Hints and tips:
...Last year, Tevita Lavaki, a former lance corporal, had his house raided by Thames Valley Police’s rural taskforce, which found £18,000-worth of sperm whale teeth....
...(When he arrived at his first unit 30 years ago, he tells me, “an ‘old sweat’ hairy-arsed corporal said I looked like the cartoon character. I didn’t.”)...
...Wellington gave the Hanoverian unit the task of defending La Haye Sainte, a farmhouse at the centre of the Allied line....
...At the climax of the book, his unit is shelled with shrapnel and explosive from formidably accurate Russian field guns....
...Lance Corporal Swofford takes his epigraph from Ezra Pound’s cantos - not a work passed out with the MREs (meals ready to eat) in the Corps, one suspects....
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