Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research 99/397

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ARMY HISTORICAL RESEARCH

accounts from the men in the ranks themselves. Therefore, the after-action reports contain several accounts from private soldiers. This gave men at the lowest level of the command structure a voice. The addition of all ranks’ personal experiences of the Third Battle of Ypres, while written as official reports, are not a dry read. The anecdotes each individual put into his account show what was considered important by the brigadiers, captains, and lance corporals of the British Army in 1917. A theme that emerges from the lower ranks of the division’s infantry battalions after the Battle of Pilkem Ridge is the lack of ammunition available to them to repel the German counter attack. Men on the spot, with pips on their cuffs or without any rank, were able to articulate their experience effectively and clearly to their divisional leaders. For the subsequent action on the Menin Road, these complaints do not appear again. This is where the strength of the Lessons from the Mud lies: the amalgamation of every possible viewpoint from within a British infantry division in one of the most controversial campaigns of the First World War. J AMES T AUB Arlington, Virginia Thomas Greenshields’ Those Bloody Kilts is an excellent resource for anyone studying Highland soldiers and other kilted soldiers of the First World War—a welcome addition to the literature, as there is no other monograph focused on kilted units during those years. This extensive study begins with the 1880s, setting up the kilted units on the eve of the war, while the majority of the book focuses on a variety of issues faced by Highland soldiers during 1914–1918. This is not an operational history. The author covers the recruitment, organisation, and training of all kilted regiments—including those from Canada, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, including both the Liverpool and London Scottish—but the study largely deals with the social history of Highland units. Greenshields lays out in the introduction that he does not intend to debunk the image of the Highland soldier, but instead to present it ‘warts and all’ to the reader. This aim is certainly achieved. Not only does he present the mystique around the history and splendour of Highland units, he also shows the disadvantages of the cultural items, such as kilts and bagpipes, that helped distinguish Highland solders from the rest of the British Army. Despite this, the author offers little in the way of revision. Discussions of the soldiers’ backgrounds, recruitment, training and deployment are similar to those found in Timothy Bowman and Mark Connelly’s The Edwardian Army: Recruiting, Training and Deploying the British Army, 1902–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University THOSE BLOODY KILTS: THE HIGHLAND SOLDIER IN THE GREAT WAR, by Thomas Greenshields. Warwick: Helion and Company, 2019. ISBN: 9781912390267, pp. 520, £29.95.