“They had made it, they had caught up with Wellington’s headquarters…” (January 18, 1814)

After pushing Marshal Soult and his troops out of northern Spain into southwestern France in mid-December 1813, Wellington’s army went into winter quarters in and around Saint Jean de Luz, a small place on the coast just inside the French border, where they remained until February 1814 (David Gates, The Spanish Ulcer: A History of the Peninsular War, 1986, p. 449).

 

I can heartily recommend Gates’s book to anyone interested in the Napoleonic Wars – or in the theory and practice of military intervention in general. I found it by accident wandering among the shelves of my local library in search of background reading and ended up with a whole new outlook on current affairs, too…