Soldiers Three

This early collection follows three roguish, hard-drinking British soldiers—Mulvaney, Ortheris, and Learoyd—through their comic and often poignant adventures in the barracks and battlefields of British India. Told in vivid dialect and rich with camaraderie, humor, and sudden pathos, the stories bring the common soldier of the Raj vividly to life. Kipling’s affectionate, unsentimental portrait of army life helped make his early fame. Lively and memorable, Soldiers Three captures the voices, hardships, and loyalties of ordinary fighting men with the immediacy that marked Kipling as a master of the short story and the great chronicler of the British soldier abroad.