In Dead Men Telling Tales: Napoleonic War Veterans and the Military Memoir Industry, 1808–1914, Matilda Greig offers a well-researched and highly informative account of the popular military memoirs written by veterans of the Peninsular War (1808–1814). The book is organized into two sections, the first of which concentrates on the authors who produced the memoirs, while the second examines the ongoing publication history of the memoirs and questions whether they form a recognizable genre. What stands out from the study is the popularity of these works. Greig observes that there has been considerable uncertainty about this question of popularity because former researchers have been divided over whether they were relatively marginal texts or well loved and commercially successful. Greig comes down firmly in support of the latter claim, as she demonstrates that the memoirs sold well, ran to multiple editions, generated lasting fame for numerous authors, and prompted a diverse range of fictional imitations and parodies right across the nineteenth century.
A key argument advanced by Greig is that the memoirs were saleable items: they were marketed as entertaining reading and as interventions into historical memory. This is a critical point because it allows Greig to challenge what she describes as a common assumption that military memoirs are based on materials discovered by accident or simply composed as a record of wartime memories for friends and family. Taken at face value, the memoirs appear to support this assumption—many include prefatory material that alludes to accidental authorship or apologizes for an unpolished writing style. Yet, as Greig demonstrates, such remarks were common across a range of autobiographical forms of writing in the nineteenth century. The prefatory material helped to market the books as authentic, while differentiating them from more formal historical writing. Her conclusion is that the memoirs were professional and commercial products that actively sought to shape historical memory of the wars.
Another notable dimension of this study is its transnational approach to the memoirs. In total, some two hundred memoirs were published in France, Britain, Spain, and Portugal during the period covered by the study. It is evidence of truly remarkable scholarship that Greig has undertaken research into all this material. Importantly, too, she discovers strikingly different traditions in each nation: French memoirs primarily offer histories of campaigns, British memoirs tend to recount personal experiences, and Spanish and Portuguese memoirs typically take the form of manifestos of service, a form peculiar to the two nations that could be described as a kind of martial curriculum vitae. There was also considerable translation and global circulation of the memoirs, although this circulation tended to be restricted to the spheres of interest of each nation—British memoirs to North America, French memoirs to Southern Europe, and Spanish to Spanish America.
One very suggestive avenue that Greig touches on but does not fully pursue is reference to Samuel Hynes's concept of “the soldiers’ tale” (The Soldiers’ Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War [1997], xii–xiii). Hynes argues that military memoirs, the tales of soldiers, document such extreme experience that they can be clearly distinguished from related genres such as autobiography, travel writing, and history. Notably, however, Hynes bases his ideas almost exclusively on twentieth-century materials and so does not offer any serious consideration of soldiers’ writing from the nineteenth century. Greig might, therefore, have still said more about how the Peninsular War memoirs relate to Hynes's idea of the soldiers’ tale, especially given that quite distinct forms of memoir emerged in each of the belligerent nations. How closely does any of this material conform to Hynes's ideas? Should we reconsider Hynes in light of the memoirs examined here?
Greig also offers thoughtful insight into George Mosse's conception of the myth of the volunteer war experience, which Mosse believes took hold of Europe from the early nineteenth century (most notably via volunteers who, like Lord Byron, served in the Greek War of Independence from 1821–1831). Greig challenges Mosse's belief that this myth emerged by itself, or unconsciously, because, she says, the memoirs actively sought to intervene into and shape the historical memory of war. But there might still have been more to say here. Is such a view of a European-wide myth of war viable given that the military memoirs from different nations were so distinct in nature? The reference to Mosse is insightful, but a slightly fuller consideration of this issue would have been good to see.
One final consideration is that while Greig does a wonderful job of expanding the story of the Peninsular War memoirs across the nineteenth century, there is still a lingering question about what has happened to them since. It certainly makes sense to end the study with the outbreak of the First World War, but we might still wonder why exactly does 1914 mark the end of the study? And how distinct are these earlier memoirs from those of the First World War? Can we see ongoing influence of these memoirs into writing of the First World War, and even beyond? Some questions still remain, in other words, about how foundational the Peninsular War memoirs were for subsequent war writing. At the very least, we do not have to look far to see that military memoirs from the early nineteenth century have continued to inspire fascination, whether via republication or as afflatus for novels, television series, and films.
Nonetheless, this is an exceptionally erudite and richly detailed study that adds considerably to our knowledge of this important body of veterans’ writing.
