THE SILVER THISTLE.* Finn. of the " K " formations

to land in France, and physically at that time perhaps the finest body of twenty thousand men that has ever coalesced into the instrument of a commander's will—the very cream of the glens, where long limbs and hard heads are as common as silken speech—the 9th (Scottish) Division, praised in equally unstinted terms by authorities so diverse as Marshal Foch and the Kaiser, has already, penAess

its official history, inspired two classics of tbs. '""une "St Hundred Thousand and Colonel lirstasisks Now Colonel W, D.4 -(4r, who, after a year with the 11th Royal Scots. eonsmanded. the 27th Infantry Brigade for fourteen months from the death of that fine soldier, General F. Maxwell,

till its march over the frontier into Germany to the sound of The Blue Bonnets," presents the vicissitudes of the Division from a third angle. His quality as a showman loges nothing from the fact that his magic lantern is manipulated without conscious art, in the simple endeavour to reproduce in straightforward and racy terms—often delightfully schoolboyish in their blunt, colloquial good humour or condemnation—the joys, vexations, aims, difficulties, in short the daily experience, of a Battalion and Brigade Commander in the field, whose common-sense forbade him in either capacity to forget the relation of the cog and the wheel. A magic lantern it is—for the slides live, often with stereoscopic sharpness of definition.

But though the primary and professed scope of the volume is simply reminiscence, the author has incidentally commingled a certain amount of technical powder with the jam—and very good powder too. Every encouragement should be given in the immediate future to similar informal expressions of opinion by officers who have commanded units in the field, as a counterweight to the theorizing tendency which is the Staff officer's

most dangerous, because most insidious, enemy. No matter how it is recruited or how frequently it is refreshed by the introduction of new blood, every General Staff is bound in time to be infected in a greater or less degree by the microbe of a-priorisni, which can be kept under but never totally suppressed.

The more the detailed application of the immutable principles of war to present-day conditions —in the course of the next three or four years to be crystallized into the dogma of our training manuals—is influenced by the consideration of the tactical likes and dislikes which the purely fighting soldier has developed on the various fronts, the more likely it is to endure.

Colonel Croft's pet aversion is the bomb, which he rightly accuses of having practically ruined the British soldier's priceless

heritage of musketry during the middle period of the war, in favour of an innovation which, except for working round traverses, is just as dangerous to the thrower as to his target, and lacks the salutary speed and accuracy of the rifle. The once fashionable delay-action fuses, too, incur his hearty disapproval :

" the delay-action fuse was not altogether an unmixed blessing to the side which used it : speaking as a humble infantryman I considered it an unmixed curse. And so it was : for what is the good of creating obstacles for one's own side, and excellent for the enemy, which was all that these graves did ? They cramped the style of the tanks, too, to such an extent that we were unable to use them when the mud got bad. They drowned our wounded, they impeded the movement of our guns and infantry : in fact, the delay-action fuse, except for special purposes, is an anachronism on the modern battlefield."

Ile is equally trenchant, and with no less reason, in regard to

that curious military classic, the dawn attack. Speaking of what the reviewer believes to have been the first daylight raid ever carried out in straightforward trench warfare, an extremely successful exploit by the 9th Scottish Rifles at Arras in March, 1917, he says :

" The great features c this raid were that all Roche O.P.'a were blotted out by smoke : that there was no preliminary bombardment, which used merely to give the Boche timely warning of our intentions ; and that the raid took place in the middle of the day, when the lloehe was asleep or feeding, and the moral of the attacker is at its best. Dawn attacks are the very devil---every one will agree to that : they are also usually tut. avoidable, owing to the need for concealing the approach of the attacker. But when it is possible to avoid, no attack should on any account whatsoever take place at dawn : for it means a night march, which means again that at a time when men should be resting they are called upon to make the greatest physical exertion, to say nothing of the mental strain. . . . And then, of course, there is the enemy to be considered. . . . At dawn he is alert and ready for an attack, with his finger literally on the trigger : the gunners also are standing to if there is any chance of an attack. . . . After stand-down, sentries are notoriously =alert, and the majority of the men, having performed their routine duties and fed themselves, usually go to sleep."

Colonel Croft further emphatically condemns, for obvious reasons which, none the less, were disregarded us ees'.4r, the attempt to replace a continues.. 15,,, m stationary warfare by a series of detach essta. He also deplores our leek of srai wood-fighting, in which, as a race, we had every reason to excel : — " As every one knows who has given the matter a thought, it is the rule for all battles, or at any rate the fiercest fighting in battles, to take place in a wood, or in a village, or in close country. A study of history will convince any doubter of this indisputable fact. Yet we never seriously thought out problems for wood. fighting, chiefly owing to its being a branch of fighting which is e sealed book to the Staff, for wood fighting is not spectacular. and it is entirely the province of the most junior leader."

His views as to that highly controversial matter, the employ. meat of cavalry on Western battlefields, will commend them. selves to infantrymen of all ranks. To the present writer, though not a foot soldier, their soundness appears indisputable :

" Masses of cavalry are normally too unwieldy for the tieetinp opportunity. And so it seems to me that we need to hark heel: to the old days of divisional cavalry, seeing that on those three occasions (High Wood, 1916 Arras, April 9th, 1917 Brood. seinde Ridge, September 28th, 19181 a squadron would have been of priceless value. The employment of cavalry must be left to the man on the spot, not to the man—however great e genius he may happen to be—who site about 20 miles back. It is not a mere question of numbers, but of moral effect, which a squadron of cavalry in quite big enough to ensure. For the larger the number of troops who abandon their arms the greater the panic: and we just wanted some one to keep them on the run and not let them get their heads up."

The volume would lend itself to almost unlimited quotation, for Colonel Croft's narrative, which of course forms the greater part of it, is as interesting as his comments, and here and there a phrase gleams out which would suffice to justify many duller pages, as when he writes of Arras after the advance " Looking back was almost as fascinating as looking forward. For far below us lay Arras—poor, beautiful, mutilated Arras, lying down

there in the hollow like a dead swan." The only faults, in fact, to be noted in the book are the misquotation on the dedicationpage, and the needless anonymity (especially when their identity is transparent) with which he envelops every officer to whom he has occasion to refer.