Sergeant Lamb Of The Ninth

These two novels are about the life of Sergeant Roger Lamb, a young Dubliner who had served the Royal Welsh Fusiliers during the American War of Independence. They are concerned with the passions and frustrations of a distant war which mirrored many of Graves' own feelings for World War II. The life of Sergeant Roger Lamb, a young Dubliner who had served the Royal Welsh Fusiliers during the American War of Independence was the subject of a novelistic enterprise originally published in two parts because of war time paper shortages. The final result is a pair of picaresque novels concerned with the passions and frustrations of a distant war which mirrored many of Graves' own feelings for World War II which was happening around him. As an account of the struggle for independence, the horrors and excitements of war, the two novels were well reviewed and popular when published in the early 1940s. This chance to have both parts of what Graves considered to be a single project in one volume offers the opportunity of access to a literary and historical creation which both opens up the world of the American War of Independence, and the creative life and mind of a great writer of the 20th century.

Robert Graves first came across the name of Roger Lamb in 1914, when Graves was an English officer instructing his platoon in regimental history. Lamb was a British soldier who had served his king during the American War of Independence, and whose claim to a footnote in history is that he managed to escape twice from American prison camps. When Graves went to America in the 1930s, he remembered Sergeant Lamb, investigated his story and created this fictionalized memoir telling Lamb's story from his Irish childhood to war and revolution, weaving a mesmerizing tale of courage and adventure.