Marengo: The Myth Of Napoleon's Horse

With a bullet lodged in his tail and the imperial cipher of a crowned letter N burnt on his left flank, a diminutive Arab stallion drew crowds to Pall Mall, London, in 1823. Sightseers came to gaze at the horse advertised as Bonaparte's personal charger, whose career had spanned the whole of the Napoleonic Wars, who, to the sound of marching songs, drums, pipes and gunfire, had trotted, cantered and galloped from the Mediterranean to Paris, Italy, Germany and Austria, and at the age of nineteen, had walked three thousand miles to Moscow and back.

Both dead and alive, this horse with the same sonorous name as Napoleon's great victory, Marengo, has been a star exhibit in Britain. His articulated skeleton was displayed as the horse that had carried his master at Austerlitz in 1805, Jena in 1806, Wagram in 1809, in the Russian Campaign of 1812, and at Waterloo in 1815. For over 150 years one of his hooves has stood in the Officers' mess at St James's Palace. Today, his skeleton is the sole equine exhibit in the Waterloo Gallery at the National Army Museum in London.

This poignant story of Marengo shows an unexpected side to the Emperor. It explores Napoleon's enormous regard for horses as well as why it was Marengo who became part of the Napoleonic legend - not Jaffa, Ali, Desiree or any of Napoleon's many other mounts. As he turned the ramshackle cavalry of the Revolutionary army into the most remarkable cavalry force in history he made spectacular use of horses in battle. But this book uncovers a secret, hidden away for over a century, a secret which brings an inspiring and moving history to a devastating conclusion.