SYW Fiction for Boys

Chris (boy wonder x) on TMP brought a fictional book to my attention, With Clive in India and I've found another by the same author, With Frederick the Great. I've always liked this sort of 'Boys' own' fiction and it's nice to see some with an SYW theme. Both are available thanks to the generosity of the people who supply Project Gutenberg with books.

If you don't fancy reading them, I'd recommend downloading the Frederick the Great one for the pictures and maps. The links to these are below, as are some of the pictures:

With Clive in India
by George Alfred Henty

With Frederick the Great
by George Alfred Henty

Three More Free SYW Books

I've found three more books but it feels like this is it, to be honest. Every search term I use brings up the same few books over and over. I've added them to the list but also included them below to save you looking through again trying to figure out which three are the new three.

The Prince de Ligne: His Memoirs, Letters, and Miscellaneous Papers

De Ligne was an officer from the Austrian Netherlands who served in many of the major battles of the Seven Years War including Leuthen. There are a good 40 or so pages devoted to that period in this book as well as a dozen or so more related to his time spent with Frederick the Great after the war.

The Prince de Ligne, a gay Marshal of the old regime

By O. P. Gilbert

The Writings of George Washington: Official letters relating to the French War

Free (Public Domain) SYW Books

I've just posted links to all of the Seven Years War books I've been able to find so far that are hosted on Google Books and the like. I'm sure somebody has compiled a better, more comprehensive list of public domain SYW books, but I haven't been able to find one yet so I've just stuck up what I've found(approx 40).

Mostly, the originals have been scanned in by university libraries meaning that the viewing quality of the books varies. I've only found time to read a couple so far (can't read books on a computer screen to save my life) but of the ones I've read I'd recommend the biography of Seydlitz. It's full of the funny little anecdotes that make this period a pleasure to study, and the quality of the scan is very good.

You can get to them by following the link in the top right of the blog or clicking here.

Visit to Leuthen, 5th December 09 - continued

Here are some more photos from Leuthen. I've only just figured out how much easier it is to upload photos if you select the new editor in blogger.

The monument to Frederick's victory viewed from the north on the road between Frobelwitz and Borne. Hopefully this photograph illustrates the gentleness of the rises in the ground that are overemphasised on a lot of the maps we are used to using. When i was walking down the road looking for the Schonberg, I was on the lookout for a relatively steep hill like the one hinted at on the map below, and was therefore very surprised to spot it on such a flat horizon. That said, the photo in the previous posting shows that, despite its low gradient, it provided a commanding view that helped Frederick assess the Austrian position.

Visit to Leuthen, 5th December 2009 (with photos)

With my temporary contract at work coming to an end, and with holidays still needing to be used at a time when nobody else would be free, I decided on a whim to visit the battlefields of Austerlitz and Leuthen on their respective anniversaries which, thanks to Ryanair and Easyjet, turned out to be relatively cheap. My visit to Leuthen proved to be the more rewarding of the two by far (Austerlitz ended in farce to be honest, but I didn’t really research before I went so I got what I deserved). Leuthen was the first battlefield I have properly visited, let alone written about, so you’ll have to excuse me if the following post reads like the ramblings of an idiot interrupted now and again with poorly-taken photographs.