ABSTRACT
Henry Milburne entered the Peninsular War in 1808 as a surgeon in the Spanish forces because he was unable to find a vacancy in Britain’s medical forces. While he admired the Spaniards and wanted to help liberate them from the French, he was also keen to join the war in order to pursue his research on gunshot wounds. Upon arrival on the Iberian shore, however, he found his regiment had been captured and imprisoned by the French, and he became caught up in the retreat to Corunna. A desire to both document its horrors and celebrate the fortitude of the British troops in the winter of 1808–9 prompted this book, which emerged very shortly after the events that it described. As with other accounts of the retreat, these excerpts illustrate the power of the image of maternal and infant suffering to elicit readers’ sympathy.
