Life In Wellington's Army

by Antony Brett-James

Shipped from UK, please allow 10 to 21 business days for arrival. Very Good, A very good, clean and sound copy in jade-green cloth boards, gilt title on spine with a very good dust jacket. Previous owner's book label on ffep.

358 pages, Hardcover

First published November 9, 1972

About the author

Antony Brett-James (1920- )

Reviews

[Melissa McShane · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have mixed feelings about this one. It's basically a compilation of details about, as the title says, life in the British Army from 1808 to 1815--to Waterloo and beyond--organized by subjects such as how the soldiers ate, what they wore, how they were billeted, etc. And as a compilation of details, it's very good. Brett-James went through the records not only of official data, but personal records of the soldiers and officers, some of them well-known, others obscure. So as a resource, it's excellent. And, having read Mark Urban's book Rifles: Six Years with Wellington's Legendary Sharpshooters, I got a little thrill every time Brett-James mentions someone I knew: Costello! Leach! Simmons!

The writing, on the other hand, never rises above high-school-history-paper level, and Brett-James had terrible ideas about paragraphing. I give him credit for writing this in 1972, because I don't read enough nonfiction to know at what point readers began demanding inherently interesting prose from nonfiction authors, and for all I know this was typical of the period. But what makes this book good is the contents, not the prose. It's also very light on the subject of women who had some connection with the army, a topic I know enough about to recognize that this was where the author didn't dig all that deep. What's there is interesting, but I got the feeling he didn't care as much about the topic as he did some of the others.

(Also, I tried not to develop a picture of Antony Brett-James in my reading, but I really got the image of him as a stereotypical British academic, never married, a long-time lecturer at Sandhurst (this one is true), sort of a man's man as far as that went. Some of his phrasing strongly implied that he was writing for an audience of fellow military men. Like, everybody's favorite eccentric uncle who could always be counted on to tell stories of his time in India (also true). Probably that's totally wrong, and I'm not sure why I devoted any mental space to conjuring this personality up. But I did.)

So the four stars are because I found this book extremely useful in my research, and I can recommend it to anyone wanting a picture of life in Wellington's Army, but you're probably better off cherry-picking the topics you care about than reading it straight through.

[Steve Groves · Rating 3 out of 5]

Details the seemingly more mundane aspects of life during Wellington's campaign s in Portugal, Spain and France during the Napoleonic wars, but full of the recollections of officers and men. War is said to be 99% boredom and 1% sheer terror, so it is good to read about the 99%. Lots of great chapters on procuring food, attending balls, fraternizing with the enemy and even the adventures of army wives.

Provides some great information to help understand the era and the campaigns.