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Europe against Napoleon: The Leipzig Campaign, 1813, from eyewitness accounts;
English (translation)
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1970
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March 15, 2019The book is slightly more focused than the title suggests - it's about the so-called 'battle of the nations' otherwise known as the battle of Leipzig that took place (mostly) over the 13th and 14th October 1813. This was the decisive period in the war against Napoleon. Russia and Prussia had managed to convince Austria to join them and had diplomatically ceded control over allied forces (which included a contingent from Sweden under the control of the Crown Prince and former Marshal of France Bernadotte , as well as battery of Rockets representing the British army) to them.
Napoleon had scratched together an army, calling up recruits and mobilising mounted police units to serve as cavalry, and confronted the allied forces at the city of Leipzig, a major commercial centre in the kingdom of Saxony - a key ally of Napoleon's.
Brett-James, who taught at the British military academy at Sandhurst, gives an impression of the battle by building up a mess of snippets from eye-witness accounts - diaries, letters, reports and the like that overall combine to give a kaleidoscopic picture of the battle - possibly one of the largest in European history before the First World War, with about half a million combatants (and then on top of that the horses and women and children) from all over Europe involved.
The downside of the author's approach is that you don't get to follow any one of the participants consistently and it's hard to get an overview of what was happening beyond that the allies were advancing and the French (and their non-French allies and dependents) were retreating. Although arguably this probably is an accurate recreation of the state of knowledge of almost all of the participants during the battle.
Napoleon had scratched together an army, calling up recruits and mobilising mounted police units to serve as cavalry, and confronted the allied forces at the city of Leipzig, a major commercial centre in the kingdom of Saxony - a key ally of Napoleon's.
Brett-James, who taught at the British military academy at Sandhurst, gives an impression of the battle by building up a mess of snippets from eye-witness accounts - diaries, letters, reports and the like that overall combine to give a kaleidoscopic picture of the battle - possibly one of the largest in European history before the First World War, with about half a million combatants (and then on top of that the horses and women and children) from all over Europe involved.
The downside of the author's approach is that you don't get to follow any one of the participants consistently and it's hard to get an overview of what was happening beyond that the allies were advancing and the French (and their non-French allies and dependents) were retreating. Although arguably this probably is an accurate recreation of the state of knowledge of almost all of the participants during the battle.
Displaying 1 of 1 review