JasonKoivu

This ain't no teen girl diary filled with airy-yet-painfully-heart-felt musings on puppy love written in loopy handwriting with a pen that could double as a peacock. But I'll bet Jakob Walter, author of The Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier wishes he could've lived that life instead of his own.

Walter was in Napoleon's army when it made the famous 1812 winter march on Russia: 500,000 men attacked, less than 40,000 successfully retreated. Walter himself barely survived to tell the tale of extreme cold, starvation, depravation, cannibalism, and the absolute breakdown of humanity.

His writing is prosaic. It is serviceable with an occasional satisfying flourish. This is a memoir, not a novel. In a soldierly way, it sets down facts first. If now and then Walter recalls the joys of civility and indulges in the gifts of opinion and decorative detail, then we should accept them gratefully, for his firsthand account gives us a very early anti-war argument from the mouth of the common man.