REVIEW: Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors by Richard Holmes

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Note: This book review was originally written for an academic reading course on "total war". That conceptual focus is reflected in the review.

Total war as a concept requires, among its many facets, discussion of total mobilisation, which in turn requires insight into the men and women being mobilised for total war aims. Richard Holmes’s Soldiers contributes to that discussion by providing a social history of the British soldier, woven tightly around military history but centring the lives and structures of those who serve as contrasted to spotlighting the events they lived through. One aspect that Holmes highlights right from the beginning, is “not how much [the British soldier] has changed: but how little”. This is a meaningful statement to hinge the volume on. Conceptually, total war is best understood as a continuity, rather than a descriptor for a singular event or events. Holmes’s recognition that the centrepiece of fighting a total war – its manpower – must also be a continuity tracks well onto the framework and thus raises both the utility and the applicability of this book in the broader corpus of literature engaging with concepts of total war.