Customer Reviews

Die Hard!: Famous Napoleonic Battles (Cassell Military Class)

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It's a good book, however, I think that it can be a bit disappointing for napoleon's fans because the author seems to have a clear bias to the british side of the conflict. That being said, the book is interesting and easy to read. The author try to remark the courage of the soldier of every nation. Some of the battles refered in the book are Marengo, Berezina, Zaragoza, Waterloo (just a small part of it). No Austerlitz, Wagram or Borodino battles in the pack.

Although inclined to be repetitive and somewhat reliant on statistics, this is a reasonably well written series of capsules recounting various battles or parts of battles during the Napoleonic era. A certain amount of detail is provided to give insights into the experiences of the ordinary infantryman, however, by necessity, most of the actual quotations used are by the officer class. This leads to the curious anomaly, if one can call it that, of individuals who have gone through some of the worst carnage that modern (sic) warfare has been able to provide, lamenting the fate of their "dear friends and brother officers" who may have been, at the time of writing, lying in a bloody bedlam that was the typical aftermath of many of these events. In fact, although the scale of the killing was obviously less, one cannot help thinking that these types of battles were a sort of prelude to the trench warfare of a century later. One is left with a feeling that, even two hundred years ago, the world had already gone quite mad!

A worthwhile read if interested in the period. I picked it up because I have an ancestor who was present in France during some of this period. It seems self-evident to say that a great many others would also have had ancestors present at that time, had they not been cut down in such swathes prior to founding a family.