Excerpt from On Secret Patrol in High Asia
Back in the last century a young subaltern, afterwards known to fame as Sir Harry Lumsden, raised in India a peculiar corps. Its name was strange and new in the army, for he called it the Corps of Guides; its uniform was stranger still, for at a time when all were clad in scarlet or blue or green, Lumsden clothed his men in a uniform of his own invention, the very same khaki which these long years afterwards has become the fighting kit, not only of the British Army, but of the armies of more than half the world. Again parting from tradition, instead of raising a regiment of cavalry or a battalion of infantry this new corps was composed of cavalry and infantry combined, in which the officers, and if they so wished the men, were interchangeable. Thus an officer might be heading a cavalry charge one day and leading an infantry assault the next. But there was a still deeper inspiration in Lumsden's mind. The corps was to be composed not only of picked fighting men whom he could be assured "would not be taken aback in a sudden emergency," but which could produce from amongst its numbers trained explorers and military reconnoitrers who singly or in small bodies could undertake the most hazardous and distant adventures, bringing back fairly accurate maps, as well as military, political, and geographical information.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге On Secret Patrol in High Asia (Classic Reprint) (Latham Valentine Stewart Blacker)