With unprecedented numbers fighting on both sides and with a death toll to match – the French alone may have lost a million men – the Napoleonic Wars stand in stark contrast to the more limited cabinet wars that characterised so much of the eighteenth century. Napoleon’s insistence on fighting decisive battles meant that engagements could last for several days without regard for the mounting losses incurred (one has only to think of Leipzig or Borodino). And if we have a fairly precise idea of the numbers of dead, we know far less, as Nebiha Guiga points out in this pathbreaking study, about the numbers of wounded, those whose battle ended with an enemy bullet or sabre cut and who risked being left for hours, often in agony, among the bodies of the dead and dying. Some, the lucky ones, escaped with shallow wounds from which they might recover with the help of local civilians. But in these wars most wounds were deep, destroying essential organs and leading to serious blood loss; one has only to turn to the anatomical sketches of the British surgeon Charles Bell of the wounds he treated after Waterloo to appreciate the extent to which the soldiers’ bodies were gouged and mangled. Though there were few technological advances, battles were now fought with new intensity and were increasingly dependent on artillery fire. If the French had 30 cannons at Marengo, all armies multiplied their use in subsequent campaigns till at Leipzig there were 2 000, inflicting huge damage on the infantry lined up against them. It is little wonder that soldiers who could face death with apparent equanimity should have expressed fear at the thought of suffering lifechanging wounds that would result in a lifetime of anguish and disability.

Though war was still talked of in terms of glory and wounds continued to be seen as a badge of honour, that language was increasingly limited to Napoleon’s ministers and commanders in the field. For the men exposed to enemy artillery the battlefield became a site of horror and misery, not least for young conscripts introduced to the reality of war for the first time. They quickly understood that warfare was a lottery, that it was a matter of chance whether they emerged intact or suffered life-changing wounds that would destroy their capabilities as soldiers and, if they managed to return to civil society, blight the rest of their lives. Hence the most common word used to describe wounds and the wounded in soldiers’ writings is »unfortunate« (malheureux). Much of Guiga’s discussion is based on their accounts, whether their letters home, the diaries and journals they wrote up at the time, or the memoirs they composed once they were released from military duties, some for publication, some private accounts for sons or other family members. This book is about their experience of war, about the chaos of the battlefield, and about the fate of those left behind when the guns went quiet. It draws on evidence from two armies, the French and the Austrian, and is the first study about what it meant to be wounded in the Wars. Even when account is taken of the social mores of the time and of men’s reluctance to admit to weakness, the picture that emerges is grimly harrowing. Despite Larrey’s reputation for providing speedy medical assistance to the wounded, their help was often very basic. Too often, the first resort of army surgeons was to amputate, which many of the soldiers regarded as a form of butchery, crippling them for life, and which many of the injured did their utmost to avoid. But the alternative may have been worse – to be abandoned on the battlefield to a slow death or captured by an enemy who might despatch them on the spot.

After a brief discussion of the armies’ medical services and of the doctors who manned them, Nebiha Guiga turns to the wounded soldiers in their care, following them through the successive stages of their treatment and, if they were lucky enough to survive, their convalescence. Her descriptions are not for the squeamish. Surgery was often primitive, limbs were amputated without anaesthetic, dressings and bandages were in short supply, and the medical posts (ambulances) set up in the open air or in requisitioned buildings close to the battlefield were seldom adequate to the medical challenges they faced. Large numbers of soldiers did not recover from surgery but died from their wounds either on the battlefield itself or in the days following the amputation. The first responses were often chaotic, with wounded soldiers being carried from the field where they lay on makeshift stretchers or on the shoulders of their comrades to the nearest medical post. From there they might be taken to a local civilian hospital, or, when their health had sufficiently improved, moved to a military hospital on the road back to France or billeted in local homes where they could convalesce. For some, this involved agonising journeys on primitive carts and along rutted roads, during which they relied on local civilians for food and shelter; others fell into enemy hands following a battlefield amputation and spent the rest of the war as prisoners. After major battles hospital provision was seldom adequate. In Leipzig, for instance, where there were some 18 000 hospital beds, the city was faced with around 90 000 wounded soldiers in need of care. There was not enough room for all.

This brings the author to discuss the representations of soldiers’ wounds in art and writing, and to examine the narratives that were constructed around them. For many of the soldier-authors, the evidence of such suffering was enough to undermine any sense of honour in war, and to destroy the propagandist image of serenity created by a generation of war painters anxious to depict the glory of the armies and the dignity of war. But for those involved in the fighting, battles were not like that. Their presence on a battlefield strewn with the wounded and dying evoked very different emotions, ranging from a sense of loneliness and abandonment to the pathos of death and suffering. The noise and smell of battle lingered with them long after the fighting stopped, and the very randomness of death and injury made soldiers superstitious and fatalistic, seeing war as a force of nature over which they had no control. Napoleon’s proclamations to his troops praising their pursuit of glory risked falling on deaf ears when the men had seen their friends’ entrails ripped open by enemy shells, spreading despondency and stripping war of any lingering romanticism. In the same way, for individual soldiers, wounds and amputations risked ending their involvement in war, defining and dating it in their memory in personal terms, distinct from the narrative that would enter history.