A little diversion today; the other thing this blog is designed for are reviews of fictional military history, or fictional events in a military context and so it’s about time to do one.
On first inspection there isn’t much to interest the reader about Cornet Matthew Hervey; It’s drawing near the end of the Peninsula campaign of the Napoleonic Wars and Hervey is a junior officer in the light dragoons. He’s got none of the rough edges that make his peers (Sharpe in particular) so engaging – he’s a dutiful, honourable minor gentleman; speaks Greek, German and Latin, conscientious, well-educated, a firm favourite in the officer’s mess, popular with his men, God-fearing, never swears, loves his mother and father, adores his sister and secretly pines for the brunette beauty who lives down the road – he is, in short, a paragon of all the virtues and disgustingly perfect. So why is he so engaging?
The answer comes partly from his profession – being a soldier amidst the mud, blood and carnage of a Napoleonic battle was never the gentlest of occupations – but mostly from the way he interacts with other people, particularly said beauty. The son of a vicar is minor gentry himself and yet she is so far above his station it’s a wonder that he can see her petticoat, let alone anything else and the stumbling way that he pursues his adoration, deals with a rival suitor and gets wrapped in the enigma that she gleefully spins for him is enough to make anyone feel more than a hint of “I’ve been there myself, mate”.
It’s also the situations and the sheer scope of them that add to the intriguing nature of Mallinson’s first book. Hervey serves in Southern France, Ireland and England before the great denouement at Waterloo and runs into nuns, crofters, idiots, ex-cavalrymen, high aristocracy, churchmen, soldiers and a sergeant and groom who both speak a nigh-impenetrable strain of Tyneside.
It would have been all to easy and, one suspects, very tempting to pitch this epitome of an officer kicking and screaming into the Hellfire of Waterloo just to see how well he comes out of the other side – Bernard Cornwell does precisely this with Sharpe and his own fictitious regiment – and yet this ex-Colonel doesn’t. Hervey is despatched on a very sneaky sneaky assignment far removed from the smoke of the gunline and so therefore misses the great majority of it. In this he is fortunate, he survives, but does so only due to the self-sacrifice of a sergeant which leads to more wrangling with his conscience. This is actuallty more plausible than many books of this type and so resists the urge to turn this meek man into a hero who positively has to be in every major scrap regardless of what history actually records, thus avoiding the trap that Sharpe for instance and Aubrey for another seem to fall into on a regular basis. It also offers a plausible explanation of what you feel was going on behind the scenes on the 18th June, 1814; the link up with the Prussians and how adroitly it was done.
The best military fiction, especially, the historical type, is that written by once serving soldiers themselves, for they can provide a depth and an insight into the little nuances that a civilain will miss. Being an ex-cavalryman himself though of the armoured variety, Mallinson brings his knowledge of a modern army and translates it very well back in time for the simple reason that throughout history soldiers have always acted and thought like soldiers, the quintessential insiders’ club and completely unlike mere civilains.
We have here the horseborne equivalent to Hornblower of the Royal Navy and it’s about damn time.
8 out of 10
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