Soldiering in Sunshine and Storm. By W. Douglas, Private 10th
Royal Hussars. (Adam and Charles Black.)—Some few chapters of this book have appeared previously in All the Year Round and the United Service Magazine. The bulk of it is new. It contains a simple narrative from a private's point of view of what befell the 10th Hussars on the road from the Bombay Presidency to the Crimea, where they arrived in April, 1855, their campaigning there, and return home. It is excel- lently written, in good taste, and quite without needless digression of any kind. Of course it tells the general reader nothing very new, and its interest is a good deal diminished by the writer's entire reticence as to his position before he entered the army. If he were an educated man, as for anything which appears in this book he may have been, there is nothing very remarkable about it. If he has educated himself since enlisting, it is a singular instance of good taste, and highly credit- able to the author as an intellectual effort. Half the books of travels one reads contain no more than this book of solid matter, but that is disguised under a mass of affected smartnesses which pass for wit with readers of little judgment. The absence of this fashionable flippancy is a very great merit.
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