Military dispatches

The vivid and exciting accounts written from the front line, taking the story of the British war with Napoleon from its desperate beginnings in Portugal to the final triumph at WaterlooThe Duke of Wellington was not only an incomparable battle commander but a remarkably expressive, fluent and powerful writer.

His dispatches have long been viewed as classics of military literature and have been pillaged by all writers on the Peninsular War and the final campaigns in France and Belgium ever since they were published.

This new selection allows the reader to follow the extraordinary epic in Wellington's own words - from the tentative beginnings in 1808, clinging to a small area of Portugal in the face of overwhelming French power across the whole of the rest of Europe, to the campaigns that over six years devastated opponent after opponent.

The book ends with Wellington's invasion of France and the coda of 'the 100 days' that ended with Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo.