Catalogue description DS/MISC/75; Ts. autobiography, entitled "Essays of a Non-Soldier", of Lieutenant-Colonel J K Stanford.

Stanford's account begins with the assertion that "those who shove in the back row of any military scrummage usually have little worth adding to history", but that, from this position, Stanford did observe how amateurishly Britain went to war and how much "graft" there was in wartime.

Stanford was born in 1892 and recalls his childhood thoughts on the Boer War, contrasting his romantic notions about the battles with the disturbing reality (pp. 8-12). He had just come down from Oxford when the First World War broke out and in late October 1914 he enlisted in the 14th London Regiment, the Reserve Battalion of the London Scottish, whose ranks at that time were full of educated and wealthy men (pp. 20-2). After training in the Home Counties during the winter, Stanford was commissioned in March 1915 into the 3rd Battalion, Suffolk Regiment, stationed at Felixstowe. That summer he was posted to the 2nd Battalion Suffolks, 3rd Division, in the Ypres Salient, but, after seeing a little action, he was sent home suffering from shell shock in September 1915. Standord returned to France the following March and was posted to the 7th Suffolks in the loss sector, where he was immediately accidentally wounded. He was then appointed an instructor in an Officer Cadet Battalion in England and did not return to France until June 1917 when he joined the 2nd Suffolks in a quiet and tedious sector near Pronville (pp. 58-9).

In September 1917 Stanford was posted to the newly formed Tank Corps, then largely composed of "throw-outs" (pp. 60-1), and proceeded to England for training at Wareham (pp. 65-7). His fellow officers at this time included Lieutenant-Colonel G Mch Sceales (p. 68) and F E Hotblack, later a Major-General (p. 70). Stanford crossed to France in May 1918 as reconnaissance officer to the 14th Tank Battalion, of which the Corps Commander was the famous Lieutenant-General Sir Aylmer Hunter-Weston (pp. 75-7). The Battalion went into action at Villers - Bretonneux on 8 August and achieved initial success, on which they were unable to capitalize. For the remainder of the war, they were transferred from one Brigade to another, Standord ending up as 2nd Tank Brigade Intelligence Officer. In one action there was a measure of uneasy co-operation with the Americans (pp. 90-1). Stanford notes the grave shortcomings in man-management and army welfare during the First World War (pp. 96-8).

From 1919 to 1937 Stanford was in the Indian Civil Service and he makes some general observations about the value of polo in strengthening ties with the native population (pp. 100-1), the lack of contact with the Indian Army and British Army (pp. 102-3) and the interesting types to be found in the Indian Military Police (pp. 105-8). When the Burma rebellion broke out in the winter of 1930, Stanford was District Commissioner at Henzada in Upper Burma and his small force was faced by three separate outbreaks. However, Stanford moved with decision and, after a skirmish, the rebels went underground and arrests became rare. Stanford was reinforced by the 2/5th Baluch Regiment, but, with subsequent events in mind, he notes that regular troops were largely ineffective in flushing out the rebels.

The final chapters of Stanford's book are devoted to a perceptive analysis of certain twentieth century Army customs. Plunder has always been a tacitly accepted part of warfare, but Stanford remarks that since 1914 troops have had no scruples about plundering their own government as well as their enemies and that, with the advent of mechanization, the acquisition of wartime "souvenirs", especially by base and staff officers, was on a larger scale than ever before (pp. 135-52). Stanford's dislike of the related vice of graft is very apparent in his brutal review of Major-General Sir Francis de Guingand's "Generals At War" (pp. 196-216). De Guingand's excuse for his "high-living" in wartime - that it was essential to sustain the morale of the senior staff - is treated with contempt and the general is dismissed as a 1939-45 version of the First World War correspondent Charles Repington. De Guingand's criticisms of Wavell also come in for savage comment.

Other chapters are given over to the Army's treatment of horses (pp. 153-85) and the virtues and shortcomings of horse soldiers in the two World Wars (pp. 186-95). Stanford ends his account by passing comment on several well-known Army customs - the average army officer's lack of enthusiasm for paper work, in particular confidential reports, and the arts of "buckpassing" and "eyewash" (pp. 217-27).