Thank You, Mr. Atkins
The British Soldier. By Colonel H. de Watteville. (Dent. 18s.)
IT is a pity, as Colonel de Watteville says in his opening chapter, that no Smollett or Marryat arose in the Army to write a contem-
porary and Kipling and Mr. C. S. Forester have each tried to fill it rarY novel about the British soldier. The gap still yawns, although fit their several ways. All have laboured under the handicap of being writers from without. Colonel de Watteville has not been tempted to fill this particular gap; but he has sought to chronicle something of the long and honourable history of the British soldier, drawing on old books, old traditions, old literary references, Did memories, and his own passionate and becoming belief in past and present glories. He has aptly dedicated his book to the memory of the first Lord Wavell, his contemporary at the Staff College, and a true connoisseur of the stout heart in the Sovereign's uniform. This book is a labour of love, and it would be ungrateful and ungracious to subject it to too severe a test; but the title is sadly at fault, for it seems to promise an exhaustive study, such as the British Soldier still deserves. If that were indeed his target, Colonel de Watteville, as an honest gunner who bears a name rich with honour M more armies than one, could claim no more than to have straddled It .He has produced instead a causerie, an errant anthology, a genial scrap-book. He has left many sources untapped: to name a
few at random, General Stewart of Garth, Serjeant Anton, Wheeler. General Higginson. He has failed to glean from the rich reapings of Mrs. Woodham-Smith and Miss Oman. 'The British Soldier' is a noble title awaiting a book still to be written. Colonel de Watteville has trespassed on the ground, and poached a fair bag; he has not properly shot the moor.
Chronology has gone by the board; and we are offered a selection of essays—on married quarters, the reign of the lash, the nation and the army, officers ancient and modern. All these are informative, none are exhaustive; and we are left hungering after the author's sources. He tells us flatly that at the time of Waterloo the normal subaltern's library consisted of four books: Hoyle's Games, The Articles of War, Dundas's Eighteen Manoeuvres, and The Sporting Calendar. Who was this 'normal subaltern,' how normal was he, and how was he viewed by such officers as Sir William De Lancey? These are the sort of questions that hang in one's mouth. Again, he quotes Toni Jones as an authority on the question of the purchase of commissions, and of mess life in the eighteenth century. But Fielding never served in the Army, and is no more worthy of being quoted as an authority for his time than Ouida for a century later.
Nevertheless, this book is highly enjoyable to browse in, and there are far too few of its kind. Gleanings are never thorough but always profitable, and here there are some rich pickings. Still one hopes that some day there will come a historian, who will do for the individual British soldier what Sir John Fortescue did for the Army as a whole, of which the common soldier was the backbone and the life's blood; and the anthologist who will pick up an ear of corn here and a grain of barley there; who will glean from such diverse fields as Stewart and Anton, Jan Hay and Eric Linklater, Gideon and Judas Maccabeus, Napier and Napoleon, Barbour and Belisarius: there is still room for such a book.
BERNARD FERG USSON
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