memoirs. A comparison of the two books may be of interest to you. Whatever the source of Tolstoy's material, his novel is one of the great masterpieces of Western literature. His humanity and love for his characters, and through them, for all mankind, are obvious in every line.

Let us start with the shorter and easier to read of the two military novels representative of the Napoleonic Era.

Rifleman Dodd by C. S. Forester was originally published in England under the title Death to the French. It was published in United States by Little, Brown & Company as Rifleman Dodd. The Infantry Journal published an Armed Forces paperback in 1943. Bantam Books, Inc., tentatively planned to publish Rifleman Dodd and The General late in 1964. Instead, they plan to reissue several of the popular Horatio Hornblower novels, which also deal with Britain's war with Napoleon. If you cannot obtain Rifleman Dodd in one of the earlier editions, we believe you will enjoy the exploits of Captain Hornblower, Royal Navy.

THE AUTHOR: Cecil Scott Forester was born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1899, son of a British Army officer. His first novel, Payment Deferred, a murder story (1924), was later adapted by him for stage and screen. He is a prolific novelist and struck real paydirt with his Horatio Hornblower, a naval officer cast in the Nelson mold. The Hornblower saga includes Mr. Midshipman Hornblower, Lieutenant Hornblower, Beat to Quarters, Ship of the Line (which won the James Tait Black memorial prize in 1938), Flying Colours, Hornblower and the Atropos, Hornblower and the Hotspur, Commodore Hornblower, and Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies, with probably more of Hornblower to come. Other novels include The Gun, The General (included in A 1001, The Military Novel), To the Indies, The African Queen, The Captain from Connecticut, and The Ship.

Forester's nonfiction includes biographies of Napoleon, Josephine, Victor Emmanuel, Louis XIV, and Lord Nelson; The Age of Fighting Sail, a naval history of the War of 1812; and Sink the Bismarck, the story of the battle between the Nazi pocket battleship of that name and ships of the Royal Navy.

THE NOVEL: A. Historical setting: Lord Wellington's army of 20,000 British regulars and 30,000 Spanish guerrillas won a bloody but indecisive battle against 50,000 French veterans at Talavera, Spain, in 1809. It remains the least impressive of Wellington's many victories, for he lost 5,000 redcoats while inflicting 7,000 casualties on the French. The Spanish irregulars vanished into thin air, their usual tactics after battle. Another French army threatened the British line of communications with Lisbon, Portugal, and Wellington was forced to retire.

Back in Portugal, Wellington had time to rest and reorganize his army and to train some Portuguese regiments under British officers. Napoleon, having won another war with Austria, was in a position to reinforce his armies in Spain. Wellington had only the forces under his direct command and could expect little aid from home. He adopted a wise defensive policy, and constructed The Lines of Torres Vedras, three successive lines of fortifications stretching 25 miles from the Tagus River to the sea, and 8 miles in depth. The first line contained 120 redoubts and 600 guns. Behind the lines, roads were constructed to move troops swiftly to any threatened point. The countryside for miles in front of the lines was swept clean of human and animal life; woods were cut down, villages were razed, roads were destroyed, and crops uprooted from the fields. The French system of living off the countryside was bound to fail in the face of this scorched earth policy, while Wellington was able to draw upon the whole world outside of Europe for munitions, food, and supplies, so long as Britain commanded the seas.

When the French advance stopped, the troops dispersed over the countryside, searching for supplies and leaving themselves open to Spanish and Portuguese guerrilla attacks. This stalemate lasted almost a year. In the summer of 1810 Napoleon sent a new commander-in-chief, Marshal Massena, and 65,000 men with orders to drive the British into the sea. He had authority to command Marshal Soult's army of equal strength, located in southern Spain, in a coordinated attack.

Wellington could be aggressive when he felt he had a good chance of success. He advanced with 50,000 British and Portu

guese troops against Massena at Bussaco on September 27, 1810. His tactics consisted of seizing the steep ridge, hiding the bulk of his infantry behind the reverse slope, and sending skirmishers forward to entice the French into an attack. At the proper time, the "thin red line" would advance to meet the French columnar attack and blast it with well-directed musketry. Wellington inflicted four to one casualties on the French, then withdrew to the Torres Vedras lines, knowing the French would follow him.

Thanks to Wellington's guerrillas, French reconnaissance units were blinded and Massena knew nothing of the lines until he had advanced too far. The shock stunned the French marshal into inactivity. He just sat and waited for something to happen. His troops found it impossible to live off the bare countryside, and finally, completely starved out, Massena retreated to Spain. We are now slightly ahead of our story, however.

As Forester's novel opens, Wellington is in the final stages of his retreat from Bussaco, in sight of the Torres Vedras lines. It is probably the first week in October 1810. General Craufurd's "Light Division” (“. . . soldiers unsurpassable, perhaps never equalled . . ." according to Napier, historian of the Peninsular War) is covering Wellington's retirement. The rearguard is Colonel Sidney Beckwith's 95th Foot (The Rifle Brigade), a small but elite corps of riflemen well trained in skirmishing and harassing tactics. Our hero, Matthew Dodd, is a soldier in this regiment.

The 95th Foot was an actual regiment and it exists to this day as the 3d Battalion of the "Green Jackets"—one of the finest regiments in the British Army. During the Napoleonic Wars the British infantry dressed in red coats and carried the "Brown Bess" musket, almost unchanged since Queen Anne's day. There were two exceptions to this statement: the 95th Foot and the 5th Battalion of the 60th Foot (The Royal Americans) were dressed in dark green uniforms (for cover and concealment), trained in skirmishing, and armed with the Baker muzzle-loading rifle, a very efficient weapon for its time. Privates of the 95th Foot were called "Riflemen" to distinguish them from the ordinary soldier of the line infantry regiments. Forester explains the origin of the uniform and equipment in the first chapter of the novel.

In a way, this novel is a tribute to the memory of General Sir John Moore, a great general and the best friend the ordinary British soldier ever had. Moore was years ahead of his time as a military thinker and trainer. He believed that it was possible so to

train units that even the smallest formation could act with perfect efficiency even when on detached duty, and fire without wasting ammunition. He appealed to the men's self-respect and pride in their unit, not to their fear of punishment. This was a most unusual attitude in any army leader of the time. Moore put his ideas into practice during 1801–02 and later trained the Light Division, so famous in the Peninsular War. As the novel progresses, note how Rifleman Dodd shows the influence of Moore's ideas.

Moore did not get an opportunity to put his ideas to the test of combat until he was given command of 35,000 troops in northwestern Spain in the winter of 1808. His "Corunna campaign" was a daring hit-and-run attack on the French which upset Napoleon's timetable for crushing Spanish resistance. Moore's army accomplished its purpose but was in danger of being cut off by superior enemy forces. He retreated across the Galician mountains in the dead of winter, and reached the port of Corunna. His men were starving, ragged, and shoeless but full of fight. They beat back repeated attacks while awaiting transports to carry them home to Britain. Moore was killed and, as his men were embarking, was buried by night in the ramparts of Corunna. Like the men of Dunkirk in 1940, his redcoats lived to fight another day-Matthew Dodd among them.

B. The Story: Matthew Dodd is young and active, a veteran of 5 years service in the 95th Foot. Although he lacks formal education, he has a rich fund of initiative and intelligence. If he has an idol, it is Moore, not Wellington-who is just "the long-nosed beggar that beats the French." Dodd has served with Moore in the Corunna campaign and on the ill-fated Walcheren expedition of 1809, which wasted 40,000 men in the swamp-flats of Holland when they were so badly needed in Portugal. (Veterans of the European theater in World War II may remember the BritishCanadian campaign on Walcheren Island in 1945-history has a way of revisiting old battlefields.) Thus Dodd is well prepared for the hardships and capable of performing the exploits which Forester describes. He had to be tough and enduring to survive for months behind the French lines, in a desolate and foodless countryside, cut off from his comrades and dependent upon chancemet Portuguese guerrillas. More to the point, it was his intelligence and training which enabled him to become the "green ghost" that haunted the unfortunate Frenchmen who encountered him. Here is "Rifleman Dodd" at your service.