Rifles - Mark Urban

Mark Urban's Rifles: Six Years with Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters is a history of the 95th Rifles, the legendary Green Jackets, who were at the forefront of the change in infantry tactics in the 19th Century.

I'm a little hesitant to recommend this book. If you're interested in military history, Wellington's Peninsular Campaign, unit histories or men at war in general you'll pick it up. It is a good read but it is somewhat flawed. Any description of a battle and the men that fight in them demands well presented contextual material such as maps, orders of battle and brief campaign histories. There are maps in this book they but they are tiny representations of maps from the period, beautiful and finely detailed but presented in half a colour plate and lacking useful keys. There is no campaign map and I was often forced to retreat to a biography of Wellington to get the context I needed to understand the book.

Urban comes across as one of those passionate and detailed writers and his prose is at times confusing. I often lose track of characters/figures in the story and find myself scrabbling to the index or the start of the book to get an idea of who this person or that person was.

I feel terrible becasue I have harped on the negatives. Urban is at a disadvantage with his source material compared to someone like Stephen

Ambrose (Band of Brothers) because all of his subjects have been dead for some 150 years. He uses his source material (letters, journals, official histories) skillfully and weaves a gripping tale of hard campaigning, tough men and hard fighting all to remove the 19th Century's menace of the Century, Napoleon. Unit histories humanise the higher level campaign histories that most people read and often bring the reality of war to the front.

If you read Band of Brothers, or you have read Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels this is a good read.