…Wars, 1793-1815 by Jenny Uglow – review
"he French wars that frame Jenny Uglow's remarkable book make the most testing of subjects. Revolution in France and then Napoleon's ambitions (the wars weren't "Napoleon's" until the turn of the century) brought to battle the largest armies ever seen in the west. They cost more European lives than any other conflict before 1914, and Europe's empires and cultures were transformed by them.
French casualties were far worse than Britain's, since most British fighting was against French seapower and colonies far away. Even so, one in six British males over 14 entered the services across these 22 years, and the regular British army grew sixfold to a quarter of a million men. Add the volunteers, militias and navy, and one takes the point of George Steiner's remark that "wherever ordinary men and women looked across the garden hedge, they saw bayonets passing". Soldiers and sailors on leave were visible in every tavern and street, and officers in uniform added dash to polite society and changed its manners. Discharged and pensionless men with one leg or arm or none, or with one eye or none, or with tin plates screwed over holes trepanned into their skulls, swelled the numbers of beggars on every corner and of lawbreakers in every prison – as did desperate mothers. In scores of topographical or satirical images beggars appear incidentally, tucked against walls. As Uglow says, Britons came to take the wars and their effects for granted, like permanent bad weather.
This most spectacular of all British mobilisations is now hazy in our memory, though next year's Waterloo bicentenary will rectify that: televisual and book-trade excitement about Flanders mud will be displaced by excitement about Napoleon and Wellington. Uglow's book is published ahead of this coming tide. It will stay ahead, too…"
Main page
link
Amicalement
Armand
gets started with Flintloque.
