that what was needed was not a great army for home defence but an increase in the number of troops which could be employed abroad, while there was grave danger that the drastic change which he advocated in the constitution of the military system would injure for many years the efficiency of the voluntary regular army at a time when British relations with Germany were becoming more and more strained. Mr. Haldane had therefore no difficulty in finding, in the War Office, hostile critics of Lord Roberts's proposal; while in 1910 Sir Ian Hamilton, at that time adjutant-general, published a volume on Compulsory Service in which he strongly advocated the voluntary system. To this Lord Roberts replied, with the help of two anonymous contributors, in his book Fallacies and Facts (1911). Though the controversy continued, Mr. Haldane persevered with his plans; and it was not until the European War had raged for nearly two years that compulsory service became the law of the land. But Lord Roberts's campaign, begun at the age of seventy-two and continued into his eighty-second year, did much to awaken the country to a sense of the dangers with which it was confronted in 1914.
On the outbreak of war with Germany Mr. Asquith summoned Lord Roberts to the first war council which settled the destination of the original British expeditionary force; and when India dispatched an expedition to France the King made Roberts its colonel-in-chief. Feeling that he must go and hearten the men of the country which had been so long his military home, he left for France on 11 November 1914, caught a chill at once, and died at St. Omer on 14 November, as he would have wished, in the midst of an army on active service. His body was brought back to England, and he was buried with due pomp in St. Paul's Cathedral.
Roberts had six children, of whom three
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