The Life of a Regimental Officer During the Great War, 1793-1815

Here is a forgotten voice from the age of Napoleon. Colonel Samuel Rice was not a Wellington, not a Nelson, not a name carved into monuments across London. He was an ensign who bought his commission with family money, a young man sent to study in St Omer just as France began to burn. What he witnessed, and what he wrote home about, forms this extraordinary account of the Napoleonic Wars from below deck and from the garrison, not from headquarters. Mockler-Ferryman has assembled Rice's letters and observations into something rarer than a biography: a portrait of what it actually meant to be a regimental officer in the British Army of the 1790s and 1800s. We see the squalor of transport ships, the grinding tedium of duty, the purchase system that let wealthy commoners buy their way past better men, and the slow accumulation of experience into competence. This is military history with the padding and polish removed, written by a man who never imagined anyone would read it two centuries later. For anyone who has ever wondered what the Napoleonic Wars felt like to the men who actually fought them, rather than to the generals who won them, this book is a window into a vanished world.