Beau Geste by P.C. Wren celebrates its centenary this month. It was to become highly popular, and the book with which he was always identified. The setting is in the period before the First World War and it starts with the meeting of a British civil servant in Nigeria and an officer of French cavalry. The latter has found a mystery of a fort containing only dead legionnaires, propped up against the battlements. Here he also finds a letter from Michael (Beau) Geste confessing to the theft back in England of the Blue Water jewel. To add to the mystery, three of his men disappear, before the fort is set alight.
The book then goes back to the three brothers Geste and their friends in their aunt’s house. The aunt is the owner of the Blue Water. The narrator is John, the youngest of the brothers. The brothers join the Foreign Legion and meet up with Hank and Buddy, two Americans who also appear in the third of the Beau Geste stories by P. C. Wren, Beau Ideal. The Legion had already been a magnet for neutrals such as Americans who sided with the Allies in the earlier stages of the First World War.
Beau and John are sent to defend the fort under command of the villainous Adjutant Lejaune. Following an attack, John and the dying Beau kill Lejaune after everyone else in the fort has been killed. Digby, the middle brother and the two Americans are in the relieving force and are the three who desert with John. John is the only one who gets back to England, where it is revealed that the Blue Water had never been stolen but surreptitiously sold by their aunt. Beau had nobly taken the blame to shield her and his brothers.
The exploits of T.E. Lawrence had quickened interest in desert warfare, but he pattern of the book may also be influenced by The Four Feathers (1902) by A.E.W. Mason, about the Mahdist war. Accusations of cowardice lead three of his fellow British Army officers to give the hero Harry Feversham three white feathers, and his girlfriend Ethne then adds a fourth. The rest of the book concerns Feversham’s often almost suicidally brave actions to get the four feathers taken back. In this he is successful and eventually wins back Ethne as well. The books have in common the themes of nobility, self-sacrifice and honour redeemed. Both the books’ heroes have what might be regarded as quixotic motivations.
There are differences. The Four Feathers was written before the First World War and the huge casualties of the trenches, and so has attitudes uninfluenced by those events. Beau Geste was written after the war but is in a world apart: the French Foreign Legion and the whole Army of Africa were looked down on by the metropolitan conscript army charged with defending France against Germany. Both books may be seen as dealing with what has been called the ‘Scramble for Africa’, although French involvement in Africa goes back before. Indeed, the Foreign Legion’s involvement goes back to 1831.
The Four Feathers is very much an officer class book. The Geste brothers are equally upper class, but they enrol as ordinary legionnaires. Mason’s book has rather more complexity in terms of ambiguous characters and in its depiction of indigenous people. There is also more subtlety about Feversham’s character: Mason suggests Harry is afraid of showing fear rather than being frightened as such and this is one of the main themes of the novel.
Beau Geste amplified the legends of the Legion and led to many imitations, pastiches and parodies. It is undoubtedly melodramatic and contrived, but has pace, plot twists and excitement, story-telling qualities that have helped it to endure.
(G J Cooling)
Image: Richard Selby Books (Bath)
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