The Wages of Virtue

Name: The Wages of Virtue
Rating: 2.5 (5 reviews)

by P. C. Wren

First published 1916

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2.5(5)

Sir Montague Merline is believed to have died after his command is destroyed in Africa, leaving his wife free to rebuild her life. He survives with his memory shattered, and when he eventually learns that she has remarried, he chooses not to reclaim his former place. Instead he disappears into the French Foreign Legion, where barrack-room rivalries, hard campaigning and the canteen world surrounding Carmelita test the identity he has sacrificed.

The novel links a domestic moral dilemma to Wren’s first extended portrait of Legion life. Its title is deliberately ambiguous: Merline’s restraint protects others, but virtue exacts a severe personal cost and cannot prevent violence, jealousy or misunderstanding. The book established many of the settings and themes Wren would later develop in the Beau Geste novels—anonymous service, concealed birth, comradeship and honour pursued outside respectable society.