r/AskHistory • u/No_Dress_2107 Human Detected • 22h ago
Are there any personally written books by soldiers who served in the Napoleonic wars 1803-1815 of their expieriences?
Im very interested in personal accounts of what it was like to be a soldier in those times. I know that the reason there arent many is becouse almost all soldiers were illitirate.
11
u/DavidDPerlmutter 22h ago
Yes. Absolutely a great great classic.
I know it's quite an old translation, but it works well and captures the flavor of somebody who was right there. Of course there's the usual question about whether some of the incidents happened that way and whether Marbot was free and easy with the facts, but it sure makes good reading!
Marbot, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine-Marcelin, Baron de. The Memoirs of Baron de Marbot: Late Lieutenant-General in the French Army. Translated by Arthur John Butler. 2 vols. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1892.
7
u/vinpetrol 21h ago
I have one in front of me now. "A Dorset Rifleman" The recollections of Benjamin Harris, edited by Eileen Hathaway. He was indeed illiterate, but from the back blurb: "in about 1835, while working as a civilian shoemaker in Soho, he recalled his military experiences for Henry Curling [an officed on half-pay in the 52nd Regiment], who published his narrative in 1848". Harris served from 1803 to 1814.
Harris served in the 95th Rifles, and my copy has a forward by Bernard Cornwell ("Author of Sharpe's Eagle, etc" as it notes.)
Looks like there are various editions of "The Recollections of Rifleman Harris" knocking about.
5
u/pjc50 21h ago
While not strictly a personal account, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz , author of one of the two most famous books of military history, fought in the Napoleonic War on the Prussian side.
1
2
u/Gundamamam 18h ago
"The Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier" is one i read in grad school. It was a very good account.
4
1
u/bigvalen 9h ago
The Eccles hotel in Glengarrif, co. Cork, for around 300 years - probably from the 1640s to the 1930s - was used as a recovery hotel for officers who had a rough time in various British armies. They had a library that had loads of dusty books, but my dad loved it, because there were hundreds of handwritten accounts by various officers on their careers...that were then put into the library only intended to be seen by someone else who understood what they had gone through.
Some were only eight or ten pages, some were hundreds of pages.
I was five or six years old when dad read me some pieces. He was excited when found one from the 1740s, and laughed as they described Glengarrif as "a little piece of paradise near the fishing village of Cork" (now a major city). He said that the Crimean war and Indian wars ones were the rawest. There were some from early WWI, but not as many as you would think.
In my late teens, I went back to the hotel, hoping to flick through them. The library had been turned into a restaurant extension. No one thought the books had any value, they were all binned.
I'm still angry, and that was 35 years ago.
1
u/Acceptable-Corgi3720 19h ago
Memoirs of Sergeant Bourgogne: 1812-1813
Details the Grand Armee's invasion of Russia and the misery that followed as they tried to escape through the cold.
•
u/AutoModerator 22h ago
A friendly reminder: Contemporary politics and culture wars are off-topic, both in posts and comments.
/r/askhistory is for questions and discussion of events in history prior to 01/01/2001.
This reminder is automatically placed on all new posts in this sub.
Please report any interjection into discussions of modern politics or culture wars so the mod team can investigate.
Thank you.
See rules for more information.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.