I FIRST came across the name of Sergeant Roger Lamb in 1914, when I was a young officer instructing my platoon in regimental history. His experiences conveyed little to me at the time, because of my truly British ignorance of America and the Americans. However, I visited the United States twenty-five years later and stayed for some weeks with American friends at Princeton, New Jersey, where Washington’s defeat of the Hessian Division of the British Army was a proud tradition of the town. It happened to be the time when King George and Queen Elizabeth were being magnificently welcomed by the President and people of the United States; and as an Englishman I came in for my share of the popular warmth. I naturally remembered Sergeant Lamb as a representative British soldier of the period and looked up his story. This novel then suggested itself as a means of learning, as I wrote, why and how the Americans had separated themselves from the British Crown. These were for me very serious questions – for I now regarded the American Revolution as the most important single event of modern times – and I had found them as equivocally treated in American as in English text-books of history.
Since Sergeant Lamb of The Ninth is not presented as straight history, I have avoided footnotes or other documentation. All that readers of an historical novel can fairly ask from the author is an assurance that he has nowhere wilfully falsified geography, chronology, or character, and that the information contained in it is accurate enough to add without discount to their general stock of history. I am prepared to give that assurance. I have invented no main characters, not even Chaplain John Martin, Sergeant Buchanan, Dipper Brooks, or the child born at the Quaker’s house in the forest by Lake George. All the opinions on the war which are here put into the mouth of Lamb or quoted from his friends and enemies – however shockingly they may read now – are actual opinions recorded during the American War of Independence.
The letter reproduced as a frontispiece, by kind permission of the Lieutenant-Governor of the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, is the only one in Lamb’s hand that appears to be extant. It is addressed to General Calvert, the Adjutant-General of the Army, and went as covering letter to his manuscript Memorial, applying for an out-pension at the Hospital. It refers to adventures subsequent to those contained in this book: when, escaping from his American prison-camp, he became Sergeant Lamb of The Twenty-third, or Royal Welch Fusiliers. These make a long story in themselves.
The date of Lamb’s death is not known, the record having apparently perished when the Four Courts were blown up in 1922 by the Irish revolutionaries: but from information that Mr Dermot Coffey of the Irish Public Record Office has been good enough to supply, he appears to have lived until at least 1824. After his discharge from the Army in 1784 he became schoolmaster of the Free School at White Friars Lane, Dublin. He married Jane Crumer by banns in St Anne’s Parish Church, Dublin, in January 1786.
R. G.
Galmpton-Brixham, Devon
1940