A Soldier of the Company

Abridged and introduced by Charles Allen from Albert Hervey's nineteenth-century memoir Ten Years in India, this book follows a young East India Company officer from his arrival at Madras in 1833 through his first decade with the 40th Madras Native Infantry. Hervey records barrack life, training, servants, hunting, social occasions and the routines of campaigning and travel in southern India.

His recollections capture the assumptions and contradictions of Company military culture before the uprising of 1857. The memoir is valuable precisely because of its immediacy: Hervey writes about the pleasures, frustrations and brutalities of colonial service from inside the system that sustained it. Allen's edited version condenses the original three-volume account while retaining its detailed portrait of an officer's early career.