Under Crescent and Star. By Lieutenant-Colonel Andrew Haggard. (William Blackwood
and Sons.) — After reading Colonel Haggard's by no means uninteresting account of our exploits in Egypt and the Soudan, we turned once more to Mr. Rud,yard Kipling's superbly humorous verses on " Fuzzy- Wuzzy," and reflected that the man of genius who has never witnessed a particular event can often give us a more vivid notion of it than the ordinary person who has been in the very thick of the affair. So it is " Fuzzy-Wuzzy " tells us more of this fierce Arab fighting than the whole four hundred pages of this active and intelligent British soldier who saw so much of it. For all that, Colonel Haggard's book is worth reading by all who take an interest in our present occupation of the land of the Pharaohs. It contains a very succinct account of the formation and training of the Anglo-Egyptian army, and of the disasters of Hicks Pasha
and Valentine Baker while the battles of El Teb and Tamai are described from the standpoint of the English soldier. The book is pleasantly, if not brilliantly, written, the style being at times rather too flippant and more " journalistic " than literary ; while Colonel Haggard has little to offer to the political student in the way of counsel as to our future relations with this ancient and profoundly interesting land.
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