Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket

The battlefield museum of Waterloo, Richard Holmes comments in Redcoat, tells us much about Napoleon, Wellington and their senior commanders but far less about the men they led. Holmes aims, in this massively researched history, to redress the balance. He does so by piling up facts, information and anecdotes, many of them culled from memoirs of the period, to illustrate the everyday life of British soldiers in the 18th and 19th centuries, from the Battle of Blenheim to the Crimean War. In the hands of a less gifted historian this might have made for a dry, daunting and overpowering text. Holmes, however, has a sharp eye for the telling details and the memorable stories that bring the past to life. He pays as much attention to the small-scale as to the larger picture: a soldier is promoted because "his beautiful black eyes and whiskers had attracted the notice of his colonel's lady"; Crimea-bound infantrymen play cricket in "what the scorebook calls Sultan's Valley, Asia Minor"; black musician-soldiers enrich the repertoire of a regimental band; a respected military surgeon is revealed, after death, to have been a woman dressed as a man. Yet Holmes is always aware of that larger picture and of the hardships and dangers of the military life. His chapters on the floggings and punishments inflicted on the common soldier and on the terrible wounds that battle could bring--which again make vivid use of period memoirs--are often very moving. Anyone wanting to find out how the ordinary soldier of the 18th and 19th centuries was recruited, how he was drilled, how he fought, how he lived and (often) how he died, need look no further than this impressive work of popular history.

Richard Holmes
Paperback 400 pages 2002