An Astonishing Infantryman: The Life and Letters of Jack Hill, Royal Welch Fusiliers (1778-1838)

Near the door of the church in Hennock, Devon, on the eastern edge of Dartmoor, is the plain box tomb of Lieutenant Colonel John Humphrey Edward Hill, CB, known in the army as Jack. Commissioned as a boy during the Revolutionary War into one of the British army's most active regiments, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, Hill's career started badly: he spent six months in captivity after his first combat and miraculously survived a disastrous shipwreck after his first campaign, in the Netherlands in 1799.

He went on to fight throughout the Napoleonic war, in Egypt in 1801, the defence of Britain against French invasion in 1803-5, the capture of Copenhagen in 1807 and Martinique in 1809 and then in the Peninsular War, including at the battles of Albuera and Vitoria, and commanding Portuguese Caçadores and Infantry battalions at Salamanca, San Sebastián, the Nivelle, the Nive and Orthez, while fighting across Portugal and Spain and into France with Wellington's army. Dangerously wounded at the battle of Waterloo and thought unlikely to live, he remarkably recovered and returned to his regiment only later to be forced into retirement by a jealous commanding officer. Between 1798 and 1815, Jack Hill participated in ten major military campaigns, travelling to four continents and fighting on three. He sailed some 21,000 miles and was wounded six times.

Written with support from the Hill family, the Royal Welch Fusiliers Museum, Blundell's school and underpinned by original research in British and Portuguese Archives, this book provides rare insights into the service of British junior and field officers of the period, including while on secondment to the Portuguese Army during the Peninsular War. It also challenges aspects of previous histories, including those by Oman and Fortescue, about the battles of Vitoria and St. Pierre and allied actions in France in early 1814. Jack's story, based on some eighty of his own letters, published here in full for the first time, is a compelling tale of adventure, ambition, endurance, frustration, reward and survival - the remarkable life of a man from a tiny Devon village who became one of the Duke of Wellington's 'astonishing infantry'.