Tried And Valiant: The Story of the Border Regiment1702 - 1959

by Douglas Sutherland

Leo Cooper [Published 1972, Hardcover, 239 pp. Black and white illustrations, color frontis-piece, index. [From front jacket flap] It is eminently suitable for a Regiment which can claim as one of its founding fathers that Sir Richard Steele who subsequently founded the Spectator and the Tatler to have chosen Douglas Sutherland as its final biographer; the military spirit and the literary muse are as admirably mixed in the latter as they were in the former. Though the tumult and the shouting are far from dead, the regiments, like the captains and the kings, have mostly departed and the Border Regiment, sadly, is no exception. Yet for over 250 years they served their country with a zeal and a devotion which others may claim to match but which none can claim to excel. The 34th of Foot, raised in 1702, and the 55th, raised in 1755, came together in 1881 to form the Border Regiment. The separate battalions had already seen service in nearly every corner of the globe in which it was the privilege of the British infantryman to freeze, swelter, sicken and die - the heroic deeds of the 34th at Arroyo-dos-Molinos and the honours won by the 55th in China being commemorated in the centre-piece of their joint capbadge, surrounded by the Fontenoy laurel wreath of the 34th. As Douglas Sutherland most ably shows the Regiment more than lived up to its glorious past in the two World Wars and many a Border soldier found his last resting place in the mud of Gallipoli or Flanders, and later in the heat of the Desert, in Sicily, in Burma and at Arnhem. In 1959 the Border Regiment was amalgamated with the King's Own Royal Regiment and, as the author says, 'for many old soldiers something very dear to them was passing out of their lives for ever.' This book is a tribute to those old soldiers and, hopefully, an inspiration to those who still cherish the 'Border' spirit.

239 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1972