Books: A Soldier's Letters

THE LETTERS OF PRIVATE WHEELER—Edited by Captain B. H. Liddell Hart —Houghton Mifflin ($3.75).

Lieut. General Arthur Wellesley, one day in 1809, stood in Spain and surveyed the ragged levies sent him for his Peninsular campaign against the French. "I don't know what effect these men will have on the enemy," said the man who was to go down in history as the Duke of Wellington, "but, by God, they frighten me."

As war would have it, they frightened the French too—right back across the Pyrenees, after one of the most brilliant campaigns of modern times. Not long afterward, Napoleon was sent packing...