Third in line to the throne, but in line with his fellow soldiers for makeshift showers and active duty in the frozen deserts of Helmand, Prince Harry has for nearly four months been doing “the soldiering that I want to do”. He has also been “a credit to his nation” and an embodiment of the simple principle that the Army is a professional fighting organisation whose every member observes the same rules. Whatever his orders now that his deployment has become a global story, Troop Commander Wales has earned yet another accolade - that of inspiration to his comrades in arms.

General Sir Richard Dannatt's decision not to allow Prince Harry to deploy to Iraq last year was the right one. However invidious it seemed, to critics of royal privilege and to the Prince himself, it was based on an assessment of the risk his presence would have posed to his entire unit. That assessment's conclusion, in blunt journalese, was that his status would have rendered him a “bullet magnet”, raising the likelihood of death or injury that might otherwise have been avoided. General Dannatt would have had to answer for those casualties.

The decision to revisit such a delicate issue and to deploy to Afghanistan in secret was also right - and imaginative and bold. It reflects well on the Army for taking a clear-eyed view of Prince Harry's usefulness not just as a joint terminal attack controller (for that has been his role, co-ordinating groundtroops' movements with those of fast jets above them) but as a strategic asset. In the Falklands conflict, and down the centuries before it, members of the Royal Family have fought in Britain's wars with varying degrees of distinction but almost always with a morale-boosting effect that is no less real for being hard to measure. If civilian readers of this newspaper feel a swelling of old-fashioned pride on hearing of the Prince's service in his forebears' footsteps, that will be as nothing compared with the pride felt by those in uniform.

Prince Harry's tour in Helmand also speaks well of him. His months in the desert have been hard, and hard-won. He made no secret of his determination to fight in Iraq with those with whom he trained, nor of his bitter disappointment at being barred from going there. But he obeyed the order to stand down, resisted the impulse to leave the Army altogether, and did what he knew the Service expected of him; he turned right and carried on. His reward has been the most sustained period he has known, and may ever know, of living to exactly the same norms as those around him. He recognises this. He has relished being “a normal person for once”. That his experience of normality will only be shared by others who have served in the gunsights of the Taleban in winter makes his remark poignant, but not inaccurate.

His tour of duty has been made possible by a rare compact with the British media. Notorious, sometimes rightly, for pushing the boundaries of public figures' privacy to breaking point, Britain's newspapers and broadcasters kept this compact until a US outlet broke it yesterday. General Dannatt's disappointment at the collapse of his worldwide embargo is understandable. Yet for it to have lasted so long is little short of miraculous. Now that his presence on the front line is in the public domain, the principles applied for Iraq should apply in Afghanistan: security comes first. That does not preclude future tours, but if it means this one is over, it has already served a noble purpose.