Sergeant Morris of the 73rd Foot

Most British military memoirs of the Napoleonic period focus on the actions of Wellington's army as it fought through the Iberian peninsula during the bloody struggle to expel the French from Portugal and Spain. Morris's important memoir is somewhat different. He elected to join his elder brother in the second battalion of the 73rd regiment of foot and found himself on board ship bound for Sweden. Battles against the French, in close co-operation with the Northern European Allies, followed as he marched with his regiment through Germany, taking part in the actions which led to the Emperor's great reverse at Leipzig. As the First Empire recoiled in its final days before the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, Morris took part in the last actions as the French Army was pushed from the Low Countries, after which they remained there in garrison. So it was that the 73rd was literally 'on the spot' when Napoleon slipped away from his exile on Elba and began his fateful march towards the apocalyptic battles of Quatre Bras and Waterloo in 1815.