The Russian Army at War
General Sir Robert Wilson’s impressions in 1807 and 1812; a paper delivered by D.G. Chandler at the Congress of Historical Sciences, Moscow, 1970.
When the poet Fitzgerald wrote: ‘How sweet the music of a distant drum’, he was clearly not considering the problems of twentieth-century military historians, striving to gain some insight into the lives, experiences and attitudes of military men belonging to earlier generations and distant countries.
The more remote the period, the greater grows the difficulty.
For, until the present century, the serving soldier has, all too often, proved reluctant - or simply incapable - of recording his impressions of the military life, and this is particularly true of the rank and file.
This problem of martial taciturnity takes a further daunting dimension when the British historian turns to consider the soldiers of East European countries, for here, all too often, one meets the language barrier.
If difficulties of identification with the fighting men of distant countries still hamper the modern historian, with all the apparatus of modern research techniques at his disposal, how much harder it must have been for our ancestors to gain even the remotest conception of conditions of service within distant, contemporary armies.
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