Corporal (later Sergeant) John Douglas of the First Foot' (The Royal Scots) was a rare figure to be found in the ranks of Wellington's army - a fine fighting soldier but also a well-read, educated man with a natural gift as an author. In this memoir, which he was  persuaded to write after leaving the army, he gives us a unique picture of an infantryman's life on campaign: the trials and tribulations and bitter hardship of endless marching, often
desperate with hunger or barefoot for lack of new boots; the harrowing experience of a major pitched battle; the horrors of siege warfare; the lighter side of the soldier's life, related with that wonderful sense of irony which is so characteristic of the veteran British soldier and that marvellous sense of fun without which sucha life could not have been endured; outbursts of bitterness against an ungrateful nation for which he and his comrades gave so much and yet which seemed to care so little for its soldiers' suffering or eventual well-being after their service was over, often leaving them sick or maimned, or both.
 
What is so special about Douglas's Tale is that the reader sees history through the eyes of a man in the ranks, sharing with him the terrors and pride of victory in a number of the great battles of our history and seeing them as he saw them and not as described in detail by the historian.

Douglas was a man of deep understanding and humanity, possessed of a strong, simple faith, evidenced time and again by his sympathy for the sufferings of the civil population from the ravages of war.