I recently read with great interest Professor Ronan Fanning’s fair and balanced review (http://www.drb.ie/essays/generals-and-their-masters) of my book, Ground Truths: British Army Operations in the Irish War of Independence. He noted some minor errors and I will not quibble over my explanation suffering for the sake of brevity.
My reason for writing, however, is Professor Fanning’s comment about the “most egregious error”, the misspelling of the word “morale” as “moral”, which he notes “occurs with infuriating frequency”. Since both Professor Fanning in this review and Professor Charles Townshend in his of March 8th, 2014, mentioned this, I thought it appropriate to go on the record as it were to point out that, as I state in the prologue (p xvi), these spelling errors are original to the text. Indeed, the copy editor found all of them and I went back to the original document and verified each one.
During the discussions with the editors at Irish Academic Press, I raised the issue of the original errors in the text and whether they should remain or have a sic erat scriptum notation next to them. We decided that the work should be true to the original text, but that since the errors occur so frequently, they decided not to put sic in constantly, but rather to make a note in the introductory material. Clearly, this appears to have caused confusion.
Respectfully,
Bill Kautt
