The Scottish Commander - Softcover

Author of the bestselling Wallace and Bannockburn, Peter Reese is one of Britain's finest military historians. Having retired from the army, he is now a full-time writer dividing his time between a home in Aldershot and Gairloch in Scotland.

Other than in their dour religious severity, Scottish military leaders, in Reese's brief narratives of a score of them, seem little different from their counterparts in other armies. Previously a biographer of one of the iconic Scottish commanders, William Wallace, Reese hardly leaves out a leader from Robert Bruce to WWI's Douglas Haig. Most compelling are the flawed generals, like the mid-Victorian Sir Colin Campbell, who, on relieving the siege of Lucknow during the Indian Mutiny, was given a celebratory dinner with food and champagne hoarded for the day of liberation. "His reaction was to enquire frostily why the food had not been handed over [before] to the [trapped] troops and he... sat with his arms folded throughout the whole dreadful repast like a ghost at a feast." Few readers will want to know more about the earlier Scottish commanders than Reese furnishes so encyclopedically. Where he falters is in handling the two big wars of the outgoing century. Most of his account of the 1914-1918 war is a strained defense of the "relatively unimaginative" Haig, who, "armed with such moral certainty, considered alternatives to the [wholesale butchery] on the Western Front less strongly than he might have done." Perhaps space constraints kept Reese from fuller coverage of WWII, for which he uses as chief example not a Montgomery or an Auchinleck but the obscure David Stirling, "a brilliant eccentric who fitted no mould." Stirling, who led the commando-trained Special Air Forces in North Africa, ended his war in a German POW camp and lived until 1990, one of the last Scottish military mavericks. 16 b&w photos. (Dec.)

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