Proud to serve as the cutting edge of empire

Alan Ross follows the long march of the Nepalese highlanders, from the first days of the Raj to Kosovo and East Timor

Imperial Warriors: Britain and the Gurkhas of Nepal by Tony Gould (Granta, £20 480pp)

Imperial Warriors: Britain and the Gurkhas of Nepal by Tony Gould (Granta, £20 480pp)

AS A child in Calcutta, I was driven past the Ochterlony monument almost every day on the way to my father's office. I had no idea who this towering column, with a Turkish dome on top of it, was in aid of; but I learn now, from Tony Gould's meticulous researches, that Sir David Ochterlony, half-Scots, half American, walked his 13 wives here on elephants. He was able to do so because, starting life as a military cadet in the East India Company, he had become, in his late fifties, the most successful British commander of the Gorkha war.

He is the hero of the first part of Gould's book, a brilliant tactician with, unusually, no taste for bloodshed. The Gurkhas, by habit mercenaries, were increasingly absorbed into the British service. They fought alongside the British at Malaun in 1815 and a year later, after a masterly campaign by Ochterlony, the Nepalese sued for peace. The Gorkha war was over.

Tony Gould, in tracing the Gurkha role in various wars over the next century and a half (they are in East Timor today and have rarely been out of trouble) has one great advantage which gives his story an affectionate, humanising flavour. He was, as a National Service soldier, a Gurkha himself. Indeed, for obvious reasons, the two chapters dealing with his own experiences among the Gurkhas - in 1957 and then researching this book - are among the most appealing.

There have been books galore about the Gurkhas. Gould lists nearly 200 he consulted - from regimental histories to Nirad Chaudhuri, from Field Marshal Slim to John Masters - but they tend to be by writers not soldiers, or by soldiers not writers. His own account has a pleasant detached feel to it, but one acutely aware of what it was like to be a Gurkha, whether an officer or in the ranks.

Alas, Gould's own relationship to the Gurkhas ended tragically, One day, out of the blue at Kowloon, he found on waking that he was unable to stand, let alone walk. He was diagnosed as suffering from polio and put into an iron lung.

Eight months later, he was returned to England and invalided out of the army. "I might have felt ambivalent about my fellow officers and military life in general," he writes, "but towards the Gurkhas my feelings were strongly romantic."

However, life in Britain had changed: "for the long-haired youth of the sixties, uniforms became fancy dress and Union Jacks decorative motifs for shopping bags... So I jettisoned my rifle-green blazer with its crossed-kukri buttons, hung up my regimental tie, put on an open necked shirt and pinned a CND badge to my denim jacket."

But the old allegiance survived Aldermaston and succeeding decades, as well as the debilitating effects of polio. One feels all through Gould's descriptions of Gurkha involvements in great and minor campaigns, of great deeds of valour and unfair treatment in status and pay, an identifying sympathy. Famous names drift through these pages - Jang Bahadur Rana, Orde Wingate, Balbahudur Singh, The Marquess of Hastings, Ranjit Singh, Prithwi Narayan Shah - each taking his place in the Gurkha story. But as well as writing this story in formal outline, Gould presents us with a host of individuals, lowly and mighty, in domestic situations, in the mountains of Nepal and the forested plains of the Terai.

The romance attached to the Gurkhas because of their valour is familiar to everyone, but their nature is complex. Emily Eden, sister of the Governor-General Lord Auckland, wrote "All the mountaineers are very small creatures, but they make excellent little soldiers. They beat our troops 25 years ago, and killed almost all the officers sent against them. Now they are our subjects they fight equally well for us, and were heard to say at Bharatour that they thought some of our soldiers were nearly equal to themselves."

Slim wrote to Auchinleck about their divided loyalties, despite the fact that they were a dissatisfied ethnic minority in their own country. "The ultimate loyalty of the Gurkha is not to India or England, but to his own country."

The British, according to a French officer at Dehra Dun in 1830, have no conversation - "they sit at table for hours on end after dinner, in company with quantities of bottles which are constantly going the round." Yet about the Gurkhas, not regarded as the most humorous or intellectual of races, he wrote "Why have I not a squad of them with me here! They would do more work and spare me more annoyance than all the rabble on foot or horseback with which I am saddled."

At the end of his long and absorbing book, Gould is inclined to agree: "From my own experience and observation I had no doubt that the spirit and traditions of the Gurkha regiments had touched all who had ever served in them, British and Gurkha, and made them the better for it." Brian Hodgson, the former Haileyburian polymath and the most influential British Resident in Nepal during the 19th century, described them as "somewhat choleric", but as steady and peaceable body of troops as any in the world, a combination of pride and docility "which I know not where to seek for a parallel in Asia".

Alan Ross is Editor of the 'London Magazine'