The title story finds Martin testing a river for industrial pollution. His phlegmatic diligence is enlivened by Ewa, a waitress at whom he makes a cumbersome pass before retreating back to his western life, and her bounding son Jacek. Their difficult circumstances are clarified when they reappear in the long closing story, “Second Best”.”The Crossing”, in which a woman struggles to get her family across a bridgeless river in a war-torn landscape, is the most curious selection. “Reach” explores the intractable difficulty of a woman struggling to make a latch-key daughter attend school while she manages her hair salon. “Blue” is a deceptively quiet account of young Kenny, feathering the nest of his new flat in the hope that his pregnant girlfriend will move in.
There is a rump of five stories set mostly in Eastern Europe. The book is full of secret codes, camouflage and “dodges” that reflect Baden-Powell’s skill at sublimation.He was accused of trying to “foster among the boys of Britain a bloodthirsty and war-like spirit”, a criticism he answers in the section Militarism. But his genius was that, rather than set out a harsh tract of indoctrination, Scouting is an assemblage of the touching elements of lost boyhood.

Racial superiority is not asserted by vilifying indigenous people, but co-opting them into the “Game”. The colonised are seen as noble savages happily contributing to their own subjugation. The narrative of imperialism is rendered into a camp-fire yarn. “Boys are full of romance,” he writes, “and they love ‘make believe’ to a greater extent than they like to show.” The success of the Scout Movement was the victory of his own hard-fought dream of youth.

He tracked the precarious frontiers of his own imagination and infantilised the Empire into a dominion of innocence.Jake Arnott’s latest novel, ‘Truecrime’, is published by Sceptre (£10.99). A four-part adaptation of his debut, ‘The Long Firm’, is scheduled for the summer (BBC2).. Warfare is nothing if not inclusive, and large-scale conflict over the past hundred years has reliably brought men of varied skills and dispositions to their potential, if also often to their death. Although combat is usually a group activity, quiet loners can find their place too, both vicariously and otherwise. Some fantasise themselves generals, others dream that they could join an ?te commando team, but the advent of accurate, long-distance firearms allowed even nerds to think they might make great warriors so long as they had a sure aim. They imagine roaming the battlefield beyond the orders of superiors, making a contribution that might not always be understood by the general soldiery.Such readers will be alternately inspired and discouraged by this brief history of the sniper. Alongside the romantic duels of the kind portrayed by Jude Law and Ed Harris in Enemy at the Gates is a description of the sharpshooter as outcast as much as free spirit.
Until recently, snipers had been seen as unfortunate necessities by comrades.