COMPANY
OF SPEARS
ALLAN MALLINSON
Also Allan Mallison
AND FEATURING MATTHEW HERVEY
A CLOSE RUN THING
1815: introducing Matthew Hervey, fighting for King and country
at the Battle of Waterloo.
‘I have never read a more enthralling account of a battle … This is
the first in a series of Matthew Hervey adventures. The next can’t
come soon enough for me’
DAILY MAIL
THE NIZAM’S DAUGHTERS
1816: in India Matthew Hervey fights to prevent bloody civil war.
‘Captain Hervey of the 6th Light Dragoons and ADC to the Duke
of Wellington is back in the saddle … He is as fascinating on
horseback as Jack Aubrey is on the quarterdeck’
THE TIMES
A REGIMENTAL AFFAIR
1817: Matthew Hervey faces renegades at home and in North America.
A riveting tale of heroism, derring-do and enormous resource in the
face of overwhelming adversity’
BIRMINGHAM POST
A CALL TO ARMS
1819: Matthew Hervey races to confront Burmese rebels massing in the jungle.
‘Hervey continues to grow in stature as an engaging and credible
character, while Mallinson himself continues to delight’
OBSERVER
THE SABRE’S EDGE
1824: in India Matthew Hervey lays siege to the fortress of Bhurtpore.
‘Splendid… the tale is as historically stimulating
as it is stirringly exciting’
SUNDAY TELEGRAPH
RUMOURS OF WAR
1826: while Matthew Hervey prepares for civil war in Portugal, he
remembers the Retreat to Corunna twenty years previously.
‘I enjoyed the adventure immensely … as compelling, vivid and
plausible as any war novel I’ve ever read’
ANDREW ROBERTS, DAILY TELEGRAPH
AN ACT OF COURAGE
1826: a prisoner of the Spanish, Matthew Hervey relives the blood
and carnage of the Siege of Badajoz.
‘Concentrating on the battle of Talavera and the investment of
Badajoz, both sparklingly described, [Mallinson]plays to his
undoubted strengths’
OBSERVER
COMPANY OF SPEARS
1827: on the plains of South Africa, Matthew Hervey
confronts the savage Zulu.
A damn fine rip-roaring read’
LITERARY REVIEW
FOREWORD
The historian Correlli Barnett (Britain and Her Army) describes how ‘thanks to their mercenary army’ Britain as a whole ‘would never feel the burden of world power in the Victorian age … The British could rage at military incompetence when the army they neglected (and never joined) suffered some disaster … they could presume to take pride in victories won despite their indifference. War became a noise far away.’
Matthew Hervey and the 6th Light Dragoons knew about noise far away: they had heard it well enough in India. But they also knew there could be noise at home – if not actual war then certainly something as repugnant, for in 1827 the Metropolitan Police Act was still two years off, and the magistrates’ only recourse was to the army when civil disturbance threatened.
There was Ireland too, restive in its condition of exploitative poverty and discriminatory legislation. Britons were divided over the Catholic question – giving Catholics the vote and removing the obstacles to holding public office – ‘Catholic Emancipation’. There were no riots against Emancipation yet, as there had been the century before; but there was suspicion, and the authorities had no certain idea where it would lead. There was, indeed, ‘noise’ enough to disturb a good night’s sleep from time to time, if not so much as to keep the country awake for too long.
So Matthew Hervey, thirty-six years old, and in the midst of that glorious metamorphosis from a regimental to a commanding officer, finds himself in noisy circumstances once again. And, naturally, he meets those who would put fingers in their ears rather than deal with the noise. For this is an age when change, change in the army, is regarded as unnecessary, perhaps even injurious to those regimental qualities that had assured victory at Waterloo: discipline, personal bravery and boldness in combat.
Meanwhile, in Prussia, a major general not very much older than Hervey – Carl von Clausewitz – who had fought the French that day in 1815, is putting the final touches to his penetrating study of war and its practice, so that if a Prussian army were again required to do its Kaiser’s will it would do so with absolute efficiency. And at the other end of the technological spectrum, in southern Africa, an instinctive soldier, Shaka, King of the Zulu, is consolidating his astonishing military successes; for in truth Shaka and Clausewitz speak the same military language.
It is these old questions and new threats that Matthew Hervey and the 6th Light Dragoons face, and whose new lessons and old truths they will have to learn and re-learn – painfully.
Allan Mallinson
July 2005
Rebuke the company of spearmen…
scatter thou the people that delight in war.
PSALM 68
PART I
PATHS OF GLORY
England
Plan of the Royal Gunpowder Manufactory at Waltham Abbey in 1830 by Frederick Drayson from his A Treatise on Gunpowder. The National Archive, ref. MFII 15/31
I
MANOEUVRES
Hounslow Heath, 12 March 1827
Acting-Major Matthew Hervey nodded to the adjutant, and in as many seconds only as it took for him, the officer in temporary command of the 6th Light Dragoons, to rein round to face front again, the first section of the Chestnut Troop discharged a thunderous salvo. Gilbert, his battle-charger, and at rising fifteen years a seasoned campaigner, threw up his head but did not move a foot. Hervey let out the reins a little so that the iron grey gelding could play with the bit as reward.