HISTORIAN OF BRITISH ARMY.

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 19032, 9 June 1924, Page 10

HISTORIAN OF BRITISH ARMY.

THE HON. J. W. FORTESCUE. ENDLESS RESEARCH. (Correspondent, Otago Times.) LONDON, April 3. For 30 years the Hon. J. W. Fortescue has been engaged, as a labour of love, in writing the History of the British Army, and the period reached is 1870. With that year the author closes. He gives some reminscences and impressions to the Morning Post, in which he describes histcry-writing as “a grind.” “Gibbon (said Mr. Fortescue) —don’t think that 1 put myself within a hundred miles of him—took 20 years for his Roman history, 1 have taken 30 writing the history of the British Army, and it is not yet finished. Had I known the work involved perhaps I should never have had the courage to begin. At first it. was one, then two, then three volumes, and so it grew to the eleventh, requiring at least another three to bring the history down to short service soldiering. Two gun teams could scarcely draw the manuscript records I have digested. I am now writing of the consolidation of India, and am searching the repords at the India Office. They are all copies of despatches, confusedly and inaccurately done, which makes the task doubly difficult.” Asked: “Why did you begin so great a task?” he replied: “I was always interested in the army, though as a younger son of a county family I was destined for the Church, the three professions of my youth being the navy, the army, and the Church. Three of my brothers entered the army and two the navy, but I went abroad after leaving the university. When I was thirtyfour I settled down to write. In my youth Whyte Melville was a popular novelist. In ‘Hombly House’ he describes Cromwell as drilling his Ironsides to advance in line, a very difficult movement. I wondered if Cromwell had done this, and found on research that cavalry did not advance in line in those days. I do not say the incident determined ny history, but I associated it with the first idea.

HISTORY OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE. “Where have my researches taken me? Into many fields of activity. I have done all my own devilling. I have read thousands of volumes, apart from printed books, diplomatic and military despatches, searched the Home Office records for information on the raising of troops, the Foreign Office for relations with other Powers, the Treasury for Transport and Supply, the Colonial Office for colonial campaigns, the India Office for Indian history, and Paris for the French point of view. You must know the world, for the history of the British Army is the history of the British Empire. I had spent four years in New Zealand and two in the West Indies before 1 began the history. Spain, Portugal, southern and northern France, Belgium, and Holland have all been visited. Many battleplaces were unmarked, demanding labourious research, and much walking, before they were located. No records of the history would Ijp complete without reference to the maps. Messrs. Macmillan deserve praise for the magnificent reproductions. But chiefly I would speak of Mr. H. W. Cribb, of Holborn, not only a fine cartographer, but also a brilliant geographer. He has done every map, many of ground previously but imperfectly surveyed. One of North Holland was completed only after a comparison of maps of four centuries. Those of the Peninsular wars illustrate the fine quality of Mr. Cribb’s work.” DEFINITION OF HISTORY. Finally came the question, 44 Now that the history is nearly finished, what impression of the English nation do you gather from the story of the British Army?” To this the answer was:

“Its gambling spirit, as strong almost as in the Chinese. The soldiers were always taking chances, preferring risk of death to safety by forethought. They would always rather lie in the open than dig-in. And what the soldiers did in tactics, the nation has done in policy. It has taken almost as many chances with fate. One thing you must remember: the writing of history demands the same sense of fitness, of proportion, ot arrangement in two words, the same artistic sense —as well as-the same imagination, as the writing of fiction. History is the study of human nature, or it is naught.”