9 x 6 in.  488 pages.  33 illustrations, 4 maps.

1812: The Great Retreat tells the story of the end of the most famously disastrous campaign in history, using the words of the survivors to describe their desperate withdrawal from Russia. Napoleon's campaign had begun with more than a third of a million men setting out on what was to be a long and terrible march to the glittering city of Moscow. Only 100,000 were to reach it. Forced to turn back in the face of winter's onset, almost nothing of the drastically reduced army recrossed the Niemen River alive.

The author's previous books on the campaign - 1812: The March on Moscow and 1812: Napoleon in Moscow - brought the Grande Armée to the head-on battle al Malo-Jaroslavetz after removing sixty miles from the capital, and for the first time in his meteoric career Napoleon had to order a retreat. In this final volume the army withdraws through 800 miles of devastated countryside, crossing the horrific relics of the Borodino battlefield, fighting its way through the Russians' successive attempts to cut it off, and winning, against overwhelming odds, the three-day battle of the Berezina crossing. First-hand narratives, many published in English for the first time, describe Marshal Ney's astounding achievement in holding together the rearguard until he himself, musket in hand, was the last man to recross the Niemen into Poland.

Using the words of 160 of the participants, Paul Britten Austin brings unparalleled authenticity and immediacy to his unique account of the end of Napoleon's dramatic and tragic 1812 campaign.

Paul Britten Austin went to sea as a cabin boy in the British merchant marine, graduating to Radio Officer and serving in tankers and liberty ships. In 1947 he recovered his childhood home in Paris, but moved to Sweden, where he married the Swedish novelist Margareta Bergman, sister of the film director. For nearly a decade he was in charge of English-language broadcasts from Radio Sweden; thereafter, from 1957 to 1969, of the Swedish government tourist office in London.

He has written many books on various subjects, both in English and in Swedish. He holds an honorary D.Litt and a Swedish knighthood of the Order of the North Star. His three books on the 1812 campaign are the result of twenty-five years of research, and together constitute his magnum opus.
 

Greenhill Books  ISBN 1-85367-246-7

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