Sergeant Lamb novels
He witnesses the naval engagements on Lake Champlain, then is chosen, with one comrade, to accompany the Mohawk chief Thayendanegea on a three-month hunting expedition.
Some time later, near Fort Edward, Lamb is charged with a lone mission to return through the forest to Ticonderoga, there to organize the transport of military stores.
Lamb takes part in a battle at Bemis Heights, in the course of which he learns by another accidental encounter that "Gentleman" Harlowe had long ago married and deserted another wife.
His half-starved regiment wins a costly victory at the battle of Guildford Court House, in the course of which Lamb encounters his old adversary Harlowe, now an American officer, and shoots him dead.
The regiment is sent to Yorktown, where, as they prepare for the French attack, he discovers that the mysterious mistress of his general Lord Cornwallis is Lamb's own Kate.
Briefly relating the remaining events of his life, Lamb tells us of the final British surrender, his voyage to England, his departure from the service and return to Ireland, his marriage and career as a schoolteacher, and his long-lost American daughter's rediscovery of him in Dublin.
Newly returned from an extended visit to America, he was mainly concerned to make a little money with which to support his girlfriend Beryl Hodge (later his second wife), and also his various needy friends who could be employed for secretarial and research work.
The recurring minor character of John Martin, a Satanic figure, closely resembles an earlier love-rival, Geoffrey Taylor (né Phibbs).
[3][1] Another motive lies in Graves's strong disagreement with the sympathetic, Whiggish view of the American revolutionary cause held by, for example, Trevelyan, which he felt impelled to correct.
Dorothy Canfield assured the Book of the Month Club that it was "finely worth reading",[16] and the New York Times ranked it alongside George Bernard Shaw's The Devil's Disciple, a play with the same historical setting.
[18] George Orwell, writing in the New Statesman, praised the accurate historical detail and convincingly 18th-century prose, and felt that "the book is really a pendant to Good-bye to All That, an act of devotion towards the regiment with which he still feels a tie".
"[I] have never had so many bouquets plugged at me", Graves exulted, and found an explanation for the difference in tone: "the first volume was a slightly new taste for people and after a time they decided that they liked it, so this one was easy money".
[24] His biographer Miranda Seymour thought the novels deserved their good reviews,[25] and the academic Anthony Quinton believed that the Sergeant Lamb books would continue to be read for as long as anything Graves had written.
