Annual Booklist 2019 : A.L. Mallinson
Brig. Allan Mallinson is a retired British Army officer and author of the acclaimed Matthew Hervey series of novels about a cavalry officer in the wars of the early 19th Century; the most recent instalment, The Passage to India, won the inaugural SAHR Prize for Military Fiction. He has also written several non-fiction books on the British Army and its campaigns, most recently Too Important for the Generals: Winning and Losing the First World War (2017).
I keep going back, in both mind and hand, to Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and, for all its inaccuracies and saloon-bar opinionating, Graves’s Goodbye To All That, books which inspired and enriched me when I was first commissioned (into that most essential arm of the service). They can do no harm, as long as less brooding books such as Charles Edmond’s (Charles Carrington) A Subaltern’s War are read too, as well as, a fortiori, David Kelly’s wonderfully robust 39 Months with the Tigers. All were written by evidently capable soldiers, of high intelligence and great facility with the pen, during the British army’s greatest trial.
I am fascinated too by the army’s response to its shortcomings manifest in the Boer War (my first published piece of serious history, in History Today in 1992, was on the transformation of the cavalry in the decade that followed). One of the most revealing works on what officers thought were the faults and remedies is H.A. Gwynne’s The Army on Itself. Published in 1904, it is a report and synthesis of responses to the wide-ranging questionnaire that Gwynne, journalist and close associate of Kipling, had sent to officers just returned from the war. Besides the details of organization, equipment and tactics, and the expectations of war in the future, it reveals an impressive sense of professionalism among officers of all arms and services, which is at odds with the sometimes-amateurish image of the late Victorian military establishment.
Kipling knew India, but John Masters knew Indians. Masters writes about the Indian Army, of course, not the British, but in the Twentieth Century, even as late as the 1980s, you couldn’t have the one without the other. I think my favourite, if perhaps the least military, is Bhowani Junction, though I recently re-read The Ravi Lancers with much pleasure and profit.
Defeat into Victory is without question - surely? - the finest book on soldiering ever written. I first read it soon after being commissioned, just before going to the Jungle Warfare School in Johore, and the following year found myself commanding my platoon route-lining the streets of Windsor for the field marshal’s funeral. I re-read the book with every subsequent promotion, and am doing so again as I write this list, before flying to India for a “Slimfest” organized by today’s Indian army.
As for the book yet to be written, I’m going to be rather partisan. I recently re-read the diary of Julius Neave, adjutant of the 13th/18th Royal Hussars (Queen Mary’s Own) from 1941 to May 1945, the regiment I later joined and commanded. 13/18H’s were the first tanks ashore on D-Day – they swam 5,000 yards to get there – and Neave, a Special Reserve officer, kept a detailed and gossipy account of the eighteen months’ preparation, and the subsequent slog to the Baltic. Not so much unwritten therefore as unedited and unpublished. I think it would make a wonderful study of morale on the Second Front: a close-knit regiment of both experienced professionals, yeomanry transferees and war-commissioned and conscripted cavalrymen, all doing their damnedest to win the war while holding to the values and standards which had served so well in the inter-war years and helped the regiment recover from the shock of 1940.