Free Sahib by Richard Holmes Page A

here an analogy with port is painfully appropriate) however much I know how much the process will hurt I can never resist the opportunity of embarking upon it again.
    In my case it is not about money – or perhaps, more honestly, not mainly about money. Nor is it about the bubble reputation, for an approving letter from a reader always pleases me more than a good notice from a reviewer who has evidently not understood the book or, as is all too often the case, has not had time to read it properly. In part it is because, however little we like to admit it, many of us have one eye fixed on immortality, and when the Grim Reaper comes to my door (and I hope he will leave the visit as long as he decently can) I will at least know that I have done something which may transcend my Biblical three score years and ten. But it is really because I have apassion for my subject which age has not wearied nor the years condemned. I seldom slide the lid off a box of documents without my heart beating faster, and even now, sitting in a reading room with earnest scholars heads-down around me, I sometimes look up, savour the moment, and thank God for the privilege.
    The process of deciding what to write next is rarely simple. You are going to be stuck with the subject for a year or three, and so you ought to love it, for bald obligation is a hard taskmaster when the muse has flown, the deadline looms, and family life and the day job justly clamour for attention. I decided to write Redcoat, Tommy and Sahib not because of any complex intellectual process or careful search for those gaps in the literature which authors often seek to fill, but because (and I can almost seize the moment when it happened) I simply knew that I wanted to write about the British soldier and three distinct aspects of his evolution.
    ‘The process of deciding what to write next is rarely simple. You are going to be stuck with the subject for a year or three, and so you ought to love it, for bald obligation is a hard taskmaster when the muse has flown, the deadline looms, and family life and the day job justly clamour for attention.’
    As the idea hardened in my mind, long before I teased it out into synopses, I knew that the books would be different in flavour even if they were similar in terms of approach and source material. Redcoat would be easiest, for it was easy to become fond of that army of red serge and pipeclayed crossbelts. I would be revisiting battlefields that I had first known as a young man, and again meeting old friends like Kincaid and Costello, Harris and Wheeler, those busy diarists of the Napoleonic Wars. Tommy would unquestionably be the hardest. Indeed, had I known when I began the book just howpainful I would find the process I am not sure that I would ever have had the courage to start. The subject of the First World War still polarises not simply professional historians but the reading public too, and cataloguing the life of the British soldier on the Western Front constantly presented me with cases when my heart tugged me one way and my head another. I do not think that I will be able to re-examine that terrible war in the near future, and there are times when I think that I have written something out of myself; that part of me is a hungry ghost howling on the chalk uplands east of Longueval.
    ‘I decided to write Redcoat, Tommy and Sahib not because of any complex intellectual process or careful search for those gaps in the literature which authors often seek to fill, but because I simply knew that I wanted to write about the British soldier and three distinct aspects of his evolution.’
    Sahib was never going to be as painful as Tommy nor as familiar as Redcoat. I knew the Indian subcontinent relatively well, from a first visit in 1976 to recent trips in the footsteps of the future Duke of Wellington, and I had ridden a curmudgeonly grey Afghan pony across a great tract of the North-West Frontier. There were several familiar friends from