Fusiliers, Eight Years with the Redcoats in America by Mark Urban Faber and Faber, HK$330 Americans are fond of pointing out to their British cousins that each exploding July 4 firework symbolises the snapping of a redcoated soldier's neck, and by extension, this was the war the British empire resoundingly lost. The colonies' struggle for independence was long and bitter, and by no means clear cut. Numerous histories have covered the events from Lexington Green in 1775 to the final surrender at Yorktown in 1781, but Mark Urban's Fusiliers is the first to consider them as a whole and from the simple perspective of the men aiming along the barrel of a British musket. And what men they were! The Duke of Wellington was later to describe British soldiers as 'the scum of the Earth' and indeed many were forcibly enlisted by the press gang, or as a sentence for committing petty crime. Volunteers were little better, persuaded to take the king's shilling after being plied with drink by recruiting sergeants, or driven into uniform by hunger and poverty. The phrase 'lions led by donkeys' originated during the first world war, but could be applied equally to the late 1800s when officers bought and sold their commissions, irrespective of leadership qualities or any merit, and received no formal training. Desertion was a frequent occurrence, perhaps because soldiers fell for local women or were offered the chance to live to fight another day but wearing a different uniform, or simply slipped into the backwoods to work on farms far away from the war. Yet despite being poorly fed, lousily billeted, ill paid - if at all - and assured of only the slightest medical attention when laid low by fever or enemy action, the soldiers (and Fusiliers follows the fortunes of that regiment, which is now on operations in Afghanistan) often did their country proud. Witness this exchange between an American colonel and a defiant, unarmed captive British corporal. Colonel Henley: 'You rascal, I'll run you through or I'll blow your brains out if you don't hold your tongue!' Corporal Reeves: 'By God, I'll stand up for my king and country, and if you have a mind to kill me, you may.' The colonel subsequently backed down; sadly, there is no indication of whether Reeves survived the war; however, his fighting spirit, and that of his comrades, were eventually to prove no match for the Americans and the remnants of the British forces set sail for England in 1783. One of the early lessons the British learned was that standing in long ranks and blasting away at the enemy was not a tactic to beat the Americans, who favoured sniping at the redcoated mass from behind cover, with deadly results. The army hierarchy was slow to mend its ways but a young second lieutenant, Harry Calvert, who fought in America and later rose to achieve high rank, becoming adjutant general in 1799, took heed of his early experiences. Calvert advocated important changes in strategy and was instrumental in the creation of a military training college. The battle of Waterloo in 1815, and many of the British army's later engagements, were not so much won 'on the playing fields of Eton', as the old adage runs, but as a result of the bloody skirmishes on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Fusiliers, Eight Years with the Redcoats in America is therefore both a personal view of Britain's war with America and an examination of the evolution of the British army as a whole. Urban, who is diplomatic editor of the BBC's Newsnight and who served briefly in the British army, did a great deal of research and turned up many previously unpublished accounts of the war, stringing them together in a single narrative that is at once arresting and illuminating. He is by no means the first military historian to do so - Robert Graves' biographies of the singular Sergeant Roger Lamb, who returned home and became a schoolmaster, were published in the 1940s - but Fusiliers covers the conflict from first to last.