The civilian¹ who attempts to write a military history is of necessity guilty of an act of presumption²; and I am not blind to my own temerity³ in venturing to grapple with such a task as the History of the British Army. But England has waited long for a soldier to do the work; and so far no sign has been given of the willingness of any officer to undertake it beyond the publication, a few years since, of Colonel Walton's History of the British Standing⁴ Army from 1660 to 1700. Nor is this altogether surprising, for the leisure of officers is limited, the subject is a large one, and the number of those who have already toiled⁵ in the field and left the fruit of their labour to others is sadly small. A civilian may therefore, I hope, be pardoned for trying at any rate to make some beginning, however conscious of his own shortcomings and of the inevitable⁶ disadvantage from which he suffers through inexperience of military life in peace and, still more fatally, in war. His efforts may at least stimulate⁷ some one better qualified⁸ than himself to treat the subject in a manner better befitting its dignity and its worth.

My design is to write the history of the Army down to the year 1870, the two present volumes carrying[vi] the story down to the Peace of Paris in 1763, and two future volumes bringing it forward to the great reforms which virtually closed the life of our old Army and opened that of a new. It would have been easy to have filled a score of volumes with matters germane⁹ to the subject and of genuine interest to at least some groups of military students; nor would such treatment have been foreign to the methods of one school of British historians. There is indeed much to be said for it from the writer's standpoint, for it simplifies his task beyond belief. To me, however, rightly or wrongly, it seemed better to gather the story if possible into a smaller compass, even at the cost of omitting many instructive statistics and

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