Napoleon Bonaparte and Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, were both born in the same year, one in occupied Corsica and the other as a member of the Protestant Ascendency in Ireland. Though they had very different childhoods, the frustrations they encountered at school shaped the ways in which they approached difficulty. Both would go on to illustrious military careers, with Wellesley making a name for himself in the British colony of India and Napoleon becoming the emperor of France. Britain and France had been experiencing conflict for some time before the start of Napoleon's rule, but...