List of Illustrations In certain versions of this etext [in certain browsers] clicking on this symbol , or directly on the image, will bring up a larger version of the illustration. Some typographical errors have been corrected; a list follows the text. While engaged during the last ten years in the task of mastering the original authorities for the history of the Napoleonic wars, I have had to peruse many scores of diaries, autobiographies, and journals of the British military and naval officers who were engaged in the great struggle.
They vary, of course, in interest and importance, in literary value, and in the power of vivid presentation of events. But they have this in common, that they are almost all very difficult to procure. Very few have been reprinted; indeed, I believe that the books of Lord Dundonald, Kincaid, John Shipp, Gleig, and Mercer are well nigh the only ones which have passed through a second edition.
Yet there are many others which contain matter of the highest interest, not only for the historical student, but for every intelligent reader. From among these I have made a selection of ten or a dozen which seem to me well worth republishing. It is fortunate that he found the leisure, and had the skill, to narrate all his adventures. In that excellent romance the narrator it will be remembered actually escapes from Givet in company with an Irish naval officer, and goes through a hundred perils before reaching safety.
What the retired captain thought, or said, on finding himself thus liberally dealt with in a novel is not recorded. But I fancy that he must have considered it hard that Peter Simple should be reprinted some thirty times, while his own most interesting book never saw a second edition. It is now very rare: in ten years of systematic searching of second-hand book shops, in quest of old military and naval autobiographies, I have only come on three copies of the work.
I trust that by this edition it may be brought once more to common knowledge. French writers have often denounced the Portsmouth pontoons, on which so many of their compatriots were forced to dwell.
