It was probably inevitable that most of the press coverage surrounding this book has concentrated on the recent conflicts fought by Hew Pike and his son, Will, but that is unfair to the generous spirit in which it is written. In a recent newspaper interview both men were outspoken about Afghanistan, but if Hew Pike makes one thing clear it is that there is little in the political and operational confusion or inadequacies in equipment there that would have surprised earlier generations of the family. There are some rich discontinuities — a week’s honeymoon at Torquay in 1915 for £4-16-11, champagne on a 1942 troopship at 7/6 a bottle, a distinct lack of talk of ‘hearts and minds’ on the Aro Campaign — but it is the continuities that make this so moving a portrait of modern soldiering. Politicians might always be politicians, whether it is the Western Front or Afghanistan, but, as Reggie Tompson says — and there is a book title there — ‘Atkins always does’.

And so, too, does the extended Pike family. They are an opinionated lot — the book is full of complaints against ‘stuffed owls’, generals with ‘solid bone from the eyebrows upward’, ‘perfect old asses’ and ‘useless’ brigadiers — but they can fight and they can all certainly write. And they are all allowed to be heard too. Strung together by a self-effacing narrative that, written in the present tense, flattens perspectives and shrinks distance, the courage, frustrations and tragedies of four generations live with as much vividness as do Will Pike’s dispatches from Helmand. The result is a fine book that transcends family history to become a story of British soldiering over the last 100 years.

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