Books: Redcoat’s View

SERGEANT LAMB’S AMERICA — Robert Graves—Random House ($2.50).

Robert Graves is one of England’s soldier-poets who, since the days of Raleigh and Ben Jonson, have given battle and exploit the lustre which means Empire. Not that Robert Graves likes modern war: his 1914-18 memoirs, Goodbye to All That (1929), were among the most disillusioned records any old soldier ever wrote. But Graves conceded that in an age of scarlet coats, flintlock muskets, brass cannon, war may have been fun, with more glory than gore.

Such a war was the American Revolution. In it fought Sergeant Roger Lamb, whom Officer Robert Graves of the Royal Welch Fusiliers discovered while teaching his platoon their regimental history in 1914. Quarter of a century later, Graves had decided the American Revolution was “the most important single event of modern times.” And, visiting in Princeton, N. J., he was struck by the U. S.’s magnificent reception of George VI and his Queen. Graves’s thoughts returned to Sergeant Lamb. Result is a fresh and provoking historical romance, Sergeant Lamb’s America, out this week.

The book purports to be a soldier’s reminiscences, written in 1814. Young Roger Lamb met a recruiting officer in a public house and, several drinks later, found himself sworn in for a long stretch of barrack-room life. In 1776 he was shipped overseas to the rebellious New World. There he defended Montreal from Benedict Arnold’s militia, lived with the Indians of the Six Nations to learn wilderness warfare, marched with Burgoyne to recapture Crown Point and Ticonderoga, surrendered honorably to General Gates at Saratoga.

Chapter after chapter of Sergeant Lamb’s America is less narrative than informal history. Admits Lamb: “The separation between the Crown and the Colonies must in the nature of things have come about at some time or other, and perhaps it was as well that it came when it did.” Even so, his view of the partition is a Redcoat’s, not a Yankee’s. Without mentioning the Declaration of Independence, Lamb subtly offers the other side of its blistering list of grievances against the “Tyrant,” George III. Lamb’s own grievance is that, while the Revolution was right, its professed justification was righteous.

Whereas the Declaration, for example, seethes over British use of “merciless Indian Savages,” Lamb remarks that 1) Americans first invited the Indians’ aid in 1775, 2) Americans had won the tribes’ enmity with endless swindles, 3) God-fearing Pennsylvanians had once offered a bounty for Indian scalps. Washington’s dignity and Dr. Franklin’s ingenuity inspired Lamb’s admiration. But he detests the hypocrisy of Demagogue John Hancock and his shyster lawyer Sam Adams, the “moral obliquity” of Boston’s pious, greedy merchants.

Professional Soldier Lamb shakes a sad head over the undisciplined, insubordinate American soldiery, their treacherous breaches of warfare’s rules, the jealousies among their generals. Sadder still, with no inexperience to excuse them, are Britain’s graft-rotten sea transport, uncoordinated military plans, incompetent ministers in London. Roger Lamb’s sharp eyes are open also to the wonders of the New World: St. Lawrence scenery, hoop snakes, strange herbs, the odd customs of the Indians and the Yankees. He also has a fresh-air affair with Kate, an enemy’s wife. But though the sergeant vomits at the sight of a whipping or of blood glistening on a bayonet, he spares his readers a like reaction. Romantic neither in the Wordsworth-Shelley nor the Zanuck-Selznick sense, Lamb’s tale is stanch and hearty.