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Book Memoirs of a Sergeant in the 43rd Light Infantry in the Peninsular War

Download or read book Memoirs of a Sergeant in the 43rd Light Infantry in the Peninsular War written by Anon and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2013-02-18 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this anonymously published memoir, the experiences of a “light-bob”, or light infantryman, are recounted in a readable and exciting account. The Author reveals himself to be a proud Irishman who joined the 43rd in time to join the expedition to Denmark, before embarking on more serious skirmishing and heavy fighting in the Peninsular. First during Sir John Moore’s retreat to Coruña and then as part of the famed Light Division under General Craufurd. His view of the actions on the Coa, Masséna's invasion of Portugal, the battle of Fuentes d'Oñoro, the siege of Ciudad Rodrigo follow before his wounds at the storming of Badajoz force his retirement. The author gives an excellent account of the day-to-day life as an N.C.O. in the light infantry, tactics and experience recounted in detail, along with the impact on the Portuguese and Spanish civilians that he encounters. An enjoyable Peninsular read. Author — Anon Text taken, whole and complete, from the edition published in 1835, London, by John Mason. Original Page Count – 278 pages.

Book Women in the Peninsular War

Download or read book Women in the Peninsular War written by Charles J. Esdaile and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2014-08-07 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the iconography of the Peninsular War of 1808–14, women are well represented—both as heroines, such as Agustina Zaragosa Domenech, and as victims, whether of starvation or of French brutality. In history, however, with its focus on high politics and military operations, they are invisible—a situation that Charles J. Esdaile seeks to address. 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. While some women fought or otherwise became involved in the struggle against the invaders, others turned collaborator, used the war as a means of effecting dramatic changes in their situation, or simply concentrated on staying alive. Along with Agustina Zaragoza Domenech, then, we meet French sympathizers, campfollowers, pamphleteers, cross-dressers, prostitutes, amorous party girls, and even a few protofeminists. Esdaile examines many social spheres, ranging from the pampered daughters of the nobility, through the cloistered members of Spain’s many convents, to the tough and defiant denizens of the Madrid slums. And we meet not just the women to whom the war came but also the women who came to the war—the many thousands who accompanied the British and French armies to the Iberian peninsula. Thanks to his use of copious original source material, Esdaile rescues one and all from, as E. P. Thompson put it, “the enormous condescension of posterity.” And yet all these women remain firmly in their historical and cultural context, a context that Esdaile shows to have emerged from the Peninsular War hardly changed. Hence the subsequent loss of these women’s story, and the obscurity from which this book has at long last rescued them.

Book Wellington s Light Division and the Defence of Portugal

Download or read book Wellington s Light Division and the Defence of Portugal written by Robert Burnham and published by Frontline Books. This book was released on 2024-05-30 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are many books on Wellington’s campaigns during the Peninsular War. Yet very few examine the pivotal year of 1811, when he went on the offensive and forced Napoleon’s armies back over 300 kilometers, from the doors of Lisbon to the Spanish border. For two months he pursued the retreating French, fighting skirmishes and rearguards virtually the whole way. The French finally halted at the Spanish border and turned on Wellington in early May, where an epic three-day battle was fought at Fuentes de Oñoro. The rest of the year, Wellington defended the border while making plans to liberate Spain in 1811. Wellington’s Light Division and the defense of Portugal looks at the famed Light Division as it led the pursuit of the French and was involved in almost every combat and battle fought that year. The book also explores the stalemate of January and February 1811, where the division maintained outposts overlooking French positions in the vicinity of Santarem, as well as the pursuit of the French Army back to Spain in March and April, when the division fought many skirmishes, combats, and small battles, often on its own. These include the actions at Pombal, Condeixa, Redinha, Casal Novo, Foz d’Arouce, Freixada, and Sabugal. May saw the Light Division in a desperate fight at Fuentes de Oñoro, where for much of the battle it held the army’s right flank. For the rest of the year the Light Division was in the vicinity of Ciudad Rodrigo where it occupied ground that it held for much of 1810, where it served as Wellington’s advance outposts. The assumed similar positions and were engaged at Fuente Guinaldo and El Bodon. In addition to these fights, the book will examine the changes in the organization of the division, with the addition of new battalions and release of other units. It will also go into great detail on the problems it had with command and control – with its leading officers exhausted, requesting permission to return home to recuperate. Drawing on diaries, letters, and memoirs, the authors tell the story of the officers and men who fought in the division. Many of these sources have never been published before.

Book Wellington s Light Division in the Peninsular War

Download or read book Wellington s Light Division in the Peninsular War written by Robert Burnham and published by Frontline Books. This book was released on 2020-12-14 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A detailed and riveting account of the Light Division and its three regiments, 43rd and 52nd Light Infantry and the 95th Rifles . . . An important book.” —Firetrench In February 1810, Wellington formed what became the most famous unit in the Peninsular War: the Light Division. Formed around the 43rd and 52nd Light Infantry and the 95th Rifles, the exploits of these three regiments is legendary. Over the next 50 months, the division would fight and win glory in almost every battle and siege of the Peninsular War. How the division achieved its fame began on the border of Spain and Portugal where it served as a screen between Wellington’s Army and the French. When it came time pull back from the border, the division endured a harrowing retreat with a relentless enemy at their heels. It was during this eventful year it developed an esprit-de-corps and a belief in its leaders and itself that was unrivaled in Wellington’s Army. Wellington’s Light Division in the Peninsular War uses over 100 primary sources—many never published before—to recount the numerous skirmishes, combats, and battles, as well as the hardships of a year of duty on the front lines. Others are from long-forgotten books published over 150 years ago. It is through the words of the officers and men who served with it that this major, and long-anticipated study of the first critical year of the Light Division is told. “Given the limited scope of the book, covering only one year of the Peninsular campaign, the depth of the study is truly remarkable . . . An excellent history of the Light Division ‘Warts and All.’”—The Napoleon Series

Book Peninsular Eyewitnesses

    Book Details:
  • Author : Charles Esdaile
  • Publisher : Pen and Sword
  • Release : 2008-09-30
  • ISBN : 1844151913
  • Pages : 353 pages

Download or read book Peninsular Eyewitnesses written by Charles Esdaile and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2008-09-30 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many books have been written about the British struggle against Napoleon in the Peninsula. A few recent studies have given a broader view of the ebb and flow of a long war that had a shattering impact on Spain and Portugal and marked the history of all the nations involved. But none of these books has concentrated on how these momentous events were perceived and understood by the people who experienced them. Charles Esdaile has brought together a vivid selection of contemporary accounts of every aspect of the war to create a panoramic yet minutely detailed picture of those years of turmoil. The story is told through memoirs, letters and eyewitness testimony from all sides. Instead of generals and statesmen, we mostly hear from less-well-known figures - junior officers and ordinary soldiers and civilians who recorded their immediate experience of the conflict.

Book Voices from the Peninsula

Download or read book Voices from the Peninsula written by Ian Fletcher and published by Frontline Books. This book was released on 2016-03-30 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Peninsular War was one of the most successful campaigns ever fought by the British Army. Between 1808, when British troops landed in Portugal, and 1814, when Wellington's Army advanced into the south of France, British soldiers were involved in countless battles and sieges against Napoleon's vaunted French veterans. Drawing on rare letters, diaries and memoirs, Ian Fletcher presents a superb insight into the daily lives of British soldiers in this momentous period and evokes such key battles and sieges as Vimiero, Talavera, Badajoz, Salamanca, Vittoria and San Sebastian. Ian Fletcher's skillful compilation of accounts, placed in context by important background detail, make this the story of the Peninsular War in the words of the men who marched, fought and triumphed with Wellington. Although there have been many accounts of soldiering in Wellington's army, Voices from the Peninsula throws new light on the experience of Napoleonic warfare and brings to life what Wellington called 'the finest military machine in existence'.

Book The Peninsular War

    Book Details:
  • Author : Charles Esdaile
  • Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
  • Release : 2015-03-17
  • ISBN : 1466892366
  • Pages : 945 pages

Download or read book The Peninsular War written by Charles Esdaile and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-03-17 with total page 945 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A stunning look at Napoleon's campaign across the Iberian peninsula from historian Charles Esdaile. At the end of the 18th century Spain remained one of the world's most powerful empires. Portugal, too, was prosperous at the time. By 1808, everything had changed. Portugal was under occupation and ravaged by famine, disease, economic problems and political instability. Spain had imploded and worse was to come. For the next six years, the peninsula was the helpless victim of others, suffering perhaps over a million deaths while troops from all over Europe tore it to pieces. Charles Esdaile's brilliant new history of the conflict makes plain the scope of the tragedy and its far-reaching effects, especially the poisonous legacy that produced the Spanish civil war of 1936-39.

Book The British Soldier in the Peninsular War

Download or read book The British Soldier in the Peninsular War written by G. Daly and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-07-23 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining military and cultural history, the book explores British soldiers' travels and cross-cultural encounters in Spain and Portugal, 1808-1814. It is the story of how soldiers interacted with the local environment and culture, of their attitudes and behaviour towards the inhabitants, and how they wrote about all this in letters and memoirs.

Book Wellington

Download or read book Wellington written by Rory Muir and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-03 with total page 693 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The leading Wellington historian’s fascinating reassessment of the Iron Duke’s most famous victory and his role in the turbulent politics after Waterloo. For Arthur Wellesley, First Duke of Wellington, his momentous victory over Napoleon was the culminating point of a brilliant military career. Yet Wellington’s achievements were far from over: he commanded the allied army of occupation in France to the end of 1818, returned home to a seat in Lord Liverpool’s cabinet, and became prime minister in 1828. He later served as a senior minister in Peel’s government and remained commander-in-chief of the army for a decade until his death in 1852. In this richly detailed work, the second and concluding volume of Rory Muir’s definitive biography, the author offers a substantial reassessment of Wellington’s significance as a politician and a nuanced view of the private man behind the legend of the selfless hero. Muir presents new insights into Wellington’s determination to keep peace at home and abroad, achieved by maintaining good relations with the Continental powers and resisting radical agitation while granting political equality to the Catholics in Ireland rather than risk civil war. And countering one-dimensional pictures of Wellington as a national hero, Muir paints a portrait of a well-rounded man whose austere demeanor on the public stage belied his entertaining, gossipy, generous, and unpretentious private self. “[An] authoritative and enjoyable conclusion to a two-part biography.” —Lawrence James, Times (London) “Muir conveys the military, political, social and personal sides of Wellington’s career with equal brilliance. This will be the leading work on the subject for decades.” —Andrew Roberts, author of Napoleon and Wellington: The Long Duel

Book The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture  1780   1835

Download or read book The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture 1780 1835 written by Neil Ramsey and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Book Robert Craufurd  The Man   the Myth

Download or read book Robert Craufurd The Man the Myth written by Ian Fletcher and published by Pen and Sword Military. This book was released on 2021-05-12 with total page 797 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To most students of the Peninsular War the name Robert Craufurd evokes images of a battle-hardened martinet, flogging his men across Portugal and Spain, driving them hard and generally taking a tough stance against anything and everything that did not meet with his own strict disciplinarian code. But that is only a partial picture of this most complex character, and it is the other side of Craufurd’s personality that is revealed in this, the first full-length biography to be written in the last hundred years. Craufurd’s letters to his wife are published here for the first time, and they show that he was a far more interesting and varied man in his private life than he appeared to be on campaign. Ian Fletcher follows Craufurd’s controversial career from India, Ireland and South America to the Iberian Peninsula where he achieved immortality as one of Wellington’s finest generals.

Book Britain and Wellington s Army

Download or read book Britain and Wellington s Army written by K. Linch and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-07-25 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Britain was France's most implacable enemy during the Napoleonic Wars yet was able to resist the need for conscription to fill the ranks of its army and sustain Wellington's campaigns in Portugal and Spain. This new study explains how the men were found to replenish Wellington's army, and the consequences on Britain's government, army and society.

Book The Hunt for Moore s Gold

Download or read book The Hunt for Moore s Gold written by John Grehan and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2019-07-30 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of The Charge of the Light Brigade examines the history behind a treasure of military gold that disappeared during the Peninsula War. History abounds with unresolved puzzles and unanswered questions, none more so than that of the loss of the British Army’s military chest during the retreat to Corunna in 1809. Now, with a group of fellow historians, the author set off to search the archives and the mountains of Galicia in a bid to find Moore’s gold. Sir John Moore’s small force had dared to attack Marshal Soult’s II Corps isolated in the north of Spain. But before Moore could pounce on the unsuspecting French corps, he learned that the Emperor Napoleon, at the head of an overwhelming body of troops, was bearing down on the British force, hoping to cut it off from the sea and its only avenue of escape. A desperate race for the coast then began, with the French hard on Moore’s heels. In subzero temperatures, the troops were driven on through the snow-clad Galician mountains at a punishing pace. As the men trudged on in deteriorating conditions, the bullocks pulling the army’s military chest could no longer keep up. So, in order to prevent the money from falling into enemy hands, the entire military chest was thrown down a deep ravine. What then happened to all those dollars and doubloons? Some were snatched up by the pursuing French cavalry. Some, also, were retrieved by British soldiers who intentionally lagged behind, though their greed cost them their lives on the end of a French bayonet. But what of the rest of the money?

Book Britain s Soldiers

    Book Details:
  • Author : Kevin Linch
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press
  • Release : 2014
  • ISBN : 1846319552
  • Pages : 238 pages

Download or read book Britain s Soldiers written by Kevin Linch and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Britains Soldiers explores the complex figure of the Georgian soldier and rethinks current approaches to military history.

Book The life of the rev  John W  de la Flechere

Download or read book The life of the rev John W de la Flechere written by Joseph Benson and published by . This book was released on 1838 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book The Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle

Download or read book The Evangelical Magazine and Missionary Chronicle written by and published by . This book was released on 1835 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: