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Dead Men Telling Tales: Napoleonic War Veterans and the Military Memoir Industry, 1808–1914 by Matilda Greig (review)

2023; University of Hawaii Press; Volume: 46; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/bio.2023.a928393

1529-1456

Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis

Reviewed by: Dead Men Telling Tales: Napoleonic War Veterans and the Military Memoir Industry, 1808–1914 by Matilda Greig Scott Krawczyk (bio) Dead Men Telling Tales: Napoleonic War Veterans and the Military Memoir Industry, 1808–1914 Matilda Greig Oxford University Press, 2021, xvi + 250 pp. ISBN 9780192896025, $90.00 hardcover. In approaching the subfield of autobiography stemming from the Napoleonic Wars, Matilda Greig wisely narrows the focus of Dead Men Telling Tales: Napoleonic War Veterans and the Military Memoir Industry, 1808–1914 to the eventful Peninsular War of 1808–1814. Yet Greig's ambitious project expands out by tracing the afterlives and influences of Peninsular War memoirs, as the subtitle implies, to the doorstep of WWI. Analyzing nineteenth-century editorial interventions, marketplace demands, political machinations, and even educational agendas that shaped, reshaped, and repurposed the original narratives, Greig concludes that "a heterogenous group of Peninsular War memoirs became something resembling a literary genre, with its own tropes, parodies, and potential for re-invention and re-use" (161). Moreover, despite their reception as "quintessentially masculine tales," late-nineteenth-century editions, Greig demonstrates, having been retooled to suit Victorian sensibilities, boyhood imagination, or national pride, regularly bore the imprint (typically through familial interest and involvement) of "female labour, preference, and editorial input" (187). Exceedingly complex as a mode of autobiographical writing, the military memoir stands apart within the larger genre(s) of life writing in that it is dictated almost exclusively by events the author experienced while serving in one or more combat zones. The bookends to that central experience serve as sites of reflection—on prewar naivete (typically) and on a dense mixture of postwar emotions and memories. For disabled veterans, of which the Napoleonic wars produced unprecedented numbers owing to advances in battlefield surgery, narratives of recovery and the challenge of reintegration could well become central to the memoir. At least this is how we have come to understand autobiographical accounts of wartime experience. Yet Greig complicates this conventional understanding in a variety of productive ways, the most fertile of which is arguably the inclusion of Spanish veterans' manifestos within the generic frame of the military memoir. To bring manifestos into this important generic conversation, Greig interrogates the historical and scholarly privileging that has been accorded to British and French memoirists at the expense of Spanish and Portuguese authors. Indeed, a significant strength of Dead Men Telling Tales is its deeply researched attention to writing by both Spanish and Portuguese veterans of the Peninsular War. Greig's superb archival work supports analysis in this domain that is both groundbreaking and convincing in its revision of previous scholarship's treatment of Spanish memoirs as "an awkward counterpart to what are seen as the much richer French and British versions" (8)—and of Portuguese memoirs as virtually nonexistent. Correcting that record is the book's finest achievement, and yet there is more research to be done, a point emphasized by Greig on more than one occasion. [End Page 446] Arguably, Greig could have focused this book exclusively on the Spanish and Portuguese experience—and to good effect. We can only hope that she continues the work and perhaps delivers such a study in the future. Greig's is the voice scholarship needs for such a project. Divided into two main parts, Dead Men Telling Tales addresses authorial and textual conditions in Part I, analyzing writers, tropes, motivations, influences, and the afterlives of the veterans themselves. For instance, in Chapter 1, "The Language of War," Greig examines how the narratives of British veterans such as George Gleig (The Subaltern, 1825) and Moyle Sherer (Recollections of the Peninsula by the Author of Sketches of India, 1824) advanced stereotypes of British superiority to the Spanish and contributed to whitewashed historical representations of the war. Through careful analysis of the language deployed by such Peninsular memoirists, Greig contends that, far from the clichéd image of authors as weathered, grandfatherly figures in the twilight of life, these writers represented "a cohort of active, politicized, and sometimes demonstrably influential public actors" (54). In certain instances, these more public interventions were tied to veteran efforts to convey the devastation wrought by new and improved weaponry, particularly artillery, which...