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I really have to wonder at the level of obsession that makes someone write so many words on one campaign, and so few on anything else. But, Gill’s obsession is our gain, as his books are worthwhile additions to the studies of Napoleon’s campaigns.

This first volume covers up up through 23rd April 1809, and the aftermath of the Battle of Eggmühl. Before that, we of course get the general build up, and the political pressures that caused Austria to go to war with France, again.

That first part is very informative, as we are treated to the crosscurrents operating in Austria, and how a commander who didn’t feel the Austrian army was ready got swept up in tide anyway. After that we get a nicely detailed account of the initial Austrian offensive, and all the problems that slowed what was supposed to be a sudden, daring, lunge over the border into a fairly slow march.

After this, things break up a bit, as the maps in the book just can’t handle the job of backing up the narrative. There’s a good number of maps, but they are not horribly well-done, and often don’t make things much clearer, as it’s often impossible to find the places being referenced in the text.

That is by far the worst problem here though. The text and descriptions are great, the narrative is a bit slow, thanks to the fine level of detail being presented, but it does not lose coherence in spite of that. I will note that he also stays focused on the main theater; I thought he might borrow some from his earlier With Eagles to Glory to fill in what was going on away from the main armies and at least present the Tyrolean revolt in its bigger chronological context, but no. Obviously, it would have expanded an overstuffed series even further, but I could do with the further context. Even so, this is not to be missed by anyone with a real interest in the Napoleonic Wars.

I happened upon a positive friend’s review at the same time this went on sale, and picked it up. I’m glad I did, it is a good book.

The name “Galatians” doesn’t mean much to anyone who has not spent a fair amount of time reading about the ancient world. They’re best loosely thought of as ‘eastern Gauls’. Which is to say they’re a Celtic people who went east and encountered Greeks instead of Romans. They had a short-lived kingdom in the middle of Asia Minor early in the Successors period, which is part of why they don’t get talked about as much, the Macedonian Soap Opera was going on around them.

Also, that’s not the best period for general knowledge, which tends to skip from Alexander straight to Rome. And the previous is also about the limit of what I knew. So, a lot of this book was new to me, going into what is known about their initial emergence into Greek knowledge around the Banat region of Serbia, some serious raids into Greece, and then the eventual settling into Asia Minor.

That last is the bulk of the book, because there’s a bit more known, and they were active for a good chunk of time before becoming a Roman province. A lot is still uncertain here, as there’s little in the way of records from them, causing everything to be from the viewpoint of looking into something of a blind spot in history.

So, even at its best, there’s not a lot of detail or certainty to be had here. So Grainger has done a fine job with the materials to hand, making everything as coherent as possible, and presenting everything quite clearly. It’s a bit of a niche subject, but it’s handled well, and adds a bit of perspective to things that get hinted at in other books.

All right, I wouldn’t have ever thought of a book on Napoleon’s German allies on my own, but this is a very good, if limited look at just that. This is a look at just the 1809 Danubian campaign. There’s a bit about the founding of the Confederation of the Rhine, and the 1808 events that lead into this campaign. And that’s it. There was continued fighting in 1809 in Spain, and a fair number of German troops were sent there before more had to be raised for the Danubian campaign. While that fact is discussed, that’s all that’s said except for some very passing mentions of how some of those contingents did in comparison with the with their brethren in this book.

Now, within that set of constraints, this is a very good book. The amount of detail is understandably high, even if the maps are at best lackluster, and often don’t back up the text well. There are two major sections, one of which mostly looks at the primary campaign, and the other goes into several subsidiary theaters, most notably an insurrection in the Tyrol and Vorarlberg. Bavaria gets (deservedly) a full, long chapter, with Württemberg, Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt, and Saxony also getting their own chapters.

Because he goes through each country in turn, the narrative of events is split up and gets a bit jumbled. But that’s not the purpose of this book; if you want a look at the campaign as a whole, look elsewhere (quite likely at Gill’s Thunder on the Danube series). You do get a look at the units themselves along with tables of organization for the units involved, and figures for the numbers of men.

For me, the most important part of this volume is the war in Tyrol. It is prominent in the Bavaria chapter, and also is the lead chapter in the second part. I hadn’t known anything about major insurrections during this campaign, and this one nearly overwhelmed the nearby German states. Since it was almost entirely left to German troops, it gets a full discussion here. The rest of the second part is about smaller events, winding down to some raids staged to get uprisings going in the rest of Germany, which did not happen, but the military security arrangements against these are gone into.

Overall, this is a well done book on a bit of a niche subject, but one that is more interesting than it would first seem. Unfortunately there are a few major flubs in the electronic version of the book. Mostly, it is in very good shape, but a large chunk of chapter 7 is missing, leaving you wondering exactly what just happened, with everything wrapping up right after a tense part of the campaign… and there’s eleven pages stuck after the chapter endnotes. (More signs that something went seriously wrong in there is a missing name, “an attack on ’s defences“.)