Captain Buchanan has done me the honour of asking me to write a short preface to a work which seems to me at all events of peculiar interest. To write a preface is a difficult task, unless one has some real raison d’être for the task; yet I find it difficult to refuse, if only for my intense admiration for the part played by the battalion with which the author was so long and honourably associated—the 25th Royal Fusiliers.
The author’s qualifications to write this work are undoubted, not only from his stout record as a soldier, but also through his previous experience as a traveller, explorer, and student of Natural History. When war broke out Captain Buchanan was engaged on behalf of the Provincial Government of Saskatchewan, Canada, in investigating the country in the far north, west of Hudson Bay, and studying and collecting the rarer flora and fauna. He had been for nearly a year many hundreds of miles out of touch with any other white man. The first rumour of war did not reach him until the end of October, when he at once struck south to a Hudson Bay Fort, which he reached at Christmas. Without delay he left to join up, and in but a month or two had changed his habitat from almost the Arctic Circle to the Equator.
