Resumen
Resumen de El ejército de Wellington, 1809–1814
Para quién es
For readers who love military and Napoleonic history, and anyone who enjoys Sharpe style fiction and wants the real machinery behind it.
De qué trata este libro
Wellington's Army, 1809 to 1814 is a study of the force that Britain sent to Portugal and Spain to fight Napoleon's marshals. It was written by Charles Oman, who held the chair of modern history at Oxford and spent years on the Peninsular War. The book appeared in 1912, when Oman had already given the war its fullest history. Here he turns from the campaigns to the instrument that fought them.
Oman asks how this army was built, led, fed and fought. He looks at the staff, the infantry, the cavalry, the guns, the engineers and the supply service. He also looks at the officers and the common soldiers, and at the Portuguese troops who marched beside the British. You will learn why a small army often beat larger French ones, and where it was weak. Let us begin with the army Britain had in 1809, and the man who inherited it.
En este resumen
- 1A small army in a long warFree
- 2Wellington ran the army himself
- 3The line beat the French column
- 4Cavalry, guns and engineers had their troubles
- 5Officers, men and their allies
- 6Strategy rested on patience and supply
Idea clave 1 de 6
A small army in a long war
Oman begins with the plain fact that Britain was a naval power with a small land force. Its army had to be raised by voluntary enlistment, since conscription on the French model was out of the question. The men were recruited from the poor, and the regiments were fitted into a system that had grown by habit rather than design. In 1809 this army was sent to Portugal as a partner to local forces, not as the main weapon of the war.
The forces that Britain placed in the Peninsula were never large beside the great French armies. Oman stresses that Wellington often had fewer than forty thousand British troops in the field. Portuguese units and sometimes Spanish troops made up the rest of the strength. This meant that every loss mattered, and that a general could not afford to waste lives in careless attacks.
The choice of 1809 as a starting point is meaningful. It was the year Wellington, then Sir Arthur Wellesley, returned to Portugal and took command after an earlier campaign had ended in a controversial agreement with the French. From then until the invasion of France in 1814 the army had a single guiding mind. Oman treats the period as a unit, because the army changed little in its basic form once Wellington had shaped it.
He also reminds readers that the army was not a perfect machine. It had faults of organisation that no one in London had cured. Part of the book's interest is how these faults were managed, one at a time, by a commander who accepted what he could not change. That attitude, more than any grand reform, explains much of what follows.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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