Excerpt from Territorial Soldiering: In the North-East of Scotland During 1759-1814

My Lord Duke,

If the Epistle Dedicatory has fallen into desuetude, the grim business of battle is so far front being in abeyance that we have been compelled to turn the poean of Peace with which the centenary of the Treaties of Paris and of Ghent was to have been celebrated into the pursuit of the greatest War the world has ever seen. And in the event, this book has been unconsciously transformed from a mere historical excursus into a practical demonstration of what our ancestors did to meet the national crisis of a hundred years and more ago.

That crisis has found Your Grace in the active ranks of recruiters, precisely as the menaces of 1759-1814 found your forefathers. You have spent your energy in summoning the youth of your Northern home to the colours. You have sent all your three sons to the front, losing the youngest of them almost within hail of Quatre Bras, to the field of which Wellington and his officers hurried from your great-grandmother's famous ball in Brussels. The gallant Regiment of Highlanders which your great-great-grandfather, the 4th Duke of Gordon, with the help of his incomparable consort, raised, has fought and bled on the fields of France and Flanders, as its predecessor fought at Quatre Bras and Waterloo, and your domains are sending more men and still more to fill up the gaps in its decimated ranks.

But Your Grace needed no such impetus as actual War to help you to carry on the traditions inherited from the Gay Gordons as well as from the line of Lennox.

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