Christmas 1826, and Captain Matthew Hervey of the 6th Light Dragoons is a prisoner of the Spanish, incarcerated in the infamous fortress of Badajoz. As he plans his escape, his thoughts return to the year 1812 when he was a cornet in Wellington’s Peninsular Army. He and the Sixth had survived Corunna to endure three more years of brutal fighting that would culminate in one of the most vital, and vicious, confrontations of the campaign: the siege of Badajoz…
And while Hervey paces his prison cell and relives the bloodshed of battles past, friends from unexpected quarters are rushing to his aid…
We here continue the story – or stories, for the book is partly one of recollections – begun in the previous Hervey volume, Rumours of War (though An Act of
Courage stands on its own).
1812 is a year perhaps best known for Bonaparte’s disastrous march on Moscow and his defeat by that most perennially reliable of Russian generals, ‘General Winter’. Or perhaps 1812 is also remembered for that extraordinary and sad outbreak of war between Britain and the United States. But as far as Britain’s war with Bonaparte was going, in the Iberian Peninsula, the only place His Majesty’s armies could come to grips with those of France, it was still touch and go.
In the four years following the ‘Emperor’s’ improvident invasion of Spain, redcoats had advanced deep into the interior on several occasions, supported erratically by Spanish armies, ferociously by Spanish guerrillas, and with increasing effect by British-led and equipped Portuguese troops, only to be pushed back as often into Portugal, or to be evacuated by the Royal Navy. It was, indeed, a most crablike progress, cautiously directed by Arthur Wellesley, Marquess (later Duke) of Wellington. But war in the Peninsula was drawing in French troops on a ruinous scale. It was to become known as Bonaparte’s Spanish ulcer.
However, the British too were becoming tired: men were wondering where – or whether – it would all end. And in London there were questions about just how vigorous was this ‘Tory general’, Wellington.
In 1826, Major Matthew Hervey can look back with the benefit of hindsight: by 1814 the uncertainties of the Peninsular campaign were resolved – and in 1815, at Waterloo, they were settled for good. Or perhaps not quite, for in the aftermath of ‘the never-ending war’ Europe was settling down to peace rather unevenly. Some countries had returned to ways even more reactionary than those of the Ancien Régime which revolution in 1789, and Bonaparte’s wars since, had meant to sweep away. This suited London no better than had Bonaparte’s regime, and yet the question was: ‘what to do?’ Would intervention work, or was Britain too exhausted (and too stretched by growing imperial commitments) to intervene at all? Portugal, her oldest ally, looked bent on civil war. Some thought Spain might follow. And what would France do then?
If Britain was not actually at war, she could not think of herself as being wholly at peace. For a professional soldier such as Hervey, this meant opportunity; but first there were the memories . . .