Just as Piet's troops had broken through Leddy Smith, another army under the command of General Delarry, known as the "Lion of the West Transvaales", entered the British colony of Bechuanaland on 27 June, and frontally attacked the British 7th Overseas Division, which had arrived from Cape Town to support.

By the end of the month, Delarry's army had completely routed the enemy with its nimble tactics and superior forces, and cut off the British Western Cape railway line, so that the British Rhodesia region in western South Africa and the capital of Cape Town were completely lost.

Suddenly, Kimberley, the most important British colony in South Africa, was in danger......

In less than half a month, the British army lost all the two fronts in the east and west, losing more than 17,800 people, and the entire British Isles were stunned because of the fiasco on the battlefield in South Africa. In the face of domestic refuge, Admiral Richard, commander-in-chief of the British Overseas Corps in Cape Town, was forced to resign from his post as commander-in-chief of the expeditionary force.

At the same time, this crushing defeat of the British army in the South African highlands also shook the world in an instant. Faced with a small Boer African country with a total population of just over 400,000 and the world hegemon of this era, the British would lose one after another in this war, which naturally exceeded everyone's expectations. Interested people have begun to analyze the reasons for this, and have begun to re-"measure" the strength of the former Empire......

Chen Zeyu, the head of state of the Republic of Seris in East Asia, also received the battle report from the front as early as possible, and from his point of view, he was not at all surprised by the setback of the British.

In his opinion, apart from the fact that the British were capable of bluffing people with a large naval fleet, their land operations had never been among the world's first-class land forces. As far as he can remember, the British Army did not seem to have performed any other feats other than the execution of a member of the royal family of their own country - whether in World War I or World War II, from the vast battlefields of Europe to the bug-infested jungles of Burma, the British Army always seemed to have played the role of accompanying the prince to study.

The first is that the political axe itself is not very important, compared to the British Royal Navy's staggering huge naval budget every year, the British Army's little possessions are really a little out of reach. In fact, there has always been a sarcastic saying among the British people that the Royal Navy is for expanding territory, and our army is for guarding the colonies.

Capability determines status, and its own budgetary constraints are reflected in the "simplification" of equipment and training in peacetime. According to the investigation of the Seris intelligence department, the average ammunition training volume of a grassroots company-level unit in the British army is only 300 rounds a month, what kind of concept is this, that is, if the British come to individual shooting training once a month, this ammunition supply is just enough to fire three rounds of ammunition for each British soldier. Comparing the current monthly ammunition supply of companies in the armies of countries around the world, the French army is 1,200 rounds, the German [***] team is 1,500 rounds, and Chen Zeyu's Republic Army is a five-five-three army (the European army adopts the traditional three-three system, a company is 120 to 150 soldiers, and a standard company of the Seris army is 260 people), and its ammunition supply has reached 5 boxes of standard 5.88mm caliber ammunition, that is, 7500 rounds! The difference between them is so great that one can imagine the training of the British Army and the shooting skills of the soldiers.

Because of the "deduction" of the British political axe on the military budget of its own army (most of which was used as military pay for the colonial army), the British army was finally able to give the troops shooting training for only three weeks a year, and it was not even as long as the time it spent on troop platoon training...... As far as Britain itself is concerned, they may never have thought of building a large army system capable of slaughtering cities and destroying countries, like the German, French, Russian and other powers, in addition to this, the tactics and equipment of the current British army are also very backward and outdated.

What surprised Chen Zeyu was that in the Boer War of the British, a large number of British troops had been using the dense array line tactics of the early flintlock era, and he could even imagine the tragic advance scene of the British soldiers lining up in a neat queue under the strafing of the Boer Maxim machine guns......

Although in the 18th and early 19th centuries, this tactic of dense charging helped the British army win more than 200 foreign colonial wars in the country. But for now, because all countries have long since replaced with breeched smokeless powder rifles, the accuracy and frequency of individual fire of their respective armies have been greatly improved, and there is no longer a need for awkward dense formations in order to concentrate firepower as in the Napoleonic era. From this point of view, the British have always stood still, at least in terms of tactics and operational thinking.

Tactically, even the Boer militias were more advanced than them, and the local Transvaal army in South Africa was adept at minimizing its own casualties by using a variety of effective means of defense compared to the rigid-minded British troops who were still deployed according to outdated military practices. With a variety of trenches and fortifications, the Cloth Army has been luring the British into this kind of powerful fortifications, so as to give full play to the amazing lethality of their modern firearms on various battlefields, in addition, they also used their superior horse resources to establish a large number of mobile and tactically treacherous horse rifle troops, which also dealt a great blow to the old-fashioned British army. Of course, the British army's crushing defeat was not entirely due to tactical mistakes. In terms of the morale of the armies on both sides, the British [***] team is mainly composed of a large number of overseas colonial legions from all over the world, which is essentially a kind of mercenary, they may be able to fight for the interests of their own country, but they don't want to let them really "send them to death", generally speaking, when their casualties and losses exceed 2 percent, this army will not be able to hold on, and the collapse is certain.

But their opponents were very different, and the Boer sequence was filled with a large number of armed militias from the Transvaal, and for these Boer farmers, who had long lived in the vast South African highlands, fighting the British was defending their own property and land. One is fighting for money, the other is fighting for their homeland, and the morale of the two sides is naturally very different when compared.

……

By July 9, 1899, the situation of the British army at the front had become more and more deteriorating...... Due to the disadvantage of its own strength and the collective "maladaptation syndrome" of several overseas corps of the British army in South Africa, as of the evening of the 9th, the outer defense line of the British colonial town in southwest Africa, Kimberley, had all been lost one by one!

To make matters worse, the British had no troops available in the whole of South Africa, and even Cape Town, the capital of the South African colonies, barely had a single division and a few cavalry wings that had fled from the front, with a total strength of less than 12,000 men. In the face of the tens of thousands of Boer troops, let alone supporting Kimberley, even whether they can protect themselves has become a thorny "problem".

In the face of this unprecedented defeat, the British people of the British Isles did not unite around the British political axe as they did on the European battlefield more than 80 years ago, and on the morning of the 11th of that month, British Prime Minister Salisbury roared down amid angry demonstrations and demonstrations.

In addition to his hapless former prime minister, 133 MPs from his party (the Conservative Party) were also kicked out of the Parliament building by an angry crowd on that day. Afterwards, one of the MPs, Joseph Chamberlain, wrote in the London Morning Post and deprecated, "Every seat in parliament won by the Boers was won by the Boers." ”

On July 12, the British New Deal came to power, and William Gladstone, a Liberal who won the post of prime minister after an emergency vote, finally calmed the domestic parliamentarians and the public after a series of lobbying and speeches.

In the face of the constant flames and smoke of war set off by the South African Boers, the former Duke of Newcastle's staff finally made up his mind not to change the policy of the former political axe and carry the war with the Transvaal to the end.

The successor prime minister, who had learned the lessons of his predecessor's political axe, began to let go of his previous contempt for the Boers, and while ordering an increase in the mobilization of troops from overseas to South Africa to reinforce Kimberley and other places, he also recruited 100,000 new army troops on the mainland. It is worth mentioning that this time the British also mobilized a large number of Gurkha mercenaries who had been stationed in the South Asian subcontinent and Singapore for a long time......

At the same time that the British stepped up the pace of war, taking advantage of the favorable opportunity when the Empire had no time to look eastward, the war god of the republic in East Asia, who was far away on the other side of the world, also drew the Taiali sword in his hand again!

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