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Description
For Sergeant Henry Turner of the Forth Battalion, the Forty Seventh Regiment of Foot, 1815 should have seen an end to his war. Napoleon had been exiled to Elba, and many of the Allied soldiers had been safely returned to their home countries. As the British Treasury sought to save money, by quickly reducing the size of the army, all Henry had to look forward to, was being cast upon the streets of his native Liverpool, or if he was lucky, sent off to some far flung outpost of the ever growing British Empire. Neither was going to happen. In Vienna, the great powers had gathered to divide up Europe. As they did, Napoleon Bonaparte sat on Elba like a spider in his web, feeding off the breeze of discontent and greed, channeled by spies. Russia wanted all of Poland. Prussia, allied with the Russian Czar, was willing to give up its share of Poland to get all of Saxony. Austria feared domination by a Russo-Prussian block. England had not fought for a generation to replace a French hegemony in Europe with a Russian one. In the squabbles what should have been a peace conference to end two decades of war with France became a shouting match between two power blocks with Austria-England-France as the other side. With the war clouds once again threatening the fragile peace, Bonaparte seized his chance and dispatched a letter to King George of England, offering his services as General Bonaparte, soldier of fortune. He offered to raise a force to serve under Wellington, if perchance, England was to go to war with either Prussia or Russia. Soon Henry would find himself fighting along side former enemies against former friends, and once more Napoleon would be marching towards Moscow. Only this time, Henry and the British army would be marching with him
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