Three Napoleonic Battles

In a way, I learned about Napoleon as a commander backwards. My interest in all things Napoleonic initially grew out of my reading of Regency romances, where the occasional hero is a veteran who served under Wellington. Nowadays it's rare, but in the 80's and 90's one sometimes ran across a Regency set in Brussels in the run-up to Waterloo, at the Congress of Vienna, or in Spain or Portugal during the Peninsular Campaign. Those were always my favorites, since I had a lurking interest in military history (possibly because one of my brothers started West Point the year I started kindergarten), and I liked the higher stakes than your typical Regency set against London high society or the pastoral English countryside.

Then I stumbled across Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe series. I have to confess I started with the TV movies, after watching The Fellowship of the Ring and wanting to know what else the Boromir actor was in. But I read the books, too, and started researching the history behind them. Which meant mostly the Peninsular War, and mostly Wellington. Like the Great Duke, I first encountered Napoleon at Waterloo. As my interest in the era and the people broadened and I started to want to write about it myself, I learned more about Napoleon, but I still know Waterloo better than anything else from his career.

I picked up Three Napoleonic Battles (Harold T. Parker, 1944) as part of my ongoing effort to get a broader perspective on Napoleon's career. Parker analyzes the battles of Friedland (1807), Aspern-Essling (1809), and, yes, Waterloo (1815). In the first, Napoleon was at the top of his game and facing a Russian commander who made serious blunders, in the second he made blunders of his own against a solid opponent and was checked, but through his and his marshals' skill and his opponent's overcaution avoided a crushing defeat, and, well, we know what happened at Waterloo. (At least I hope we do. If you're reading this and thinking, "I vaguely recall Napoleon from high school history class, but isn't Wellington a boot and Waterloo an ABBA song?" please talk to me. I have books to recommend. You'll love them, I promise. History is exciting, and 1789-1815 especially so.) For the most part, Parker's conclusions are pretty straightforward--Napoleon got older. His health and energy declined, enough that he lost a mental step, too, though he was obviously still beyond unusually intelligent. His natural optimism was perhaps less tempered by realism--e.g. his stubborn refusal to believe the evidence that the entire Prussian army was indeed marching to unite with the Anglo-Dutch forces at Waterloo. Plus, his opponents got better, both in the sense of learning his game plan and that over decades of war, the cream of the other powers' generals eventually rose to the top.

For all that, it's a worthwhile and well-researched read, dense with detail. I expect I'll be turning back to the Friedland and Aspern-Essling sections as I develop my alternative history, and I never get tired of learning more about Waterloo. Wellington once commented (I'm paraphrasing wildly here) that you might as well write the history of a ball as of a battle--everyone who was there gives a different account, and it's impossible to pin down what really happened. To me, that's precisely what makes Waterloo especially so endlessly fascinating. Every time you look at it from another angle, you get another facet of the glorious horrible chaotic epic of it all.

The Illustrious Dead

When you think of Napoleon's invasion of Russia (as I'm sure you often do, doesn't everyone?), you probably think it failed because of the Russian winter, hunger, and the Russians' clever, though somewhat accidental, strategy of leading the Grande Armee deep into their territory, too far from supplies or reinforcements. All those, along with a strange combination of lassitude and hubris on Napoleon's part, certainly played a role. But The Illustrious Dead (Stephan Talty, 2009) gives the lion's share of the credit to typhus, showing how the disease burned its way through the army from the very beginning of the campaign to when the handful of survivors staggered into Germany.

This is a good, readable work of popular military history. I'd recommend it to just about anyone interested in the era--it's straightforward and clear enough for those who haven't read much military history, but the focus on typhus gives a different spin for those who already know Napoleon's campaigns well. And Talty knows how to make nonfiction history read like a page-turning novel.

I've never been an admirer of Napoleon's, but I try very hard to understand why so many people have been, then and now. And sometimes I think I've almost grasped it until I read another account of the invasion of Russia. So much death and destruction for the sake of one man's ambition and hubris.

Sharpe's Devil (Book #6)

Sharpe's Devil is the very last book in the Sharpe series. I'm going to miss those books. Of course, I can always read them again, and Cornwell has, I believe, three historical series I still haven't read yet. (I've read all the Starbucks, of which he needs to hurry up and write more, plus the standalones Gallows Thief, Stonehenge, and Redcoat.) But the Sharpes are in "my" era, so I have an affinity for them I don't expect to find with his Dark Age and medieval series. So I have to mourn a little.

Devil is set in 1820-21. Sharpe has settled down as a farmer in Normandy. He's happy with the woman he unfortunately can't marry because he can't afford to divorce the wife who stole his money and ran off with another man toward the end of the series, they have two children, and all they could ask for is a little more money to make improvements on the farm. Harper, similarly, is keeping a tavern in Dublin with his Isabella and raising four sons. But when an old friend is in trouble, they're persuaded to sail off to the rescue in Chile, along the way meeting Napoleon on St. Helena and Thomas Cochrane, the rogue naval officer Patrick O'Brian's Jack Aubrey is largely based upon. It's a good read, but I didn't enjoy it quite as much as the Napoleonic War stories, possibly because I know very little about the Chilean Revolution--I seem to remember filling "Bernardo O'Higgins" into a blank on a sixth grade test, but that's about it--and so couldn't place it into context quite as well.

But the series, overall, gets a solid "A" from me, with the best volumes--Triumph, Trafalgar, Waterloo--scoring an A+. I'll miss you on my to-be-read pile, Lt. Col. Sharpe!

Napoleon and Wellington (Book #4)

Napoleon and Wellington (Andrew Roberts, 2001) is a readable and compelling dual biography/military history...but only if you already have a fair amount of knowledge of the men and the era. If, for example, the names Salamanca and Borodino don't mean anything to you, you'll be pretty lost.

The book is almost a biography of reputations--what Napoleon and Wellington thought of each other before and after Waterloo, history's verdict on both and its accuracy or lack thereof. I agree with Roberts' assessment of their characters--that as much as each one's apologists would like to make them into contrasting types, they were actually quite a bit alike in their sheer arrogance, talent, and ambition. Napoleon was the more ambitious, sure, but who knows what Wellington might've done if absolute power had been an option for him. He did, after all, rise as high as an Englishman could in both military and civilian arenas, and seemed to think it no more than his due. Which, at least on the military side, it was, but that doesn't change the fact that Wellington was the very reverse of a humble man.

So, yeah, Napoleon and Wellington weren't exactly opposites. I still like Wellington a lot more--he was more humane and had a better sense of humor, for starters--and take the minority view that he was the better general of the two.

Anyway, this is a very good read for anyone with a fair amount of knowledge of the era. One caveat, though: unlike most of the nonfiction authors I'm drawn to, Roberts is clearly a conservative. I don't think his politics color his views of Napoleon and Wellington, but I have trouble believing the Whigs were as nigh-treasonous as he paints them. Must find a more balanced book on that particular topic...

Napoleon's Egypt (Book #1)

This may be the longest it's ever taken me to read my first book of the new year. It's early days, but I'm not exactly on pace for my annual goal of at least 100 books! I started two books that I abandoned around the halfway mark, and I've even been losing reading time to soggy weather. At least half my reading time is during my commute, and when it rains, I can read on the bus, but not so much while I'm standing at the bus stop. And the past few weeks have been unusually rainy even for Seattle, so...

I've just now finished Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East (Juan Cole, 2007). I got it from the library for research for my alternate history. While I was hoping for a little more about Napoleon specifically (the book is more Napoleon's EGYPT than NAPOLEON'S Egypt) it proved useful, and I'm much better informed on Egypt and its place within the Ottoman Empire than I was before. And, I did pick up some useful facts and intriguing incidents.

Incidentally, this is another book where the author uses the past to illuminate the present. It's not heavyhanded, but the parallels to the American invasion of Iraq are definitely there.