About book The War Of Wars: The Great European Conflict 1793 - 1815 (2006)
I call myself a history lover, so it is with some embarrassment that I must admit how little I know about one of history’s greatest actors: Napoleon Bonaparte. A quick rundown on my mental file on the diminutive conqueror. He has a very large tomb in Les Invalides, which I visited during college but could not enjoy because I spoke zero French. I once watched part of a miniseries about Napoleon and his wife, Josephine. Their relationship makes my marriage look excellent! I also read the first installment of a planned multi-volume biography, but was so disenchanted with the author’s pedantic prose that I never reached for the second book. But based on Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, he seems like a pretty chill guy.Whenever I feel at a deficit regarding a historical topic, my remedy is to find the biggest book available and read that. This is a very unscientific way of doing things, but time is always slipping away, and this is a mode of catching up. Robert Harvey’s The War of Wars, covering the Napoleonic Wars from 1789 to 1815 leapt out at me as exactly what I was looking for. It was, indeed, impossible to miss, for it is roughly the size and weight of a brick. It is an imposing, 926-page literary edifice. (That is 926 pages of text, so we’re talking War and Peace levels of verbosity). If a mugger had come up to me on the subway and tried to steal this book away, I could have easily beat him over the head with it, thereby forcing his submission. Fortunately, that did not happen in this case. Harvey uses those 926 pages to tell a big story. He starts with the French Revolution and ends at Waterloo. In between, a few things happened. There were battles, many of them epic, at Austerlitz and Borodino and Cadiz and Dresden and – well, you see what I’m doing here. There is a battle for almost every letter in the alphabet. And that’s just on land. Upon the water you have the Glorious First of June, the battle of Cape St. Vincent, the Nile, Copenhagen, and – of course – Trafalgar. There is also sex, just in case you are wondering what to read while George R.R. Martin labors away on the next installment of A Song of Ice and Fire. There is Napoleon’s tempestuous relationship with Josephine; Josephine’s many affairs; and even Admiral Nelson’s open cuckoldry of his friend, Sir William Hamilton. Harvey chooses to tell this story in true narrative fashion. There is no analysis of events. There is no quibbling over sources. There is no hemming and hawing over what actually occurred verses what might have occurred verses pure mythology. He chooses the best story and he tells it. This is a lot like the Napoleonic version of Shelby Foote’s American Civil War trilogy, right down to the utter lack of source notes. I can’t really complain too much about this approach. It is a hell of a lot of fun to read. For a person, like myself, just embarking on a subject, this is the best kind of book. It kept my attention, introduced me to the important players, and kept me flipping pages. Later on, once I’ve got a taste for it, then I can start worrying about the academic debates. Now, it is enough that I get a little blood and thunder (and adulterous affairs!). Throughout, the emphasis is always on storytelling. Take, for instance, the battle of Trafalgar, which Harvey recounts in heated, credulous prose, especially the death pageant of his hero, Nelson: Aboard the Victory, the long, heroic, pathetic and tragic tableau of Nelson’s death was unfolding. When the ship’s surgeon reached his side, Nelson told him, “I am mortally wounded. You can do nothing for me Beatty. I have but a short time to live.” Beatty prodded the wound with his finger and realized his admiral was right. He was running a high temperature and desperately thirsty. “Drink, drink, fire, fire” he kept repeating and was given lemonade, water and wine. He asked repeatedly for Hardy. The captain came after an hour during a lull in the fighting. “Well, hardy, how goes the day with us?” Nelson asked. Hardy replied that twelve or fourteen ships had surrendered. “I hope none of our ships have struck, Hardy?”“No, my Lord, there is no fear of that.”“I am a dead man, Hardy,” the admiral replied. Hardy returned to his duties and Nelson turned back to the doctor: “All pain and motion behind my breast is gone and you know I am gone.” Beatty concurred. “God be praised. I have done my duty,” breathed Nelson.Between the massive bloodletting, Harvey finds time to recount the gentler pursuits of the generals and admirals who ruled this era. For instance:[Napoleon] was romantically besotted with his wife, to whom he wrote a letter every day, begging her to join him. But she was otherwise engaged: she had taken a lover, Hippolyte Charles, a small but dashing hussar addicted to drinking and gambling, the polar opposite of the intense, self-disciplined Napoleon. The young general ordered his two most faithful friends, Androche Junot and Joachim Murat, to bring her to him. Of the first, he wrote crudely: “You must return with Junot, do you hear, my adorable one, he will see you, he will breathe the air of your shrine. Perhaps you will even allow him the unique favor of a kiss on your cheek…A kiss on your heart, and then another a little lower, much much lower.” He also remarked that she had “the prettiest little vagina in the world, the Three Isles of Martinique were there.”(Reviewers Note: No, I’m not sure what that description means. Yes, I did attempt to find out). Even with close to a thousand pages, there is not space for everything. There are tradeoffs. Harvey is clearly more interested in the sea than the land. Thus, more attention is given to naval battles than land battles. He devotes an entire chapter to the raider Lord Cochrane, while giving a sentence to the Battle of Ulm. There is also the old forest-verses-the-trees conundrum. Here, Harvey’s story is so pointillist and character driven that I lost sight of the overall geopolitical situation. The skirmishes and battles sort of bleed (pun: intended) into each other, without separation or explanation. Furthermore, in presenting a seamless narrative, unencumbered with footnotes or endnotes, there is no way to verify the sources Harvey used in his interpretation. I am a rank amateur when it comes to the Napoleonic Wars. I’ve admitted as much already. But certain facts struck me as questionable. One example: the Battle of Marengo. Harvey states that at Marengo (which I’d never heard of), “[s]ome 6,000 Austrians were killed.” Once again, I don’t know the Napoleonic Wars from a basket of rabies-stricken albino squirrels. But I do know some history generally. That’s more fatalities than the bloodiest day of the American Civil War at Antietam. It’s almost as many fatalities as the combined three-day total at Gettysburg. It is higher than the fatalities suffered by the Allies on D-Day. I’ve read books by Dave Grossman and SLA Marshall regarding the correlation between fire-rates and training. I know that in 1800, these were levee armies using inaccurate smoothbore muskets that fired one or two or three shots per minutes and which emitted a cloud of smoke that hung over the battlefield like a veil. With all this in mind, I doubt that figure. Of course, I can’t check where Harvey got it, since there are no source notes. It’s also clear, even to a Napoleonic newbie, that Harvey has some strong pro-British biases. He swoons at British seamen, and is constantly degrading Napoleon. At one point, in talking about France’s Revolutionary Armies, he states that there were any number of more talented generals than Napoleon. I doubt that – if they were as talented as Napoleon, they would have been Napoleon. Harvey comes close to referring to Napoleon as a monster – holding out his treatment of the Mameluk in Egypt – conveniently forgetting that the British Empire did not hold sway over the world by handing out kind words and butterscotch candies. He is dismissive of Napoleon’s political prowess and his famous code of laws, without ever really explaining why this is being dismissed. These downsides are always going to be the downsides of any history book of this type. Its faults are the very things that make it immensely readable and digestible. And a bit exhausting.
This is a book with an extremely ambitious brief, to cover the history of the pan-European conflict that began with the French Revolution and ended with the second and last downfall of Napoleon after Waterloo.Although the book is 900 odd pages, it by necessity has to move at extraordinary speed. The French Revolution is covered in just a few pages. This is fine, for a general history of this sort cannot afford to get bogged down in topics that are best covered by more specific histories.Before discussing what I liked about the book, I must first state my reservations. I have noted one major factual error, an unsupported assertion, and a general bias. These lead me to wonder precisely how accurate the book is overall. The factual error is this, in the book, Harvey claims that Napoleon Bonaparte put up the Arc de Triomphe and had 'Haussmann' cut new thoroughfares out of medieval Paris. Actually, while Napoleon Bonaparte commissioned the arch, it was barely begun by the time of his final fall, and was not completed for another twenty years. Baron Haussman never worked for Napoleon Bonaparte, rather, he reconstructed Paris under the rule of Napoleon's nephew, the Emperor Napoleon III. So this is a large error, and easy to check, so what were the author and the editor doing? Mistakes like this always make me uneasy when reading a book.At the end of the book, Harvey claims that Napoleon was 'suffer[ing:] from a rare condition that was changing his sexuality to that of a woman which may account for some of the hysteria he often displayed' (pg 911). This is a statement that is not only breathtakingly politically incorrect, it is also not something that I have ever heard of before and really requires citation(s). From what I know, there are conditions that do change gender, but these are primarily developmental issues, not ones that affect adult humans. I can only conclude that Harvey has really gone off the deep end on this one.My third issue is this. I do believe that political orientation does not need to bias one's writings. However, there are substantial areas in this text where I detect Harvey's conservative viewpoint poking through into his analysis. The author was a Conservative MP and unfortunately it shows. I feel that Harvey, being British, is less obnoxious in both his views and his language than many American conservatives would be, but this is disappointing. Note to the reader: I would be as disappointed if a radical Marxist, libertarian, or anarcho-syndicalist viewpoint intruded into a work like this UNLESS it was branded as 'A Conservative/Liberal/Silly Party Re-evaluation' or such.There is a great need for general histories of this era because it is such a big topic. War of Wars is almost 1000 pages, but it spends just a few pages for each battle, and just 50 pages on the invasion and retreat from Russia. The brevity does not annoy me for the particular purpose of the book. I read it because I wanted to get a general oversight of the time, to identify the major landmarks, and begin the process of letting information percolate into my brain. On a certain level, then, this book has been useful from the standpoint of me beginning to develop a 'sight picture' of this era. But my trust for what I learned, unless I already possessed independent knowledge of various parts of the narrative, is low. The author did not engage in rigourous fact-checking of the kind that is so necessary but unfortunately so despised today. I would recommend this book only to the discriminating reader who is able to read between the lines and is capable of not believing everything that he or she reads.
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A really quite riveting and fast-paced account of over 25 years' worth of war. Definitely pop-history - the author does exercise some poetic licence with his judgements, I feel - but worth the read if, like me, you are not familiar with the narrative of the French Revolution and its subsequent years of war. There are some comments regarding some apparent bias of the author towards Britain. On this, I'd just point out this is not bias in the usual sense, in that the author isn't seen to be favourable towards the actions of Britons and their government; on the contrary, his analyses often do not show Britain in a good light. There is, however, significantly more space awarded to Britain's role in the conflict than any other opponent of France. But for me that's just something to bear in mind, and since the author is British and his work covers so many events, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
—Ben
What a great over-view of a very long and very complex period in European History. Harvey's book is clearly from the British perspective, but he gives ample space and good detail from the French side. The Russian, Austrian and Prussian perspectives are lacking—especially in the wars of the Fourth Coalition, the French invasion of Russia (Lieven's Russia against Napoleon is a really good account from the Russian experience) and the war of the Sixth Coalition. These periods of great complexity are a bit glossed over, especially the drive into Germany and the fall of France, I guess since Britain did not take direct part in it, except for actions in Southern France.Still a really good book for those who want to have an over-view understanding of the Napoleonic wars.
—Shaun
I'm so proud of myself for reading this - but of course actually 927 pages on the Napoleonic wars is easy when it's as well written as this. Never heavy, full of interesting and amusing insights into characters, fantastic descriptions of the horrors of the wars, the retreat from Moscow etc. i loved the pen portraits of characters completely new to me, such as Cochrane, and many mysteries were solved regarding names I know so well but know so little about, like Wellington. A philanderer! who knew!Interesting to be reading this as we gear up for the centenary of WW1, and seventy years on from D-Day. the bloodshed, atrocities and torture are extraordinary to read about. And the British were not always the innocent party. Humanity does move on, but you don't have to dig very far to find the dark side.
—Sarah Harkness
