1826: Bonaparte is dead and there is peace in Europe. But in Portugal, the rumour is of civil war following the death of King John VI. With Spain, and perhaps even France, threatening to take sides, England’s historic treaty with Portugal is set to be invoked.
Newly returned from India, Matthew Hervey joins a mission sent to assess the situation and lend support to the Portuguese Regent. But the Peninsula is redolent with memories. It was there, nearly twenty years earlier, that the young Cornet Hervey had his first taste of action when the 6th Light Dragoons played their part in Sir John Moore’s defiant stand at Corunna. And as he prepares for battle once more, Hervey finds himself confronting ghosts from his past…
The long peace that followed the final victory at Waterloo was in many ways similar to that which has followed the Second World War. The principal powers, exhausted to a greater or lesser degree, looked to their interior economy or their empires; distant wars of decolonialization troubled some of them, while several wrestled with the forces of revolution within. The Ottoman empire, in its early phase of collapse, resembled the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. The Iberian peninsula too, for a decade one of the hottest seats of war on the continent, lapsed into a sad and squalid period of civil war, the implications of which, in Europe and South America, taxed the wisdom of the great figures of British politics. One of those was the Duke of Wellington, then in the process of metamorphosis from first soldier of Europe to prime minister of the world’s foremost power.
Captain and Brevet-Major Matthew Hervey, a professional officer of the 6th Light Dragoons, was recently returned with his regiment from India. Like many a cavalryman in the Cold War a century and a half later, he found himself frustrated with soldiering in such a peace. He therefore sought the sound of the guns . . .