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This volume owes its inception to the difficulty experienced by its author in finding, English, any satisfactory history of a campaign which he felt could not be less interesting than its predecessors of Austerlitz and Jena.There is, it is true, an outline of it in Alison's History of Europe; but that is hardly sufficient for the student of military history, and there is no good general map attached to it. Sir Robert Wilson's account of it is not available in every library, and it is not very accurate in many respects.The English text-books on military history, as a rule, scarcely allude to the campaign. The brief sketch of it in Adam's Great Campaigns is, unfortunately, marred by inaccuracies and misprints.In French, the best history of the campaign is contained in vols. xvii.-xix. of Comte Mathieu Dumas' admirable Précis des Evènements Militaires, etc. It was, however, written at a time(1826) when many sources of information, now easily accessible, were closed to most writers.Thiers' Histoire du Consulat et de l'-Empire is not more reliable in regard to 1806-7 than it is in the case of Waterloo.
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