First up is a book covering a little known and much disregarded part of the War of Spanish Succession; the actual war in Spain. Suffering under the lamentable name of "Marlborough's Other Army" (I really doubt that his high-and-mightiness, John Churchill, gave more than a passing thought to events in Spain) this little volume is chock-full of the sort of information that it would take the average gamer ages to accumulate. I am highly recommending this book to anyone interested in the campaigns in Spain. It has some serious drawbacks (which I will explain later) but, as a single volume, I cannot think of a better start on the theater in question.
In one slim hardbound volume it collects information on the leaders, troops and the severe logistical restrictions that the topography of the Iberian Peninsula imposed on operations. There are extensive orders of battle and descriptions of operations leading to the important battles in the area. There are chapters that examine in turn the British, Dutch, Carolean Spanish, Palantine and Austrian/Imperial armies as well as descriptions of most of the significant commanders of the theater.
That praise rendered I will now voice my concerns starting with a rather peevish dislike for the title; almost any other title would have rendered better service to the men who struggled in Iberia for ten long years than to be considered to be Marlborough's appendix. "With Schomberg in Iberia", "The War of Spanish Succession in Iberia", "The First Spanish Ulcer" all would have been more accurate and interesting. I have to guess it is a particularly English obsession to have to tie every military event of the early 18th Century to Marlborough.
Second, and far more important, is the generally poor quality of maps. This is a problem that has spread across military history books over the last decade or more. Whole theaters are reduced to a blank white square with a few squiggly lines and some dots with names next to them. If we are really fortunate one of these lines will have the name of a river next to it. There is no suggestion of the complicated terrain that dominated operations in Iberia, no indication of roadways that were vital logistical routes and a great many of the cities named in the text do not appear anywhere on the map. If I was not familiar with the countryside of Spain and Portugal from Sir Charles Oman's works I would have spent a lot of time on Google Earth searching for these locations. Even the battlefield maps are rudimentary in their depiction of terrain. Armies are depicted as moving in straight lines across a void as if it were interstellar space. Given the amount of information freely available on the internet and the inexpensiveness of drawing programs there is simply no excuse for these "white-board and a marker" maps. If you are not familiar with the Iberian Peninsula I would suggest that you buy an old-fashioned large format atlas from a second-hand bookstore (they are absurdly cheap and will do good service over time as this map problem infects almost all current military writing)
Third; the text, while jam-packed with data, it is written in a simplistic style that would suffer badly at the hands of a High-School English teacher. Repeated use of the word "lots" and recurrent mismatches of tense and homonyms leave me to wonder if there was a proofreader beyond the word processor used during writing. I'm not looking for Nobel-Laureate style writing; just something that keeps what should be a riveting story moving along in an interesting manner. I grant that the need to pack simply mountains of data into such a slim volume requires certain economies of writing, but there simply seems a need for some more polish on this work.
Last, the illustrations. This has long been a plague that has infected historical works. The inclusion of portraits of the sundry leaders and battle paintings done by artists that clearly were working from vague descriptions do very little to expand the reader's understanding of events. Small matter indeed if the 3rd Duke of Schomberg was a dour looking fellow with a double chin, the space given over to portraiture could be better spent on larger depictions of the terrain and soldiers fighting on it. Small portions of the truly large battle paintings that accurately depict uniforms or events would be a better use of space as well. Paintings that are several yards across lose a great deal of value when shrunk down to an area of just a few square inches. Better yet, stylized uniform sketches would be far more useful to the enthusiast of the period.
All of those criticisms aside, I heartily recommend this book to any gamer interested in the events of the part of the war that actually decided who sat on the Spanish throne. The criticism is aimed more at the publisher than the author but, in no way, does this impair the value of the book as an excellent place to start a study of the war in Iberia 1702-1712.
This book looks interesting and I appreciate your critique. One using “rendered” twice in one sentence and “simply” twice in another might not pass your proofreading scrutiny either.
ReplyDeleteBooks like these have been superseded by the internet. I was suspicious of these books when I saw they didn't offer a "Look Inside" option on Amazon.
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