The Peninsular War

This is a book about the ruination of Spain and Portugal during the six years between 1808 and 1814, when those two countries were torn apart by warring armies that descended on them from the rest of Europe, and the way in which the British generals Moore and Wellington used the wars as a rehearsal ground for a later attack on Napoleonic France. The tales of the great battles of the Peninsular War have been often told and re-told, and from every point of view - Britain cheers on the Great Duke while France looks at the scene from the point of view of Napoleon, and Spanish and Portuguese historians have had almost as many points of view as there have been writers. Liberals, Marxists and historians of every shade of opinion in between have tugged this way and that with very different theories. Esdaile has tried to impose some kind of order on the picture, looking at the untidy conflict, with its guerrilla warfare and the slaughter of over a million people, from a viewpoint that comprehends every angle, and attempts to answer such knotty problems as the real reason for Napoleon's intervention in the war, the basis of the defeat of his highly trained and competent army - and the way in which the campaign contributed to his final subjugation in 1814. He deals also with the political and social scene (religion, as usual, was largely responsible for the worst atrocities of the campaigns), and with the social, political and financial scene that not only forms a background to the battles, but largely shapes them. Every great political and military campaign profits from a re-examination every 50 years or so; this book is an excellent example of how a modern historian, with a little more distance from his subject than his predecessors, can shed light on a confused scene, and make it comprehensible for a new generation. (Kirkus UK)