in the boys choir. Roderick served in the South Wales Borderers in the Gallipoli campaign of World War I, and was awarded the Military Cross. Eventually he achieved the rank of major-general. A daughter, Enid, was born in 1890, and a second daughter was born in 1894 and died the same year. Education and career Petre was educated at Oscott College, and called to the Bar by Lincoln's Inn in 1873. The next year he competed in the examinations for the Indian Civil Service, in which he was placed fourth of the top thirty. Initially he served in the North-Western Provinces, and later in Oudh. From 1885 to 1889, he was at Hyderabad, in the Political Department. He also served in the Secretariat of the Indian Board of Revenue. Upon his retirement in 1900, he was Commissioner of Allahabad. While serving in India, he published several articles on Indian politics and culture, and on the progress of the central states of India. In 1888, his article on "Progress and Prospects of Native States of Central India" was published in the Asiatic Quarterly Review. After retirement, he maintained his interest in India Affairs: he regularly attended the meetings of the East India Society, a group of civil servants and military men who had served in the Far East and India, and of which he was a member of the governing council. In 1901, he presented a paper, The Indian Sectarists and their Relation to the Administration, which was published in the Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review. In 1907, during the civil turmoil in India, he wrote to the editor of The Times (London) to clarify the problems faced by local police forces in maintaining civil order in the Indian Provinces. Military historian On his retirement from the Indian Civil Service, his interest in the Napoleonic Wars led him to seek out studies of the European campaigns. The lack of English language studies on the wars, particularly the campaigns of 1806 and 1807, encouraged him to write both Napoleon's Conquest of Prussia 1806 and Napoleon's campaign in Poland, 1806–1807. The latter, originally published in 1910, has been reprinted in several additions, the most recent in 2001 by Stackpole and Greenwood Press. His Napoleon's Conquest of Prussia 1806, first published in 1901, entered three editions: in 1907, by J. Lane and in 1914; its 1907 and subsequent editions contained an introduction by the