LETTERS TO SOMEBODY.* M.Emours of an official career are rarely

so amusing as those which Sir Guy Fleetwood Wilson has just published. He spent many years at the War Office, acting as private secretary to successive Ministers and taking charge of Army finance, and he

• Lettere to Somebody. By Sir Guy Fleetwood Wilson. London : Cassell. Rs. 6d. net.]

served for five years in India as Financial Member of the Viceroy's Council. He has produced an entertaining little book, with touches of sardonic humour. He writes with the detachment of a bachelor. He was born in Italy, as long ago as 1850, and spent his boyhood there, so that when he came to England in 1868 and went to a crammer's his fellow- students regarded him as " a d— foreigner " with too many " monkey tricks." One can see by the vehemence with which

he denounces King " Bomba " at Naples and the Austrian rule in the North how vivid are his boyish memories of the Risorgi- mento. He quotes from his father's diary examples of the truly Prussian brutality with which the Austrian troops behaved in Florence and of the persecution of Protestants by the Roman Church under Austrian patronage ; in those days men were confined in the Bargello for possessing copies of the Bible and the Pilgrim's Progress. Such facts help to explain why Italians loathe Austria and look askance at the Papacy. The author

remembers the Grand Duke fleeing before the Revolution in 1859. " I was struck by the fact," he says, " that he wore blue carpet slippers." When the old man had run away, it was found that written orders had been given to the gunners

at the Belvedere fortress to bombard Florence ; the gunners had sense enough to ignore orders that were the product of some

spiteful German mind and the city was not damaged. The Wilsons had many English friends in Florence. There were the Brownings, of course, whose receptions the author attended :-

" It was Lady Normanby who, on hearing that little Browning had written a poem, exclaimed with mock solemnity : Then there will no longer be two incomprehensibles but three incoinpre- hensibles.' "

There was Walter Savage Landor :- " He looked like a satyr and was possessed of the most vitriolic tongue and pen. Also he had the vilest of tempera. On one occasion I was sitting with him when his dinner was brought in. Something about it displeased him, and he took up the tablecloth by its four corners and threw the whole bag of tricks out of the window into the street, utterly regardless of the risk to those below ; and he lived on the fourth floor in the Via San Gallo, a crowded thoroughfare. He had quarrelled with every soul he owned or knew, and appeared to have no affection for any living thing except my Aunt Gertrude and Giallo, his yellow pomeranian, a brute who bit everyone without distinction."

There was the second Lord Lytton, to whom the Grand Duke, desiring to say the right thing to the young attaché, remarked :

" I hear your father once wrote a book." There was the famous Mrs. Norton, a beautiful woman with a most violent temper.

Her son married a peasant girl of Capri, whereupon Mrs. Norton, in Lytton's words, " left London like a hurricane and arrived in Florence like a tornado." The author says that Mrs. Norton, for all her quarrels and lawsuits, retained some devoted friends. The late Lord Wemyss once greeted her, in the author's hearing, with : " And how goes the wreck of the old Teme.raire' Y " and made her laugh, in spite of herself.

The author dwells lightly on his War Office experiences.

He knew three soldiers who were first-class administrators—

Sir Henry Brackenbury, Sir Beavers Buller and Sir John Cowans —and, he adds, " a great number of thundering bad ones."

He pays a high compliment to Lord Haldane :-

" To Lord Wolseley belongs the credit of the creation of our modern army, but to Lord Haldane appertains all credit for the correlation of its component parts, the well-thought-out plans for its co-ordination and the scheme for its expansion, which even Lord Kitchener's folly, when he scrapped a sound organiza- tion in successful operation, failed to destroy."

He found Mr. W. H. Smith a very hard and conscientious worker, whereas Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was " distinctly lazy." "It was this very indolence which, after I had left him, caused his defeat in the House of Commons on the occasion of the cordite debate "—though it may be that the Liberal Cabinet wanted to be beaten in June, 1895. The Duke of Cambridge was " at times a little tempestuous," but it " was impossible not to love him." The author had a difference with Lord Roberts over the office cat—for Lord Roberts hated cats as much as Sir Guy loved them—but, for the rest, was on friendly terms. He tells us, too, a little more about Lord Kitchener. Official minutes seem to be at times more vivacious than the public supposes :-

" I saw one at the War Office which closed a voluminous dissertation to which all the military authorities had contributed. It was by Lord Palmerston : What damned nonsense.—P.' Lord Hartington thus closed a collection of drivelling and very lengthy minutes as to what cheese should be issued to the troops : ' I don't like, cheese. H.' The most delightful note ' I came across in India was one by Lord Curzon. The Viceroy had addressed a tart rebuke to a member of his council who was as lazy as they make them. The unfortunate man wrote pages of apology and explanation, ending : I wish His Excellency could see my study crowded almost to the ceiling with official papers.' Curzon was on him like a stoat on a rabbit. ' It would give His Excellency infinitely greater pleasure to see the honourable member in his study dealing with his papers.' . . . The official English in my early days was often appalling. My own immediate chief in the first office I served in wrote a letter to the Treasury commencing : I think the itch is with the Treasury, not the less notwithstanding I will again look at it.' The Treasury sent him an assurance that all the officers of that department were in perfect health. Few can realize the appalling length and futility which charac- terized the minutes written during the long period of peace after the Crimean War. I have perused a fair-sized volume of correspondence between the Admiralty and the War Office which dealt with an unseemly squabble between the officer commanding troops in a West Indian island and the captain of a man-of-war stationed there as to whose wife should take precedence at the communion table ! "

The author recalls his visit to Dublin after the rebellion of 1916, when he had to inquire into the conduct of the Civil Servants. He affirms most positively that if conscription had been introduced and enforced in Ireland at that moment, half the people would have welcomed it, especially the National Volunteers and the older priests. But Mr. Asquith let the opportunity pass. Finally, we may mention the author's account of the Air Ministry under Lord Rothermere. He was struck by " the amazing beauty " of most of the girls employed and by the general disorganization that prevailed at the Hotel Cecil.