Henty, G. A. (George Alfred)
"Battles of the nineteenth century, vol. 1 of 7" by Forbes, Griffiths, and Henty is a collection of military histories written in the late 19th century. It assembles vivid, illustrated accounts of major battles across Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, highlighting key commanders, tactics, and decisive moments. The volume aims to engage general readers with dramatic narrative while acknowledging both the glory and the horror of war.The opening of the volume presents Major Arthur Griffiths’s sweeping introduction, a brisk tour of the century’s warfare: from Napoleon and Wellington through the Peninsular triumphs and Waterloo; the Crimean battles of Alma, Balaclava, and Inkerman; the Indian Mutiny’s sieges at Delhi, Cawnpore, and Lucknow; and later British campaigns in Scinde, the Sikh wars, Abyssinia, Ashanti, Afghanistan, Zululand, the Transvaal, and Egypt/Sudan. Griffiths also sketches non‑British conflicts, including Italy’s struggle against Austria, the American Civil War, the Austro‑Prussian war, and the Franco‑Prussian war, stressing evolving weapons, generalship, and national resolve. He closes by promising a roam through great fights, unfettered by strict chronology, to show heroism and its cost. The narrative then begins with Archibald Forbes’s “Saarbrück,” depicting tense frontier outposts at the start of the Franco‑Prussian war: civilians watching opposing videttes, experimental French shelling that shatters the “Bellevue” inn, the first fatality, and Major von…
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