The Peninsular War is often eclipsed by the spectacular individual battles by sea and land of the Napoleonic Wars, but it was the decisive struggle in which the Emperor's troops faced defeat for the first time. Michael Glover seeks to give the basic skeleton of facts and to flesh it out with first-hand accounts of what it was like to march and fight, to eat and be wounded, to command and be commanded at the start of the 19th century. Stress is laid on the technological limitations of warfare during this period, when all the movement was limited to the pace of a heavily-laden infantryman moving across country.