{"product_id":"9780806189321","title":"Sickness, Suffering, and the Sword: The British Regiment on Campaign, 1808-1815","description":"\u003cp\u003eAlthough an army’s success is often measured in battle outcomes, its victories depend on strengths that may be less obvious on the field. In \u003ci\u003eSickness, Suffering, and the Sword\u003c\/i\u003e, military historian Andrew Bamford assesses the effectiveness of the British Army in sustained campaigning during the Napoleonic Wars. In the process, he offers a fresh and controversial look at Britain’s military system, showing that success or failure on campaign rested on the day-to-day experiences of regimental units rather than the army as a whole.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBamford draws his title from the words of Captain Moyle Sherer, who during the winter of 1816–1817 wrote an account of his service during the Peninsular War: “My regiment has never been very roughly handled in the field. . . But, alas! What between sickness, suffering, and the sword, few, very few of those men are now in existence.” Bamford argues that those daily scourges of such often-ignored factors as noncombat deaths and equine strength and losses determined outcomes on the battlefield.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn the nineteenth century, the British Army was a collection of regiments rather than a single unified body, and the regimental system bore the responsibility of supplying manpower on that field. Between 1808 and 1815, when Britain was fighting a global conflict far greater than its military capabilities, the system nearly collapsed. Only a few advantages narrowly outweighed the army’s increasing inability to meet manpower requirements. This book examines those critical dynamics in Britain’s major early-nineteenth-century campaigns: the Peninsular War (1808–1814), the Walcheren Expedition (1809), the American War (1812–1815), and the growing commitments in northern Europe from 1813 on.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eDrawn from primary documents, Bamford’s statistical analysis compares the vast disparities between regiments and different theatres of war and complements recent studies of health and sickness in the British Army.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Oklahoma Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47118426669296,"sku":"9780806189321","price":29.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780806189321_p0.jpg?v=1763725888","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780806189321","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}