First published in 1967

First Published in 1967. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

MEMOIRS OWN OF SERGEANT BOURGOGNE 1812-1813 Authorized Translation from the Trench Original with an Introduction by the Hon. SIR JOHN FORTESCUE and Illustrations from the drawings of FABER DU FAUR 1929 NEW YORK ROBERT M. McBRIDE COMPANY PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN I K s I INTRODUCTION THE conscientious historian will always use the older volumes of military reminiscences by British non-com missioned officers and privates with considerable caution. The memories of the most accurate of us become treacherous with advancing years, and, unless we have a contemporary diary or contemporary letters to check us, are apt, in all good faith, to lapse into romance over past experiences. This is especially true of the experiences of war, and in particular of battle, when a man can see little himself, but, after repeated discussion with his com rades, is liable to confound a multitude of their visions with his own. If by chance a man be possessed by the demon which is called the literary instinct, he is the more likely to be misled, not necessarily through deliberate ill-faith, to record occurrences as within his actual know ledge, though, as a matter of fact, he is aware of them only through hearsay. Some little touch, which will heighten the effect of a sentence or a paragraph, suddenly strikes him, and down it goes. The private soldier is not as a rule endowed with the literary gift but he may have friends in the lower ranks of the literary profession who flatter themselves that they enjoy it and they pick his brains, as the phrase goes, and make copy of the result. This is the true origin of most of the books concerning the Peninsular War which purport to have come from the ranks. They are mainlythe work of hack-writers, who give their information at second-hand, having INTRODUCTION gathered It, very likely in a public-house, from some old soldier, who probably was not above hoaxing them if sober, and was very voluble of reminiscence if drunk. The military memories of officers are rather more trustworthy, as a rule but they too need to be carefully checked. Some of them seem to lose their hold upon facts directly they take a pen into their hand others cannot refrain from picturesque touches because they are effective. One such writer, for instance, makes great capital out of the supposed coincidence that Badajoz was stormed upon Easter Sunday whereas study of the almanac shows that it certainly was not. Even such a writer as Napier sometimes, for the sake of literary effect, gravely prints a scrap of the merest camp-gossip. But on the other hand there are reminiscences which, however startling, bear upon them the unmistakable mark of truth, and among these must be ranked those of Sergeant Bourgogne and though they are those not of a British but of a French soldier, of the great days of Napoleon, they are well worth study by all British readers who would understand military human nature. Bourgogne, the son of a cloth-merchant, with some private means and a superior education, joined the Light Infantry of the Imperial Guard in 1805, went through the Polish campaign of 1806-7, was wounded at Essling in 1809, d was then moved to the Peninsula whence, after having to do with the British army under Wellington, his regiment was withdrawn in March, 1812, for the Russian campaign. Of his experiences in Spain and Portugal he tells us nothing. There is not so much as a reference to them, from which we may infer that he was not among those who made the disastrous retreat, under Massena, from Torres Vedras. He mentions that from Paris the regiment travelled in vi INTRODUCTION waggons, day and night, to the Rhine, but he does not report what would have been most interesting to know the condition of the men, their arms and equipment at the end of the journey. Thence they marched eastward to the Niemen, crossed it on June 25th and entered on the road to Moscow...

A masterpiece of military history, this is the concise biography of arguably England's greatest General by arguably Britain's greatest military historian. Fortescue's Marlborough is less of a hagiography than the huge two volume life by Marlborough's great descandent, Winston Churchill, but is a marvellous read for all that. Briskly taking in the story of the political machinations in Britain which often bedevilled the Duke's brilliance in battle, Fortescue's focus is firmly on the field of conflict. His accounts of the Duke's four great victories - Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet - as well as his sieges and lesser actions, is magnificent. A master of military history writing about a master of the art of war itself - this book, like Marlborough himself, cannot be beaten.