Publisher's Synopsis
Garnered from the memoirs, letters, and diaries of common soldiers as well as officers, this vivid and gripping volume of eyewitness history offers firsthand accounts of the engagements that bloodied battlefields in Europe and America during the French Revolutionary War, the Napoleonic Wars, and the War of 1812. A compelling chronicle, it marches through the more than two decades of battles and campaigns in which the brilliant and charismatic general Napoleon reinvented warfare. From Austerlitz to Moscow, from New Orleans to Salamanca, here are the true-life stories behind history-making events that have become the stuff of some of the world's most popular novels and films. Here are the famous hussars and artillery, the musket and sword, the patriotic fervor and paralyzing fear, heroic deeds and tactical disasters. Here, too, are detailed views of the ordinary soldier's daily life: the short rations, the long marches in the hot Iberian summer and numbing Russian winter, the painful coping illness and wounds, the lashings, the amours, and the always close companionship of danger and death. Vibrantly, vitally, here is history at its most intimate and most thrilling.
