"TRUMPETER, SOUND !"

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 291, 9 December 1933, Page 2 (Supplement)

"TRUMPETER, SOUND !"

A SPACIOUS JTOVEIi. Thank heaven thero is still a demand for real stories, spacious in content, with characters in whoso arteries real blood runs, and there arc novelists to supply them. "As one who for a weary space lias lain"—irritated by the inanities of London cocktail parties, secondhand, ono welcomes so full-blooded a tale as Mr. D. L. Murray's "Trumpeter, Sound!" (Hodder and Stoughton). This long aiul simple novel ie fresh evidence that writers are turning to Victorian times for subjects a/id readors for entertainment. The story is about tho fortunes of a small boy from tho country who is set to work in a London warehouse in the eighteen-forties. lie is the illegitimate son of a peer, and when, after a few years, his sense of adventure and his personal condition after a fight with fists compel him to enlist, lie finds himself a trooper in the crack cavalry regiment in which his legitimate brother is an officer. Mark has been lodging all these years with a Pickensian old man connected with the theatre, whose young daughter Fancy is a dancer. Mark falls in lovo with Fancy, but so does his officer brother, who wrongs her by going through a form of marriage and then deserting her. The scene shifts to the Crimea, and tho regiment takes part in the charge of tho Light Brigade, of which a really magnificent account is given. That historic mistake is made understandable by confusion between two lots of enemy's guns, and events are given a bias by tho operations of a Russian spy. The book is rich in broad pictures of life—the rough, coarse, brawling world of London at the beginning of tho era. of free trade, the glitter and drabhess of theatrical life, the sharp contrast between conditions in the army—the sordidncss of the men's quarters and the glamour of the officers' mess on a big guest night. The military portions of the story arc exceedingly well done. Tho people are really alive, from the theatrical father of Fancy to the colonel of the "Mercuries" and Lord Cardigan, arrogant and vindictive, but riding at the head uf the brigade "into the valley of death" as if lie were cantering in Hyde Park. Mark becomes regimental trumpeter of this Hussar regiment, and his trumpet thrills through the stoiy, telling a tale of horror and glory. Fancy, with her warm heart and ready tongue, her motherliness and art, is one of the most attractive heroines in recent fiction. A first-rate novel.