Wellington and Napoleon: Clash of Arms Book

The purpose of history will, in my mind, always remain as Herodotus gave it- "...preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory; and withal to put on record what were their grounds of feuds."

Here, the Greeks and Barbarians are Frenchman and Allies, and specifically Napoleon and Wellington. Neillands' clearly meticulous research is long on order-of-battle and short on the sort of anecdotal vignettes that really make the "rattling good history" one may well expect from a time which produced such quality and conviction in so many- as another reviewer so aptly commented, he doesn't make us "smell the powder."

Another conspicuous absence was any sort of table or chart containing the commanders and the forces they commanded- the many nationalities involved means that his reliance on contextual clues to convey to the reader which general fought on which side is at times confusing. Maps would also have been helpful.

The raw emotional power of such massive events was not entirely masked, however, and one comes away from the work with a very real sense that the battles covered were the cruel marriage of the angels of manly excellence and the demons of brutality and excess which lead General Lee to comment half a century later that "it is well that war is so terrible, lest we grow too fond of it."