Critical Studies 22
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Cocked Hats and Firelocks:
Robert Graves’s Ethnography of Soldiering in the Sergeant Lamb Novels
Paul Skrebels
As soon as the hero of Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth (1940) enlists in the army in Chapter 2 of the novel, Robert Graves embarks on what is effectively an ethnography of military life in the eighteenth century and, by cleverly reworking his original sources’ techniques of narrative digression and projection, of soldiering and warfare generally. Ethnography is a genre usually associated with anthropologists; it is premised on a ‘concept of culture’ that, in the words of one of its better known advocates, Clifford Geertz, ‘is essentially a semiotic one’,[1] semiotics being defined by Jonathan Culler as ‘the science of signs’.[2] Ethnography, therefore, is ‘what the practitioners do’ (Geertz, p. 5) as they write their way towards an understanding of a particular culture by sorting out the ‘structures of signification […] and determining their social ground and import’ (p. 9), or – as more succinctly put by Ferdinand de Saussure – by studying ‘the life of signs within society’.[3] This discussion will explore the ways in which a couple of such signs are developed and deployed in the Sergeant Lamb novels. It will do so based on a comparison between Graves’s work and the original Lamb texts, to demonstrate that the ethnographic strand running through the novels owes more to Graves’s talents as a scholar and writer, as well as his sensibilities as an ex-soldier in one of Lamb’s own regiments, than to the content of his source texts: Roger Lamb’s An Original and Authentic Journal (1809) and Memoir of His Own Life (1811).
The narrative style and plot framework of Graves’s novels nevertheless evolve out of Lamb’s rather quirky autobiographical-historiographical-geographical-anthropological hybrid originals. Lamb’s topics include not only soldiering, but also the customs, habits and environments of Native American and European settler groups, together with character sketches, anecdotes and various discourses of a philosophical and moral nature, all recounted via a predominantly first-person narrative written some thirty years after his service in the American War. Comparisons between the two œuvres, however, dispel any notions that the novels are simply derivative; that the material is all there in Lamb’s Journal and Memoir ready simply to be edited and rearranged accordingly.
In the Foreword to Proceed, Sergeant Lamb (1941), Graves warns us that:
Lamb’s own rather disjointed Journal and Memoir, published in Dublin in 1809 and 1811, provide the bones of the story: the body has been built up from a mass of contemporary records, British, American, French and German.[4]
Even so, it comes as something of a shock to discover just how little of the ‘body’ is derived from Lamb’s original works. The Journal was intended as a broad history of the war – ‘a Summary and Impartial View of that momentous and interesting Subject’[5] – interspersed with some additional information based on his personal experiences and partialities. It contains nothing about his pre-war enlistment in the army, and the sections dealing with his own part in the war tend to be recounts of events, often in actual diary form, with the occasional digression on the flora, fauna and topography of the regions where he served. Lamb avoids descriptions of the commonplaces of soldiering, possibly out of some neoclassical regard for the decorum of whatever genre he believes he is working in. Indeed, he is so self-conscious about imposing details of his own service in the Journal that at one point he adds the footnote, ‘this passage being literally copied from the author’s private Journal, he hopes pardon for narrating it in the first person’ (p. 142).
As an ethnography of soldiering from a personal perspective, the Memoir of His Own Life is in many ways an even more disappointing document.[6] To take a crucial example: Graves devotes almost all of Chapter 2 of Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth to describing drill and equipment; in Lamb’s Memoir, when he at last enlists in Chapter 4 (having taken three lengthy chapters to cover what Graves deals with in one, which in itself points to the priorities of each author), he dismisses the whole process thus:
On the 24th [of August 1773] I joined the regiment, and was put into the hands of a drill serjeant, and taught to walk and step out like a soldier. This at first was a disagreeable to me. During twenty-one days I was thus drilled four hours each day. However, having at last rectified the most prominent appearance of my awkwardness, I received a set of accoutrements, and a firelock [the contemporary generic term for a military flintlock musket], and was marched every morning from the barrack to the bowling green, near the water-side, to be instructed in the manual exercise.[7]
What exactly ‘like a soldier’ means is never properly explained, except by implication, and herein lies the fundamental difference between Lamb’s project and that of Graves. Lamb apparently assumes that his general readership is either already familiar with or uninterested in the stuff of soldiering; there is also more than a hint that he may have found his early army life traumatic. As the quoted passage shows, it was initially ‘disagreeable’ and he suffered from ‘awkwardness’, and later he mentions how ‘some of the old drill-serjeants were unnecessarily, if not wantonly severe’, but praises the Duke of York’s post-American Revolution reforms which, in a blatant piece of circular argumentation, by Lamb’s time of writing see the recruit taught drill and exercise ‘like a man and a soldier’ (Lamb, Memoir, p. 62).
Whatever the psychology behind Lamb’s Memoir – he spends a good deal of Chapter 4 (and elsewhere) expounding on issues of control, punishment and morality in the army, for example – it is apparent that the minutiae of soldiering are topics of little moment to him, and that he prefers instead lengthy digressions about almost anything else: the biographies of officers and prominent personalities, gossipy tabloid anecdotes, and, as in the Journal, much detail about the inhabitants, natural history and topography of North America. Indeed, Lamb’s intellectual meanderings hark back to when Renaissance humanist scholars wrote elaborate treatises which, at an individual, virtuosic level were a means of showcasing their scholarship, while at the level of public service imbued learning with a moral dimension, yet in as diverting a fashion as possible. Certainly a didactic agenda is consistent with Lamb’s post-military profession of schoolmaster, and is reinforced in the so-called Advertisement prefacing the Memoir, where he declares his aim to be ‘to instruct as much as possible the young and unguarded, by furnishing the example of his own life without self-disguise or vanity’ (p. iv). But the reader is left with a sense that the impetus of the Memoir is away from its putative subject of service in the American War, rather as that famous English treatise, Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (first published 1621), employs its many digressions – of anatomy, of the misery of scholars, of the air, of love, and so on – so that both writer and reader might forget and subsequently conquer melancholy itself. Lamb’s technique is similarly Burtonesque, in that it is divergent in content and therefore centrifugal in effect, allowing readers only small glimpses of Sergeant Lamb at war as they are made to observe a world in which he and his service record are minor events. Graves instead adapts the broad humanist goal of delightful instruction to create an ethnography of warfare: within the framework of a lively and interesting tale his digressive strategies are convergent and thus centripetal, in that they keep drawing us back towards Lamb and the profession of soldiering, making these the centre of the reader’s imaginative orbit.
In dealing with the topic of warfare itself, Lamb prefers an abstract and often indirect approach. For example, stimulated by Benjamin Franklin’s suggestion that the patriot army might make effective use of bows and pikes when it can’t obtain sufficient firearms, he slips on his schoolmaster’s gown and discourses at length on medieval archery and classical spear formations, eventually coming out in favour of firearms (Lamb, Memoir, pp. 122–26). Later he weighs up the value of levies versus regular troops, drawing his examples from the battles being fought by the armies of the French Revolution and Napoleon (pp.195–98). And when at last he does hit on a matter of more immediate consequence, namely the British soldier’s success in battle with the bayonet – arising out of his account of Gates’s army’s unwillingness to close in and finish off the tattered remains of Burgoyne’s force at Saratoga – he does so in terms of vague and contentious theories of national characteristics, rather like old Corporal Jones in the TV comedy Dad’s Army, whose argument in favour of ‘cold steel’ is that other nations’ soldiers ‘don’t like it up ’em you see, sir, they don’t like it up ’em!’[8]
This is in marked contrast to Graves, for whom the bayonet’s success is more effectively dramatised in the context of Lamb’s actual service. Thus after the battle of Hubbardton, Graves’s Lamb tells how his comrade-in-arms Smutchy Steel had kept loading his firelock without priming it, so that the powder and ball mounted up in the barrel without being discharged at each shot. This was a not uncommon occurrence in the heat and noise of battle in the black powder era, with muzzle-loading weapons recovered from the field often found to have multiple charges still down the barrels. Smutchy is unperturbed, countering ‘there was no confusion as to my baggonet’; but the sight of it triggers a stronger reaction in Lamb:
glancing at it, I observed blood upon the blade. There was a sudden sick revulsion in my belly at the sight of a fellow creature’s blood smeared on the steel, and I went apart into the bushes and vomited. (Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth, p. 211)
In Graves’s hands the concrete may still give rise to the abstract; in this case Lamb takes the opportunity to muse over fate, the psychology of battle, and quite another way of looking at national characteristics with ‘the agreed rules of civilised warfare’ seemingly ‘despised’ or ‘not well understood’ by the New England militia (Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth, pp. 212–13).
Graves’s manifesto justifying his reworking of Lamb’s works takes the form of the clever and decorously fictional ‘Roger Lamb’s Note of Explanation’, supposedly produced in December 1814 as a preface to this ‘rewrite’ of the ‘original story’ (Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth, p. 7). Here ‘Lamb’ professes his ‘vexations and disappointments’ (p. 5) over his publisher’s decision to divide that story into first the Journal, ‘in which he would include the more general and striking parts […] and fat it up with extracts drawn from dependable works of travel and biography’ (p. 6), and then the Memoir, turned into ‘a sad hotch-potch of religious sentiment and irrelevant anecdote’ (p. 7) by ‘a hackney writer, some hedge-parson or other, who could strike the note of contrition that the middling public would heed’ (p. 6).[9] His damning critique of Lamb’s works aside, Graves’s case for the significance of his project rests on the achievements of the British soldier. His narrator argues
that the present hostilities with France would greatly favour the book, as calling attention to the thankless heroism once displayed in America by the same regiments then triumphantly engaged under Lord Wellington in the Spanish Peninsula. (Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth, p. 5)[10]
More specifically, his rhetoric hinges on those markers of the soldier’s trade – the details of his uniform – that signify tradition, comradeship and unit pride:
I asked this question of old Mr Courtney: ‘When is it, sir, that old campaigners speak most earnestly about the hazards, fatigues, triumphs, and frolics that they have lived through together?’ ‘It is’ (I informed him in the same breath) ‘when a new war is in progress and when the regiments whose badges and facings they once wore are again hotly engaged.’ (Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth, p. 6)
While Graves is writing for a readership for which the particulars of life and warfare in the eighteenth century are no longer common knowledge, his inclusion of ethnographic detail such as the dress and drill of the British soldier does not represent a descent into what Carter and Nash, in discussing style in popular fiction, term ‘a paradox of unrealistic realism’.[11] They note how works of popular fiction, especially those with exotic or unfamiliar settings and characters
are often elaborately ‘researched’, in historical, technical, topographical, institutional and sartorial detail, documenting reality with overwhelming care [...].
The authors of such fictions spare no effort to engross their readers, making them accept as credible – because the cars, the guns, the cocktails, the hemlines and street-names are so ruthlessly right – narratives which at another level invite scepticism. (Carter and Nash, p. 99)
The Sergeant Lamb novels have been quite correctly labelled ‘picaresque’, and Graves unquestionably stretches credibility to the limit in his employment of both coincidence and chance as devices for turning Lamb’s story into a ripping yarn.[12] But nowhere is he guilty of indulging in the populist stylistics that characterise this passage from a more recent novel set during the same war:
The thronged pavements went silent a moment later as a company of Grenadiers goose-stepped past. At their head, pacing magnificently, a sergeant led a black bear on a silver chain. At times, prodded by its keeper, the bear reared hugely on its back paws and flailed the air. Behind their prancing mascot the soldiers were helmeted in mitred shakos faced with brass, while their faces had huge, thick moustaches that were waxed into upturned tips. They had silver buttons on yellow waistcoats and silver cords hanging from the shoulders of their dark blue jackets. Short golden-hilted swords hung from white leather straps by their hips. Their muskets had scarlet slings and fittings of gleaming brass. Meaty white-breeched thighs rose in the grotesque march before the gaitered boots slapped down into the mud.