Adventures in Holland and at Waterloo; And Expedition to Portugal

Thomas Knight was nineteen years old when he walked away from his apprenticeship and enlisted in the British Army on impulse. That rash decision swept him into the heart of the Napoleonic Wars, a drummer boy in Holland enduring brutal winter campaigns, a witness to the chaos and heroism at Waterloo in 1815, and finally a soldier marching into Portugal to aid Portuguese resistance against French occupation. Knight writes with the raw immediacy of a young man thrust into extraordinary times: his anecdotes about fellow soldiers crack with irreverent humor and mischief, while his accounts of battle carry the stunned precision of someone who survived what he describes. This is military memoir stripped of glorification, the cold, the fear, the strange brotherhood formed in adversity. It endures because it captures the Napoleonic era not from the strategists' vantage but from the muddy ground where ordinary men met history head-on.