Adventures of a Soldier, Written by Himself: Being the Memoirs of Edward Costello, K.s.f. Formerly a Non-Commissioned Officer in the Rifle Brigade, Late Captain in the British Legion, and Now One of the Wardens of the Tower of London; Comprising Narratives of the Campaigns in the Peninsula Under the Duke of Wellington, and the Subsequent Civil Wars in Spain.

Here is a soldier's eye view of the Napoleonic Wars, direct from the man who lived it. Edward Costello, an Irishman who joined the British Army seeking adventure, rose through the ranks of the famed Rifle Brigade to fight alongside Wellington in the grinding campaigns of the Peninsular War. Later, he served as a Captain in the British Legion during the bloody civil wars that tore Spain apart in the 1830s. What emerges is not dry history but the raw, immediate voice of a man who loaded his rifle at dawn and slept in mud by night, who watched comrades die in the siege lines and traded stories with fellow veterans in the mess. Costello's memoir captures what textbooks cannot: the particular smell of a battlefield after rain, the black humor that kept soldiers sane, the strange pride of surviving. His later appointment as a Warden of the Tower of London gave him the distance of years to look back on his campaigns, but the prose retains its youthful fire. For anyone who wants to understand what war actually felt like to the men in the ranks, this is an indispensable account.