BOOKS.

SIR IAN HAMILTON'S SECOND VOLUME.* WE are glad that Sir Ian Hamilton has been encouraged —nay, more, allowed—to fulfil the promise he made in his first volume, and to give us in this second volume the story of his " advance with Kuroki through conflicts fiercer and bloodier far" than any he has previously attempted to set down. We are, however, by no means ready to agree with him that the "small things" to which, in his modest preface to his second volume, he declares that he confined himself in his first, were by any means the least valuable items in the intellectual treat with which his Scrap-Boot has provided us. It is often claimed that first impressions are best, and in some ways Sir Ian's first impressions of the soldiers of Japan and of the ethos of her people provide more food for the reflection of the political philosopher than his more matured judgments of a people who must, when all is said, for ever remain inscrutable to the Occidental mind. No doubt, as the months of his comradeship with the splendid First Army ran on, Sir Ian became more intimate with Kuroki and his men. In proportion as the strangeness wore off, the contrast between the soldiers of the Rising Sun and those with whom we are familiar at home became less vivid. The result is an appreciation which, so far at least as the ethical, and not the purely warlike, element is concerned, may be, and veiy likely is, saner and juster, but which possibly somewhat loses in impressiveness what it gains in accuracy.

Sir Ian takes up the tale in his second volume on August 3rd, 1904, when the work of Kuroki's corps as an independent unit was ended. Front that day onward it falls into line as the Right, well swung forward, of Marshal Oyame.'s grand army. Sir Ian did not, however, abandon his old comrades of the First Army, but remained with them through the eleven days' battle of Liaoyang and the still more terrible struggle to be known to history as the battle of the Sha.ho, when Kuropatkin endeavoured in his turn to thrust his enemy back, and sent Stackelberg to outflank this same right wing of the Japanese. Thanks mainly to the stubborn First Army, Stackelberg failed, though he was within an ace of succeeding.

We do not propose to deal in detail with Sir Ian's graphic description of the two titanic struggles round which practi- cally the whole of his second volume centres. This description takes the excellent form of a series of notes which he has written day by day, and almost hour by hour, upon the field of battle, or, rather, while seated upon the successive points of vantage selected by Kuroki and his Headquarters Staff, before which the whole magnificent battle-canvas lay unfolded. The point of vantage was generally some hill, from which, as BO skilfully depicted in the admirable panorama sketches by Captain Vincent with which the text is illustrated, as well as with maps, Kuroki and his Staff gazed across a valley on a whole series of other hills, up the slopes of which, or towards which, across the plain, the storm of battle was raging under a fleecy cloud of bursting shrapnel. But even Kuroki's far-flung battle-line extended for many miles, while the simultaneous actions of the Second and Fourth Armies far away to the left were altogether beyond the range of sight, and their progress, owing to the strange absence of visual signalling, was often unknown to Kuroki at the critical moment. Consequently, the partial story of the eyewitness is amplified and corrected at the conclusion of each narrative by a careful epitome, culled partly from the lips of the other foreign Attaches, and partly from the narrative of the

A Staff Officer's Scrap-Book during the Russe..Tapattese War. By Lieutenant- General Sir Ian Hamilton, ILOB. With Illustrations, Maps, and Plans. Vol. IL London Edward Arnold. [Hs. net.] Japanese General Staff itself, with Sir Ian's own most valuable reflections added thereto. We have, therefore, an almost ideal combination for the making of battle history : the wide range of view and cool atmosphere of the Headquarters Staff (Sir Ian had by this time won the full confidence of our allies and was no longer kept fretting in the rear), the pen of a graphic writer, the enthusiasm of a born fighter, the experience of a general who is second to none in tactical coup (Neil and knowledge of the use of ground. The result is all that might be anticipated. The passages descriptive of the actual fighting have in any case suffered no blurring or bowdlerising Take this from the account of Okasaki's assault upon Terayama Hill :— " There arose a continuous tearing, crepitating sound, not very loud, and yet sufficient in intensity and volume to cause us all to shiver with excitement. To the ear of a civilian, the noise might have awakened comfortable reflections of frizzling bacon ; to a woman it might recall the bubbling of her tea kettle. But it stirred my own blood like the Valkyrie Ritt. It startled me like

the sudden snarl of a wild beast. For I knew that thousands of

rifles had opened magazine fire and were struggling at from five hundred to six hundred yards distance for the fire mastery, that fire mastery which, established by the one side, would render the assault possible ; established by the

.other, must doom it to disastrous failure For a long, long time the anguish of anticipation was spun out to the uttermost. A quarter of an hour passed, then another quarter of an hour ; the General Staff could hardly endure it longer, but Kuroki remained confident and calm. Then another ten minutes. The tension became unendurable. The setting sun threw its reddish rays slantwise on Terayama, and showed it smoking like a volcano, but apparently quite lifeless 'Ah,' said Kuroki, he cannot get on. To-day we are stuck fast all along the line? In his voice was no tone of regret, no shade of mortification ; at the most only some touch of despondency. Hardly bad he spoken when a sharp exclamation from an adjutant made me turn my glasses once more upon the deserted plain, and, to my amazement, I saw it deserted no longer, but covered with a vast, straggling, scattered crowd of individuals, each running towards the Russians at his topmost speed. The Okazaki Brigade was crossing the open to try and storm Terayama by one supreme

effort Bullets fell thick amongst those who ran for life or death across the plain, and the yellow dust of their impact on the plough rose in a cloud almost up to the men's knees The assaulting infantry ran 600 yards without the semblance of a halt, and as their leading files reached the sunken road, they dashed unhesitatingly into it, and right on to the top of the crouching Russian infantry ! Next second and the Russians and their assailants were rushing up Terayama slopes in one confused mob, the whole mass convulsively working bayonet and bullet and clubbed rifle as they ran. The hill was carried. Bravo ! Bravo !! Bravo ! !!"

This is high-strung, realistic writing ; the inspiration of it is twofold. It is good to be seated on Olympus viewing the battle from afar; the soldier's heart exults as the opposing columns draw near to each other. But it is better far to he amongst the heroic mortals themselves, a living part of dashing assault or stubborn defence. Hence the restless, almost nervous, tension which animates the tale. Had Sir Ian, sword in hand, been pressing up the fatal slope, there would have been no painful suspense, and his readers would have been the poorer for it. Or had he found himself in Kuroki's place, the author of each struggle, though no participator in the fierce excitement of the actual combat, with the whole weight of responsibility upon his shoulders, we may be sure that he would have shown that grand calm, that power of standing by cool and aloof and of doing nothing beyond taking responsibility, which, as he tells us, the Japanese bold, and hold rightly, to be the one supreme qualification for a commander, and which was possessed to so complete a degree by Kuroki himself, as opposed to the officers of his General Staff. As it is, as a mere spectator he shares to the full all the tortured anxiety of the Staff officers, and the result is a realism of rare merit.

Most unfortunately for all of us, Sir Ian was recalled to take up his command upon Salisbury Plain in February, 1995, and did not therefore witness the crowning victory of Mukden, the first and last great battle of the war in which the dogged Russians were not only defeated but routed. But he was able before he left Manchuria to view the ground and give us his impressions of the "Devil's Ploughing" outside Port Arthur, together with his appreciations of the battles of Nanshan and Telissu, which should be of the greatest value to students of tactics. As to the lessons of the war, they are, of course, legion. We have space only to call attention to four to which Sir Ian gives especial prominence. The first is the paramount importance of a welbarmed and

well-horsed artillery and plenty of it,—it was the superiority of the Russian guns alone that saved Kuropatkin over and over again from disaster. The second concerns the co-operation of commanders of different columns in the field. "If people ask me," Sir Ian writes, "'What are the lessons of the war?' I ought, if I have the pluck of a mouse, most certainly to reply : 'To change our characters, my dear friend, so that you and I may become less jealous and egotistical, and more loyal and disinterested towards our own brother officers. This is the greatest lesson of the war?"

The third and fourth concern the qualifications that go to make a good private soldier. First, he must, in Sir Ian's view, hate his enemy,—each Japanese private entered into the war with burning feelings of personal anger. Next, the Japanese officer was surely right who declared to Sir Ian that the Russian conscription, with its system of short colour service and masses of rusty reserves insufficiently welded together, has proved a broken reed, since the national policy of Russia has not a natural warlike basis. "Russia above all nations should have provided herself with a voluntarily enlisted long-service army." Again—and here we quote from the interview given in Vol. I. with another Japanese officer who had been cele- brating a feast and was more than usually communicative- " we can turn a Japanese soldier into a first-class soldier in three weeks, and the Germans cannot make their pudding. headed yokels into soldiers under three years. What do you think of that ?" We trust that Sir Ian will think a good deal of it, the more by token that be has now so large a share in the new task set before us all of trying to see whether the naturally warlike character of our people here in England, and the real patriotism which we believe is still theirs, will not justify us in making a National Army of our own under a system of short training and voluntary service.

We have left ourselves no space in which to comment upon the many sidelights on the life and character of this strange people, which were, perhaps, the most attractive features of Sir Ian's first volume. Despite our opening sentences in this notice, and despite the fact that this second volume is avowedly devoted chiefly to war and war's alarms, and to "the figure of the warrior-spirit of Japan as it emerged, triumphant, from the bloody struggle," there is much, and particularly in the opening chapter, which will delight even the most unwarlike of readers. A single story out of many must suffice. It relates to a sermon preached to the Imperial Guard by a Buddhist priest, inculcating the insignificant value of life. The preacher told the men a story of two friends meeting in the street :—

"After the usual salnlations, one friend asked the other after the health of his most honourable father. The reply was that his father had just been drowned, which cast rather, a damper upon the conversation. Plucking up courage, the man whose father had been drowned asked his friend in turn as to the health of a favourite uncle. The reply was that the uncle also had just been drowned. This time the friends could hardly help laughing. .The moral of my story is,' continued the preacher, that the place. of every one's death is preordained there is nothing in nature or philosophy which should incline a man to go

less boldly into a fight than into his bed at night Fear not at all, if your intentions are right, your actions will be right also:"

We trust we have given a sufficient idea of its contents to commend the second volume of what is undoubtedly a work of first-rate importance to the attention of our readers.