Customer Reviews

On The Road With Wellington: The Diary of a War Commissary in the Peninsular Campaigns (Napoleonic Library)

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Greenhill Books has done students of the Peninsular War a great favor with this addition to their Napoleonic Library. August Schaumann, a 30-year old Hanoverian served as a commissary for the King's German Legion, paints an incredible picture of Britain's war in Iberia while maintaining a running travelog with wry humor and succint observations. Whether describing the horrendous retreat to Corunna, his cook (the Witch of Endor), the small kissable feet of a young lady, or the peculiarities of the English, French, Spainish and Portugese his insightful pen entertains and educates without stopping. His small book will make you roar with laughter and sigh sadly at man's inhumanity to man.

A.L.F. Schaumann's "On the Road with Wellington" is a delightful memoir of his service as a deputy assistant commissary officer during the Peninsular War. Schaumann's duties as a civilian supply officer for various units took him everywhere the Anglo-Portuguese Army went on campaign during the period 1808-1812. As a non-combatant, Schaumann's story focuses on the mundane tasks required to keep an army quartered and fed, but his eye for detail captures vignettes of the soldiers and civilians with whom he dealt. His gift for narrative provides the reader with a strong of sense of what it was like to be on campaign in that era. His account of the retreat of the British Army under Sir John Moore to Corunna under horrendous conditions in the winter of 1808-1809 is particularly vivid (and heartbreaking).

This is not a battlefield account, although Schaumann was close enough to the fighting to pass on some accounts of battles. Nor is this in any sense a history of the Peninsular War. Strategy and politics are played out well above Schaumann's head, and even Wellington is glimpsed only in passing. The average reader will sometimes be dependent on the footnotes to understand what is happening in the larger war. What Schaumann does provide is the human level detail that makes such a distant conflict real for the modern reader. It is no wonder that writers such as Bernard Cornwell of the Sharps series happily mined Schaumann's memoir for material. Cornwell provides an introduction to complement the translater's preface and the author's own introduction, all well worth reading for the context of Schaumann's story.

This book is highly recommended to students of the Peninsular War. It may also be of interest to the casual reader with some background in the Napoleonic Wars.