1907. From here, he was posted to India, where he held a variety of commands, culminating in that of the Burma Division, the senior military officer in the colony, from 1912 to 1914. From 1914 to 1928 he was Colonel of the Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment. At the time of the outbreak of war, though still holding the Burmese posting, he was on leave in England. Personal life and writing In 1889, Pilcher married Kathleen Mary Gonne, daughter of Colonel Thomas Gonne of the 17th Lancers; her sister, Maude Gonne, later became a prominent Irish nationalist and mother of the politician and Nobel laureate Seán MacBride, as well as a close associate and muse of W. B. Yeats. Pilcher disapproved of his sister-in-law, particularly after her marriage to John MacBride, and relations were frequently strained; however, the two sisters remained close. The couple would have a daughter, Thora, and three sons – Toby, Tommy, and Pat. The elder son, Sir Gonne Pilcher ("Toby", to his family), became a High Court judge, while Tommy would be killed at the Battle of Neuve Chapelle in 1915, aged 21. Pilcher's marriage was not a happy one; a gambler and womaniser, he expected his independently wealthy wife to bail out his debts and turn a blind eye to his mistresses. The two gradually drifted into separate lives, and after finally confronted with an affair becoming public, Kathleen sued for divorce. The precipitating event was Pilcher having been named as co-respondent in a divorce suit; it was alleged that he had committed adultery with Millicent Knight-Bruce, the wife of Major James Knight-Bruce. The case dragged on through 1910, delayed by Pilcher's inability to return from India to attend the court. Pilcher did not contest his wife's suit, and his own divorce was granted in 1911; he married Millicent, now divorced, in 1913. Pilcher was a particularly active observer of the German army, studying their military methods and attending German army manoeuvres. He would later publish a translation of Clausewitz. His writing was sometimes controversial, beginning with the 1896 Artillery from an Infantry Officer's Point of View, in which he argued strongly in favour of adopting indirect fire techniques from concealed locations. Conventional doctrine held that artillery should be used to fire directly on its targets, as much from principle as from practical effect, with one prominent artillerist arguing that "firing from cover ... will destroy