The Morning Post of Friday week published a letter from
Mr. John Fortescue in which he explained that he had not, as reports in several newspapers had asserted, been dismissed from his post as official historian of the war on account of his crushing review of Lord French's book in the Quarterly Review. Mr. Fortescue said that for private reasons he had long wished to resign, and had more than once offered his resignation. He was requested to stay on, and ultimately it was arranged that he should stay till the end of this year. That arrangeleartt holds good, and there is consequently no truth in the re,teirts. We can only imagine that they were put about as a last desperate attempt to support the authority of Lord French, so unfor- tunately shattered by his own hand, and also as a still further attempt to injure the credibility of Mr. Asquith in the shells controversy. Mr. Fortescue says :— " When Lord French's book was published, I found it to be so full of inaccuracies that I wrote to my employers and told them that, in my opinion, my only course was to ignore its existence entirely in the official history. I received an answer confirming my judgment in the matter."
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