The best novels about the British Army

I found this novel on a secondhand stall in Kenya when I was 18 or 19 and devoured it. Little known today, it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and later adapted by the BBC.

Judd relates a tour by a fictional British Army unit in Northern Ireland in some of the most violent days of the Troubles in the 1970s. The protagonist, Charles Thoroughgood, is an Oxford graduate at a time when most army officers were school leavers, and the book chants his increasing disillusionment.

My early edition featured on the cover – next to a crouching individual in combats toting a pistol on a lanyard – an endorsement from Jack Higgins: “Quite simply one of the best novels of army life I’ve read in years.” Higgins was right. 

I have a theory that great fiction about the British Army may require conscription – that system propelled individuals who otherwise would have never joined the military into the institution. They could then respond in writing in a manner that peacetime volunteers were never able to.

Evelyn Waugh, already in his late 30s when the Second World War was declared in 1939, was an unlikely soldier. However, he turned his experiences – notably in West Africa, Crete, and Yugoslavia – into a trio of fine fiction centered on a somewhat Waugh-like character, Guy Crouchback.

Waugh’s genius is to capture some of the eccentricities of army life – the discussion about the merits of porpoise skin as a material for boots will echo with anyone who has ever overheard, or participated in, an earnest discussion about the minutiae of kit. 

This is the one First World War novel in which the characters actually talk like soldiers – i.e., they swear. It therefore provides a powerful counterpunch to our usual notion of what the trenches sounded like.

The scalding language survived intact due to the book’s complicated publication history. Initial release in an anonymous volume available only for subscribers meant that Manning, an Australian who had served on the Somme, could sidestep the mores of his time.

The result was lines like this: "“Fuckin' slave drivers, that's what they are!” said Minton, flinging himself on the ground.  “What's the cunt want to come down ‘ere buggerin’ us about for, ‘aven't we done enough bloody work in th’ week?”” A bowdlerised version – “Her Privates We” – later followed, but the unexpurgated original is the one to read.

Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and T.E. Lawrence all praised Manning’s work.

Anthony Powell was another fundamentally unmilitary individual pushed into service by the demands of a world war.

However, while Evelyn Waugh depicts the run of regimental life and active service, Powell’s achievement in The Soldier's Art and The Military Philosophers, the seventh and eighth installments of his Dance to the Music of Time sequence, is to show the British bureaucratic war, the battle as (theoretically) run from Whitehall, with an equally acute eye. The central character - Nick Jenkins, a cipher for Powell - finds himself in a London desk job, a liaison officer to variously the Poles, Belgians, and Czechs.

On one occasion in The Military Philosophers an overextended memo - "three and a half pages on the theory and practice of soap issues for military personnel, with special reference to the Polish Women’s Corps" - is appended with the simplest yet most withering of comments. “Please amplify.” Anyone familiar with this kind of vicious paper combat will find something to recognise here.

In the interests of full disclosure, I knew Campbell at university so my judgment on this novel of the Afghan war cannot be fully impartial.

I found it powerful though. There are obvious overlays between the experience of Campbell himself and his central protagonist Tom Chamberlain – both serve in high-period Afghanistan as officers with cavalry units. (Campbell was in the Blues and Royals). That overlap grants the novel its authenticity – from its dissection of 'ally,’ British army slang for cool, to “rock star” bomb disposal officers capable of “squaring up to colonels” and coffins of blast victims reduced to a few scraps of ruined flesh subsequently weighed down with sandbags.

Campbell’s next novel, The Fires of Gallipoli, set in the First World War, will be out next year.