The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence: A Hero of the Peninsular and Waterloo Campaigns

What separates this memoir from a hundred military histories is the voice. William Lawrence was no aristocrat, no officer with a commission bought by family money. He was a Dorset boy, son of a laborer, apprentice to a builder who beat him. He enlisted for adventure and found something else entirely: the Peninsula's burning plains, the nightmare of Waterloo. But this isn't some sanitized account of noble war. Lawrence writes with a soldier's black humor, his mates' crude nicknames, the stolen hours between atrocities. He captures the brotherhood and the brutality, the terror and the tedium that historians always omit. For over a century his voice was lost. Then volunteers found it. This is what the Napoleonic Wars looked like to the men who actually fought them, not from a general's horse, but from the mud, watching your friends die. If you've ever wondered what it felt like to be nineteen and afoot in a battle that changed Europe's fate, Lawrence tells you.