Hunting the French fox
Patrick Skene Catling
AN ACT OF COURAGE by Allan Mallinson Bantam, £16.99, pp. 366, ISBN 0593053400 ✆ £14.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 Which of the acts of courage does the title mean? In the Peninsular War, there were so many it’s hard to choose. In the seventh volume of the Matthew Hervey saga (a novel well able to stand alone), Allan Mallinson’s protagonist is a hero among heroes, when the cavalry was the cavalry and his regiment, the 6th Light Dragoons, Princess Caroline’s Own, seems in retrospect to have been an order of chivalry.
Young Matthew, son of a country parson, was recently ‘an ink-fingered boy at Shrewsbury School’. Now he is a cornet, the most junior cavalry officer, in Wellington’s army. He is already a veteran of the famous retreat to Corunna, where the regiment had to destroy all its horses before sailing back to England. And now, at the age of 18, in 1809, he is about to take part in the battle of Talavera, against the French in central Spain, the greatest military action since the days of Marlborough.
Regimental morale is high and Hervey is eager for the fray,
to be in the middle of it! With what pride might he write home that evening! . . . Hervey felt his stomach churning. He could hardly contain his delight. . . Hervey fancied there could be few finer sights than 1500 sabres on the move.
Of course, there were setbacks. For example, one fellow had his head blown off by French artillery. Another was disembowelled. Hervey even lost one of his two beloved horses. But, after three years of hard campaigning on meagre rations in bad weather, he confronts the French musketry and bayonets and other hazards of the third siege of Badajoz, near the Portuguese border, with undiminished boyish zeal.
Mallinson served in the British army for 35 years. He commanded one of its oldest cavalry regiments and attained the rank of brigadier. His own obvious pride and expert knowledge have enabled him to combine romantic nos talgia with convincing realism. With the aid of three maps, his detailed account of strategic intentions and tactical troop movements can be followed easily enough even by lay readers. He makes Hervey’s regimental loyalty, courage and ambition for glory and promotion believable, although, in 2005, difficult to understand. Hervey might have said, without irony, ‘Oh, what a lovely war!’ Passages of military exposition are coloured by lively dialogue, in the formal precision of gentlemen’s early 19thcentury diction and the yokel burblings of masterful NCOs apparently recruited in farmlands. Senior officers bring to battle analogies from the hunting field, to which, one day, survivors hope to return. One commander warns Hervey that
there will be no bolting Reynard and running him fast to kill. Believe me, Hervey, these French marshals will show us more foxery than you’d see in a dozen seasons in Leicestershire!
Yes, there are xenophobia and snobbery in the mess. They, too, are depicted realistically, yet, it seems, with a hint of wry humour.
There are some nice touches of esoterica, especially displaying details of equine husbandry. Hervey’s sturdy little mare is prescribed ‘marshmallow ointment. It will keep her feet from crack ing.’ Mallinson provides musical notations of bugle calls. When the commanding officer lowers his telescope and orders the dragoons to turn about, his trumpeter blows ‘falling crotchets, G, E, C, G, dotted quavers and semis on C then E, and a long C for the executive’. How’s that for expertise?
There is a court-martial when a brother cornet, a bibulous Galway squireen an absolute rotter, actually — has the effrontery to charge Hervey with assault. Sixteen years later, our hero, a widower, finds himself a military prisoner in Spain, with a prayer book to enforce his feelings of guilt for having committed adultery and neglected his daughter. The situation is discouraging until he discovers he can convey the password of the week in a Greek acrostic to an officer at liberty who was a friend at school, thus accustomed to Greek word-games.
The moral of the Matthew Hervey series is plain. Mallinson deplores recent cuts in the infantry, which will end the honourable history of regiments such as the Royal Scots, Green Howards, Cheshires, Royal Welch Fusiliers, Black Watch and others. ‘From the long perspective of military history,’ he writes, ‘which is the perspective of my tales, it appears there is but one unvarying lesson of war: there is never enough infantry. Vide Iraq.’
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