The Letters of Private Wheeler

They are simply marvellous. Wheeler was a naïve writer of real power - a natural story-teller, a provider of portraits, someone whose gift was to bring everything he wrote about to life * TES *
In a later age he would have become a successful war correspondent … We have no more human account of the Peninsular War from a participant in all its battles. Vivid images - of people, landscapes, events - flows from his pen … One of military history’s great originals – John Keegan * DAILY TELEGRAPH *
These letters have already become a minor classic … deftly edited, they are clear and telling in the accounts they give of a soldier’s day-to-day life, a mixture of danger, boredom, discomfort and occasional delight * GOOD BOOK GUIDE *

Private William Wheeler was a soldier in the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry. He served from 1809 until he was invalided out in 1828, then a sergeant. Living on his army pension, he turned his letters home into a journal, which was preserved by the family down the generations, until, in 1948, a visitor to the house saw it and thought it should be published.

B H Liddell Hart was a British soldier, strategist and military historian. He wrote a series of acclaimed military history books including A HISTORY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR, A HISTORY OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR and THE OTHER SIDE OF THE HILL.

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