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Examining the memoirs and autobiographies of British soldiers during the Romantic period, Neil Ramsey explores the effect of these as cultural forms mediating warfare to the reading public during and immediately after the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Forming a distinct and commercially successful genre that in turn inspired the military and nautical novels that flourished in the 1830s, military memoirs profoundly shaped nineteenth-century British culture's understanding of war as Romantic adventure, establishing images of the nation's middle-class soldier heroes that would be of enduring significance through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Ramsey shows, the military memoir achieved widespread acclaim and commercial success among the reading public of the late Romantic era. Ramsey assesses their influence in relation to Romantic culture's wider understanding of war writing, autobiography, and authorship and to the shifting relationships between the individual, the soldier, and the nation. The memoirs, Ramsey argues, participated in a sentimental response to the period's wars by transforming earlier, impersonal traditions of military memoirs into stories of the soldier's personal suffering. While the focus on suffering established in part a lasting strand of anti-war writing in memoirs by private soldiers, such stories also helped to foster a sympathetic bond between the soldier and the civilian that played an important role in developing ideas of a national war and functioned as a central component in a national commemoration of war.
July 22, 1812. Salamanca, Spain. Frustrated at their first advance, British forces under Wellington’s command have spent the last four days maneuvering and retreating from the French army. Patient and cautious, Wellington is determined not to make a fatal mistake. He glimpses a moment of opportunity and grasps it, committing all of his troops to a sudden devastating attack. At the end of the day, the French army is broken, panic-stricken, and reeling; Wellington has achieved the finest victory of his brilliant military career. This book examines in unprecedented detail the battle of Salamanca, a critical British victory that proved crushing to French pride and morale in the Peninsular War (1808-1814). Focusing on the day of the battle, award-winning author Rory Muir conveys the experience of ordinary soldiers on both sides, dissects each phase of the fighting, and explores the crucial decisions each commander made. Muir employs wide-ranging British and French sources—many unpublished or obscure—to reconstruct every aspect of the battle. Having walked the battlefield itself, a site which remains today much as it was in 1812, he relates the ebb and flow of the battle with particular vividness. Muir also discusses in separate commentary sections his sources of information and explains how he has dealt with the inevitable contradictions and gaps in evidence that emerged during his research. Complete with maps, battleground plans, and other illustrations, this compelling book focuses long overdue attention on a single day in Salamanca that changed European history. Rory Muir is visiting research fellow in the department of history, University of Adelaide. His previous books include Tactics and the Experience of Battle in the Age of Napoleon and Britain and the Defeat of Napoleon, 1807-1815, both published by Yale University Press. !--caption: Charles Hamilton Smith, Ensign with colour, 9th foot. National Army Museum.--
In Women in the Peninsular War, Esdaile looks beyond the iconography. While a handful of Spanish and Portuguese women became Agustina-like heroines, a multitude became victims, and here both of these groups receive their due. But Esdaile reveals a much more complicated picture in which women are discovered to have experienced, responded to, and participated in the conflict in various ways.