Opening Passage:
The youthful gentleman in the scarlet coat with blue facings and gold lace, who was seated in the window of Lady Worth's drawing-room, idly looking down into the street, ceased for a moment to pay any attention to the conversation that was in progress. Among the passers-by, a Bruxelloise in a black mantilla had caught his eye. She was lovely enough to be watched the whole way down the street. Besides, the conversation in the salon was very dull: just the same stuff that was being said all over Brussels. (p. 1)
Summary: All the people in Brussels have one major topic on their minds: Napoleon, who has returned from Elba and is gathering his army, with what seems to be extraordinary success. The city, already filled with English visiting the continent, begins to fill up with English, Prussian, and Dutch soldiers. Everyone is waiting for the arrival of the Duke of Wellington, and Lord and Lady Worth are awaiting the arrival of Colonel Charles Audley, Lord Worth's brother.
While Napoleon may be the major topic of discussion, there is one other figure who keeps coming up in the talk and gossip: Lady Barbara Childe, the daughter of the Duke of Avon, known to her family and friends as 'Bab'. Strikingly beautiful, daring in fashion, scandalously flirtatious, and apparently completely heartless, Bab seems untameable. When Colonel Audley arrives, however, she finds his cool head and social competence surprisingly intriguing, and when he proposes marriage, she accepts. Nobody thinks that it will work. And, indeed, Barbara seems temperamentally incapable of leaving off her scandalous and flirtatious ways; Charles's relatively unshakeable attitude, if anything, only provokes her. The whole relationship breaks down completely. But then news comes that Napoleon is advancing from Paris. In an instant, all of Brussels is turned upside-down as the men go off to war, and the world looks very different.
There is so much going on in this book, it's difficult to summarize it in a way that does not cut out a great deal. One of the more interesting characters is the Duke of Wellington himself, whom Heyer has famously depicted with extraordinary historical accuracy. The Duke, due to his work in the Peninsular War against Napoleon's invasion of Iberia, is the one on whom everyone's hopes rest, but there is a nagging worry, because he has never gone up directly against Napoleon himself. What is more, the Allied army against Napoleon is a chaotic, thrown-together mish-mash of very different forces with radically different styles of training and fighting. Why, then, is most of the story concerned with young men and women at balls and on holiday excursions? The big problem with fighting Napoleon is the necessity for good timing, which means that you have to have a very large number of young men in the same place, waiting but ready and in good spirits for the time to be unleashed. You need things to keep them out of trouble, especially the officers. The officers are generally from the upper gentry and the nobility, and the governments have a vested interest in keeping their families as supportive of the war as possible. So they must kept busy with the sort of entertainments appropriate to respectable gentry and nobility. But perhaps more fundamentally, every military is just the marching of the society from which it is drawn; a Regency-period military will be a microcosm of a Regency society.
As to the main storyline that binds the whole together, I found Bab very annoying at the beginning, but it eventually becomes clear that she has her almost-redeeming qualities, and that much of our scandalous disregard for propriety is a sort of rebellion against expectations arising from the fact that many others, especially women, will maliciously interpret her actions, anyway. Charles is perhaps the weakest point, in that his primary narrative function is to be imperturbable; but even so, he has enough to do to stay interesting. In both cases, in any case, we have an example of one of the main themes of the novel; in the Duchess of Avon's words, "Nothing in this world is quite perfect, nor quite unbearable" (p. 468).
Favorite Passage:
'By all means let him be shaved,' said the Duchess, frowning at him. 'He will feel very much more the thing.'
When Barbara came in with her grandfather to be met by the news that Colonel Audley was in the valet's hands, beings shaved, she exclaimed, 'Shaved! Good God, how came you to let him disturb himself for such a foolish thing?'
'My love, when a man begins to think of shaving you may take it from me that he is on the road to recovery,' said the Duchess.... (p. 469)
Recommendation: Highly Recommended.
*****
Georgette Heyer, An Infamous Army: A Novel of Love, War, Wellington, and Waterloo, Sourcebooks Landmark (Naperville, IL: 2007).