PRECIS 
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THE OPERATIONS OF WELLINGTON AND SOULT 
IN 1809 AND 1812. 
BY 
THE LATE MAJOR VON ROESSLER OF THE GERMAN 
GENERAL STAFF. 
TRANSLATED BY 
MAJOR EH. 8S. MAY, R.A. 
Tuts paper was to have been read before the Military Society of Berlin on the 
15th of November, 1893, but the untimely death of the author—a most gifted 
man—before that date prevented its ever being heard. 
It has been published however in the supplement to the Militiér Wochenblatt 
for 1894 by Colonel von Lezczynski, and is now offered to English readers in the 
hope that it may interest them as being a foreign estimate of the great duke’s 
strategy. HS. M. 
16th September, 1895. 
Rich even to repletion in stirring and dramatic situations as is the Peninsular 
war, it is the great strategic operations which are nevertheless the most in- 
teresting, and it is concerning them that we also possess the most complete 
information. 
The generals who took part in the great struggle have either themselves written 
memoirs dealing with their experiences in it, as in the case of King Joseph 
Buonaparte, Suchet, Jourdon, and Marmont, or we possess biographies of them 
compiled from the most reliable sources, as in the case of Brialmont’s great work 
on Wellington. Finally the correspondence of the first Napoleon, published 
under the auspices of Napoleon III, furnishes us with an almost inexhaustable 
fund of information on the subject. We are thus enabled to follow the operations, 
campaign by campaign, from the point of view of both head-quarters, we can 
weigh them impartially, and can pronounce an unprejudiced judgment. The 
study of the tactical incidents of the war is on the other hand found to be 
coloured by the personal feelings of the individual officers who have devoted 
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