At a time when the British Army is going through something of a crisis — plucked from the frying pan of Iraq only to be plunged into the fire of Afghanistan, with inadequate equipment, a lack of clear object- ives, mounting casualties and dwindling public support — it might not appear to be the best moment to publish a history of the Second Service’s achievements since the days of Cromwell.
Yet Allan Mallinson, a former soldier best known for his Matthew Hervey series of historical novels, has approached this book with a purpose: to explain how and why ‘his’ army has become what it is today — ‘extraordinarily capable in spite of its small size’ — by looking at the people and events that have shaped its past.
He rightly flags up the formation of the New Model Army — ‘superbly disciplined, equipped and trained’ — during the English Civil War as the model for the first royal standing army raised by Charles II in 1661 (the father of the modern British Army). But he is wrong to attribute the New Model Army to the vision of Oliver Cromwell; it was rather the brainchild of Sir Thomas Fairfax, the Commander-in-Chief of the Parliamentarian forces.
The author does, however, give due credit to George Monck, the former Cromwellian commander, whose march on London in 1660 made the Restoration — and the subsequent creation of the English (and later British) Army — possible. Monck believed it was his duty ‘to keep the military power in obedience to the civil’, and so have most British generals since. But not all have kept out of politics — as evidenced by General Dannatt’s recent comments on Iraq — and Mallinson might have had more to say on the subject if he had read Hew Strachan’s excellent Politics of the British Army.
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