We received the following press release.--RL

Upcoming Book Release

The next book to be published in the Napoleonic Library is:

On the Road with Wellington
by A. L. F. Schaumann

The remarkable memoirs of August Schaumann capture the life and adventures of a junior officer in the British Army as he endures the drama and agonies of the fierce struggle in Spain, Portugal and the south of France between 1808 and 1814. Schaumann took part in Sir John Moore's ill-fated campaign in Spain, was present at the 'bloody battle of Talavera', witnessed the battle of Bussaco and invasion of Portugal, fought at Fuentes d'Onoro and Vittoria, and accompanied the allied forces over the frontier into France itself in 1814.

As a commissary, entrusted with gathering supplies as the army advanced, Schaumann was caught up in a host of brawls and skirmishes, and his narrative is all the more valuable for relating the small war of picquets and outposts that went on through the conflict but was overshadowed by the more famous battles. He laments the lot of commissaries 'to expose themselves on their various raids to the danger of meeting enemy forces, to shoulder the greatest responsibilities, to be constantly threatened with assassination by enraged natives and to be treated shabbily by the generals'. This is a classic narrative from the pen of a gifted writer and superb observer of the people, places and events on campaign.

ON THE ROAD WITH WELLINGTON is the thirty-fourth volume in the continuing Napoleonic Library.

Bernard Cornwell's use of non-fiction is a feature in each of his Sharpe books, and at the end of each he provides a Historical Note to indicate that which is fiction in the novel and that which is based on actual events. He frequently cites a book published by Greenhill, such as A HISTORY OF THE PENINSULAR WAR by Sir Charles Oman.

ON THE ROAD WITH WELLINGTON:
The Diary of a War Commissiary
by A. L. F. Schaumann
Introduction by Bernard Cornwell.

222 x 141mm, 448 pages, 1 illustration.
ISBN: 1-85367-353-6. Price: £20.00

Greenhill Books/Lionel Leventhal Ltd
Park House
1 Russell Gardens
London NW11 9NN
Tel: 0181 458 6314
Fax: 0181 905 5245
E-mail: LionelLeventhal@compuserve.com
Web site: www.greenhillbooks.com

Distributed in the United States at $39.95 by:

Stackpole Books
5067 Ritter Road
Mechanicsburg PA 17055
Tel: 717 796 0411
Fax: 717 796 0412
E-mail: sales@stackpolebooks.com

INTRODUCTION

by Bernard Cornwell, 1999

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 hischildren 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 from the continent of Europe and so break Britain's economy. Sweden was one of the biggest importers of British goods, and no port was more active in the trade than Gothenburg, and so Napoleon despatched an expeditionary force to Denmark with orders to find ships with which to invade and capture the Swedish city. The British, naturally enough, saw it was in their interest to protect Gothenburg and so they, in turn, sent a fleet and an army to protect the city. The army never disembarked, which hardly mattered because the French never invaded either, and eventually the British fleet and army sailed away. Napier called it an 'eminently foolish expedition', and so it probably was, but when the Royal Navy left Gothenburg it carried a civilian passenger - Augustus Schaumann. The rolling stone was moving on, but this time to a career which proved as satisfying as it was useful. Augustus Schaumann would join the King's German Legion.

The Legion, like Schaumann himself, was from Hanover, and Hanover was the German state which had given Britain its ruling family. George III was monarch of both the United Kingdom and of Hanover and so when, in 1803, the French overran Hanover, many patriots fled to Britain where they formed a King's German Regiment, which consisted of two battalions of light infantry. Soon, however, there were so many recruits that the regiment was expanded into the Legion; a small army consisting of five cavalry regiments, ten infantry battalions, six artillery batteries and a small corps of engineers.

They proved superb troops. Their cavalry, in particular, was reckoned the best in the Peninsula, and it is no surprise that it was KGL heavy cavalry that broke the French squares at Garcia Hernandez, a famous and unrepeated feat. Wellington, who was not swift to offer praise, said of the KGL, 'It is impossible to have better soldiers than the real Hanoverians'. Even the French conscripted a Hanoverian Legion, but their experience was less happy, for the best of the French Hanoverians invariably deserted to join the KGL as soon as they could. The King's German Legion was, in brief, a famous and formidable unit that did Britain real service during the Napoleonic Wars.

It was this unit which Augustus Schaumann joined in 1808, though not, officially, as a soldier. He wore a uniform and carried the courtesy rank of lieutenant, enabling him to mess with the officers, but his job, deputy assistant commissar, was a civilian appointment carrying a salary of seven shillings and sixpence a day. It was also, and I suspect the first Duke of Wellington would not have disagreed with this judgement, one of the most important jobs in the whole army, a war-winning job indeed, for the commissary had, among other things, to provide the army with all its daily rations. An assistant commissary-general (one rank above Schaumann) was responsible for providing a division's rations, a daily total of ten-and-a-half thousand pounds of bread, seven thousand pounds of beef and seven thousand pints of wine. Every day. It was an unglamorous job compared, say, to leading a company of riflemen or riding at the head of a troop of dragoons, but without men like Schaumann the British army could never have thrown the French out of Portugal and Spain.

Wellington understood the commissary. He prized it. He knew, better than any other contemporary general, that an army which was properly supplied was an army that would fight better than a force that was left to forage for its own food (as the French frequently were). As a consequence Wellington demanded high standards from his commissary officers. They had to buy food from peasants (never steal it, for an aggrieved peasant became a fearsome guerrilla enemy); they had to find mills to grind the corn, ovens to bake the bread and women to do the baking; they had to supervise the enormous train of pack animals that followed the troops and ride herd on the beef cattle that trudged in the army's wake ready to be slaughtered for the evening pot. All this while their unit might be marching in unexpected directions. Not only that, but the British Treasury, which, rather than the War Office, had authority over the commissary officers, held them and their heirs responsible for every penny of public money that passed through their hands, so each night was spent in writing up receipts and copying accounts. It cannot have been an easy life, yet Augustus Schaumann took to it with ingenuity and delight.

It is that delight in a difficult, dangerous and picaresque life that infuses Schaumann's diaries, for they are among the very best memoirs ever to have come from the Peninsular War. Schaumann had a roguish eye, a good pen, and an appetite for life. His description of the retreat to Corunna is the best that we have, and he manages to infuse that melancholy episode with excitement and verve. Schaumann enjoyed his war, and he communicates that enjoyment. This is no dull account of troop movements and supply difficulties, but a lively account of a young man unleashed to the pleasures of a foreign campaign. When I was writing the novels of Richard Sharpe's exploits in the Peninsular War, and had much recourse to diaries and memoirs, I used Schaumann twice as much as any other source. He had an eye for detail and an enthusiasm for campaign life that makes him the most immediate of all the war's chroniclers.

Schaumann survived the war and returned to Hanover as Napoleon was banished to Elba. The following year, when Napoleon escaped back to France, Schaumann again volunteered for the KGL, but he never reached Waterloo and so missed that battle. He lived on in Hanover, surviving on his half-pay pension and investments, and died in 1840, aged sixty-two, leaving eight children. It was for those children that he re-worked his diaries and the manuscript stayed in the family until 1922 when a grandson, Lieutenant Colonel Conrad von Holleufer, published a shortened version. Ludovici, when he translated the German edition into English, edited the memoirs still further, but more than enough remains. Anyone who is interested in the Peninsular War must be delighted that Schaumann's book is being republished, for it is truly the most entertaining and keen-eyed account of the wild and triumphant years when Wellington led his men from the coast of Portugal, across Spain, and into the heartland of France itself. Schaumann marched every step of the way, and this, now, is his splendid story.

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