The Walcheren Expedition

A little covered Napoleonic campaign

The Walcheren Expedition often appears in military memoirs of the British Army during the Napoleonic Wars, though rarely in much detail. The impression that the reader gains is that it was a campaign of appalling conditions producing crippling and debilitating illness that swept away many and left survivors so broken in health that they were unfit for immediate military service and indeed were frequently invalided for life. Here then is a rare account in the form of letters by a serving British infantry line officer of that campaign. This was a war of stalemate where British and French soldiers struggled with each other and the putrid miasmas that rose from the stagnant swamps of this worst of battlegrounds. For students of the Napoleonic Wars this book will provide important insight into a disastrous sideshow.