"Many years ago at the Naval Postgraduate School, I managed to read all seven volumes of Sir Charles Oman's masterful History of the Peninsular War.[1] The experience deepened my appreciation of the generalship of Sir Arthur Wellesley, later the Duke of Wellington. I have since often recommended Oman's work to students interested in Wellington's achievements, especially on the operational level. Now, however, I will instead recommend the first volume (and the second to come) of Rory's Muir's fine political-military biography.
Muir (Univ. of Adelaide) has written several extremely readable histories of the Peninsular campaigns and Napoleonic warfare and tactics in general.[2] Some thirty years of scholarly research underlie his new biography.[3] His book is not merely a shorter, updated version of Oman shorn of all its other narratives and concentrating only on Wellington. Muir presents a veritable Clausewitzian[4] analysis of the man, stressing "the connection between politics and war, the army and Parliament" (xiii). Throughout, he casts his subject as a political general of the first order, fully attuned to the politics of the day, both domestic and international; Wellington used his military expertise in the service of various British governments, both in India and during the generation-long conflict with the French and Napoleon.
The book is organized in four parts, treating: Wellington's early life prior to his career as a young officer in India; his time in India, where his military and political talents first became generally recognized while he achieved fame as a "sepoy general"; the period after India and before his overall command in Portugal; and, occupying almost half the book, his campaigns in Portugal, Spain, and southern France up to Napoleon's first abdication in 1814. It may surprise some that Muir does not conclude this first volume of his biography with the Battle of Waterloo (1815). However, since Wellington's career after 1814 became primarily political, Waterloo may be seen to belong to the later phase of his life. And, too, there is a pleasing symmetry in the bookending of the long final section of the volume between his defeats of Marshal Nicholas Soult at Oporto in 1809 (305–14) and at Toulouse in 1814 (566–83). Muir himself provides no rationale for his choice of endpoint. He concludes his final chapter, on Toulouse, with a summary of Wellington's attributes as a commander from 1809 to 1814. Finally, a short epilogue prepares the reader for volume 2 with a vignette of Wellington's triumphant return to Dover Roads in June 1814—"[he] would never be quite as popular again until his death, almost forty years later, united the nation in mourning"…"
Full review here
miwsr.com/2014-068.aspx
Amicalement
Armand
goes to sea with the Terrain Mat.
