The war of wars - Writers Forum

Olly Buckle · 02-23-2008, 10:42 AM

Used my spare time on holiday to finish reading The war of wars (the epic struggle between Britain and France: 1789-1815) by Robert Harvey.
the scope of the subject is to large, 926 pages does cover it but the author makes heavy going of it, battles are described in terms of the numbers of dead and the guns captured rather than by strategy and tactics and he prefaces them by giving us Napoleon's pre battle speeches to the troops, I have always been suspicious of these, in the days before amplification nobody can have made a speech to tens of thousands of men. the author seems unselective of the "facts" he reports as well, many seem like the unsubstantiated opinions of eighteenth century ignoramuses. For example that the French prisoners were repeatedly raped by their Egyptian captors because of the attractive colour of their skin seems unlikely, I can think of other reasons. The maps of battles were all placed at the front of the book with no reference to them in the text and did not seem very informative, for example Ligny and Waterloo which took place over three days 16-18 June 1815 are compressed into a single threequarter page of blocks and arrows which is almost meaningless, combine that with the map before the introduction and the description starting on page 880, well...
Even the anecdotes he picks do not seem interesting ones, I suppose he was trying to bring in original material, but the very reason the well known ones are well known is that they are the ones worth telling. Its contribution is in bringing the whole narrative together in a single volume and demonstrating the relationship between the various participants and theaters of war but I could not help thinking it could have been done better and that the sheer volume of information overwhelmed the author at times.

seigfried007 · 03-21-2008, 09:34 AM

Never read that, but having read Napoleon's biography back in middle school, I know he's too neat a person to be stuck in a boring book. I'm sorry you read that piece, Olly, and I feel your pain

Find a few good biographies. The one I read was most entertaining as it mentioned a lot of Napoleon's oddball personality quirks (for instance, that he couldn't stop moving and was always doodling on the tables at meetings). I loved his quote on surgeons.