Den engelske soldat William Wheeler gjorde tjeneste i 51st - som senere blev til 1st Battalion, King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, og deltog bl.a. i Walcheren Expeditionen, i Peninsular Campaign, den lange udmattende krigsførelse i Spanien, og Waterloo Felttoget i 1815, og bagefter også i den Græske Frihedskrig. Hans breve og dagbøger er grundige og udførlige og gengiver stemningsbilleder, øjenvidneberetninger og øjenvidneskildringer af hans mange små og store oplevelser i felten og i hverdagen for soldater i den engelske hær i disse år.
Combining military and cultural history, the book explores British soldiers' travels and cross-cultural encounters in Spain and Portugal, 1808-1814. It is the story of how soldiers interacted with the local environment and culture, of their attitudes and behaviour towards the inhabitants, and how they wrote about all this in letters and memoirs.
Drummer Richard Bentinck of the 23rd of Foot (Royal Welch Fusiliers) was a rarity: he survived many sanguinary experiences and recorded his adventures. His writings provide an evocative portrait of an ordinary soldier’s perception of living with one of the most experienced Napoleonic infantry battalions. He was discharged in 1823 for ill health, but lived a full life, dying in 1878 as an old man. Jonathan Crook has meticulously researched his ancestor’s life, finding unpublished first-hand accounts from Bentinck of desperate conflict across the globe, from Copenhagen to Martinique, throughout the Peninsular Campaign and culminating at the battle of Waterloo. These accounts are drawn from interviews that Bentinck conducted with a journalist just before his death. The title of the book is taken from the Battle of Aldea de Ponte: Wellington identified a tactical vulnerability and called for infantry to conduct an immediate manoeuvre. On being informed that the 23rd of Foot was best disposed, he smiled and said, ‘Ah, the very thing,’ demonstrative of his hard-earned confidence.
Mercers journal is the most outstanding eyewitness account of the Waterloo campaign ever published. It is a classic of military history. This new, fully illustrated edition, featuring an extensive introduction and notes by Andrew Uffindell, one of the leading authorities on the Napoleonic Wars, contains a mass of additional material not included in the original. As the bicentenary of Waterloo approaches, this beautifully prepared, scholarly edition of Mercers work will be essential reading for anyone who wishes to know what it was really like to fight in the final, great battle against Napoleon.
Although an army’s success is often measured in battle outcomes, its victories depend on strengths that may be less obvious on the field. In Sickness, Suffering, and the Sword, military historian Andrew Bamford assesses the effectiveness of the British Army in sustained campaigning during the Napoleonic Wars. In the process, he offers a fresh and controversial look at Britain’s military system, showing that success or failure on campaign rested on the day-to-day experiences of regimental units rather than the army as a whole. Bamford draws his title from the words of Captain Moyle Sherer, who during the winter of 1816–1817 wrote an account of his service during the Peninsular War: “My regiment has never been very roughly handled in the field. . . But, alas! What between sickness, suffering, and the sword, few, very few of those men are now in existence.” Bamford argues that those daily scourges of such often-ignored factors as noncombat deaths and equine strength and losses determined outcomes on the battlefield. In the nineteenth century, the British Army was a collection of regiments rather than a single unified body, and the regimental system bore the responsibility of supplying manpower on that field. Between 1808 and 1815, when Britain was fighting a global conflict far greater than its military capabilities, the system nearly collapsed. Only a few advantages narrowly outweighed the army’s increasing inability to meet manpower requirements. This book examines those critical dynamics in Britain’s major early-nineteenth-century campaigns: the Peninsular War (1808–1814), the Walcheren Expedition (1809), the American War (1812–1815), and the growing commitments in northern Europe from 1813 on. Drawn from primary documents, Bamford’s statistical analysis compares the vast disparities between regiments and different theatres of war and complements recent studies of health and sickness in the British Army.
Drawing a portrait of the islands off the coast of Greece, Corfu resident Jim Potts narrates the cultural legacies of this unique place from Homer to modern times.
Bruce Collins's in-depth reassessment of the Duke of Wellington's siege of San Sebastian during the Peninsular War is a fascinating reconstruction of one of the most challenging siege operations Wellington's army undertook, and it is an important contribution to the history of siege warfare during the Napoleonic Wars. He sets the siege in the context of the practice of siege warfare during the period and Wellington's campaign strategies following his victory at the Battle of Vitoria. He focuses on how the army assigned to the siege was managed and draws on the records of the main military departments for the first time to give an integrated picture of its operations in the field. The close support given by the Royal Navy is a key aspect of his narrative. This broad approach, based in fresh archive research, offers an original perspective on both San Sebastian's significance and the nature of siege warfare in this period.
In the 200 years since the famous battle in the muddy, bloody fields of Waterloo, almost every aspect of the fighting has been examined and analyzed, apart from one – that of finding and illustrating locations relating to the campaign. From Napoleon’s landing on the Golfe Juan on France’s Côte d’Azur, along the Route Napoleon and through Grenoble, the Emperor’s journey back to Paris, and back to power, is shown in glorious full color. In this beautifully produced book, we see where Napoleon distributed the Imperial Eagles to the regiments of his army, and where his forces assembled before marching to war, and where the Due of Wellington’s Anglo-Allied army gathered in Brussels. The camera follows the initial encounters on the banks of the River Sambre and the maneuvering of the French and Coalition forces leading to the first great battles of the campaign at Quatre Bras and Ligny. The key sites occupied by the opposing armies at these battles are investigated as are the routes of the withdrawal to Mont St Jean by Wellington’s army and to Wavre by Blücher’s Prussians. The Waterloo battlefield and its associated buildings are examined in pictorial detail, as are the locations which marked the pivotal moments of the battle. The sites of the corresponding battle at Wavre are also shown, as well as the pursuit of the two wings of beaten French Army, including the sieges of the fortresses by the British army, before Paris was finally reached. The uprising in the Vendée and the last clashes of the campaign before Napoleon’s abdication are also featured. The book closes with Napoleon’s journey from Paris to St Helena via l'Île d’Aix and Plymouth. Headquarters buildings, observation posts, monuments and memorials, bridges and battlefields, and the principal locations of the campaign are portrayed in unique photographs – and behind every plague and place is a tale of political posturing, military maneuvering, sacrifice and savagery. Together these images tell the story of Napoleon’s greatest gamble, and we know that a picture is worth a thousand words!
For Fear of Pain offers a social history of the operating room in Britain during the final decades of painful surgery. It asks profound questions: how could surgeons operate upon conscious patients? How could patients submit? It presents a revisionist view of surgery, hygiene, nursing, military and naval surgery and the introduction of anaesthesia.
