A Boy in the Peninsular War

The Peninsular War was the first of Britain's many foreign conflicts in which increasing literacy produced a bumper crop of memoirs, not only by Generals and senior officers, but by ordinary rankers and subalterns too. This book is one of the very best. It's author, Robert Blakeney, enlisted in 1804 in the 28th regiment of Infantry as an Irish boy at the tender age of fifteen. As such, he was in at the beginning of the long war in the Iberian peninsular, and stuck through to the end, witnessing