Hunting the French fox

Which of the acts of courage does the title mean? In the Peninsular War, there were so many it’s hard to choose. In the seventh volume of the Matthew Hervey saga (a novel well able to stand alone), Allan Mallinson’s protagonist is a hero among heroes, when the cavalry was the cavalry and his regiment, the 6th Light Dragoons, Princess Caroline’s Own, seems in retrospect to have been an order of chivalry.

Young Matthew, son of a country parson, was recently ‘an ink-fingered boy at Shrewsbury School’. Now he is a cornet, the most junior cavalry officer, in Wellington’s army. He is already a veteran of the famous retreat to Corunna, where the regiment had to destroy all its horses before sailing back to England. And now, at the age of 18, in 1809, he is about to take part in the battle of Talavera, against the French in central Spain, the greatest military action since the days of Marlborough.