Mr. Coleman was not, as is usually the case with civilians who are attached to an army in the field, constrained to keep out of the fighting line. On the contrary, it is clear from his stirring personal narrative that most of his time was passed within the region in which a hail of "Black Marias," shrapnell shells, and Mauser bullets has been asserting Germany's right to occupy "a place in the sun" by slaughtering the youth of England, by devastating the fair homesteads of France, and by reducing to ruins the sacred buildings and historic monuments of which French soil is so prolific. Mr. Coleman does not profess to write a history of the operations of which he was a witness. He frequently dwells on a point which is too often forgotten by those who read the accounts given by the actors in the great struggle. It is that each individual can only bear testimony to what passes before his own eyes. Very few are in possession of information which would enable them to judge of the relative importance of events. "No one," Mr. Coleman says, "would imagine how little regimental officers, or Brigade commanders for that matter, know of the broad plan of operations." But Mr. Coleman provides us with a very vivid picture of what he himself saw, and thus enables us to realize the general character which the war must have assumed elsewhere. Mr. Coleman joined the Expeditionary Force in August, 1914, about the time when the retirement from Mons and its neighbourhood began. His account of this operation is deeply interesting. It would be altogether premature to discuss, and still more to criticize, the strategy of which this movement was the outcome. Moreover, the British commanders were in no way responsible for the early strategy of the campaign. They merely had to make their military dispositions conform to the requirements of the plan which had been already elaborated and partially executed by the French General Staff, and that plan necessitated a withdrawal from the advanced position originally occupied by the British troops in Flanders. A retreat does not necessarily connote permanent defeat or irretrievable disaster. When the Duke of Wellington withdrew within the lines of Torres Vedras, he did so deliberately in order to prepare for the advance which eventually drove the invaders from Spanish territory. It is greatly to be hoped that the history of Torres Vedras will be repeated at Salonika. Nevertheless, retreat generally involves at least a temporary check. It disheartens the rank-and-file of an army, more especially if it is the sequel of some local success in one portion of the field of operations. Describing the situation at St. Quentin on August 27th, 1914, Mr. Coleman says: "An orderly, well-disciplined army had been through a great fight. Its infantry, unbeaten by the infantry that opposed it, had been ordered to retire. 'Gawd knows why,' hundreds of Tommies were saying.... Everything