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Voices From the Napoleonic Wars - From Waterloo to Salamanca, 14 eyewitness accounts of a soldier's life in the early 1800s (Paperback)
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Voices From the Napoleonic Wars - From Waterloo to Salamanca, 14 eyewitness accounts of a soldier's life in the early 1800s (Paperback)
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List price R394
Loot Price R329
Discovery Miles 3 290
You Save R65 (16%)
Expected to ship within 9 - 15 working days
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Voices from the Napoleonic Wars reveals in telling detail the harsh
lives of soldiers at the turn of the eighteenth century and in the
early years of the nineteenth - the poor food and brutal discipline
they endured, along with the forced marches and bloody,
hand-to-hand combat. Contemporaries were mesmerised by Napoleon,
and with good reason: in 1812, he had an unprecedented million men
and more under arms. His new model army of volunteers and
conscripts at epic battles such as Austerlitz, Salamanca, Borodino,
Jena and, of course, Waterloo marked the beginning of modern
warfare, the road to the Sommes and Stalingrad. The citizen-in-arms
of Napoleon's Grande Armee and other armies of the time gave rise
to a distinct body of soldiers' personal memoirs. The personal
accounts that Jon E. Lewis has selected from these memoirs, as well
as from letters and diaries, include those of Rifleman Harris
fighting in the Peninsular Wars, and Captain Alexander Cavalie
Mercer of the Royal Horse Artillery at Waterloo. They cover the
land campaigns of the French Revolutionary Wars (1739-1802), the
Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) and the War of 1812 (1812-1815), in
North America. This was the age of cavalry charges, of horse-drawn
artillery, of muskets and hand-to-hand combat with sabres and
bayonets. It was an era in which inspirational leadership and
patriotic common cause counted for much at close quarters on
chaotic and bloody battlefields. The men who wrote these accounts
were directly involved in the sweeping campaigns and climactic
battles that set Europe and America alight at the turn of the
eighteenth century and in the years that followed. Alongside
recollections of the ferocity of hard-fought battles are the
equally telling details of the common soldier's daily life - short
rations, forced marches in the searing heat of the Iberian summer
and the bitter cold of the Russian winter, debilitating illnesses
and crippling wounds, looting and the lash, but also the
compensations of hard-won comradeship in the face of ever-present
death. Collectively, these personal accounts give us the most vivid
picture of warfare 200 and more years ago, in the evocative
language of those who knew it at first hand - the men and officers
of the British, French and American armies. They let us know
exactly what it was like to be an infantryman, a cavalryman, an
artilleryman of the time.
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