A British Rifle Man: The Journals and Correspondence of Major George Simmons, Rifle Brigade, During the Peninsular War and the Campaign of Waterloo

Here is a voice from inside the Napoleonic Wars, unfiltered and immediate. George Simmons was an officer in the 95th Rifles, the elite light infantry division that fought across the Iberian Peninsula and culminated at Waterloo, and what survives is not a polished history but something far rarer: the letters he sent home to his family in Hull and the journal he kept in snatches between battles. He was there at the storming of Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo, those brutal siege assaults where the British infantry poured through breaches in walls draped with defending French scalped alive. He watched Major O'Hare march off to lead the advance, shake his hand, and say "A Lieutenant-Colonel or cold meat in a few hours", and hours later, Simmons found his body naked amongst thousands more. At Waterloo, a musket ball to the chest nearly killed him. This is not romance. It is a religious man, not priggish, recording the fear and death and mayhem he witnessed with unflinching clarity. For anyone who has read Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels and wanted to hear the actual voices of those men, Simmons is the closest thing to time travel we have.