Early Thoughts on Esdaile's The Peninsular War

El 2 de mayo de 1808 en Madrid by Goy

I'm a good piece into Charles Esdaile's The Peninsular War. That's the name given to the complex and ferocious war fought across Spain and Portugal between 1808 and 1814. Spain, suffering from centuries of corruption, political and religious repression, and was facing revolution in its colonies in the Americas, had been forced into an alliance with the French Empire. Together, they had invaded and conquered British-allied Portugal. They had failed to capture the Portuguese royal family and treasury, both of which had been safely evacuated to Brazil.

 Despite the battlefield victory, Spain continued to be a state in turmoil. Machinations between various parties led to complete chaos, with followers of the king, Charles IV, facing off against followers of his son, Ferdinand VII.

 To ensure Spanish acquiescence to French plans, Napoleon began moving troops commanded by several of his marshals into eastern Spain. In the chaos that followed, King Charles IV abdicated and his son, Ferdinand VII, attempted to assume the throne. Napoleon forced them both out, installed his adoring older brother Joseph on the throne in Madrid and attempted to occupy the whole of the country.

 The invasion lead to a massive uprising against the French conquerors. Despite retaliation by the French, the uprising proved impossible to suppress. Spanish regular forces under General Castaños forced the surrender of nearly 18,000 French soldiers at Bailén. This led to British intervention, followed by Napoleon himself taking over the reins of the French forces. Then the British retreated, with their commander, General Moore getting killed, and the French in control of much of Spain and part of Portugal. Napoleon returned to France to raise troops to fight the resurgent Austrians and left his generals in command once again. It was only then that Arthur Wellesley arrived on the scene with a renewed British commitment to fight the French. At that point there were five more years of brutal fighting ahead.

El tres de mayo de 1808 en Madrid by Goya

That's as far as I've gotten in the book and it's been packed with examples of military and political incompetence and atrocities of all sorts. Like most guerrillas before them, the Spanish and Portuguese partisans, unable and unwilling to confront the French in the field, carry out murders of collaborators and messengers. Most of the Spanish generals are mildly competent at best and the poor Spanish infantry are often untrained and poorly armed as well as underfed and ill-clothed. The French wantonly sacked and raped their way across the country side. The second, and successful, assault on Zaragoza left 20,000 Spanish soldiers and 34,000 civilians dead after months of siege and weeks of house-to-house fighting.

Abbey of Santa Engracia by Louis-François Lejeune
from the Second Siege of Zaragoza

The British fare no better in the book. Most were Anglican or Methodist and anti-Catholic and had a strong dislike of the Spanish priests and monks, seeing them as lazy parasites living on the largesse of the citizenry. For the Spanish army, they had little regard, treating it with contempt and derision. Without a dedicated supply train, the British army, like the French (and the Spanish, as well), lived off the countryside, routinely plundering whatever farm or village they come upon.

Saragossa 10 February 1809 by Harold Hume Piffard

I've never read much Napoleonic history, but I was still taken aback by the murderousness of the war - and this is only in the early stages. It's clear, already, why the fighting came to be called the Spanish Ulcer. It may not have been cause of Napoleon's great defeat - that was the Russian Campaign followed by the battle of Leipzig - but the deployment of so many troops away from his greater objectives was a significant contribution.

The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna by George Jones

Esdaile's book is very clear in his explanations of the assorted factors that led to the war and where it fits into the greater history of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. What it doesn't do is give long, complicated descriptions of the battles - which in this sort of history, that is one covering a lengthy war - I quite like. Instead of describing the movement of every Spanish and British company at the battle of Talavera, Esdaile concentrates on the French and English strategies that led to the battle being fought in the place it was fought.

Talavera

I'm going to take a break from The Peninsular War for a few days. I'm going to dive back into Perez-Reverte's The Siege. Then, it's onto War and Peace. It's funny, when I decided on the latter as the follow-up to Doctor Zhivago (more on that later), I didn't consciously pick for its being set during the Napoleonic Wars. It was just synchronicity.

Imperial Reading List

I'm nearly finished with this and it's helping set the direction for the next several books I'll read covering European events. The war represents the collapse of the forty years of peace following the Congress of Vienna and onset of several years of European war (2nd Italian War of Independence 1859, the 2nd Schleswig War 1864, the Austro-Prussian War 1866, and Franco-Prussian War 1870) that saw the birth of two new important European states (Germany and Italy), that would leave their own indelible marks on world history over the next seventy-five years.

One of the odd bits of an odd war was that the Kingdom of Sardinia, essentially Italy-in-waiting, sent troops to the Crimea. The kingdom was hoping to create a unified nation out of the various principalities and Austrian controlled regions of in present-day Italy, and wanted to secure French support for their efforts. By committing soldiers to the Crimea, Sardinia endeavored to show it was a mature state and not in any way connected to the radicalism of 1848. They succeeded and the intervention of Napoleon III in 1859 secured Sardinia's victory against Austria. 

This 1907 book is one of the few books I've been able to find on this short war, despite being one of the first major steps on the road to Italian unification in 1870. With massive French assistance, the Austrians were driven from Lombardy and its capital, Milan. The aftermath of the war's biggest battle, Solferino, left such an impression on Swiss businessman, Henry Dunant, it led him to create the International Red Cross.

This just showed up in the mail (yes, I had to buy an actual paper book). It's one of the only recent (and in English) books on Prussia's swift victory over the Austrians. The war broke Austria's hold over the German states, paved the way for Prussia's ascension to the world stage, and broke Austria's hold over Italy once and for all. Königgrätz, the battle that broke the Austrians, was fought three years to the day after the last day of Gettysburg with armies nearly three times as large. In one day of fighting, nearly as many men were wounded and killed at Königgrätz as during the three of Gettysburg. The war left Prussia dominant over the rest of the German states and Austria a broken hulk just waiting for the wreckers to arrive.

I'm half way done with this massive account of the birth of the American overseas empire during the "splendid little war" against the decaying Spanish empire. It goes into tremendous detail about the fall and rise of the US navy in the years following the Civil War and the political warfare between the various Democratic factions, the Republicans, and the imperialists and their opponents. While the book is primarily about America and its actions, it doesn't neglect the Spanish and Cubans. Between the Spanish brutality and the Cuban scorched earth policies, the chapters on the Cuban wars of independence are harrowing.

Both of these are supposed to be good, solid histories of their respective conflicts. Most people's, only knowledge of the Anglo-Zulu War is from the rousing film, Zulu. While it portrays the Zulus as brave it never really explains who they are or why they're fighting the British. I know enough to know they were responding to British aggression.

The Boer War was also the result of British bad intentions. As someone of Dutch background, I've always been intrigued by the Boers and their history. For a people bound and determined to be independent, they never seemed to have missed an opportunity to hold black Africans in bondage. 

This trio of books tell the history of America's expansion to the Pacific Coast and Rio Grande River. There were earlier events clearly a part of this continental expansion (Tecumseh's War, the Florida Wars, etc.) and the War of 1812 (an appendix to the Napoleonic Wars), and maybe I'll get to them, but I admit to being drawn to images of Mexican lancers, the storming of Chapultepec, blue uniformed cavalry troopers, and Sioux and Cheyenne warriors riding across the plains.

There's so many more books I want to read before I'm finished with this project and I really hope I'm able to stay with it. Among them are Rising Sun and Tumbling Bear (Russo-Japanese War), The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870-1871, The Sino-Japanese Naval War 1894-1895, and just maybe, The Spirit Soldiers: A Historical Narrative of the Boxer Rebellion. 

I still want to finish Herwig's The Marne, and there's a book about the Ashante War that looks good. This list totally neglects British action in India and the Northwest Frontier, as well as French and Italian colonial escapades too, and I don't want to do that. 

I'm not completely sure what I'm trying to do with all this reading but so far it's been a tremendously exciting and interesting undertaking. I haven't read this much history since college and it's invigorating.