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 autobiographicalhistoriographical-geographical-anthropological hybrid originals.
Lamb’s topics include not only soldiering, but also the customs,
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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
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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
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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,
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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’
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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)
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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
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from the shoulders of their dark blue jackets. Short goldenhilted 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.
‘Hessians!’ a voice near Caroline said, and the hiss went
through the crowd.13
The struggle for authenticity here, down to the last buttonhole,
conforms to the Carter and Nash formula, although the author tries
so hard to find suitably militaristic terms to evoke the ‘demonic’
Hessians and their ‘doom-laden march’ (Cornwell, p. 70) that the
specificity of the period, and thus accuracy itself, goes out the
window: the mention of goose-stepping and shakos is
anachronistic, and the bear mascot is a ludicrous addition to the
company.14 Here the soldiers are depicted from a completely alien
and unsympathetic perspective that has more in common with
early accounts of circus freak shows or visits to Bedlam than to
serious attempts at understanding the past. The Hessians’
behaviour and appearance is merely another contribution to a
taxonomy of the strange or bizarre other designed to excite
certain, usually negative, reactions in the reader. Contrary to the
aims of the ethnographer, there is no attempt to contextualise the
soldiers’ costume and drill and so arrive at some appreciation of
their actual cultural significance. By contrast, Graves offers quite
a different picture of the uniform of the German grenadiers among
the royal army’s auxiliary troops, ‘with their enormous swords,
long-skirted clothing, heavy brass-fronted caps and big canteens’
(Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth, p. 224) – in a passage closely based
on Lamb’s Memoir (pp. 178–79) and one of the few occasions
when Lamb actually details soldiers’ accoutrements – as an
example of the severity of the ‘common soldier’s labour’
(Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth, p. 224). This is not grotesquery for
its own sake, but an insight into what labour actually might entail
for the different contingents making up Burgoyne’s army as it
struggles to march and fight through the forests of North America.
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In describing the ethnographic mode of writing, Geertz uses the
term ‘thick description’ for the method by which the observer
seeks out the ‘hierarchy of meaningful structures’ in what the
observed is doing (p. 7). The method involves analysis and
interpretation as well as observation: ‘Doing ethnography’, says
Geertz, ‘is like trying to read (in the sense of “construct a reading
of”) a manuscript – foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies,
suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries’ (p. 10).
For Graves, wading through and making sense of the ‘8000 pages’
of research he reckoned he had made into ‘American War of
Independency [sic] literature’ the process was even more literal
than Geertz intended by his allegory.15 So, while Graves’s writing
obviously lacks the participant observer dimension which the
ethnographer undertaking fieldwork usually can draw upon, his
close reading of Lamb and other memoirists and integrating their
first-hand experiences and observations into a single coherent text
are consistent with the ethnographic project at large:
‘anthropological writings are themselves interpretations’, notes
Geertz, ‘and second or third order ones to boot’ (p. 15). Indeed,
given Graves’s own service in one of Lamb’s regiments, and that
the novels – ‘prompted by the pertinence of his subject (war)’
(Zilboorg, p. vii) – draw upon trans-historical aspects of soldiering
and warfare as yet another war is played out, it might be said that
Graves actually operates along a cline of interpretation from first
to third order. Unlike the thin description to which the popular
fictional style already alluded to is prone, Graves’s digressions
regarding headgear or firearms are intended to raise questions
about ‘what their import is: what it is […] that, in their occurrence
and through their agency, is getting said’ (Geertz, p. 10). And
what is ‘getting said’ – what the hats and firelocks signify,
because the ‘shaped behaviour’ that constitutes culture must be
seen as ‘symbolic action – action which […] signifies’ (p. 10) –
has to do with concepts underpinning the culture of the military:
honour, comradeship, discipline, tradition, and so forth on the one
hand; and with the ability to get on with the job of fighting
effectively on the other.
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The induction into army culture begins for both Graves’s hero
and his reader with the instructions of the redoubtable drillsergeant, Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick’s career represents an inverted
version of the trajectory Lamb’s will take, in that Fitzpatrick
transferred from the Twenty-third Royal Welch Fusiliers to the
Ninth Foot, while Lamb will eventually join the Twenty-third as a
sergeant and achieve his apotheosis as a soldier after escaping
captivity with the Ninth. Part of the novels’ raison d’être lay in the
tribute being paid to the Royal Welch Fusiliers, as George Orwell
recognised in 1940 when he connected ‘Lamb’s fierce loyalty and
the passion Graves felt for his old regiment’ (Seymour, p. 284).
But this hagiographical dimension, which is confined largely to
the second novel, Proceed, Sergeant Lamb, only really makes
sense to the reader because Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth highlights
and helps unravel some of the ‘webs of significance’ (Geertz, p. 5)
that constitute military culture at the level of the ordinary soldier.
Sergeant Fitzpatrick’s instructions introduce Lamb and the
reader to one of the most significant aspects of the soldier’s trade,
which as soldiers they must work at in order to perform effectively
as a unit on campaign and the battlefield. This consists of
deportment and marching drill on the one hand, and the Manual
and Platoon Exercises, involving the handling and use of
weaponry, on the other. Graves goes into considerable detail
concerning both Fitzpatrick’s methods for training the recruits to
carry themselves like soldiers, and to learn the Manual Exercise.
In particular, the reader is given a list of the commands for loading
and firing the firelock, a complex series of motions whose mastery
was essential for maintaining battlefield discipline and unit
cohesion in volley firing, as Graves has Lamb explain:
A trained platoon could fire two aimed volleys in the space
of one minute, following these orders, and the motions
became so mechanical that I have seen a man who had been
knocked senseless in battle with a blow to his skull, yet
continue loading and firing in exact perfection of discipline.
(Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth, pp. 24–25)
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Graves then historicises the process to show that the drills are
not ends in themselves; they have a life and a purpose, in that they
evolve according to historical and technological imperatives –
chiefly the types of firearms being used at any given period – and
exist in order to make best use of the technology to hand under
changing battlefield conditions. He does this first by comparing
Lamb’s drill to the ‘old words of command […] of ninety years
before’, which involve no fewer than thirty-one instructions for
handling the matchlock musket with its burning fuse and forked
rest, and constitute ‘a sermon in themselves’. Lamb knows this
because, conveniently, a copy of the old exercise ‘hung in a frame
in our Sergeants’ Mess’ (p. 25). Then he projects the reader
forward into 1814, the narrator’s own time of writing – ‘the
present trousered, booted, and short-haired days’ (p. 23) of the
British infantry’s supremacy over the French Napoleonic columns
– when ‘a great improvement has been made even upon our
expeditious orders; so that only ten words of command’ are
required for loading and firing (p. 25).16 The implication is, of
course, that this process of narrative projection can be carried
forward to Graves’s era and to that of subsequent readers, in order
to appreciate that drill in whatever form it may have evolved is a
crucial part the soldier’s trade.
Along with the specialised work come the specialist clothing and
tools of the soldier, as Lamb notes: ‘we were each given his
regimentals – coat, waistcoat, breeches, hat – a set of
accoutrements and a Tower musket with its bayonet and ramrod’
(p. 23). There is also a lengthy ‘complement of necessaries’ (p.
23) that make up the kit, and we are informed about the soldier’s
responsibilities for their use and upkeep. The lists are accurate and
authentic, not to mention demanding for the reader unaccustomed
to the details of eighteenth century warfare, but it is the hat which,
together with the firelock, in Graves’s deft authorial hand
becomes a focal marker by which we come to a better
understanding of the day-to-day life of the soldier.
Graves introduces the military headgear while explaining the
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procedure for saluting, and has Lamb pass on a small but
significant piece of information:
These hats were wide awkward affairs, not looped threecorner-wise, as in the time of the German wars, but only
before and behind, so that they afforded neither shade to the
eyes nor protection against sunstroke. (p. 23)
The reference here is to the change in military fashion during the
1760s that saw the front corner of the cocked hat pushed gradually
higher until, with the Royal Warrant of 1768 governing all aspects
of regimental uniform during the American Revolution, it sat
virtually flush against the front of the crown. This transitional
shape – called by the French retapé, literally ‘straightened out’17 –
between the old tricorne of ‘the German wars’ of the 1740s and
50s and the ‘lofty bicorne’ of the 1790s,18 represented a move
towards the hat as primarily symbolic item at the expense of its
functionality. Consequently, as we shall see, it became a
particularly strongly contested cultural site where ordinary
soldiers (aided by sympathetic officers) struggled to reassert the
utility of military headdress while at the same time having to
acknowledge – during this period when ‘military uniforms […]
started to move away from the styles of civilian dress and began to
develop features of their own’ – its value as a sign of their
profession (Strachan, p. 11).
The semiotic position of hats in relation to soldiering in Sergeant
Lamb of the Ninth can be better understood when read against the
problematic utility of late eighteenth century uniforms generally.
Sylvia R. Frey remarks on ‘the costume look of the uniform,
popular among all European armies in the eighteenth century’,19
which for the British Army fighting in America ‘was an
anachronism; ill-designed for military operations and ill-provided
by the government’ (Frey, p. 34). Thus immediately prior to
embarking on the Saratoga campaign, the troops in Canada are
told to make do with their by now rather ragged issue of clothing,
the new annual supply not having arrived: ‘but, to make them
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more presentable, all with long coats were told to reduce them to
jackets, and their hats into caps’ (Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth, p.
192). The order, which is historically correct, and which Graves
probably gathered from the memoirs of Thomas Anburey, an
officer serving with Burgoyne’s army, had as much to do with the
serviceability of the uniform in the forests of Canada and upstate
New York as it had with presentability, and in appearance at least
made the British contingent an all-light infantry force.20 The fine
balance between utility and show is well illustrated in the efforts
taken by Lamb and his comrades to procure the ‘cockades of hair’
required for the new caps (p. 192), as they comically raid various
supplies of animal hair on the hoof in order to fulfil a ruling that
will add nothing to the caps’ functionality.
That military headgear under the 1768 Royal Warrant constituted
a particularly hotly contested cultural site arose from the ordinary
infantryman’s recognising the significance of the various types of
headdress in marking out his role within the regiment, while being
only too aware of their ineffectiveness in the field. In each
regiment, the regulation cocked hat was worn by the eight socalled battalion companies, consisting of the standard troops of the
line who, because of their headgear, were commonly referred to as
hatmen. Then there were two different flank companies, the
grenadiers and the light infantry, who in Lamb’s time were usually
separated from their parent regiments and clumped together with
others of their ilk to form discrete grenadier and light infantry
battalions. The elite grenadier company, made up of the tallest and
strongest men who could be called on for shock action, wore a tall
bearskin-covered cap (this was also supposed to be worn by all
except the light companies of fusilier regiments). The light
company, made up of agile men who did skirmishing duty as well
as fighting in the line, wore short-tailed jackets and small jockeystyle caps with upturned peaks.
In reality, all three species of headgear were unpopular; none
offered adequate protection from the weather, and all could be
difficult to maintain. Consequently, contemporary inspection
reports of individual regiments are peppered with comments such
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as: ‘Men’s hats not according to regulation’ (Strachan, p. 239).
Within a few years many regiments were taking it upon
themselves to improve the functionality of the headgear,
particularly in the light companies, whose work involved being
out and about rather more. Surprisingly, perhaps, some senior
officers approved of these efforts, as in this report made of the
Seventeenth Foot – a regiment which was to see much service in
America – while stationed in Ireland in 1773, the very year that
Lamb enlisted in the Ninth Foot in Dublin:
The caps of the Light Infantry are of a better size and better
fit than any other regiment yet under my inspection. A flap
has been added since they were sent to the regiment which
makes them without comparison more serviceable and adds
greatly in my opinion to their appearance. (Strachan, p. 212)
Clearly in this case form and function were shown to be not
mutually exclusive qualities, and in fact a number of regiments,
the Ninth included, adopted handsome leather caps with
regimental badges and protective peaks at the front and which, as
a member of the Ninth’s light company, Lamb himself would have
worn.21
Then, upon joining the Twenty-third Fusiliers, Lamb probably
would have been issued a bearskin cap. Probably, because this
was a particularly problematic item of dress and, compared to the
old pre-1768 cloth grenadier mitre, ‘appears to have been much
less popular and generally reserved for formal occasions’ (Reid, p.
42). It is far more likely that, by the time Lamb joined them, the
Twenty-third were wearing a much simpler and more practical
form of headgear: the plain round-brimmed hat, either the cocked
hat uncocked, or a locally procured civilian item. If so, the
regiment may have decorated it with three feathers arranged in
imitation of the Prince of Wales’s crest, one of its badges; the
Twenty-third definitely were wearing such a headdress in 1784,
immediately following the regiment’s return from America
(Strachan, p. 216). This in turn throws into question the accuracy
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of the episode, at the Battle of Guilford Court House in 1781,
where Graves has Lord Cornwallis recognise Lamb’s regiment by
‘observing the White Horse on my cap’ (Proceed, Sergeant Lamb,
p. 403), that is, the bearskin cap.22 Modern scholarship suggests
that the brimmed hat was indeed widely employed by the British
soldier in America (see Reid, p. 44, and Mollo and McGregor, pp.
186–87), so much so that the soldiers’ experiences in this war led
to the round hat becoming regulation for British troops ‘serving in
warm climates’ in the 1790s (Strachan, p. 27). Thus the contest
over the hat resulted in a victory of sorts for the common soldier.
At the expense of the strictest historical accuracy, then, Graves
makes his hero an every-soldier issued with virtually any of the
types of military headgear then current: the cocked hat in its
original and cut-down forms, the light infantryman’s cap, and the
bearskin cap of the grenadiers and fusiliers. Regardless of
whichever hat or cap Lamb should be wearing at any particular
stage of his career, the importance for Graves is not in getting the
exact model right, but in providing the reader with an insider’s
view of what wearing the headgear actually involves, in order to
better understand the workings of the culture of which it forms a
part. The incident already cited where Lamb and his men go
searching for animal hair to decorate the newly-cut down hats is a
case in point. Technically, as a light infantryman who already
wears a cap, Lamb has no need to modify his headdress; the
episode therefore has more of an ethnographic function than a
purely historical one, in that it says as much if not more about
comradeship and unit pride as it does about the simple act of
redesigning hats into caps.
Graves’s method reaches its highest symbolic point at Bemis
Heights, one of the final battles of the Saratoga campaign, when
Lamb is stripped, as it were, of the two most distinctive features of
his military costume as a prelude to his temporary removal from
the theatre of war: ‘A bullet carried off my cap, another grazed my
side, a third broke the lock of my fusil, which I was forced to
abandon’ (Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth, p. 242). Here and
elsewhere the narrative ventures beyond realism in the banal sense
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of the term – and in the process diverges markedly from the
popular fictional mode of authenticity for its own sake – towards
the realms of literary truth, where objects and events that
constitute the world achieve a metaphorical significance. And it is
exactly this mode of fictiō – of ‘something fashioned’ – that,
according to Geertz, lies at the heart of ethnographic analysis and
interpretation (p.15).
If the hat is more of a symbol by implication and association in
Graves’s novels, the firelock remains the more obvious marker of
what is, after all, the profession of arms. Its significance is made
very clear when Lamb emblematises himself on a map presented
as a gift to a Native American ‘as a lamb holding a firelock in the
Make Ready position’ (Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth, p. 181). Yet it
is also evident that the connection, while nurtured by the Manual
Exercise, is by no means completely governed by it, as Lamb’s
description of the fighting in the thick brushwood at the Battle of
Hubbardton illustrates:
I was proud to find how steadily our men behaved, though
we could preserve no sort of order or dressing, nor use the
manual exercise for platoon firing in which we had been
perfected during our training. We made an improvement ex
tempore upon it, however, by abstaining from any use of our
ramrods: after loading and priming we merely struck the
breech of the firelock to the ground, which sent the cartridge
down, brought it to the present, and fired. (p. 210)
The point here is that under difficult conditions the men reveal
an individualistic skill at arms that has progressed beyond mere
slavish adherence to the Manual Exercise. At the same time they
maintain their cohesion as a unit, which is marked by their
‘singing in unison Hot Stuff’ (p. 210), a popular and rousing song
in the style of ‘Liliburlero’ or ‘The British Grenadiers’, as they
keep up a steady fire. Graves’s soldiers therefore are not the
redcoated automatons caricatured in contemporary revolutionary
propaganda or current popular books and films. These are men
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bound by a pride in their profession which is inextricably linked to
loyalty to and love of regiment and each other; it is to Graves’s
credit as both novelist and cultural commentator that he can
dramatise this through the symbolic bond between soldier and
weapon.
Nowhere is the significance of this bond more evident than when
it is at last broken, and the British troops are marched into
captivity:
There were soldiers who now wept at being parted from the
muskets that they had carried so long and cared for so well,
and that seemed almost a part of themselves; and I own that
for days I missed the familiar weight of my piece upon my
shoulder, and felt in a manner naked without it. (Sergeant
Lamb of the Ninth, p. 262)
Eventually in the second novel, Lamb, Smutchy and Harlowe
escape captivity and make their way back to the British lines,
where the first soldier they meet is their old comrade Mad Johnny
Maguire standing guard with the Royal Welch Fusiliers.
Smutchy’s immediate reaction typifies the means by which the
good soldier defines his cultural identity:
‘Give that Tower musket into my hand, dear Johnny. Let me
feel its weight. I have been a sick man these thirteen months
without my old musket, Johnny – a sick man and a slave.’
(Proceed, Sergeant Lamb, p. 330)
Following the groundwork set by Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth,
where significant outward aspects of day-to-day military life are
thickly described to build up a complex and multi-layered portrait
of the soldier, Smutchy’s request seems perfectly natural to the
reader. And because the first novel has so effectively carried out
its ethnographic project of induction into the culture of soldiering,
we are not surprised by the apparent paradox in the second when
Lamb, now a sergeant in a crack regiment whose officers are
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‘persons of substance and with a pride in their profession’ (p.
342), finds not only fulfilment but also a sense of liberation
through his symbolic rebirth into a higher order of soldiering:
Martial finery can be an encouragement to formal discipline
and clean drill, and I must confess that it did my heart good
to be included in a parade of this regiment: it took out of my
mouth the taste of drills perfunctorily performed in
captivity, with sticks instead of muskets, and the memory of
the awkward squads who had been set as guards over us
prisoners at Prospect Hill and Rutland. (Proceed, Sergeant
Lamb, p. 340)
With his self-professed ‘great love of the regular, the orderly and
the neat’ which he is now free ‘to indulge to the full’ (p. 342),
Lamb has become the very model of the professional soldier,
proud of his trade and at home in his world, and by this stage in
the narrative we ourselves are acclimatised to that world. Geertz
points out that ‘understanding a people’s culture exposes their
normalness without reducing their particularity’ (p. 14), implying
that the ethnographic processes ideally involves a conjunction of,
and some empathy between, the worlds of writer, subject and
reader. The goal is no less applicable to projects such as the
Sergeant Lamb novels, where the analytical lens focuses on past
rather than present cultures. Greg Dening uses the term
‘ethnographic history’ to describe ‘an attempt to represent the past
as it was actually experienced in such a way that we understand
both its ordered and disordered natures’.23 The link between
writer, reader and subject comes when we realise that
we live in a world that is at the same time full of meanings
that are simple and meanings that are multiple. These
qualities of the world of the present, we must assume, were
qualities of the world of the past. (Dening, p. 5)
In bringing to life the actual material circumstances of soldiering
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– what Geertz terms the ‘things of this world’ (p. 10) – and
imbuing them with a deeper cultural significance, Graves rescues
Lamb and his comrades from the oft-vilified and misunderstood
ranks of anonymous redcoats, lobsters and bloody-backs, and
finds a place for them within the reader’s world as well.
According to Geertz, the ‘claim to attention’ of an ethnography
rests on its author’s ability […] to clarify what goes on in
[faraway] places, to reduce the puzzlement – what manner
of men are these? – to which unfamiliar acts emerging out of
unknown backgrounds naturally give rise. (p. 16)
The same claim surely can be made of the Sergeant Lamb
novels. In the Advertisement to the Memoir, Lamb maintains that
‘it has […] been his endeavour to demark the right line of duty
and behaviour which the soldier in the ranks ought invariably to
pursue’, adding that ‘he may lose his aim, but, even in its failure,
he trusts his motive will be thought laudable’ (p. iv). Graves puts
almost those exact words into the mouth of his narrator at the end
of the first novel (Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth, p. 270), but with
considerably more justification. For whether or not the reader of
the Memoir agrees about the motive, few could help but concur
that the wide-ranging digressions employed in both this work and
the Journal too often cause Lamb to take his eyes off the avowed
object of his writing. Not so Graves, whose skill as a historical
novelist results in a more coherent and interesting narrative than
Lamb’s originals, and whose equally remarkable abilities as an
ethnographer of military culture really do help ‘to bring us into
touch with the lives of strangers’ (Geertz, p. 16), such that he
much more faithfully discharges the old sergeant’s duty.
Paul Skrebels was formerly Senior Lecturer in Writing and
Creative Communication at the University of South Australia. He
is editor of the journal of the Military Historical Society of
Australia, Sabretache.
Critical Studies 20
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NOTES
1
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic,
1973), p. 5.
2
Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature,
Deconstruction (London: Routledge, 1981), p. vii.
3
Jeremy Hawthorn, A Concise Glossary of Contemporary Literary
Theory (London: Arnold, 1997), p. 211.
4
Robert Graves, Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth and Proceed, Sergeant
Lamb, ed. by Caroline Zilboorg (Manchester: Carcanet, 1999), p. 273.
All subsequent quotations are from this edition.
5
Roger Lamb, ‘Preface’, An Original and Authentic Journal of
Occurrences during the Late American War, from its Commencement to
the Year 1783 (Dublin: Wilkinson and Courtney, 1809; repr. New York:
New York Times and Arno Press, 1968).
6
The Journal has been frequently cited by historians. The Memoir is
obviously a much rarer work, as Graves himself pointed out in a letter to
the military historian Basil Liddell Hart: ‘The memoir book is never
quoted by the usual authorities and is excessively rare [...]. It does exist,
but only just, apparently’ (quoted in Robert Graves, Sergeant Lamb of
the Ninth and Proceed, Sergeant Lamb, pp. viii–ix). To my knowledge
the Memoir has not been reprinted.
7
Roger Lamb, Memoir of His Own Life (Dublin: J. Jones, 1811), pp.
61–62.
8
Jimmy Perry and David Croft, Dad’s Army: The Lost Episodes
(London: Virgin, 2002), p. 48.
9
Miranda Seymour surely has grasped the wrong end of the stick when
she speaks of Graves’s research involving a letter asking his son David
in November 1939 ‘to hunt […] for a missing document, a memoir
which Lamb had kept of the year 1812’ but which David ‘failed to find’;
Miranda Seymour, Robert Graves: Life on the Edge (London:
Doubleday, 1995), p. 285. Graves’s letter to Liddell Hart written that
same month indicates that he was in fact referring to the 1811 Memoir,
which he hadn’t yet read. But read it he must have done, for there are
passages from the Memoir that appear almost verbatim in the novels.
10
Graves’s narrator’s general line also reminds us that knife in the back
theories of the sort made after the First World War by right wing
German elements and more recently by revisionists of the Vietnam War
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– that ‘it was not we [the soldiers] who had lost the war […] but that it
was lost by a supine and ignorant Ministry seconded by an unpatriotic
and malignant Opposition’ (Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth, p. 6) – are
long-standing complaints among the politically and socially disaffected.
11
Ronald Carter and Walter Nash, Seeing through Language: A Guide
to Styles of English Writing (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 99.
12
Miranda Seymour, Robert Graves: Life on the Edge, p. 284.
13
Bernard Cornwell, Redcoat (Dingley, Victoria: Hinkler, 1994 (1987)),
p. 70.
14
Redcoat is riddled with such errors – too numerous to list here –
which, while small in themselves, collectively undermine the
plausibility of the narrative, and make a mockery of Cornwell’s note of
gratitude to a named secondary source to which his novel ‘owes much of
its accuracy’(p. 405). While Cornwell’s inclusion of a bear in the
Hessian company is pure sensationalism, nevertheless some regiments
did have mascots, among them the Royal Welch Fusiliers, who had, and
still maintain, a billy goat. Graves mentions ‘our fine regimental hegoat, with horns gilded’ in his description of the Twenty-third’s insignia
and traditions (Proceed, Sergeant Lamb, p. 340).
15
Caroline Zilboorg, ‘Robert Graves’s Sergeant Lamb: An
Introduction’, in Robert Graves, Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth and
Proceed, Sergeant Lamb, p. viii. Graves’s biographers point out that
Graves employed Alan Hodge as a research assistant on this and other
writing projects, but Graves’s own scholarship and involvement in the
preparation for the Sergeant Lamb novels is beyond dispute. See Martin
Seymour-Smith, Robert Graves: His Life and Work (London:
Hutchinson, 1982), p. 346, and Miranda Seymour, p. 285.
16
Even so, Graves may be guilty of comparing apples and oranges here.
John Tincey points out that ‘in fact drill manuals were training aids, not
regulation procedures. Many “postures” were illustrated as distinct
“motions” to make them clearer’, which would account for the
multiplicity of moves which, if actually carried out in the field, would
mean ‘that a matchlock would take three to five minutes to load and fire
while the same could be achieved with a flintlock in just 15 to 30
seconds’ (The British Army 1660-1704, Men-At-Arms Series 267
(London: Osprey, 1994), p. 20). Training with the flintlock could be just
as arduous, as a comparison of the 1685 drills for each type of firearm,
with thirty-two motions (rather than Graves’s thirty-one) for the
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matchlock and thirty for the flintlock, reveals: ‘the difference is a matter
of seconds’ (Tincey, p. 20).
17
Liliane and Fred Funcken, The Lace Wars, Part 1 (London: Ward
Lock, 1977), p. 102.
18
Hew Strachan, British Military Uniforms 1768–96 (London: Arms and
Armour Press, 1975), p. 12.
19
Sylvia R. Frey, The British Soldier in America: A Social History of
Military Life in the Revolutionary Period (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1981), p. 35.
20
See John Mollo and Malcolm McGregor, Uniforms of the American
Revolution (London: Blandford, 1975), p. 188. Anburey, ‘a volunteer in
the 29th Regiment’, had a two-volume memoir of his American service
published in 1789 (Frey, pp. 99 and 193). His work is twice cited as an
authority by Graves’s narrator, but he is identified as a lieutenant ‘of
The Fourteenth’ (Sergeant Lamb of the Ninth, p. 207, p. 262).
21
See Stuart Reid, King George’s Army 1740–93: (1) Infantry, Men-AtArms Series 285 (London: Osprey, 1995), p. 42.
22
Graves’s attributing the White Horse of Hanover as one of the
Twenty-third’s badges (which he also does earlier, see Proceed,
Sergeant Lamb, p. 340) is almost certainly mistaken. I have found no
mention of its use this way in any studies of British Army uniforms of
the period (see, for example, Alan Kemp, The British Army in the
American Revolution (London: Almark, 1973), p. 71). Before the 1768
Warrant, the White Horse was worn on a flap at the front of the cloth
mitre caps of every line infantry grenadier company (see Funcken, p.
107); after 1768 it remained a distinctive badge of another fusilier
regiment, the Seventh Foot (Royal Fusiliers); see Kemp, p. 71. The
apparent confusion is hard to reconcile with Graves’s detailed personal
knowledge of and research into the Royal Welch Fusiliers.
23
Greg Dening, Mr Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre
on the Bounty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 5.