MAN OF
WAR
ALLAN MALLINSON
ALLAN MALLINSON
Allan Mallinson is a former cavalry officer. Besides the Matthew Hervey series, he is the author of the recently revised and updated Light Dragoons, a history of four regiments of British Cavalry, one of which he commanded. He is also a regular reviewer for The Times and the Spectator, and defence commentator for the Daily Telegraph.
For more information on Matthew Hervey, please visit his website on www.hervey.info
www.rbooks.co.uk
Also by Allan Mallinson
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’ 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
MAN OF WAR
1827: at home and at sea, crises loom.
‘As tense, exciting, vivid and gory as we’ve come to expect from this master of military fiction’ SPECTATOR
MAPS
The Mediterranean and the course of HMS Prince Rupert, 1827 (page 16).
The Allied Squadrons and the Turkish Fleet at Navarino, October 20th, 1827 (page 378).
FOREWORD
1827
‘Soldiers and sailors are always acceptable in society,’ says Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park. But, says Kipling a century later:
In times of war, and not before,
God and the soldier men adore;
When the war is o’er and all things righted,
The Lord’s forgot and the soldier slighted.
Certainly army officers, especially when in regimentals, remained acceptable in society after Bonaparte had ceased his great disturbing. It was the rank and file who all too quickly regained their status as ‘the brutal and licentious’. Sailors were spared this ignominy to some extent, for when they were not at sea they did not greatly trouble the country – at least not beyond a few ports. Their officers may have lost a little status (in the opinion of Sir Walter Elliot of Kellynch Hall they had, of course, possessed little in the first place), but the relative fortunes of the army and the Royal Navy were anyway changing. Traditionally, Britain had entrusted her prosperity and safety to her ‘wooden walls’, the ships that kept the seas safe for her merchantmen, and saw off the periodic threats of invasion. There was a hearty fear of a standing army and the expense and hazard of continental campaigns. And this was no less so, to begin with, in the war with revolutionary France. The death of Nelson had moved the fleet and the nation; the ‘band of brothers’ – Nelson’s captains – and their younger siblings had not imagined, however, that their service would soon be eclipsed by men in red coats ashore. After 1808, when Bonaparte’s invasion of the Iberian Peninsula gave Britain her chance to come to grips with the real Napoleonic engine of war, the Grande Armée, Trafalgar became rather a distant, if hallowed, memory; Salamanca, Talavera, Vitoria – these and others were the names that thrilled an Englishman in the decade that followed. And then the greatest of them all – Waterloo, the Iron Duke’s culminating victory, which sent Bonaparte to his distant, fatal exile, and ushered in the concert of Europe on which an everlasting peace was to be built.
Now, however, in 1827, two decades after Trafalgar, the pendulum of military fortune was swinging back: it was His Majesty’s ships that would again make war in the cause of peace and of liberty; the slave trade was being vigorously suppressed, and a triple alliance of Britain, France and Russia would oblige the Turks to quit Greek waters – the very cause for which Byron had died in the Peloponnese, and which philhellenes throughout Europe had long promoted. The Royal Navy was at last resurgent. Men like Matthew Hervey’s friend Captain Sir Laughton Peto, who had thought themselves beached, would have their chance once more.
But what of those in red coats? There were certainly far fewer of them than at any time in the life of all but the most grey-haired. Many were gaining a good dusting in far-flung corners of the growing empire; Hervey’s own uniform, though blue not red, had had a good dusting in India, and of late in the Cape Colony. But the growing use of the army to police the nation’s agrarian, industrial and political unrest made the cavalry unwelcome in some quarters (‘Peterloo’ was on the lips of many a rabble-rouser yet, and in the pages of the radical press). And when the explosive element of Catholic emancipation was added, coupled inextricably as it was with the condition of Ireland, society at times looked distinctly brittle. The old order was changing; the statesmen and soldiers who had brought Bonaparte to his knees and had managed to keep a lid on the unrest during the economic depression that followed were passing. New men gilded the ancient games.