Although there are many accounts of the Peninsular War by fighting men, this book is justly famed because it is a rarity: a memoir dictated by a ranker in Sir John Moore's army. At a time when many members of his class were illiterate, Benjamin Harris, a 'Dorsetshire sheep-boy' serving in the 95th Regiment of Foot from 1803 conveys the hard life of an old sweat fighting both the French and the Iberian climate in lively and vivid prose. Harris records the sicknesses and medicines suffered by ordinary soldiers; recounts the savage punishment of a fellow Rifleman, and the cut and thrust of...