This book is the perfect present for the Guardsman in your life. It offers an authorised biography of the five regiments of Foot Guards and two of Household Cavalry from 1969 to the present day. In that half century the Guards have been under fire in Northern Ireland, the Falklands, Iraq, the Balkans and Afghanistan, with much of the time also spent maintaining a presence in West Germany.

These were busy years. Units of the Household Division took part in no fewer than 24 operational tours in Afghanistan between 2006 and 2013, many of them involving intense combat. At the same time, the Guards have also had to keep up a demanding schedule of ceremonial duties. Buttoning up their red coats, brushing off their bearskins and buffing their boots, they have not only appeared in major parades and processions such as Trooping the Colour and the King’s coronation but have also mounted daily guard outside the royal palaces. As Alice told Christopher Robin: ‘A soldier’s life is terrible ’ard.’

One of the strengths of this book is that it is an inside job. Commissioned by the Household Division, the authors are themselves former members of the Guards, know them well, and have enjoyed privileged access to many serving and retired officers. They whisk us behind the scenes of major events such as Elizabeth II’s funeral, and capture the atmosphere of institutions such as the now-closed Guards Depot at Pirbright, which were important waypoints in the lives of many Guardsmen.

The accounts of operations may sometimes be rather breathless, but there’s plenty of ground to cover. The care with which the authors have compiled the details of unit deployments and their commanding officers will please those who served. So will the large collection of mess-night tales, although as an outsider I confess that some of the anecdotes might have appeared more ‘life-enhancing’ had I been listening to them in distinguished company with a bottle of ’63 Graham’s, as Bruce Anderson did in these pages ten years ago (‘A military funeral for a heroic vintage’, 10 May 2014). The colour photographs in the book are excellent and there are maps for reference. 

The British Army is a bit like the Brazilian rainforest. From afar, it looks big (if shrinking), uniform and green. Up close, however, you can see that it’s actually a complex ecosystem of exotic species and tribes. At the top of the tree the Guards bask in the sun, resplendent in their scarlet and gold plumage. They manage to give the impression that they simultaneously represent the Army at its best and yet are somehow not really part of it. The joke that ‘You’re not in the army now, you’re in the Brigade of Guards’ is probably as old as the rank of sergeant-major.

The question of what makes them as special as they think they are is one that recurs throughout this book. The answer possibly lies in the close relationship the Guards enjoy with the royal family, the ceremonial role it involves and the demands that drill and public scrutiny make of the soldiers’ precision, professionalism and excellence. A sceptic might suggest that, while the success of the Guards is no doubt built partly on their ability to balance continuity and change, impeccable connections probably don’t hurt. Nothing builds an aura of infallibility as quickly as a hotline to the boss.

Readers hoping for gossip will be disappointed. Even old controversies such as the murder of Robert Nairac in 1977, the Sir Galahad disaster of 1982 or the rumours of occasional tactical shortcomings in Helmand tend to be either handled at light infantry pace or discussed so elliptically that only the best-informed will be able to follow. That is a shame. Much of this is ancient history now, and although most of what went wrong in Afghanistan was the fault of politicians and senior generals, not all of it was.

None of that is what this book is about, however. This is, in the words of the late Captain Professor Sir Michael Howard, who won the Military Cross with the Coldstream Guards in 1944, ‘nursery history’, by which he meant nothing disparaging at all. Nursery history introduces the young to the realities of life and is ‘a highly skilled affair’. Books of this kind are designed primarily to foster myths which present a ‘selective and heroic view of the past’ to sustain young soldiers through the muddle and horrors of combat, while reminding old ones of comrades and glories past. That, thought Howard, was a useful role for any book to fill, and it’s one that Those Must Be the Guards carries out with parade-ground precision.