'Reflections From The Bridge; The Victorian Sapper in Photographs', by Col. Keith H.Cima, published by Baron, in conjunction with the Institution of Royal Engineers, ISBN 0 86023 545 9, price £ 17.95.

Reflections From The Bridge is essentially a pictorial review of the role of the Royal Engineers in the Victorian era; it is crammed with photographs, and is sure to delight anyone who has ever felt the delight which comes with looking upon the faces of the men who actually made history. With an ingenuity worthy of the imagination of H.G.Wells, the Victorian Sapper was expected to build forts, blow them up, dig or fill in trenches, build bridges from an extraordinary range of materials, work under water, in the air, or at the end of a telegraph line, and all of it in countries and climates as different as the UK, India, Abyssinia, the Sudan and South Africa, and sometimes under fire. Colonel Cima's book presents each aspect of the Sapper's experience in a well-chosen selection of photographs, rich in incident, in the character of the faces of the men themselves, and in uniform detail.

Because the book is organised according to their skills and duties, the greater emphasis is on peace-time training and achievements, and the Victorian campaigns in which it was all put into practise are given only brief mention. Nevertheless, there are some fascinating pictures here, including a sequence of three showing the Prince Imperial of France fighting a mock duel with a fellow officer, not long before he sailed off to his fate in the Anglo-Zulu War.

There is at least one error in the captions, however; the photograph purporting to show troops at Rorke's Drift the morning after the fight most definitely does not do so; in fact the scene appears to be the ruins of the Zulu homestead in which the Prince Imperial was killed.

This point aside, this is an intriguing took at the men without whose work the Victorian army could not have functioned.

Reviews

Introduction
Fearful Hard Times: The Siege and Relief of Eshowe 1879
Lord Chelmsford's Zululand Campaign 1878-1879
But Burdens Shouldered; Anglo-Zulu War Graves and Memorials in the United Kingdom
Deeds of Valour: A Victorian Military And Naval Trilogy
Warrior Chiefs of Southern Africa
Fuzzy Wuzzy; The Campaigns in the Eastern Sudan, 1884-85
Buller: A Scapegoat?
Steam, Steel and Shellfire: The Steam Warship 1815-1905
Victorian Military Campaigns
British Campaign Medals: Waterloo To The Gulf
Guns of the British Empire: Firearms of the British Soldier, 1837-1987
Reflections From The Bridge: The Victorian Sapper in Photographs
Osprey Round - Up: Colonial Titles
Pony Wars Round-Up

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