The Regiments of the British Army, Chronologically Arranged

This is a love letter to military memory, written at the precise moment the British Army was dismantling the regimental system that had defined it for centuries. Compiled in the late nineteenth century as reforms threatened to dissolve centuries of proud tradition, this volume attempts something urgent and bittersweet: to preserve the DNA of each regiment before reorganization erases them. Here are the Foot Guards who have stood guard at the Tower of London since Stuart days, the Highland regiments with their clan roots stretching back before Culloden, the Line Infantry who bled at Waterloo and Sebastopol and the Somme. Trimen chronicles not just battles and campaigns, but the subtler matter of identity: how a regiment's uniform, its marches, its battle honours, its very name carried meaning that no administrative reorganization could replace. For military historians, family genealogists tracing an ancestor's service, or anyone fascinated by the architecture of empire, this is both reference work and elegy, capturing the British Army at a hinge moment when its ancient structure was giving way to modernity.