M R D Foot
Fighting Talk
The Making of the British Army: From the English Civil War to the War on Terror
By Allan Mallinson
Bantam Press 550pp £20 order from our bookshop
Brigadier Mallinson spent over thirty years in the army, first as an infantryman, then in light cavalry; he commanded the 13th/18th Hussars for four years, and his last post was as defence attaché in Rome. He retired to a life of authorship, and has written a number of historical novels about nineteenth-century warfare. His latest book, strictly historical, begins in 1642 on Edgehill, with mostly amateur soldiers fighting the opening battle of the war that cost Charles I his head, and goes right through to the present day, when the individual volunteer professional soldier belongs to a much more sophisticated unit, with equipment undreamed of in the 1640s but with some ideas in his head that were first instilled into the national consciousness during the Civil War.
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