Whomever the Duke of Wellington had in mind when he fulminated that his soldiers were "the very scum of the earth," he could not have been thinking of Private William Wheeler. Steady, good-natured and unaffected, Wheeler was rather the sort of man who formed the backbone of the Peninsular Army- as indeed he would have in any army in any age.
Wheeler served with the 51st Foot- a storied regiment in its time, as it had once been led by Sir John Moore, the hero of Corunna- from early in the Peninsular War to well after Waterloo. After he retired from active service, he collected and edited many of his letters home into an engaging and highly readable volume. Together, they offer insights into a British soldier's life that are indispensible to anyone interested in the Napoleonic Wars.
Tellingly, few bullets fly in Wheeler's letters. Devotees of Waterloo memoirs may be disappointed that he has little to say about the campaign. The 51st was not at Quatre Bras and stood mostly away from the main action at Waterloo, and Wheeler attests to little beyond his immediate angle of vision. Instead, he gives us much about what went on behind the lines- barracks life, mustering for overseas duty, palling around with friends of the moment, military and civilian alike.
One of the most affecting narrative threads from these letter begins late in the Peninsular War, when Wheeler befriends a French POW while recuperating from a nasty wound to his foot. No fanatical Bonapartiste, the Frenchman is actually the son of an Anglophile father and an English mother, and joined the army only to efface the anguish of an unhappy love affair. Two years later, Wheeler looks up his old friend when English troops occupy Paris after Waterloo, and they have a fine old time trolling about the city. This is a revealing look at war in fine detail, a useful reminder that even the greatest historical events are woven from threads of individual experiences.
As a stylist, Wheeler has his moments of plainspoken eloquence, and both Elizabeth Longford and Jac Weller have quoted him to fine effect in their books on Wellington. My own favorite moment is his definitive judgement on his old Commander-in-Chief, and stands, I think, as the last word in the debate over the merits of the greatest of the generals who labored in Napoleon's shadow: "If England should require the service of her army again, and I should be with it, let me have 'Old Nosey' to command.... There are two things we should be certain of. First, we should always be as well supplied with rations as the nature of the service would admit. The second is that we should be sure to give the enemy a d----d good thrashing. What can a soldier desire more."