This was a challenging yet fun book. I started with the same question that I had with the Greece and Roman guides, namely 'Would anyone, after reading this book, feel that they might actually have been there and done that?' Getting the answer to be 'yes' involved poring over some very dry technical material relating to papyri and archaeological discoveries, combining this with the experiences of re-enactors who can relate their own personal interactions with the material, and adding a certain world-weary cynicism by swapping sandbag stories with veterans of half-a-dozen different modern armies.

The result was a much more varied research experience than required for the average book. With boots, for example, the first thing I discovered was their central importance in the life of any foot-soldier. Then it was off to look the actual caliga itself (There's a good example in the French Archaeology Museum near Paris if you are interested) and examine pictures of the blisters of a re-enactor who had just discovered the importance of getting the edges of the straps filed down.

This was also a book I could relate to at a more personal level, having done a fair bit of walking under a heavy pack while unfriendly locals took pot shots at me. In every modern army I've found that individuals had pride in their unit and their fellow troopers were often as close as family. However, that pride was invariably mixed with frustration that things were not even better, and family is not necessarily the same as friends. From the glimpses we get of life in the Roman legions - for example from military tombstones or excavated letters - it seems things were not much different back then, and this helped to inject realism and a sense of personal experience often missing from more technical treatments of the subject.