Review ~ The Last Campaign of Marianne Tambour : A Novel of Waterloo

Silverwood Books
2014

Cleverly combining factual history with fiction, the story of Marianne Tambour brings alive the story of the Battle of Waterloo as seen through the eyes of the book’s two main protagonists. The story is told from the French perspective, and Marianne Tambour, a cantinière is a grenadier in the regiment of the Imperial Guard, and Liberté Dumont, who is a female dragoon and also a paid informer for the police minister Joseph Fouché. Both of the women are feisty protagonists, however, Marianne seemed to be the stronger of the two characters, and as such, her story, for me, is perhaps the more vivid.

The story is intricate and well plotted. The author clearly has researched his subject very well and this is evident in the amount of detail which is explored throughout the novel. There is much to take in, not just from the historical perspective about the complexities of the Napoleonic conflict, but also about the characters of those who command the novel. There is a splendid richness to the narrative which brings the period to life and the atmospheric explanations of the battle scenes are vivid and realistic. The author has cleverly included comprehensive historical references at the end of the novel, and also a glossary, which I found particularly useful.

There is no doubt that in this two hundredth anniversary year of the Battle of Waterloo, The Last Campaign of Marianne Tambour is a fitting tribute to the bravery, courage and heroism of a group of people who fought and died for a cause they little understood, but who gave everything they had in the search for truth and justice.

Amazon UK

Amazon.com

About the Author

My thanks to David for sharing his book with me.

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Sunday War Poet ...Author's choice ...David Ebsworth

I am delighted to welcome 

Author

David Ebsworth

Sharing his Sunday War Poem

So far as First World War poetry is concerned, I still remember reading Wilfred Owen's The Sentry for the first time. It would have been early 1963. The war in Vietnam was escalating. We'd just come through the Cuban Missile Crisis. As a member of a local cadet force, I was regularly involved in "Civil Defence" drills on how to survive a nuclear attack. It was a period of lunacy in human history almost as stark as the summer of 1914, and those final two lines have always stayed with me. I guess that, at the age of fourteen, I thought our lights were going out yet again - though this time for good. 

The Sentry ~ Wilfred Owen

We'd found an old Boche dug-out, and he knew,

And gave us hell, for shell on frantic shell

Hammered on top, but never quite burst through.

Rain, guttering down in waterfalls of slime

Kept slush waist high, that rising hour by hour,

Choked up the steps too thick with clay to climb.

What murk of air remained stank old, and sour

With fumes of whizz-bangs, and the smell of men

Who'd lived there years, and left their curse in the den,

If not their corpses. . . .

There we herded from the blast

Of whizz-bangs, but one found our door at last.

Buffeting eyes and breath, snuffing the candles.

And thud! flump! thud! down the steep steps came thumping

And splashing in the flood, deluging muck —

The sentry's body; then his rifle, handles

Of old Boche bombs, and mud in ruck on ruck.

We dredged him up, for killed, until he whined

"O sir, my eyes — I'm blind — I'm blind, I'm blind!"

Coaxing, I held a flame against his lids

And said if he could see the least blurred light

He was not blind; in time he'd get all right.

"I can't," he sobbed. Eyeballs, huge-bulged like squids

Watch my dreams still; but I forgot him there

In posting next for duty, and sending a scout

To beg a stretcher somewhere, and floundering about

To other posts under the shrieking air.

Those other wretches, how they bled and spewed,

And one who would have drowned himself for good, —

I try not to remember these things now.

Let dread hark back for one word only: how

Half-listening to that sentry's moans and jumps,

And the wild chattering of his broken teeth,

Renewed most horribly whenever crumps

Pummelled the roof and slogged the air beneath —

Through the dense din, I say, we heard him shout

"I see your lights!" But ours had long died out.

***

David Ebsworth

is the author

of

The Jacobites' Apprentice

The Assassin's Mark

The Kraals of Ulundi

The Last Campaign of Marianne Tambour:A Novel of Waterloo

  

My thanks to David for sharing his personal choice of WW1 war poem and for explaining why
 The Sentry is important to him.

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My Author's Choice of Sunday war Poem have been

Jane Cable
Claire Dyer
Karen Maitland
Elisabeth Gifford
David Ebsworth

My thanks to them all for giving so generously of their time and for their support of Jaffareadstoo.

Today my guest author is David Ebsworth...

I am delighted to welcome 

David Ebsworth

David Ebsworth is the author of a new novel about the Zulu War called The Kraals of Ulundi and I recently had the chance to ask him about the research he’d done for the story, and whether he’d discovered anything that surprised him.

 It turned out that he’d been all the way to South Africa as part of his research and this is what he told me:

It really doesn't matter how much reading you do about a location, there’ll always be something that you fail to capture if you don’t actually visit the scenery in which your novel takes place.

But this was especially true with Kraals, in which much of the action is set in the former colony of Natal, and the former kingdom of Zululand, both now part of a single distinct region of South Africa known as KwaZulu-Natal. Much of this beautiful area has changed little since 1879, so our visit to KZN in November 2013 let me capture sights and smells that would have been impossible without the trip.

More importantly, since much of the story is told from a Zulu viewpoint, it was easy to make friends among the Zulu population and get help with the book’s isiZulu language, pronunciations and culture.

And making friends so easily with those remarkable people also helped me realise how long there’s been a really close affinity between the British people and the Zulus. But it took a research trip to South Africa before I understood how deeply it ran.

To some extent, British colonial officials took advantage of that affinity to launch an illegal invasion and land-grab of Zululand in 1879, but soon paid the price when a column of 1,500 British troops was massacred by 25,000 warriors armed with only shields and spears on the slopes of Isandlwana. We can easily imagine the animosity there’d be today if a similar disaster befell our soldiers somewhere in the world.

Yet, in 1879, within months, and while the war was still raging, groups of Zulus were being brought to England to perform on theatre stages to packed houses and fêted as heroes. Zulu shows had been popular in London since the days of Charles Dickens, and they were very familiar to contemporary audiences.

The response of the British public was also surprising in the sense that the news of Isandlwana provoked far more anger against the colonial officials who’d launched the war than it did against the Zulus.

And this was a two-way process. The Zulus themselves were fighting to defend their own homeland, and they did so ferociously. But while they may have been ruthless in battle and its aftermath they grew to respect the British soldiers sent against them, despite the savage way in which those soldiers treated the Zulus in return.

It was that complex relationship that I was trying to capture in Kraals and, hopefully, the research trip helped me get it right. But it also gave us the chance to enjoy the astonishing scenery and wildlife. Wonderful country! Everybody should go there, if they get the chance.

Silverwood
2014

Here’s a great review of The Kraals of Ulundi by the Historical Novel Society

 http://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/the-kraals-of-ulundi/

More details of the novel can be found on David’s website pages

 http://www.davidebsworth.org/?page_id=13

My thanks to David for sharing the details of his research with us.

It's always fascinating to see how much background work goes into writing such an interesting novel.

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