This is a heavyweight volume in every sense, but it falls with a resounding thud on just one restricted part of the period. As the sub-subtitle states, it deals only with the Prussian dimension of Napoleon's defeat in Germany in 1813. Following a brief introduction sketching the situation in the early summer of 1813, nearly nine hundred pages are needed to get the reader from July to November. This bulk is partly due to the luxuriant footnotes at the end of each chapter, which often consume more than a page of small print and do not make for easy reading. The multiple citations also make it difficult to sort out the relative importance of archival material and printed sources. The short bibliography is unhelpfully vague. There is no general guide to the abbreviations used in the footnotes, so if the first citation is missed, a frustrating hunt backwards is required. Leggiere's publisher has nevertheless been generous in many ways. They have given him as much space as he needed to take his account forward on an almost day-by-day basis, and have provided him with many excellent maps (although the important Silesian fortress Neisse is consistently misspelled as “Niesse”) and even some illustrations.

This is essentially a detailed narrative of the fluctuating fortunes of the Prussian Army of Silesia commanded by General Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, as it first evaded successive knock-out blows by superior French forces, then scored crucial victories at the Katzbach river on August 26 and at Wartenburg on October 3, before finally forming part of the Allied force that inflicted a decisive defeat against Napoleon at Leipzig during the great four-day “Battle of the Nations” between October 16 and 19. The Prussian contribution was out of all proportion to their resources. Despite the losses in territory and population inflicted on them by Napoleon at Tilsit in 1807, they managed to mobilize 250,000 soldiers in August 1813 and 275,000 for the autumn campaign—truly astonishing numbers. Moreover, their quality was commensurate with these impressive figures: they were “infinitely better” than the Russians, observed the British officer Charles Stewart, adding that “they have everywhere greatly distinguished themselves” (447). Partly this was due to the intense hatred of the French nursed by every Prussian soldier, no matter his rank, thirsting for revenge for the humiliation and exploitation inflicted on Prussian forces in 1806–7 and again in 1812. Following Gordon Craig, Leggiere stresses that it was an ideological war for these soldiers, even a “holy war” on the antichrist, driven by “mystical nationalism” (9).

Particularly interesting in this account is the repeated stress on the importance of the irregular units in the Prussian army: the Freikorps (infantry), the Landwehr (militia), and the Landsturm (home guard). Given that so many historians have sought to discredit the old nationalist “War of Liberation” picture, this redressing of the balance is very welcome. Whether recounting how the famous Lützow Streifkorps caused havoc behind the French lines, or how three recently mustered Silesian Landwehr companies repulsed Jacques Lauriston's veterans at Goldberg, Leggiere makes it clear that this was much more than a clash between mercenary armies. Looming over them all was the towering figure of Blücher, seventy-one years old but a powerhouse of energy and enterprise. Despite his sobriquet “Marshal Forwards,” he also knew how to mix prudence with aggression, especially when confronted by Napoleon in person. He needed all his management skills, too, to deal with such difficult subordinates as the vain Ludwig Yorck von Wartenberg, the incompetent Louis Alexandre Andrault de Langeron, and the timid Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte.

As he follows Blücher and his army during the four months from the end of the armistice to the flight of the French to the Rhine, Leggiere displays an impressive ability to present a huge amount of information coherently and cogently. Every now and again the trees threaten to obscure the forest, but the diligent reader should be able to keep to the path. Not always present is an awareness that equally important events were happening elsewhere, both to the north and the south of Silesia. To make sense of the campaign as a whole, it might be advisable to have on hand a more general account, such as David Chandler's The Campaigns of Napoleon (1973). The author promises a further volume on the Army of Bohemia, by which time Leggiere will have had the opportunity to read Wolfram Siemann's recent Metternich, Eine Biografie (2016), which will help him to do justice to the Austrian contribution to the defeat of Napoleon.