Customer Reviews

The Battle

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This historical novel slaps its readers in the face with the reality of a grape loaded 12 pounder. We are wisked from the streets of a newly occupied city, Vienna in 1809, to the front lines of a Napoleonic battle, where in one stunning scene the emperor's guard stand to attention while a hail of fire thins their ranks, literly filling the gaps in the line by shoving away the fragments of their now destroyed commrads. Each scene is accurate, in every detail, from the horrors of 19th century medicine, to the soilder's uniforms, arms and food. One feels the panic of the helpless city as it is looted and plundered, and one can smell the cordite and hear the clash of sabers as the combat discriptions grip your heart and stomach to each line. A excellent book if only because of its ability to seem like a bit of real insight into what a event like this was at so many levels. To the common solider, the oficer, the camp follower, and to Naploeon himself. A great read

i love a good war film, but this book, a historical recreation of Napolean's defeat near two small towns in Austria, is cinematic in its intensity, drama, excitement, and horror. while it helps to know some prior biographical information about the marshals and generals who lead the troops into battle, you won't be too hard-pressed to keep straight all the details. as vivid and anti-war as "johnny got his gun" or "all quiet on the western front," you will gain a front row seat to what it was like to wage hand-to-hand combat on a warm May day in 1809. you will experience the cannons, the smoke, the blood, the confusion, the terror, the roundshot taking off soldiers' limbs, the bloodlust and anarachy on the battlefield. Napolean was a lucky and brilliant leader, whose quick tactical thinking led to surprising truimphs, but even he acknowlwedges at the end that what had defeated him was not another army or leader but General Danube--the river. A force of nature, Napolean met his match with the Danube. Just wait til he experiences the Russian winter in a few years.

On May 16, 1809, the battle of Essling took place at the gates of Vienna. It lasted two days. 40'000 soldiers were killed. Napoleon, accompanied by his trusted marshals Berthier, Lannes and Massena, was on his way to Vienna. The Austro-Hungarian forces met him at the Danube, at the plain of Essling. Napoleon miscalculated the terrain and hesitated. He lost the battle. The author describes the 48 hours, meticulously researched, in incredibly vivid detail. The sound of the battle. The cannon shot ripping through the ranks of Napoleon's imperial guard. The field hospital awash in blood, amputated limbs and the dead. The surgeons' muscles giving out from sawing arm after arm, leg after leg. Soldiers fleeing across the Danube to a little island in the river, not being safe there either. An incredible carnage, interspersed with observations of the life in Vienna. The writer Stendhal and the painter Lejeune caught up in it. The author paints a picture that is incredibly vivid. It is on the same level as Plivier's "Stalingrad" in describing th command of the battle and the mortal fear of the common soldiers. In 1998, this book won the highest French literary award, the Prix Goncourt. It amply deserved it. It must be read by everyone interested in military history. Two weeks after the battle of Essling, the composer Haydn died in Vienna.

May 16, 1809 marks the beginning of a great work based on Napoleon's battle at Essling. The actual battle was begun on the 21st of May and continued until May 22nd. The number that staggers the senses is that 1 man died every 3 seconds during this battle. Approximately 40,000 individuals died in less than 48 hours.

The book can be enjoyed strictly from a great historically based read, or can be followed in detail with the help of the record of the battle formations on the inside covers of the front and back of the book.

One of the many great attributes of this book is that the Author covers the events so you feel as though you have gained a detailed knowledge of the events and major players without making you feel as though you have trudged through a dry history textbook.

Mr. Rambaud accomplishes this is 294 pages of prose, in a style that does not lack detail or depth due to the relative brevity of the work. It's true the battle was for just under 2 days, the events and those involved were in the tens of thousands, and an Author less in command of his subject and its expression could have droned on. Mr. Rambaud fascinates, vividly recreates the gore of early 19th century battle, but never stoops to the sensational. The facts of the battle and the manner in which it was carried out require no embellishment. To be enjoyed and understood by the lay reader is not easily done, Mr. Rambaud just makes it seem so. To those interested in greater detail there are the battle records, as well as outstanding source notes, and brief histories of the remainder of the lives of many key players.

Mr. Rambaud has produce a tremendous award winning book that old fans and newly interested parties of Napoleon, his Marshals, and Generals will enjoy.

Recommended, a great read!

When this book was recommended to me as "the greatest war story since War and Peace," it was described in such a way that I was confused as to whether it was fiction or non-fiction. This confusion of fact and fiction is both the book's strength and its weakness, I think. The reviewers before me have all shown their love of history in their reviews, and they all seem extremely knowledgeable. In their admiration for this book, they cite the author's careful depiction of the battle itself, the details that make the action vivid, bloody, and unrelenting, and his ability to create plausible historical figures. I don't disagree with any of this praise.

As a novel, however, The Battle is certainly not War and Peace-or even Cold Mountain-its claim to being a novel resting primarily in the fact that the author recreates not only the battle, but the (invented) conversations and thoughts of the participants. Although he does this well, I was disappointed that the book felt so skeletal, largely lacking in the unique, personal details which contribute to the development of real, breathing humans with whom the reader can identify and who make "novels" come alive. Although the author does include a minor love interest and glimpses of the author who later calls himself Stendahl, the "biggest" character for me was Vincent Paradis, a young private whose opinions, observations, and movement among camps provide the author with a vehicle for organizing this immense amount of material. The book seems almost totally driven by the real movement of the real battle, and it feels like a good history book. I would have enjoyed getting to know Napoleon as a real human facing human crises.

This is a prize-winning novelization of Napoleon's battle at Essling in 1809, presenting the whole crushing spectacle from the abattoir of a field hospital to the ridiculous glory of the Imperial Guard. This is a one-sided (French) view of the events, but (a) hardly flattering in any case, and b) of great value for not being another of the British novels on the Napoleonic war we already have in plethora (e.g., Hornblower, Sharpe, etc.). Essling was the only time Napoleon was personally defeated without British intervention (and their high rates of fire). For once I think I understood something of the utter genius he was. However, we get little sense of what the Austrian opponents were thinking or up to (nor a citation in the bibliography); in fact the slaughter among them was far worse than that depicted so vividly for the French under the arrogantly indifferent Napoleon. But their absence enhances the clouds of gunsmoke and 'fog of war' which drifts through the French ranks and disrupts everything in this battle. Although seen from multiple perspectives drawn from the memoirs of true participants, there's no one protagonist and you don't get a coherent view--unless it be Col. Lejeune who, as liason for the Emperor, thankfully serves to link some actions across 3 miles of desperate and maddening battle. The battle maps are essential to making out the larger sense of the individual actions, since you are plunged into the story without preamble, much as battle is like for ordinary soldiers. Future-famous author Stendahl is the pretext for additional civilian perspectives from nearby Vienna.

This story is not for the squeamish; the author relishes the gore of war as part of the close-up and personal atmosphere of this novel. And the whole affair was pointless; it had to be refought less than two months later. Don't let the page count fool you, the typography is generous and the story enthralling. This seems to be the only one of Rambaud's three novels of the Napoleonic era that has been translated into English.

The French novelist Patrick Rambaud has written an excellent historical novel that is based on several eyewitness memoirs. The subject is the Battle of Aspern-Essling in May 1809, which was Napoleon's first serious battlefield defeat. Napoleon attempted the most difficult military operation of all: an opposed river-crossing against an alert and resolute enemy. A hard-fought two-day battle for the villages of Aspern-Essling resulted, exposing the fact that the emperor was not infallible and that he could make mistakes. Rambaud's version of this brutal slugging match is equally brutal. Heads are blown off by roundshot, civilians are murdered and the thousands of wounded are left to suffer in the rain and mud. Numerous soldiers, including one of the fictional enlisted soldiers, commit suicide under the stress of battle. This novel is not as good a work as Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels, partly because Rambaud does not attempt to interpret what the characters were thinking. The other reason is that there are no Austrian characters; in Killer Angel's, Shaara brilliantly portrayed soldiers from both sides and their efforts to prevail over the other, but that balance is lacking here.

The characters in the battle range from Napoleon on high, to Marshals Massena and Lannes, to mid-rank soldiers and even a few enlisted soldiers, although the focus tends to stay mostly on the upper ranks. Massena is probably the most interesting figure in the novel, since his battlefield performance as Aspern was incredible. Others however, like Colonel Lejeune, a general staff officer, become tedious as he spends far too much of the novel mooning of his Austrian girlfriend in captured Vienna. Rambaud also omits or alters some key aspects of the battle. The French three-division counterattack on the second day is portrayed as a success in breaking the Austrian center when in fact, the nearly-routed Austrians were personally rallied by Archduke Charles and their center held. The French attack ran out of steam, but Rambaud's account says that the French called of the attack because their bridges over the Danube had been broken. In fact, Rambaud clearly portrays the cause of this defeat as bad luck and the rising waters of the Danube River in frustrating Napoleon's efforts to get reinforcements across the river. In reality, Napoleon's slipshod river-crossing effort and gross underestimation of the enemy were prime contributors to his defeat. The fact that the Austrian army had learned something from its earlier defeats in 1796-7, 1800 and 1805 at Napoleon's hands is not even alluded to.

The strength of this novel lies in excellent battle descriptions that convey both the desperation and futility of this action. However a weakness of the novel is the addition of minor characters and sub-plots, including a dim-witted assassination attempt on Napoleon and opera performances, that distract the reader from the battle. These minor characters and sub-plots persist to the end, but without resolution or even relevance. Nevertheless, Rambaud's novel gives an excellent "feel" for what it was like to be in a Napoleonic battle.

Patrick Rambaud's "The Battle," skillfully balances the madness of the war fought in the trenches with the madness inherent in commanding a war. Originally written in French (unread by me), Will Hobson's English translation retains the power and the poetry of Rambaud's highly praised work.

Building on the incomplete research by the immortal Honore de Balzac, Rambaud tells the tale (from the French perspective) of Napoleon's first defeat on the Continent at the Battle of Essling, a village on the Danube on the outskirts of Vienna. While Napoleon looms large in this telling, the Emperor spends most of his time in the novel screaming at subordinates and living his lonely life in the midst of the maelstrom he created. While entirely unsympathetic, Napoleon is no more consumed by the madness of war than any of his countrymen.

Instead of focusing merely on the "Great Man," Rambaud weaves his story using several minor characters, some real, some fictitious. Several senior officers experience the horrors of the battlefield first-hand, as the Napoleonic Wars were still fought with generals and field marshalls wading into the front lines of battle, often never to wade out again. Essling was a battle where forty thousand men died in two days, thanks to tactics that had all the skill and craft of a Rocky Balboa-Clubber Lang boxing match. Strategy seemed to consist of "I'm gonna kill more of you than you can kill of me," and the cost of a brigade was negligible, a single human life mere piffle.

Rambaud also introduces the reader to several low-ranking soldiers, the dregs of the army. For these men, obedience and murder go hand-in-hand, and they spend two days butchering each other. Arms, legs, torsos, chests . . . they all come apart under cannonshell, bullet, and sabre. This is the kind of combat where a man can fight for two days, emerge without so much as a scratch, and then blows his own head off with a pistol. Rambaud also throws the reader into the horrors of battlefield medicine, which basically consisted of having a really sharp saw and the strength to use it over and over and over as the arms and legs piled up into mounds . . .

Not for the faint of heart, "The Battle" introduces you to several characters just long enough to see them killed. Rambaud makes most of them sympathetic to some degree through his depiction of the merciless caudron of war . . . even the soldier who engages in a bit of necrophilia. What is most mind-blowing in this whole depiction of war is how naturally the inhuman comes to so many different men, from the act of killing itself to the act of ordering thousands of men into certain death.

Rambaud presumes that the reader brings a great degree of familiarity with the actual history of Essling and Napoleon, a familiarity that I did not have. The fact that I had to do some quick research several times while reading is probably my fault, but it did undermine my enjoyment of the book. Still, I ripped through this page-turner pretty quickly, and rather enjoyably. Highly recommended for fans of historical fiction of a military bent.

The Great Army is attacking Essling in the surbubs of Vienna. Napoleon galvanizes its troup to win yet another battle while facing an ennemy twice as numerous . This is like a 3D movie. you will smell the powder, feel the wounds and cringe at the horror of the scene. Unlike Hollywood revisionist view of history, these facts are historical and the courage of these men so amazing that you do not need loud explosive noises on the screen to be engulfed in the action. By far the best war book ever written.

The author of this book utilised the efforts of Honore de Balzac who 150 years previously had researched this battle with a view to writing this book. Rambaud has done a commendable job portraying the battle and the reader is cartwheeled headlong into combat and into the Aspern-Essling battlefield. Napoleonic battlefields were anything but glorious and this is conveyed by Rambaud who gets down to the nitty gritter of warfare. I enjoyed the book, especially the description of combat itself. The depiction of characters such as Napoleon and his marshalls was also interesting. Overall, this was a good read. It does not match the fantastic battle scenes depicted in Stephen Pressfields 'Gates of Fire' (few books ever will) but it doesn't pull any punches either about the horrors of war. The hardcover version has a plain tan cover and a glossy dust jacket featuring a rather dashing Napoleon on a white steed. The cover notes that the book was a 'Winner of the Prix Goncour and Grand Prix du Roma de L'Academie Francaise' awards. Recommended.