Memoirs of British soldiers who fought in the Peninsular War are
commonplace and histories of the momentous campaigns and battles of Sir
John Moore and Sir Arthur Wellesley, the future Duke of Wellington, can
be numbered by the score. Yet surprisingly little has been published in
English on their opponents, the French.
Using previously unseen material from the French army archives in Paris,
which includes numerous memoirs that have not even been published in
France, renowned historian Paul Dawson tells the story of the early
years of the Peninsular War as never before.
Eyewitness accounts of the horrific Siege of Zaragoza, in which more
than 50,000 soldiers and civilians were killed defending the city, and
of the cataclysmic Spanish defeats at Medellin and Ocaña are
interspersed with details of campaign life in the Iberian Peninsula and
of struggling through the Galician mountains in pursuit of the British
army marching to Corunna.
As well as the drama of the great battles and the ever-present fear of
Spanish guerrillas - the knife in the back, the flash of steel in the
dark - Paul Dawson draws on the writings of the French soldiers to
examine the ordinary conscript's belief in the war they were fighting
for their Emperor, Napoleon.
In this much-needed study of the Peninsular War from the French
perspective, Paul Dawson has produced an unprecedented, yet vital
addition to our understanding of the war in Iberia. Napoleon's
Peninsular War is destined to become one of the classic accounts of
this turbulent, yet endlessly fascinating era.
