Wellington and the Invasion of France: the Bidassoa to the Battle of the Nivelle, 1813

As Napoleon's French Army retreated, all hope that it could maintain a hold over the Iberian Peninsula began to fade. By September of 1813 the Allied Army commanded by the 'captain of the age'-the Duke of Wellington-stood on the frontier of France within the area of the estuary of the Bidassoa. Napoleon was being pressed on two fronts, but he still had a large reserve of veteran troops stationed in the south of France to call upon.

The time had come to tighten the grip on France. Wellington would now invade it, engage the southern army which it was hoped would spur the Coalition of northern European powers to greater endeavours to bring about its defeat. No longer now an expanding empire, the French were faced with the defence of their own homeland and Wellington was poised for a campaign which would bring a large and prosperous region of it under allied control.

It would be a contest bitterly fought as only those with desperate stakes can be. In this ,the second of Beatson's series on the fall of Revolutionary France published by Leonaur, the reader is once again taken into the centre of Wellington's strategic and tactical genius. Every action is described in detail and complemented by the voices of the soldiers who experienced those momentous times.