I just found Forester’s “The Gun” and “Rifleman Dodd”. They were pretty grim, dealing more with the guerilla fighting and less with the conventional combat you give the reader. Part of the Forester voice is to stand back and remark on the situation.
Have you read them? What do you think of them?
I have to say I like the way you put the necessary historical context to the reader without obvious lecturing. It’s not easy.
I gave some young relatives Sutcliff’s trilogy published several years ago. I figured, no matter how educated they were, they needed four pages of history, or it may as well have been science fiction.
When Kipling introduces one of his Puck series by having Una–maybe twelve–shouting verses from Lays of Ancient Rome into the wind, Kipling presumes his readers know the poem and don’t find anything odd about a kid knowing it as well. But today, in the US…?
Thanks so much for building it into the novels so invisibly.
Richard Aubrey