Young Bloods

Europe and India, 1769–1797. Arthur Wellesley grows up in an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family and enters the British Army without an obvious vocation, while Napoleon Bonaparte leaves Corsica for military education in France. Revolution gives Napoleon opportunities that birth alone could not provide, and service abroad begins to shape Wellesley’s discipline. Their separate paths establish the ambitions and institutions that will later bring them into the same continental war.