Books with author P. C. [Percival Christopher] Wren

A cavalry unit, having crossed the Sahara to relieve a besieged French Foreign Legion fort, arrives to an eerie silence — the enemy has vanished, and the post's walls and ramparts are defended by dead men. The fort's commander, slain by a bayonet through the heart, clutches a letter that links the riddle of the desert massacre to another mystery, the long-ago and far-away theft of a sapphire known as the Blue Water. It was the scandalous disappearance of the Blue Water that led to the self-exile of Beau, the oldest of the Geste brothers. John and Digby couldn't believe that Beau was a thief and refused to allow him to shoulder the blame alone. Thus all three Gestes turned up in North Africa, among the ranks of the Foreign Legion. Their story of suspense, betrayal, and bravery has inspired several movie versions and remains a favorite with readers who relish a classic adventure.

The story of Ethan Allen and the much-loved Green Mountain Boys of Vermont and their role in the American Revolution—the myth and the reality. A rare look at a corner of the Revolutionary War.In Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom, Wren overturns the myth of Ethan Allen as a legendary hero of the American Revolution and a patriotic son of Vermont and offers a different portrait of Allen and his Green Mountain Boys. They were ruffians who joined the rush for cheap land on the northern frontier of the colonies in the years before the American Revolution. Allen did not serve in the Continental Army but he raced Benedict Arnold for the famous seizure of Britain’s Fort Ticonderoga. Allen and Arnold loathed each other. General George Washington, leery of Allen, refused to give him troops. In a botched attempt to capture Montreal against specific orders of the commanding American general, Allen was captured in 1775 and shipped to England to be hanged. Freed in 1778, he spent the rest of his time negotiating with the British but failing to bring Vermont back under British rule. Based on original archival research, this is a groundbreaking account of an important and little-known front of the Revolutionary War, of George Washington (and his good sense), and of a major American myth. Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom is an important contribution to the history of the American Revolution.

The myth and the reality of Ethan Allen and the much-loved Green Mountain Boys of Vermont—a “surprising and interesting new account…useful, informative reexamination of an often-misunderstood aspect of the American Revolution” (Booklist).In the “highly recommended” (Library Journal) Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom, Wren overturns the myth of Ethan Allen as a legendary hero of the American Revolution and a patriotic son of Vermont and offers a different portrait of Allen and his Green Mountain Boys. They were ruffians who joined the rush for cheap land on the northern frontier of the colonies in the years before the American Revolution. Allen did not serve in the Continental Army but he raced Benedict Arnold for the famous seizure of Britain’s Fort Ticonderoga. Allen and Arnold loathed each other. General George Washington, leery of Allen, refused to give him troops. In a botched attempt to capture Montreal against specific orders of the commanding American general, Allen was captured in 1775 and shipped to England to be hanged. Freed in 1778, he spent the rest of his time negotiating with the British but failing to bring Vermont back under British rule. “A worthy addition to the canon of works written about this fractious period in this country’s history” (Addison County Independent), this is a groundbreaking account of an important and little-known front of the Revolutionary War, of George Washington (and his good sense), and of a major American myth. Those Turbulent Sons of Freedom is an “engrossing” (Publishers Weekly) and essential contribution to the history of the American Revolution.

The narrator of this story is an American called Otis Vanbrugh, who forms a friendship in childhood with the Geste boys, and with Isabel, who grows up to be John's beloved. Otis is also madly in love with her, and it is on her account that he throws himself heroically into the penal divisions of the French Foreign Legion in the middle east in order to save John for Isabel. (John himself has gone on an addle-pated but honourable rescue mission. In fact, the men in this story are all so busy rescuing each other, they seriously endanger each other at every turn!) So we're operating in the realms of High Honour here, with all the repressed misogyny masquerading as devotion, and all the similarly repressed homoeroticism that that world entails. The patronizing tone with which the Arabs are treated is enough to make you gag. Add that to the singularly patronizing attitude to women that I have already mentioned, and it was enough to make this a far less enjoyable experience...

My brother caught the priest and Dolores… . In the priest’s own church… . My brother married them before the altar… and their married life was brief!… But of course, God knew he was mad… . As he left that desecrated church, he cried, 'Never will I enter the House of God, again!… ' And that very night the big earthquake came and shattered our village with a dozen others. As we dashed through the door—the old mother in my brother’s arms, my crippled sister on my back—the roof caved in and the very road fell from before our little posada, down the hillside. My brother was in front and fell, my mother still in his arms… . And where did he recover consciousness? Tell me that!… Before the altar, upon the dead body of his victim, the murdered priest—who thus saved my brother’s life, for he had fallen thirty feet from the half-destroyed church-roof, through which he had crashed… . Yes, he had entered the House of God once more!… "It was to South America that he fled from the police—to that El Dorado where so many of us go in search of what we never find. And there he went from worse to worse than worst, defying God and slaying man… and woman! For he shot his own woman merely because she knelt—just went on her knees to God… . And one terrible night of awful storm, when fleeing alone by mountain paths from the soldiers or guardias civiles, a flash of lightning showed him a ruined building, and into it he dashed and hid. "It may have been the rolling thunder, the streaming rain, or an avalanche of stones dislodged by the horses of the police who passed along the path above—I do not know—but there was a terrible crash, a heavy blow, a blinding, suffocating dust—and he was pinned, trapped, held as in a giant fist, unable to move hand or foot, or head.

Stepsons of France by Percival Christopher Wren first published in 1917. Percival Christopher Wren was a British writer, mostly of adventure fiction. He is remembered best for Beau Geste, a much-filmed book of 1924, involving the French Foreign Legion in North Africa, and its main sequels, Beau Sabreur and Beau Ideal (in fact the so-called "trilogy" was extended in Good Gestes and Spanish Maine, so John Geste adventures feature in five books). At the Depôt at Sidi-bel-Abbès, Sergeant-Major Suicide-Maker was a devil, but at a little frontier outpost in the desert, he was the devil, the increase in his degree being commensurate with the increase in his opportunities. When the Seventh Company of the First Battalion of the Foreign Legion of France, stationed at Aïnargoula in the Sahara, learned that Lieutenant Roberte was in hospital with a broken leg, it realized that, Captain d'Armentières being absent with the Mule Company, chasing Touaregs to the south...

In the first place, there was the old standing trouble about the Shuwa Patrol; in the second, the truculent Chiboks were waxing insolent again, and their young men were regarding not the words of their elders concerning Sir Garnet Wolseley, and what happened, long, long ago, after the battle of Chibok Hill. Thirdly, the price of grain had risen to six shillings a saa, and famine threatened; fourthly, the Shehu and Shuwa sheiks were quarrelling again; and, fifthly, there was a very bad smallpox ju-ju abroad in the land (a secret society whose "secret" was to offer His Majesty’s liege subjects the choice between being infected with smallpox, or paying heavy blackmail to the society). Lastly, there was acrimonious correspondence with the All-Wise Ones (of the Secretariat in "Aiki Square" at Zungeru), who, as usual, knew better than the man on the spot, and bade him do either the impossible or the disastrous. And across all the Harmattan was blowing hard, that terrible wind that carries the Saharan dust a hundred miles to sea, not so much as a sand-storm, but as a mist or fog of dust as fine as flour, filling the eyes, the lungs, the pores of the skin, the nose and throat; getting into the locks of rifles, the works of watches and cameras, defiling water, food and everything else; rendering life a burden and a curse. The fact, moreover, that thirty days' weary travel over burning desert, across oceans of loose wind-blown sand and prairies of burnt grass, through breast-high swamps, and across unbridged boatless rivers, lay between him and Kano, added nothing to his satisfaction. For, in spite of all, satisfaction there was, inasmuch as Kano was rail-head, and the beginning of the first stage of the journey Home. That but another month lay between him and "leave out of Africa," kept George Lawrence on his feet. From that wonderful and romantic Red City, Kano, sister of Timbuktu, the train would take him, after a three days' dusty journey, to the rubbish-heap called Lagos, on the Bight of Benin of the wicked West African Coast. There he would embark on the good ship Appam, greet her commander, Captain Harrison, and sink into a deck chair with that glorious sigh of relief, known in its perfection only to those weary ones who turn their backs upon the Outposts and set their faces towards Home. Meantime, for George Lawrence—disappointment, worry, frustration, anxiety, heat, sand-flies, mosquitoes, dust, fatigue, fever, dysentery, malarial ulcers, and that great depression which comes of monotony indescribable, weariness unutterable, and loneliness unspeakable.