Sword of the Raj : the British army in India, 1747-1947 /

Princes could live no better than we,"" wrote the martial young Winston Churchill from India, but this compact documentary overview of the Indian Army shows the rigors as well as the benefits of maintaining a standing force with native troops. Combining brief eyewitness extracts with commentaries, Beaumont, a military historian, sees a combination of the Crown tradition of ""muddling through""--least successful in the WW I period, perhaps--and successful use of the Indians' own martial traditions. The cruelty of dumdum bullets, baggagemasters whipping family camp-followers, and what George Orwell calls the ""stifling, stultifying"" club life in peacetime come through. Yet the general tone is one of pride and cheerfulness, as in Ronald Ross' report of his crucial discovery of the malaria parasite in 1897, the itemizations of regiments and their gigantic food supplies, the account of successful mobilization against the ""Russian bear"" on the northwest frontier. If Clive began in 1759 with an offhand reference to ""any number we please of black troops,"" Beaumont is not inaccurate in pointing to the army's centralizing contributions in ultimately fostering Indian nationalism. A tidy contribution through both its documents and explanatory efforts, and supplementary to Philip Mason's narrative history, A Matter of Honor (1974). Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.