Undressed Warriors

WARRIORS IN UNDRESS--F. J. Hudleston--Little, Brown ($3.50). As librarian of the British War Office, Mr. Hudleston has pored these many years over curious volumes. To readers of Warriors in Undress it will be instantly self-evident that he long ago formed the excellent habit of jotting down a good thing when he sees it. Probably on these occasions he slaps his knee and cries: "By gad! That's good!"

Out of a rarely discriminative collection of such tidbits, he has fashioned these wholly delightful and often pungent essays chiefly anent great soldiers of the past. One can no more resist quoting a few of Mr. Hudleston's "good things" than he could resist jotting them down:

Wellington: [At Waterloo] "Lord Anglesey suddenly observed, 'By God, I've lost my leg!' 'Have you, by God?' replied the Duke.

"There is a noble simplicity about this reply. ... Is there any phrase in English military history equal to it?"

Marshal Saxe: "It is impossible not to admire (although he once set out to invade England) that high-spirited batard de Roi, Marshal Saxe. ... To wrap it up pleasantly, in the quaint language of the turf, he would have started 100 to 1, and no takers, for the Continence Gold Cup. . . . His father (Augustus the Strong) was well called the Strong: he had 353 illegitimate children."

Early Bostonian: [There is] "a story told by Carl Schurz, who, during the American Civil War, on asking a sentry guarding his tent why he had not presented arms to a General who had just left it, received the answer: 'Why, sir, that General was never introduced to me.' '

Garibaldi: "His was an impulsive nature. He fell in love with his Anita at first sight. . . . His first words when they first met were: 'Thou oughtest to be mine'--which she incontinently was."

Nero: "Has not modern research proved that Nero (as if his character were not black enough already) while Rome was burning, played, not the fiddle, but the bagpipe?"

Women: "I find amongst many anecdotes [concerning women] a note of an Austrian General, who, in 1859, was savagely denounced by a French newspaper because he had put in an application to headquarters for belladonna* for the use of his men."

* Bella, beautiful; and donna, woman, in Italian.