Swordpoint (2011)
“Known to the rest of the army as ‘Dean’s Dandies’, because, in the days when a regiment was virtually the private property of its colonel, a certain Colonel Joshua Dean had lavished on their uniforms enough of his personal fortune to give them fashion parity with the cavalry, the North Yorkshires consisted of 22 officers and 642 other ranks. Or to be more exact, at that moment, 21 officers because Second-Lieutenant Marsden had overturned a jeep outside Caserta and been carted off to hospital with a broken leg; and 622 men because one man had died after an operation following a burst appendix in Naples, two men had fallen drunk out of the back of a lorry, and seventeen more had gone down with a recurrence of malaria contracted in Sicily and a variety of other illnesses. There were four rifle companies, the HQ company, and battalion headquarters, all ruled over by the awesome figure of the regimental sergeant-major who was appropriately named Mr Zeal.
‘When James VI of Scotland became J...ames I of England,’ Company Sergeant-Major Farnsworth of A Company liked to tell his men, ‘he and his court wore out their brogues on the journey south, so they sent a message back to Edinburgh asking for a thousand more.MoreLess
‘When James VI of Scotland became J...ames I of England,’ Company Sergeant-Major Farnsworth of A Company liked to tell his men, ‘he and his court wore out their brogues on the journey south, so they sent a message back to Edinburgh asking for a thousand more.MoreLess
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