ARmy Rumour SErvice

‘We don't want to fight but by jingo if we do…
‘We've got the ships, we've got the men, and got the money too!
‘We've fought the Bear before... and while we're Britons true,
‘The Russians shall not have Constantinople…’
Chorus to Macdermott’s War Song, GW Hunt, 1878

The Dawlish Chronicles September 1877 - February 1978

The background to this novel is the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-8, of which I suspect most British people know little, perhaps not even that this where we got the word ‘Jingoism’. Vanner has clearly studied it in great depth, and appears to have the political and strategic background off pat. Briefly, Russia, on a pretext of saving her co-religionists in Bulgaria from Moslem atrocity and tyranny, attacked Turkey and pressed on in order to put the Ottoman Empire out of business once for all by taking Istanbul. It had tried and failed to do in the 1850s, but Britain and France decided that a Russia with unfettered access to the Mediterranean could not be tolerated, still less perhaps the chaos that would result from the resulting power vacuum in the Middle East.

Vanner’s hero, Commander Nicholas Dawlish RN, has been sent to Turkey to take charge of naval matters in the eastern end of the Black Sea and so help to frustrate Russia’s advance. Vanner has the technology weighed off, too, in his description of the warships of the time and their armament, and the action cracks along at a rapid pace, pulling the reader into such a credible narrative that one almost forgets this is fiction. The motivation of the British Government is thus to support Turkey covertly so as to avoid having to intervene overtly. Meanwhile both sides vie with each other in a litany of abominable atrocity against the adherents of the opposite religion, in a tit-for-tat that gets ever more extreme and brings incalculable suffering to non-combatants across the entire sphere of action. Dawlish has to square his conscience on this one because his duty to Britain requires him to fight for a morally indefensible regime. Johnny Turk was of course still in the massacre business in the 1920s.
...

.
I chose to review this book as the title is the motto of the Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, a Corps I spent more than a little time in. I thought it was going to be a new take on the history of my old Corps so dived right in but soon realised it wasn't the link was to the main character who was an armourer in REME who was discharged from service as a result of a courts martial.

Despite the somewhat misleading title, the book can be said to actually reflect the Corps motto as the main character Mark Harrison spends most of the book either engaged in fighting or scheming to get one over on his enemies, so calling the book “By skill and by fighting” whilst misleading in one way is totally accurate in another!

...

.
This is the first in a series of four books titled "The Kills" and it arrived in a bullet. Rather, what a five year old might imagine a bullet to look like. It is in fact a vaguely bullet shaped memory stick with the Kindle edition of the book and ‘enhanced AV content from the author’. More on this twaddle later.

The plot sounds OK. “This is Stephen Lawrence Sutler’s last morning at Camp Liberty, Iraq. In two hours a massive explosion will conceal the theft of $53,000,000. Sutler, shaken by the blast is forced to go the run”.

...