Twenty-Five Years in the Rifle Brigadee

The 95th Rifles produced some of the most exciting accounts written about the Napoleonic Wars. One of these is Twenty-Five Years in the Rifle Brigade by William Surtees, who volunteered for the Rifles in 1802 and served with them for 25 years. All the esprit de corps, the initiative, the pluck and the glamour of the Rifles shine out of these pages. Surtees deals with episodes as dramatic as those featuring Richard Sharpe, Bernard Cornwell’s fictional hero of the 95th Rifles - and the feats Surtees describes are all the more compelling for being true.

Sharing the perils of many a battlefield, he was able to leave immensely valuable eyewitness descriptions of fighting in the Peninsular War and the later stages of the 1812-14 war against America. In peace time Surtees served in Ireland and Nova Scotia, retiring in 1826 to his home in Northumberland, where he wrote these memoirs.