Thomas B. Costain · 1944 · global

Thomas B. Costain's 1944 novel of the Napoleonic wars. Francis Ellery runs a London newspaper and prints broadsides against Bonaparte, falls for a French emigree, and then goes to see the war for himself - as a correspondent on the Peninsula and, in 1812, with the army that walks into Russia and does not walk out.

1. 1
   London

   Ellery owns a newspaper and uses it against Napoleon at a time when invasion is expected within the year - and falls in love with Gabrielle de Salle, one of the exiled French aristocrats filling the drawing rooms of the city.

2. 2
   Lisbon

   He goes out to the Peninsula as a war correspondent, into a Portugal held by earthworks and a British army that intends to fight its way back into Spain - and discovers what reporting a war is actually like.

3. 3
   Salamanca

   The campaign into Spain, where a summer of marching in the heat ends in an afternoon that breaks a French army - and Ellery sees at close range the difference between the war as printed in London and the war as fought.

4. 4
   Moscow

   In 1812 he follows the Grande Armee into Russia and reaches a Moscow that burns around them - and then the retreat, which is the passage the whole book has been moving toward and which Costain does not soften.

5. 5
   London

   He comes home to a country that has spent a decade expecting invasion and is beginning to believe it will not come - and to the question of Gabrielle, whose loyalties were never as simple as his own.