I was rather delighted to see R.F. Delderfield on Wikipedia’s list of books published in 1949, even more so to find that his book, Seven Men of Gascony, was easily available secondhand. I went through a fairly extensive Delderfield phase after seeing the dramatization of To Serve Them All My Days way back when, reading everything that my local public library had of his — presumably the “biggies,” the “Avenue” and “Swann” cycles certainly, though no non-fiction, and not Seven Men, and so I was happy to choose it for the 1949 Club.
The novel tells the story of a group of voltigeurs, sharpshooters or skirmishers, in Napoléon’s army, who come together in their own ways and for their own reasons, and form, as people do under dangerous circumstances, deep and lasting bonds. The story encompasses some six years of Napoléon’s war and a great swathe of the European continent, from Moscow to Lisbon, even, for a time, England when a number of the seven are taken prisoner by the British, and yet there is always at the heart of it the events of the men’s lives and, it must be said, of many deaths along the way. Delderfield’s prose is as intelligent and smooth as I remember it, and he brings the fortunes of the seven voltigeurs alive as easily as he does with his own present-day.
It is to the credit of the first edition’s dust-jacket illustrator, by the way, that he had clearly read the book, but I guess I had the idea that a French cantinière‘s cart of the Napoleonic era would look less like an American pioneer’s covered wagon than this one does …! And I was pleased that although the cover of the McBooks Press edition that I did buy was focused on Napoléon instead of any of his men, let alone any of the title’s seven, the illustration itself is much better, certainly more period-appropriate than some of the other choices for this book! —
For other readers’ reviews in the 1949 Club today, visit Simon’s blog here.
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