God's Vindictive Wrath, by Charles Cordell
Published by Myrmidon in 2022
A full-throttle account of Edgehill and Brentford fights in 1642. The focus is squarely on the details of the battles as experienced by the soldiers of both sides; the equipment, the feelings, the waiting, the random chances that make the difference between survival or not.
There is no definite ‘main character’ until near the end of the story, and the villain is simply war, or life, that impersonal threat to all our hopes and plans. We follow a cross-section of men whose lives are marked by the opening battle and campaign in the most cruel and lethal set of wars in Britain’s history. The battles unfold through the eyes of these representatives of all of us. Some cope well with the stress, some don’t, and some pay the ultimate price for the choices that brought them to those fateful events.
Clearly, this is a well-researched story, based on first-hand accounts of this campaign of the first civil war. The details help us to feel what those men felt. We learn the backgrounds of the characters we follow so we understand something of their reasons for hazarding their lives. We come to care about them and feel their terror in the visceral descriptions of the battle.
The gradual rolling forward of the individual stories through the battles builds tension. I was reminded of the way that Christopher Nolan uses noise in the background of his film about the rescue of the BEF from Dunkirk: a constant, unremitting, disturbing, inexorable driving forward to the inevitable. Cordell uses a stop-start switching from one character to another, and we sort of hear the whining, unavoidable progress of war and death as it crashes into men’s lives. This is epitomised by the slow grinding, terrifying combat of ‘push of pike’. How would I cope in such a situation when five hundred men were pushing seventeen-foot-long pikes at me, and my regiment at them? Vicious, close-quarter warfare.
I found it confusing to distinguish between all the characters during the story of Edgehill. There was too much to take in about their situations, and then the battle was a constant deluge of detail. I felt more engaged with the story around the Battle of Brentford. By this time, I had travelled with the characters and understood them more, so I identified with their plight more. The situations each found himself in were compelling and engrossing.
This is a book for those who want to feel what those men felt at those moments of highest drama. It isn’t an intimate portrayal of family relationships, and only towards the end did I pick up the thread of Ralph Reeve as the main character and sense that there is more to come and a life journey to follow. But then, with war, nothing is certain. At this stage the personal threads are present, but only secondarily to the physical reality of war.
I enjoyed the book. I wanted to get into the detail of the battles, and I understand that battles are confusing and disjointed, so a little of that in my understanding of the story is fine. By the end I felt I had been on a journey – a buffeting, wounding journey, and it helps me in understanding those tumultuous times and my ordinary, yet extraordinary forebears.
This is the first in a series of books about the civil wars. I am looking forward to reading the next story.
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