7 FEBRUARY 1920, Page 22

A Galloper at Ypres. By Lieutenant-Colonel P. R. Butler (T.

Fisher Unwin. 158. net.)—Colonel Butler went out to Flanders early in October, 1914, with the Seventh Division, which concentrated at Bruges, advanced to Ghent to protect the Belgian retreat from Antwerp, and then retired by Thielt and Roulers to Ypres before the great German armies that were intended to march to the sea at Calais. Colonel Butler's account of this little-known movement is interesting ; he pays a compli- ment to the small but efficient Belgian cavalry force which covered the Seventh Division. His narrative of the First Battle of Ypres, up to November 2nd, 1914, when he was wounded, Ilustrates the fog of war. He knew very little of what was happening, except in his own neighbourhood, although he was on the Headquarters Staff and personally attached to the General. He describes how one of our few aeroplanes, unfamiliar at that time to most of the troops, was shot down by our own men, who were told by a Staff officer that it was an enemy machine. He was wounded while helping to rally the men retreating from the wood east of Veldhoek on November 2nd, 1914 ; " they were not in a panic or moving out of a fast walk," and they cheerfully turned about and formed a new line against which the Germans spent themselves in vain. The author's mother, Lady Butler, contributes a coloured drawing of his chargers' heads as a frontispiece.