On The Road With Wellington: The Diary of a War Commissary in the Peninsular Campaigns (Napoleonic Library)

WELCOME to the diaries of Lieutenant Augustus Ludolph Friedrich Schaumann, a deputy assistant commissary-general in the service of the King’s German Legion. Or, alternatively, a footloose Hanoverian who marched through Portugal and Spain with Wellington.Strictly speaking this is not a diary at all, but rather a memoir based on diaries that Schaumann compiled in later life for the benefit of his children and grandchildren. The first quarter of his book told the story of his childhood and youth, and Anthony Ludovici, who translated the memoirs into English in the early 1920s, sensibly decided to leave out those formative years and plunge the reader straight into the Peninsular War. This explains the book’s abrupt beginning: ‘At about ten o’clock on Sunday morning the 28th August, 1808, we were given the signal to land.’Schaumann was thirty years old on that fateful Sunday, and he was about to experience the six most adventurous and rewarding years of his life. He had been born and raised in Hanover, the son of an impoverished lawyer who was determined that his son should establish himself in a respectable career, but as Anthony Ludovici’s Preface reveals, the young Augustus Schaumann consistently disappointed his demanding father. He failed as a soldier, then as an official of the Hanoverian Post Office, and was finally trained as a clerk. He endured four years of ledgers and double book-keeping and then, to escape his father’s disapproval, left Hanover to seek his fortune abroad. He found work as a clerk in Holland, then in England and afterwards in Gothenburg, Sweden, where he was stranded during a vain attempt to reach Russia. He was nearly thirty years old and his life had been aimless, unrewarding and frustrating.Then, in 1808, war broke out between Denmark and Sweden. France joined this war on Denmark’s side, seeing in the conflict a chance to seal one of the biggest loopholes in Napoleon’s Continental System which attempted to bar British goods ...

This remarkable memoir captures the life and adventures of a junior officer as he endures the drama and agonies of the fierce struggle in Spain, Portugal, and southern France between 1808 and 1814. As a commissary, he was entrusted with gathering supplies and was caught up in a host of brawls and skirmishes. He laments the lot of commissaries exposing themselves to the enemy on their foraging raids, risking assassination by enraged natives, and being treated shabbily by the generals. This edition is introduced by Bernard Cornwell, author of the Sharpe series of novels.

As a classic work and out of print for many years, August Schaumann''s diaries provide a graphic and vivi d account of campaigning life during the Peninsular Wars. As a classic work and out of print for many years, August Schaumann"s diaries provide a graphic and vivi d account of campaigning life during the Peninsular Wars '