“Among the minor factors of this complicated situation was the permanent quarrel between Patagonia and Utopia, and though it has been much neglected by historians, and is, indeed, but a detail upon the flank of the great struggle of the coalition, a few moments must be given to the abortive operations in the Tusco Valley. They appear to have been conducted without any grasp of the main rules of strategy, each party advancing in a more or less complete ignorance of the position of the other, their communications parallel, their rate of advance deplorably slow, and neither possessing the information nor the initiative to strike at his opponent during a three-weeks’ march, at no point of which was either army so much as fifty miles from the other. These farcical three weeks ended in a sort of skirmish difficult to describe, and apparently confined to the extreme left of the Patagonian forces. The Utopians here effected some sort of confused advance, which was soon checked. At the other end of the line they retired before a partial movement of the enemy, effected without any apparent object, and certainly achieving no definite result. The total losses in killed and wounded were less than seven per cent of those engaged. The next day negotiations were entered into between the two generals; their weary discussion occupied a whole week, during which hostilities were suspended. The upshot of the whole thing was the retirement of the Patagonian Army under guarantees, and in consideration of the acceptation of the old frontier by the Utopian Government. Politically the campaign is beneath notice, as both territories were absorbed six months after in the recasting of the map after the Treaty of Lima, and the policing of them handed over to the now all-conquering Northern Power. Even as military history the operations deserve little more than passing notice, save, perhaps, as an example of the gross yet ever recurrent folly of placing numerically large commands in the hands of aged men. Mitza, upon the occasion of this fiasco, was over seventy-five years of age and long in his dotage, while the Prince of the Blood who had been chosen to lead (nominally, at least) the Patagonian Army was, apart from his increasing years, a notorious drunkard, and what is perhaps worse from a military point of view, daily subject to long and complete lapses of memory.” A Descendant of William Shakespeare It was during the early months of 1909 that I first became acquainted with a descendant of William Shakespeare the great dramatist, who happened at that moment to be in London.