Introduction

As a supplement to his magisterial History of the Peninsular War (1902–30), Charles Oman published an account of the daily life of the Duke of Wellington’s Peninsular forces, Wellington’s Army (1912), in which he listed all of the sources consulted during his research. Of his sources, he claimed a particular fondness for soldiers’ ‘[m]emoirs and autobiographies’, indicating that he ‘thought it worth while to give in an appendix the names and titles of the best of them’. His appendix lists over 100 military memoirs written by British soldiers who served during the Peninsular War (1808–14) and which were published between the start of the conflict in 1809 and the publication of his own book in 1912. (Around half were published during the wars or within 20 years of their conclusion.) It was, Oman conceded, an astonishing list. None of Britain’s earlier wars had produced anything like this outpouring of soldiers’ writing. He concluded: ‘It is a very notable fact, which requires (but has never hitherto received) an explanation, that it is precisely with the coming in of the nineteenth century that British soldiers and officers alike began to write diaries and reminiscences on a large scale and in great numbers’. ¹