CURRENT LITE RAT UR E.
agree with Mr. Arnold White, who contributes a preface to Mr. Edmondson's book, that its publication will serve any useful public end. Mr. Edmondson is a man with a grievance. He was deprived of his rank as squadron-sergeint-major of the 35th Middlesex Squadron Imperial Yeomanry for failure to remain with his squadron during an action near Senekal in June, 1900, in which the Boers turned the tables upon a force commanded by Colonel Harold Grenfell sent out to surprise their laager at dawn. We do not purpose to enter into the merits of the controversy, which is argued with great heat by Mr. Edmondson in his book. Suffice it to say that on his breathless arrival at Ventersburg Road, many miles from the scene of the action, Sergeant Edmond- son charged his leader, Colonel Grenfell, with "neglect of duty" for not placing pickets on a hill, which by superior authority Colonel Grenfell was informed he could disregard. His charge was not taken up, and Colonel Grenfell continued to the end of the war as one of the most successful of column leaders. In the stress of the campaign Sergeant Edmondson escaped a Court-Martial, but was deprived of his rank and even- tually sent home. It is quite possible that the general question of Courts-Martial and of punishments for minor offences in the Army might with advantage be subjected to dispassionate examination by a Committee of Inquiry. We also agree that the public exhibition of the goose-step through the railings at Wellington Barracks is not a good advertisement for the Army. And it may be desirable in the near future to see whether it may not be possible to throw commissions in the Regular and, more particularly, in the Territorial Army open to all qualified men irrespective of social status or wealth, though this is a question upon which we should hesitate to give any definite opinion. And the terrible prevalence of disease in the Army must be faced once for all at the earliest possible moment. But these complicated and difficult questions are not new, nor is a man with a grievance against his officers, and, indeed, against the whole Army system, at all a fit person to argue them in a dispassionate manner. If what he writes has any effect at all, which we doubt, the effect can only be harmful to the Service, and we are not sure that this is not his real object. We need only quote a single sentence from this pen of gall. Those who know anything of the Army know well that by far the best and finest element in it is the company officer. Though there are exceptions to every rule, there is no finer animal in the world than the young British subaltern, and, taken as a class, no more just and even devoted superiors, be they regarded as rulers or merely as foremen, than the company com- manders of a marching regiment. Certainly no officers in the world care more for their men, inspire greater devotion, or set a higher standard of healthy and vigorous life. Yet this is what Mr. Edmondson, in spite of many somewhat insubordinate years in the 21st Lancers, as his own account testifies, says of the officers of the Army :—" Lop away the mouldered branch of ridiculous persons called officers, who are no more capable of organising or commanding men than you [Lord Roberts] are of
carrying Westminster Abbey on your shoulders Dare you face the society women of both sexes, who, like murderous mid- wives, strangle reform at the birth ? " The passage reminds us of one of those popular melodramas where the hero is a private soldier, and the villain the Colonel commanding. We suggest to Mr. Edmondson that he has missed his vocation. And has he not also chosen a misleading title for his book? For it is surely not the Army which he is turning inside out for the public delectation; it is his own angry self.
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