A Close Run Thing

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This is not just the story of an officer in the Duke of Wellington’s army: it is the story of a regiment — that peculiarly British institution which John Keegan, the most percipient historian and observer of all things military, has described as ‘an accidental act of genius’. Every regiment was — still is — different, and revelled in that difference. The difference was not just in the people but in the regiment’s history and traditions — the received notions of how things should be done, the esprit, the spirit.

The 6th Light Dragoons are a fictitious regiment, but the events in which they take part are historical fact. The major characters outside the regiment are real figures of history. Occasional liberties have been taken — General Slade did not go to Ireland in 1814, for instance — but not in any way that changes the historical plausibility of the story.

The army of 1814 was singular. It had endured five years of campaigning in the Peninsula, and it had gone from success to success, until the duke was able to remark, famously, that it ‘could go anywhere and do anything’. Sir Charles Oman, one of the two greatest historians of the campaign (the other being Sir William Napier), made also this interesting observation: ‘A very appreciable number of men were of a religious turn — a thing I imagine to have been most unusual in the army of the eighteenth century.’ (Wellington’s Army, 1809–1814.)

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