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Wellington: A Military Life
"Next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained." - Wellington
The Duke of Wellington, the most successful of British commanders, set a standard by which all subsequent British generals have been measured.
His defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815 crowned a reputation first won in India at Assaye and then confirmed during the Peninsular War, where he followed up his defense of Portugal by driving the French from Spain.
Gordon Corrigan, himself an ex-soldier, examines Wellington’s claims to greatness.
Wellington was in many ways the first modern general, combining a mastery of logistics with an ability to communicate with and inspire men of all ranks.
He had to contend not only with enemy armies but also with his political masters and an often skeptical public at home.
' A Military Life' is a brilliant examination of one of Britain's most important historical figures.
‘Political, fluent, well-researched and extremely argumentative’ – Andrew Roberts.
Major Gordon Corrigan is a retired Gurkha officer, a member of the British Commission for Military History and Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. Fluent in the Nepali language, he is now a freelance military historian and battlefield lecturer. He is a well known figure on the History channel. He is also the author of ‘Sepoys in the Trenches’.
The Duke of Wellington, the most successful of British commanders, set a standard by which all subsequent British generals have been measured.
His defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815 crowned a reputation first won in India at Assaye and then confirmed during the Peninsular War, where he followed up his defense of Portugal by driving the French from Spain.
Gordon Corrigan, himself an ex-soldier, examines Wellington’s claims to greatness.
Wellington was in many ways the first modern general, combining a mastery of logistics with an ability to communicate with and inspire men of all ranks.
He had to contend not only with enemy armies but also with his political masters and an often skeptical public at home.
' A Military Life' is a brilliant examination of one of Britain's most important historical figures.
‘Political, fluent, well-researched and extremely argumentative’ – Andrew Roberts.
Major Gordon Corrigan is a retired Gurkha officer, a member of the British Commission for Military History and Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. Fluent in the Nepali language, he is now a freelance military historian and battlefield lecturer. He is a well known figure on the History channel. He is also the author of ‘Sepoys in the Trenches’.
516 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2001
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
October 27, 2021
It took me a while to warm up to this book. By the time I reached his account of Wellington at Waterloo, I couldn't put it down. Corrigan covers all the major points in Wellington's life. This book is a great introduction to the "Spanish Ulcer", explaining the military reasons for the various events but includes some political rationale as well. Wellington was lucky in many respects but he made his luck in many ways:
Wellington was successful and his victories made a difference to England’s world position, but his reputation rests on far more than that. He had a natural assumption of command. He understood the political limits under which he operated. He had a happy knack of cooperating with allies, whatever he thought of them privately. He understood the importance of logistics in what we would now term third world countries. He appreciated the limitations of his subordinate commanders, using their talents and compensating for their weaknesses. He had a mastery of detail and was capable of prodigious amounts of work. He effectively ran the whole army himself. He had an astute feel for tactics and an ability to cut through the ‘fog of war’ and identify what was critical and what could be ignored or postponed. Finally, Wellington had that inherent and instinctive assumption of leadership and a confidence that communicated itself to those under him.
Wellington had a knack for being in the right place at the right time. He was also practical, doing the things expected of a good commander:
Wellington was concerned about the treatment of wounded, not so much for humanitarian reasons but because of his shortage of manpower. On one occasion he rode thirty miles at night, accompanied only by an ADC, Captain Alexander Gordon, to check a report that wounded men had been left outside on the ground while their officers were comfortably billeted in houses. Arriving at the scene, he ordered the officers out of their accommodation and the wounded into it. Knowing his army as he did, Wellington returned the next day to find the officers once more inside with the wounded back on the ground. The officers were arrested and court martialled.
Three Stars for this one.
Wellington was successful and his victories made a difference to England’s world position, but his reputation rests on far more than that. He had a natural assumption of command. He understood the political limits under which he operated. He had a happy knack of cooperating with allies, whatever he thought of them privately. He understood the importance of logistics in what we would now term third world countries. He appreciated the limitations of his subordinate commanders, using their talents and compensating for their weaknesses. He had a mastery of detail and was capable of prodigious amounts of work. He effectively ran the whole army himself. He had an astute feel for tactics and an ability to cut through the ‘fog of war’ and identify what was critical and what could be ignored or postponed. Finally, Wellington had that inherent and instinctive assumption of leadership and a confidence that communicated itself to those under him.
Wellington had a knack for being in the right place at the right time. He was also practical, doing the things expected of a good commander:
Wellington was concerned about the treatment of wounded, not so much for humanitarian reasons but because of his shortage of manpower. On one occasion he rode thirty miles at night, accompanied only by an ADC, Captain Alexander Gordon, to check a report that wounded men had been left outside on the ground while their officers were comfortably billeted in houses. Arriving at the scene, he ordered the officers out of their accommodation and the wounded into it. Knowing his army as he did, Wellington returned the next day to find the officers once more inside with the wounded back on the ground. The officers were arrested and court martialled.
Three Stars for this one.
July 11, 2021
Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, defender of Portugal, liberator of Spain, victor at Assaye and Waterloo lays claim to being one of the greatest, if not the greatest, British General in history. While Wellington's story has been told in numerous biographies, and campaign and battle narratives, few have been written by a modern, professional military officer.
Gordon Corrigan, himself a former officer in the British Army (I do believe as part of the NATO forces in West Germany, or the British Army on the Rhine), has written a superb, very technical, yet extremely readable look at both Wellington the soldier, as well as Wellington the man.
Part biography, part campaign narrative, part doctrinal and nuts and bolts analysis this is definitely a very scholarly work, and maybe not the best place to go for an introduction to the Iron Duke, or the times in which he lived. However, despite the dense quality of Corrigan's research and analysis, this is a very good read. As seems so common with UK trained academics and military officers, Corrigan, himself Scottish, is a fantastic writer. And while he never ceases to offer technical critiques and insightful analysis on what is happening in the narrative, he always manages to do so in a way that never seems to interrupt the flow of the narrative, or take away from truly epic nature of the events being described.
Wellington led the only major Army in the field that the British decided to field for quite some time (until in 1812 that whole fundamental disagreement over maritime procedures with the Americans blew up into a little spat which prompted London to assemble another, major, field force). As such, Wellington was highly cognizant that he was in command of a highly precious asset.
As Corrigan showcases, this knowledge that he was in charge of the only major standing British Army, and it's precious nature, informs the Duke's strategic planning and his operations. Preferring to stand on the defensive tactically (usually, though not as is commonly assumed, always) in order to make use of superior geographical force multipliers, Wellington waged a very careful, but not at all cautious, campaign against the French in Iberia.
With the stalwart Portuguese typically fighting side by side, this little British Army, usually around no more than 40,000 men or so, waged a brilliant campaign against a huge force of highly aggressive Imperial French, as well as having to deal with the vagaries of coalition warfare with a not always welcoming Spanish Junta or cooperative Spanish field forces.
Operating on a tight logistical budget, nearly always outnumbered and outgunned, Wellington managed to, consistently, if not out-maneuver his adversaries, he could usually out-fight them. British adherence to linear as opposed to columnar or mixed order infantry tactics wreaked bloody havoc with assaulting French and Imperial forces who were, usually, shot to pieces and mown down by highly disciplined British musketry and carefully husbanded artillery fire.
If the British Army had a couple of Achilles heels, however, it was their cavalry, and their logistics.
The British cavalry, despite being equally as well trained and equipped as the Imperial, as well as normally much better mounted, lacked the tight discipline of their French counterparts, who mastered the art of reigning in and reforming to perform multiple tactical evolutions. The British horse, however, looked with disdain on such nonsense and never considered it a good day unless once they began to dash at something, they didn't stop till they had dashed as far as they could have dashed had they dared. This, of course, typically landed them in very hot water.
Wellington consistently complained about the discipline of his cavalry, and was more than a few times loath to commit them to battle for the very reason that they tended to be a one shot weapon. The Imperial ability to reform and recover their charges, to do so multiple times,are their mounted element a much deadlier threat, overall.
If Wellington grumbled about his cavalry, he all but pulled his hair out over the issues of supply and material maintenance. London seemed, at times, to be reluctant to send their only major field force the bare essentials to survive, let alone sustain high tempo operations for long periods.
This lack of sustained supply, especially food, led to egregious breakdowns of discipline within the British Army in field, especially after the taking of cities, which were sometimes sacked worse than when first occupied by the French. Needless to say, this didn't exactly do wonders for British and Spanish fraternal relations.
Despite these difficulties, however, Wellington not only soldiered on, he prevailed.
Wellington defended Portugal from three separate French invasions (albeit the episode of the Lines of Torres Vedras, and the scorched earth tactics involved do come under some scrutiny from Corrigan), and threw back the French every time. He advanced into Spain, and while shoved back from his advances more than once, Wellington persistently kept at it, adroitly utilizing the Spanish insurrection as both an incredibly reliable intelligence network, and as a way to divide the French forces into smaller components which could then be beaten in detail.
Eventually, Wellington helped liberate Spain, tossed the French back over the Pyrenees, and then invaded southern France itself. Had this been the end of the story, in and of itself it would be more than enough to mark Arthur Wellesley as one of the Great Captain's of history, let alone of England.
However, Napoleon grew somewhat bored on Elba, and decided to vacation in France once again, and wound up as Emperor after a sight seeing tour to Paris.
Although Corrigan did a phenomenal job with the Peninsular War portion of Wellington's career, I have to say it is his handling of the Waterloo Campaign that is the best part of the book.
Wellington manages to scrape together a polyglot British-Dutch-Belgian-German Army in Flanders, and after a confused, and sometimes botched battle at Quatre Bras on the 16th of June, 1815, Wellington falls back to the ground around Mont St. Jean, and there, outside a small Belgian town called Waterloo, takes his stand.
Much of the battle on the 18th is Wellington absorbing blow after blow landed by the French, as he waits for the Prussians to arrive and ensure an allied victory. Corrigan does a wonderful job narrating the Battle of Waterloo, even conveying the sense of drama as Wellington has to feel battered and bruised, and wondering when will Marshal Blücher arrive.
Corrigan's narration of the battle, often, put me in mind of that excellent Sergei Bondarchuk film from 1970 starring Christopher Plummer and Rod Steiger on the Battle. When Plummer, as Wellington, utters the line while looking up to the heavens: Give me night, or give me Blücher, you can hear the Duke saying that while you read the description of the battle in the book.
And just as the climax of the Battle was the charge of the Imperial Guard, so too is it in these pages.
Again, Corrigan puts you in the mind of the film, and when the Imperial Guard Battalions go in, you can almost hear the music, and Wellington muttering, "if they don't stand, they'll break every bone in my body!"
Except the British do stand, and Wellington's stout stand at Waterloo, one of the best days in the history of the British Army, breaks the bones of not just the Imperial Guard, but of Napoleon as well.
Covering the entirety of Wellington's illustrious career, from his days as a young man just entering service, to his stint in India and his triumph at Assaye (the event that causes Napoleon to, foolishly, disregard Wellington as little more than a "Sepoy general"), through the Peninsular War and the Hundred Days, and to his years served as a public servant of the Crown. Beyond just a military history, it also details his personal life, and Wellington's married life had to rank as one of the saddest in history, devoid of any happiness in the slightest.
Perhaps why he devoted himself so thoroughly to warfare and it's study.
This is one of the very best books on Wellington you can find, made all the better by analysis from a former, modern, British Army officer, as well as incredibly well written.
Very highly recommended.
Gordon Corrigan, himself a former officer in the British Army (I do believe as part of the NATO forces in West Germany, or the British Army on the Rhine), has written a superb, very technical, yet extremely readable look at both Wellington the soldier, as well as Wellington the man.
Part biography, part campaign narrative, part doctrinal and nuts and bolts analysis this is definitely a very scholarly work, and maybe not the best place to go for an introduction to the Iron Duke, or the times in which he lived. However, despite the dense quality of Corrigan's research and analysis, this is a very good read. As seems so common with UK trained academics and military officers, Corrigan, himself Scottish, is a fantastic writer. And while he never ceases to offer technical critiques and insightful analysis on what is happening in the narrative, he always manages to do so in a way that never seems to interrupt the flow of the narrative, or take away from truly epic nature of the events being described.
Wellington led the only major Army in the field that the British decided to field for quite some time (until in 1812 that whole fundamental disagreement over maritime procedures with the Americans blew up into a little spat which prompted London to assemble another, major, field force). As such, Wellington was highly cognizant that he was in command of a highly precious asset.
As Corrigan showcases, this knowledge that he was in charge of the only major standing British Army, and it's precious nature, informs the Duke's strategic planning and his operations. Preferring to stand on the defensive tactically (usually, though not as is commonly assumed, always) in order to make use of superior geographical force multipliers, Wellington waged a very careful, but not at all cautious, campaign against the French in Iberia.
With the stalwart Portuguese typically fighting side by side, this little British Army, usually around no more than 40,000 men or so, waged a brilliant campaign against a huge force of highly aggressive Imperial French, as well as having to deal with the vagaries of coalition warfare with a not always welcoming Spanish Junta or cooperative Spanish field forces.
Operating on a tight logistical budget, nearly always outnumbered and outgunned, Wellington managed to, consistently, if not out-maneuver his adversaries, he could usually out-fight them. British adherence to linear as opposed to columnar or mixed order infantry tactics wreaked bloody havoc with assaulting French and Imperial forces who were, usually, shot to pieces and mown down by highly disciplined British musketry and carefully husbanded artillery fire.
If the British Army had a couple of Achilles heels, however, it was their cavalry, and their logistics.
The British cavalry, despite being equally as well trained and equipped as the Imperial, as well as normally much better mounted, lacked the tight discipline of their French counterparts, who mastered the art of reigning in and reforming to perform multiple tactical evolutions. The British horse, however, looked with disdain on such nonsense and never considered it a good day unless once they began to dash at something, they didn't stop till they had dashed as far as they could have dashed had they dared. This, of course, typically landed them in very hot water.
Wellington consistently complained about the discipline of his cavalry, and was more than a few times loath to commit them to battle for the very reason that they tended to be a one shot weapon. The Imperial ability to reform and recover their charges, to do so multiple times,are their mounted element a much deadlier threat, overall.
If Wellington grumbled about his cavalry, he all but pulled his hair out over the issues of supply and material maintenance. London seemed, at times, to be reluctant to send their only major field force the bare essentials to survive, let alone sustain high tempo operations for long periods.
This lack of sustained supply, especially food, led to egregious breakdowns of discipline within the British Army in field, especially after the taking of cities, which were sometimes sacked worse than when first occupied by the French. Needless to say, this didn't exactly do wonders for British and Spanish fraternal relations.
Despite these difficulties, however, Wellington not only soldiered on, he prevailed.
Wellington defended Portugal from three separate French invasions (albeit the episode of the Lines of Torres Vedras, and the scorched earth tactics involved do come under some scrutiny from Corrigan), and threw back the French every time. He advanced into Spain, and while shoved back from his advances more than once, Wellington persistently kept at it, adroitly utilizing the Spanish insurrection as both an incredibly reliable intelligence network, and as a way to divide the French forces into smaller components which could then be beaten in detail.
Eventually, Wellington helped liberate Spain, tossed the French back over the Pyrenees, and then invaded southern France itself. Had this been the end of the story, in and of itself it would be more than enough to mark Arthur Wellesley as one of the Great Captain's of history, let alone of England.
However, Napoleon grew somewhat bored on Elba, and decided to vacation in France once again, and wound up as Emperor after a sight seeing tour to Paris.
Although Corrigan did a phenomenal job with the Peninsular War portion of Wellington's career, I have to say it is his handling of the Waterloo Campaign that is the best part of the book.
Wellington manages to scrape together a polyglot British-Dutch-Belgian-German Army in Flanders, and after a confused, and sometimes botched battle at Quatre Bras on the 16th of June, 1815, Wellington falls back to the ground around Mont St. Jean, and there, outside a small Belgian town called Waterloo, takes his stand.
Much of the battle on the 18th is Wellington absorbing blow after blow landed by the French, as he waits for the Prussians to arrive and ensure an allied victory. Corrigan does a wonderful job narrating the Battle of Waterloo, even conveying the sense of drama as Wellington has to feel battered and bruised, and wondering when will Marshal Blücher arrive.
Corrigan's narration of the battle, often, put me in mind of that excellent Sergei Bondarchuk film from 1970 starring Christopher Plummer and Rod Steiger on the Battle. When Plummer, as Wellington, utters the line while looking up to the heavens: Give me night, or give me Blücher, you can hear the Duke saying that while you read the description of the battle in the book.
And just as the climax of the Battle was the charge of the Imperial Guard, so too is it in these pages.
Again, Corrigan puts you in the mind of the film, and when the Imperial Guard Battalions go in, you can almost hear the music, and Wellington muttering, "if they don't stand, they'll break every bone in my body!"
Except the British do stand, and Wellington's stout stand at Waterloo, one of the best days in the history of the British Army, breaks the bones of not just the Imperial Guard, but of Napoleon as well.
Covering the entirety of Wellington's illustrious career, from his days as a young man just entering service, to his stint in India and his triumph at Assaye (the event that causes Napoleon to, foolishly, disregard Wellington as little more than a "Sepoy general"), through the Peninsular War and the Hundred Days, and to his years served as a public servant of the Crown. Beyond just a military history, it also details his personal life, and Wellington's married life had to rank as one of the saddest in history, devoid of any happiness in the slightest.
Perhaps why he devoted himself so thoroughly to warfare and it's study.
This is one of the very best books on Wellington you can find, made all the better by analysis from a former, modern, British Army officer, as well as incredibly well written.
Very highly recommended.
December 27, 2022
Nice and thorough with a good turn of phrase & concise. You might need familiarity with geography as there are no maps but the descriptions are good.
April 8, 2015
A long and fairly detailed history of a long life, and an interesting look at a man who came along at the right time to make a big mark on history.
My only criticism is that I felt I needed maps of the various battles in order to understand the manoeuvres. I realise that this would make the book longer and more expensive to produce, but it would have helped me a lot.
My only criticism is that I felt I needed maps of the various battles in order to understand the manoeuvres. I realise that this would make the book longer and more expensive to produce, but it would have helped me a lot.
Read
March 21, 2021Extremely good biography. Would benefit from some editing and the inclusion of some maps. Recommended.
September 25, 2024
Spoiler: Wellington dies in the end.
Stipulation: I'm giving five stars to Corrigan's text, but the copy I read is the Sharpe Books reprint, which is nice looking on the outside, and a mess within. I suspect the original had maps and an index, this does not. It was clearly scanned into a computer, and not copyedited by a human, so it is full of hyphenated words in the middle of a line, or dates like i8oo, and other such stupidities. One date typo near the end tells us that Lord Liverpool had a stroke in 1827, and died of it nine years earlier.
Until recently I had three books on Waterloo, a soldier's memoir from the Peninsular Campaign, dozens of books on Napoleon, but no actual biography of Wellington. My wife started listening to the Sharpe's Rifles books, and asked to borrow my bio of Wellington, which I didn't have. So I bought two -- this one and the Holmes -- and she's reading the other and I read this one.
Corrigan asks rhetorically why another Wellington biography was needed, and the book is his answer, because this thing is both tight and clear. As well read as I am in the history of this period, I was learning things at regular intervals. The explanation of the practice of buying officers' commissions, along with its history, is given very effectively. The state of officer training, and of infantry training, is covered with clarity -- both how it was at the beginning and how Wellington (and York) changed it.
The historical situation in India is very well handled without getting bogged down in the billion details, and what Wellesley's concerns and strategies were is most excellently explained. His breakdown at Seringapatam, after the disaster of the Tope attack, is not prettified or ignored. Corrigan is also very good at noting the lessons Wellesley seems to have learned from that experience.
There are some wonderful set pieces in here, that are lessons in how to write history. He spends less than two pages, but an effective two pages, explaining why France did not rise to the defense of Louis XVIII when Napoleon slipped away from Elba. Nicely done.
Though it WOULD REALLY HAVE BEEN USEFUL TO HAVE MAPS, the explanation of Napoleon's strategy on the Waterloo campaign is clear and effective. He points out that everything hinged on which way the Prussians would retreat, and on Napoleon's reasonable expectation that it would be away from Wavre (and therefore away from Wellington), and how difficult his situation was when that didn't happen.
Wellington was a ne'er-do-well junior son who somehow got his act together, an untrained officer who figured out his business, and mastered it brilliantly. Because the armies he commanded were relatively small, and frequently rather rag-tag, we will never know what he was capable of as a general; but what he did with those armies is beyond impressive. Oh, and I have to add him to the list of generals (Alexander, Caesar, Sheridan, Sherman and Grant) who mastered the art of logistics, and designed their campaigns with that as the paramount determinant.
This biography was so effective that I have no intention of taking up the Holmes in the foreseeable future. I strongly recommend the book, though I hope you'll be able to get a better edition.
Stipulation: I'm giving five stars to Corrigan's text, but the copy I read is the Sharpe Books reprint, which is nice looking on the outside, and a mess within. I suspect the original had maps and an index, this does not. It was clearly scanned into a computer, and not copyedited by a human, so it is full of hyphenated words in the middle of a line, or dates like i8oo, and other such stupidities. One date typo near the end tells us that Lord Liverpool had a stroke in 1827, and died of it nine years earlier.
Until recently I had three books on Waterloo, a soldier's memoir from the Peninsular Campaign, dozens of books on Napoleon, but no actual biography of Wellington. My wife started listening to the Sharpe's Rifles books, and asked to borrow my bio of Wellington, which I didn't have. So I bought two -- this one and the Holmes -- and she's reading the other and I read this one.
Corrigan asks rhetorically why another Wellington biography was needed, and the book is his answer, because this thing is both tight and clear. As well read as I am in the history of this period, I was learning things at regular intervals. The explanation of the practice of buying officers' commissions, along with its history, is given very effectively. The state of officer training, and of infantry training, is covered with clarity -- both how it was at the beginning and how Wellington (and York) changed it.
The historical situation in India is very well handled without getting bogged down in the billion details, and what Wellesley's concerns and strategies were is most excellently explained. His breakdown at Seringapatam, after the disaster of the Tope attack, is not prettified or ignored. Corrigan is also very good at noting the lessons Wellesley seems to have learned from that experience.
There are some wonderful set pieces in here, that are lessons in how to write history. He spends less than two pages, but an effective two pages, explaining why France did not rise to the defense of Louis XVIII when Napoleon slipped away from Elba. Nicely done.
Though it WOULD REALLY HAVE BEEN USEFUL TO HAVE MAPS, the explanation of Napoleon's strategy on the Waterloo campaign is clear and effective. He points out that everything hinged on which way the Prussians would retreat, and on Napoleon's reasonable expectation that it would be away from Wavre (and therefore away from Wellington), and how difficult his situation was when that didn't happen.
Wellington was a ne'er-do-well junior son who somehow got his act together, an untrained officer who figured out his business, and mastered it brilliantly. Because the armies he commanded were relatively small, and frequently rather rag-tag, we will never know what he was capable of as a general; but what he did with those armies is beyond impressive. Oh, and I have to add him to the list of generals (Alexander, Caesar, Sheridan, Sherman and Grant) who mastered the art of logistics, and designed their campaigns with that as the paramount determinant.
This biography was so effective that I have no intention of taking up the Holmes in the foreseeable future. I strongly recommend the book, though I hope you'll be able to get a better edition.
January 15, 2025
As the title suggests, this primarily a military history, focussing on Wellingon’s roles in India and in the Peninsula War driving France out of Portugal and Spain, with a long chapter on Waterloo in 1815. His later political life until 1852 is covered in one short chapter,
September 11, 2019
Loved it
Was very good, some errors here and there maybe from putting from paper to screen, but overall I loved it.
Was very good, some errors here and there maybe from putting from paper to screen, but overall I loved it.
December 5, 2024
great book!
Loved this book. What a well written, brilliant topic for such an inspirational story about Wellington - the maestro of the military!
Loved this book. What a well written, brilliant topic for such an inspirational story about Wellington - the maestro of the military!
May 25, 2025
An excellent read
Thorough and thought provoking with many new facts regarding military life at that time- I highly recommend this book about a great British hero
Thorough and thought provoking with many new facts regarding military life at that time- I highly recommend this book about a great British hero
March 26, 2011
Although it is a very cut and dry telling of the life of Sir Aurthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, it was a very thorough account of his life.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews