Hervey 09 - Man Of War (2 page)

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.