" THE GUNPOWDER LOOK."*
Mn. THOMAS'S Life of the Duke of Marlborough has no pre-
teneions to be more than a timely piece of bookmaking, evoked without doubt by the fact that our troops are once again'" swear- ing terribly in Flanders," whilst the Great War has raged over the scene of so many Churchillian triumphs. But it is a very
readable compilation. Mr. Thomas has drawn largely on such contemporary sources as Tristram Shandy and the Life of Christian Davies, which, whilst devoid • of direct historical
value, undoubtedly embody many details which Sterne and Defoe got from the lips of old soldiers who had fought at Wynen- dael and Malpiaquet. From these and other less-known pamph-; lets Mr. Thomas has constructed a striking picture of the fighting of two centuries ago, which in some of its phases was curiously like that of to-day. The Grenadiers, the " men with the gun- powder look," have come into their own again—indeed, as the present writer is scribbling this notice he can hear a bombing party practising with " hairbrush grenades " and " jam-tins " and the other ingenious devices which represent the simple old bombs of the early eighteenth century. Thus history repeats itself on a larger scale :-
" When the French were besieging the allies with Charles III. in Barcelona in 1706, the English soldiers threw the enemy's grenades hack to them. They fought in armour by lantern and candle in galleries thirty or forty feet underground at Tourney ; they mined and countermined, and blew men into the air or were blown up, by hundreds at a time ; they were suffocated by smoke, buried alive by falling earth, drowned by inundations ; meeting unexpectedly sometimes these moles fought by mistake with friends. What with cannon, bombs, grenades, small shot, boiling pitch, tar, oil, brim- stone and scalding water, the English Grenadiers had scarce six sound men in a company after the siege of Lille."
It is mainly in the greater numbers engaged and in the increased ingenuity of the man-killing devices employed that the present war differs from the campaigns of Marlborough= butalso, let us add, in the justice of .its cause and the deter- mination of the present Allies to stamp out all possibilities of a new conflagration before they rest from their labours.
Previous page
