A Soldier of the Seventy-First

‘The author’s sharp eye for the illuminating detail and the oddities of human behavior enabled him to present a picture of army life as graphic and revealing as any drawn by a private soldier during the Napoleonic Wars’ - Christopher Hibbert

This remarkable memoir was first published in Edinburgh in 1819 and has withstood the test of time. One cannot improve on Sir Charles Oman’s description of the book as: ‘the work of a man of superior education, who had enlisted in a moment of pique and humiliation to avoid facing at home the consequences of his own conceit and folly. The author wrote from the ranks, yet was so different in education and mental equipment from his comrades that he does not take their vices and habits for granted’.

The reader receives the narrative of an intelligent observer, describing the behavior of his regiment as it traveled the globe. His account covers Whitelock’s disastrous South American adventure in 1806, the Peninsular War, the Walcheren Expedition and the Battle of Waterloo. For the first time, Joseph Sinclair has been unmasked as the author of the memoir, thanks to new research work by Stuart Reid.