[6] After serving in Afghanistan, Burma, and Sudan, he entered the Staff College at Camberley, where he was a brilliant student,[5] and where his peers included the future senior generals Herbert Plumer and Horace Smith-Dorrien.
Repington told Wilson – at Chieveley, near Colenso in South Africa, during the 2nd Boer War campaign in February 1901 – that he regarded himself as absolved from his promise to give Mary Garstin up after learning that her husband had been spreading rumours of his other infidelities.
Repington believed that Wilson had betrayed a fellow soldier in this, but was forced to resign his commission and retire from the British Army in social disgrace with the rank of Lieutenant Colonel on 15 January 1902.
Repington was an advocate of the creation of a larger British Army (at the expense of the then all-powerful, in Edwardian England, Royal Navy), which brought him into conflict with Admiral Fisher).
[citation needed] In May 1915, Repington personally witnessed the failed British attack at Aubers Ridge in Artois, and was particularly moved by the casualties sustained by his old Corps the Rifle Brigade in the action.
[12][13] The appearance of this story in The Times and later in the Daily Mail, resulted in a political scandal which contributed to the creation of a separate Ministry of Munitions under the future Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and a reduction in the power of the War Secretary Lord Kitchener.
He resigned from The Times in January 1918 due to a disagreement with its proprietor, Lord Northcliffe, who after the German counterattack at the Battle of Cambrai had distanced himself from Field Marshal Douglas Haig's conduct of the war, and required journalists in his employ to do the same.
[14] On 16 February 1918, as part of the power struggle between Lloyd George (Prime Minister since December 1916) and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General Robertson, Repington along with the Morning Post's editor Howell Arthur Gwynne appeared at Bow Street Magistrates' Court charged with having contravened DORA Regulation 18 by publishing articles (on 11 February 1918) disclosing Lloyd George's attempts to bypass Robertson by setting up a rival staff under Henry Wilson at Versailles; Lloyd George's plans to re-focus British military effort away from the Western Front towards defeating the Ottoman Empire, and the Government's failure to keep the British Army on the Western Front up to required troop strength for offensive operations.
The marriage produced four children: Charles Edward Geoffrey (1888-1889), (Melloney) Catherine ("Kitty") Isabel (1891–1965), Elizabeth Frances (1892-1950), and Violet Emily (1895-1898); they were judicially separated in 1902.