The Green Dragoon!

Our book today is The Green Dragoon, a 1957 book by Robert Bass, and it illustrates a very good impromptu rule of book-buying: never pass up a book with a title like The Green Dragoon.

This particular Green Dragoon is about Lieutenant Colonel Banastre Tarleton, who commanded the so-called British Legion during the American Revolution (and wore a distinctive green frock, hence the book’s title), reporting to Lord Cornwallis and operating mainly in the Carolinas. Virtually every war has produced troop commanders like Tarleton: cavalrymen who could cut a dash with dramatic maneuvers and preposterous headgear, flashy figures whose own vanity and freedom of movement, you sense, counted for much more to them than The Cause or any chain of command.

But even in such a company of brigands, Tarleton stood out as among the worst. He was born in Liverpool in 1764 to a well-off merchant family that had made its money in the slave trade; the family had enough money to send him to reputable schools – London’s Middle Temple and then Oxford – where his earlier lack of promise was abundantly confirmed: young “Ban” was powerfully built, handsome, ruthless, and a smooth talker, but he was utterly uninterested in school or learning anything. From a very, very early age, the only subject that interested him was himself, and he worked hard for his entire life to advance that subject.

In 1775 he became a cavalry officer in the 1st Dragoon Guards and shipped out as soon as he could to American in order to see action (and, as he loudly proclaimed in cafes and drawing rooms all throughout London, to bring back the head of General Charles Lee in a bag), and the plentiful action he saw there allowed him to realize two things fully about himself: first, that he had genuine tactical ability as a cavalry commander, and second, that he was a bloodthirsty homicidal maniac, a twitching, dead-eyed serial killer in the disguise of a London dandy.

He did capture General Lee (didn’t decapitate him, though), and he engaged in a dozen major battles besides. He had half a hand shot away (which is why in his most famous portrait by Joshua Reynolds he’s artistically using it to reach for his sword, thus keeping it out of sight), and he famously had his forces decimated at the Battle of Cowpens, and he chased American guerrilla leaders without noticeable success, and Bass researches all of this with a comprehensive thoroughness that no previous writer had been able to match, since it was Bass himself who found a huge trove of Tarleton’s personal papers in 1956 and quickly incorporated them into his book. We get dozens and dozens of the polished dispatches Tarleton sent to Cornwallis and received from him – so many, in fact, that no subsequent biography of Tarleton is possible without a heavy debt to this book.

All the more odd, then, that it should be so incomplete. Tarleton the tactician and horseman is here in abundance, but during the portions of the book dealing with the American Revolution, Tarleton the sadistic killer is virtually invisible. The man who ordered his men to maim farmers, then had the farmers’ wives dig their graves, then ordered the wives to finish off their husbands in front of their children or the children themselves would be massacred – then massacred the children anyway, ordered the gang-raping of the wives, then massacred them too … that Tarleton, though well-attested at the time, makes no appearance in Bass’s book. It was that Tarleton, the taut-faced stormtrooper who came up with new and more diabolical means of torturing the hapless civilians who fell into his hands, doesn’t square well with the high-living swell who’s going to feature so prominently in the second half of The Green Dragoon, so he’s excised from the first half.

That second-half Tarleton is the lyric-quoting Beau Brummell who seduces Mary “Perdita” Robinson on a bet and is always living beyond his means in the more rarefied company:

Tarleton was constantly with the royal brothers. Cricket, horse racing, musicals, and card playing consumed their time and energy. “Last Friday a match at Cricket was played, on the Flat near Brighton; the Duke of York on one side, and Colonel Tarleton on the other; who chose eleven each,” said the Oracle of August 20 [1789]. “The Duke’s side fetched in their inning 292; Colonel Tarleton’s 7, having five wickets to do down.” The game was not played out for lack of time, but “The same gentlemen will play again on Wednesday for 100 guineas; Colonel Tarleton is to have Street the Miller.”

The Green Dragoon is full of such details. The more you read through its undeniably entertaining pages, the more you understand why the thing has a title like something you’d find in Georgette Heyer’s backlist.

Of course, there’s no real disguising a creature like Tarleton. It was that creature who was shunned by the convivial victors at the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown (aggrieved, he took aside the Comte de Rochambeau and asked, “Why? Why am I thus humiliatingly singled out? It was wartime!” to which Rochambeau, recoiling just a bit in that way the French have of forever seeming not to want to get mud on their clothes, replied, “It was wartime. But none was like you”), and it was that Tarleton who was snubbed for promotions later in life and again appealed in squealing outrage (this time to the Prince Regent, who eventually awarded him a baronetcy). And it was that Tarleton who loudly and mockingly resisted the efforts of Charles James Fox and others to urge Parliament to abolish the slave trade – and by that point in his book, Bass is so accustomed to defending his subject that he repeats his lines without commentary, refraining even from mentioning the personal financial stake Tarleton had in that vast industry of human misery:

General Tarleton had the greatest objections to this bill. He spoke of the rise of the commercial city of Liverpool. He told again of her ships in the African trade. Again he proclaimed Liverpool the nursery of England’s seamen. And again – and for the last time – he lamented the value of her property about to be destroyed.

There haven’t been many biographies of Banastre Tarleton, and the man’s own memoir defending his military service in America is thankfully long ago and permanently out of print. But The Green Dragoon makes wonderful reading despite the creature at its center. For $1 at the Brattle Bookshop, it was the right choice.