As a follow-up to Robin Room's recollection about Susanna Barrow's story of the fighting abilities of soldiers after imbibing alcohol, I wanted to point out that this was a classic experiment taken up by the temperance movement at the very beginning of this century, and copied in Germany and other countries. The original was a 1903 investigation in the Swedish army, carried out by Lieutenant Bengt Boy, testing the marksmanship of soldiers on days when they drank only water, and when they drank alcoholic beverages. The Bavarian army, after being pestered by Professor Emil Kraepelin, grudgingly agreed to duplicate the experiment, and had soldiers shoot a total of 34,000 rounds on 16 consecutive days, but came to the conclusion that drinking alcohol made no difference whatever to their marksmanship. "Our squads, trained to strict discipline and will power, resisted the influence of the proffered dose almost entirely. It may be a different matter with less well-trained soldiers (perhaps those of Lieutenant Boy"! More on this in my still-to-be-completed book on alcohol in Germany. And the outline for the course I am teaching this semester on "Alcohol in History" can be seen on my homepage, as a contribution to that discussion. Best wishes, Geoffrey Giles Professor Geoffrey J. Giles Department of History P.O. Box 117320 University of Florida Gainesville FL 32611-7320 Phone: (352)-392-0271 Fax: (352)-379-0935 E-mail: [log in to unmask] Home pages: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/ggiles/