With Napoleon’s Guns: The military memoirs of an officer of the First Empire (ed. trans. Rosemary Brindle)

This book is a translation by Rosemary Brindle of the memoirs of Colonel Jean-Nicolas-Auguste Noël, initially published in French by Berger-Levrault, Paris 1895, under the title Souvenirs militaire d'un officier du Premier Empire. It includes an introduction giving a biograhpical of sketch of Noël. There are useful maps, but the original illustrations of the French 1895 edition (the Fort de San-Felice, the Siege of Cuidad-Rodrigo, for example) are not reproduced. A set of black-and-white photographs provide portraits of the major players such as Blucher, Murat, Napoleon, etc, but not unfortunately the original vignette of Noël himself present in the French edition. Colonel Noël was present at the second Italian campaign, the campaign of 1809 under Macdonald (battles of Piave, Tarvis, Raab), the Spanish and Portuguese campaigns (battles of Ciudad-Rodrigo and Torres-Vedras), the campaigns in Russia, Germany and France, and finally at Waterloo. Of particular interest is Noël's criticism of Napoleon for not coming back to Spain in 1810 to take command of the operations. Whilst for the most part the translation is lively and helpful, unfortunately there are regular errors of translation and omissions which give the reader no confidence that what he is reading was what Noël wrote (see the selective list of errors here appended).
 
Errors
– Omissions:
Sentences omitted on pp. 20 and 24
 
– Mistranslations:
p. 20 translation has 'at the time of the general uprising'; text should read 'at the time of the mass conscription' (lors de la levée en masse)
p. 25 translation has 'an archduke'; text should read 'the archduke' (i.e., the Archduke Charles!!!)
p. 26 translation has 'apart from the Mincio'; text should read 'beyond the Mincio' (au de là du Mincio)
p. 26 translation has 'Easter Week in Verona'; text should read 'Pâques Véronaises' or 'Verona Easter Uprising'
p. 27 translation has 'the town was burned'; text should read 'we surrounded the town' (on cerne la ville)
p. 98 translation has: 'What gave this belief more credibility was that the enemy had permitted us, unopposed, to cross the steep Portuguese mountains, leaving only a few groups of alert well commanded guerillas to hinder us. If they had killed only our artillery horses, the invasion of Portugal would have become impossible for us.'
Text should read: 'What gave this belief more credibility was that the enemy had permitted us, unopposed, to cross the steep Portuguese mountains: all that was required to hinder us was a few corps of alert well-commanded guerillas; even if they had only killed our artillery horses, our invasion of Portugal would have become impossible.'