ON THE ROAD WITH WELLINGTON: the Diary of a War
Commissary in the Peninsular Campaign. By A. L. F. Schaurnann. Edited and Translated by Anthony M. Ludovici. (Heinemann. 25s.) IF the civilian reader had to decide, the Commissary would always have been appointed chronicler of past military cam- paigns. Neither Froissart nor the Bayeux tapestries tell us how Edward III. fed his army at Poitiers and Crecy, or whether William the Conqueror brought stores as well as troops across the Channel. Moreover, the Commissary was, and had the point of view of, a civilian in uniform. He accom- panied the troops wherever they went and shared their un. speakable discomfort, starvation and cold, but when the fighting came he was left an eye-witness. So Adolph Schau- mann, who helped to feed and clothe Wellington's army, saw the war from 1808 to 1813 with the eyes of a good-natured, unimaginative little business man. His life was a frantic one. As soon as the army halted he had to find food for thousands of exhausted men when to all appearances there was no food anywhere. Whole herds of cattle and stores of grain had to be hastily commandeered from unwilling peasants, killed and distributed in a couple of hours. Everybody gave him different orders and blamed him if anything went wrong, but no one gave him a thought in time of danger. He marched everywhere with the army and saw nearly every battle. His diary is detailed and long and not all of it is interesting, but he could tell a tale very well when he had the material, as he had, for instance, in Sir John Moore's terrible retreat to Corunna.
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