This being the final volume of John Gill's magisterial trilogy on Napoleon's 1809 campaigne I see this as the perfect time too review this brilliant work. This is the best and most complete work on any campaigne of the period from 1792-1815. Only Oman's Peninsular history matches it in detail. This trilogy is a model of what military history should be. Well written, balanced, detailed. The maps are both plentiful and exceedingly well done.
I want to thank the publisher for being willing to devote three volumes to this study. Without this space the writer would not have been able to give us this story in it's completeness. I also wish to thank the author for being expeditious in his writing of this book. It's been about two years I think between the first and last volume of this trilogy. I am reaching a point in life where I don't have decades to wait for a multi-volume history to be completed.
A little background on my history with this book. For decades the only work in english on the 1809 campaigne was Petre's "Napoleon and the Archduke Charles", the best of Petre's five volumes on the Napoleonic Wars. This was a good if dated account. The most modern account had been James Arnold's two volume work. While Arnold's work was more modern and had better maps each volume was only 200 pages and thus added little detail to Petre's work, and certainly didn't replace it as the best english language account of this campaigne. A few years ago while scanning greenhill books website I came upon a description of a two volume history of the 1809 campaigne by John Gill. When I saw the first volume was listed at 300+ pages I got excited at the prospect of a more detailed account of this campaigne, that is until I noted that the volume carried to the end of the battle of Aspern-Essling which kind of doused my enthusiasm since it wouldn't be anymore detailed than Petre and Arnold's books had been. But always on the lookout for a new book on a campaigne I anxiously awaited the books January publication. When that time came I could find no information on how to buy the book or whether it was even going to be published. Maybe a year or so later I saw it on Amazon's site but information was vague about the books lenghth or any useful about it. It was only when the book was about to be published that it was mentioned that this was going to be a three volume study
Each volume is 300 pages of text, with the final a little bit more. The first volume covers the political machinations leading up to the war and then covers the April campaigne in Bavaria. The beginning of this campaigne is one of the most difficult to follow because of Berthier's bungling and Napoleon's unclear orders to him. For the first time I got a clear understanding of what happened in these early days of the campaigne and the peril in which the French army put itself. I knew I was onto something special with this book when the operations of Kollowratt's two corps were gone into in detail. In most studies of this campaigne the operations of these two corps, operating out of Bohemia, are just glossed over but we get a good account of what they were doing and their potential impact on the campaigne as a whole. This is my favorite volume of the three because it consists of a lot of little battles that come together in a major campaign and crushing defeat for the Austrians.
Volume 1 flows smoothly into volume 2 without any need to recount what had happened previously. I hate when writers feel the need to waste space recounting what had happened in a previous volume. In a sense you could say that this trilogy falls into three parts, with the first part deeling with the principal campaign down the Danube up to Napoleon's defeat at Aspern-Essling. The first 200 pages deal with this part, and the first volume, while the next 250 pages deals with the secondary theatres. The last 100 pages of volume two deal with the Italian theatre while the first 150 pages of volume three cover the polish,dalmation and hungarian theatres. The final 150 pages of the book deals with the great battle of Wagram and the events leading to the end of the War.
If there is anything to be critical about in this book (and to me it's not a problem) it's that these books are not the last word on the battles of Aspern-Essling and Wagram. Eighty pages is devoted to each battle. The former gets two battle maps while the latter gets three battle maps. This is not to say that he slights these battles, both are well covered, but that this is not one of those books where 90% of the space is given to the big battles and everything else is summarized. This is a history of the campaigne as a whole and not just of the two big battles. Some people may find out more about the Italian campaign than they wish to know, or the Polish or the Dalmation. My feelings are that you'll always be able to find accounts of the two big battles, but to me it's the small operations that make this book for me. I've already mentioned the operations out of Bohemaia, but before this book I'd never even heard of the battle of Linz, covered in volume 2. I always wanted to know more about what was going on in Poland, and now I know.
This is not a thesis history where an author has an axe to grind or is pushing some theory. This is a plain vanilla history of a campaign in which the author tells the story from both sides and lets the domino's fall where they may. If the Austrian's come out worst it's because they deserve to, they ran a terrible campaigne. Napoleon is not treated here as a tyrant or is he idolized. He's treated as The Last Great Captain (in my opinion) in history.
I hope the author won't sue me for quoting from the last paragraph of his final book.
"All of this, of course, lay in the future. None of it was inevitable, and none of it was obvious as 1809 came to a close. The conclusion of the war opened new opportunities for Napoleon and for the other powers. The road to Moscow and Leipzig was only one of many paths to the future."
I hate it when historians see a particular event as leading inevitably to some other particular event years down the road. Nothing that occurred in 1809 set us inexorably on the road to Waterloo or any other result. Given Napoleon's megolomania he and his empire were probably doomed in the long run, but many things could have changed that or determined when it happened. As the author above said his victory offered many paths to the future and choices to be made, I congratulate the author for not falling into the trap of implying that a particular path was pre-ordained.
I hate it when the term definitive is applied to a book, as anything that can be done once can be done better and in more detail by someone else. I prefer to use a term someone used to describe Albert Castel's history of the Atlanta campaign, A Category Killer. That is how I would prefer to describe Mr. Gill's brilliant trilogy, A Category Killer. It will be a brave or foolhardy author who in the future decides to write a book on Napoleon's 1809 campaign. I personally could ask for nothing else on the subject as Mr. Gill has written it all.
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Carrosio Roberto
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 29, 2013