Posts : 4902 Join date : 2012-01-01 Location : Belgium
Subject: Napoleon Peninsular War Russian Campaign Fri 17 Jun 2016, 21:42
Reread after sixty years a novel by Thomas B. Costain: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1262416.Ride_With_Me Although I am, after all those years, a bit "blasé" with all these love stories, a bit in the trend of "Doctor Jivago", nevertheless read it still with interest. After all it is a novel from 1944. I saw yesterday in the afternoon while resting a bit: The Flame and the Arrow just curious if it was the film I saw with my grandma even more than sixty years ago. And yes with the young Burt Lancaster...and the "muet" that I saw in several other films...
And watching it now in French dubbed version without subtitles, I had a perception that it was indeed a film for eight years old children...although the american made in that time I suppose, have to check, rather serious films as "On the Waterfront" That was quite other stuff.
My question: Was it due to the Peninsular War with Wellington that Napoleon, when starting his Russian campaign that there always were bound a lot of soldiers in Spain and although he had enough soldiers to invade Russia he at the end with the disastrous retreat over the Berezina had from then on not a great army anymore in mainland France. And indeed after 1812 Wellington could move over the Pyrenees and invade France... In fact it could be a sequense of wars which led ultimately to the defeat of Napoleon? First the Peninsular War made the Russians prepared to contradict the French emperor and so the Russians with their clever tactics brought Napoleon on the knees? And after that former allies of Napoleon changed camps to form a new allied coalition against him...
Or was it all due to those bloody British, who from the beginning opposed the dictator..? Trafalgar Nelson and all..
Kind regards, Paul.
PaulRyckier Censura
Posts : 4902 Join date : 2012-01-01 Location : Belgium
Subject: Re: Napoleon Peninsular War Russian Campaign Fri 17 Jun 2016, 22:10
Home 
) but even with my new knowledge of the last 14 years on historyboards, I learned nevertheless something new on the Peninsular War and the Russian Campaign.