This is a Victorian military record that reads like a regiment's living memory. Richard Cannon, a clerk at the Adjutant General's Office, assembled what remains the foundational account of the Twenty-second Regiment of Foot, the Cheshire Regiment, from its mustering in 1689 through the mid-nineteenth century. The record traces this unit through the wars that built and tested the British Empire: the Nine Years' War, the War of Spanish Succession, the Carnatic Wars in India, the Peninsular War, Waterloo, and beyond. Cannon draws on official returns, regimental orders, and eyewitness accounts to reconstruct not just battles won and lost, but the texture of soldiering itself, the long marches, the camp diseases, the particular courage of particular men on particular days. The narrative honors individual acts of gallantry while illuminating the collective spirit that defined the regiment. For historians of the British Army and descendants of Cheshire soldiers, this book remains an indispensable record of names, places, and deeds that might otherwise have been forgotten.
