Leon Garfield's imagination is disciplined so that the surprises and bizarre events in his stories are properly related to the whole. He makes it seem natural, and yet astonishing [in The Drummer boy], that Charlie Samson the drummer boy, the "golden lad" of the regiment, should be the link between the General who gave orders (or said he did) in anticipation of ambush, his son-in-law who disastrously failed to carry them out and the young soldier whose remarkably unheroic death will deprive the General's daughter of life and love—unless Charlie is prepared to stand substitute…. What is heroism? What is love? How can a mere boy, trained to lead with the sound of his drum, learn to work out his own orders for life? Perhaps none of Leon Garfield's parables of innocence tarnished has been quite as moving or as sharply considered as this one. In his...