England can never have an efficient army during peace, and she must, therefore, accept the rebuffs and calamities which are always in store for the nation that is content to follow the breed of cowards who usually direct her great affairs. The day will come when she will violently and suddenly lose her former fighting renown to such an unmistakable extent that the plucky fishwives will march upon Downing Street, and if they can catch its usual inmates, will rend them. One party is as bad as the other, and I hope and pray that when the national misfortune of a great defeat at sea overtakes us, followed by the invasion of England, that John Bull will turn and rend the jawers and talkers who prevent us from being prepared to meet invasion.--_From a letter written by Lord Wolsley, ex-Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, to Lord Wemyss, and published, and ignored by the public, in the year 1906._ It is no part of my intention to make any attempt to limp after the historians of the Invasion. The Official History, the half-dozen of standard military treatises, and the well-known works of Low, Forster, Gordon, and others, have allowed few details of the Invasion to escape unrecorded. But I confess it has always seemed to me that these writers gave less attention to the immediate aftermath of the Invasion than that curious period demanded. Yet here was surely a case in which effect was of vastly more importance than cause, and aftermath than crisis. But perhaps I take that view because I am no historian. To the non-expert mind, the most bewildering and extraordinary feature of that disastrous time was the amazing speed with which crisis succeeded crisis, and events, each of themselves epoch-making in character, crashed one upon another throughout the progress toward Black Saturday. We know now that much of this fury of haste which was so bewildering at the time, which certainly has no parallel in history, was due to the perfection of Germany's long-laid plans. Major-General Farquarson, in his "Military History of the Invasion," says: