They say that you can't truly feel alive unless you have come close to death. If that's true, then a person who survived sixteen campaigns and forty-eight battles, only to finally die at the age of 89, could certainly claim to have squeezed the cup of life to its last drop.

Jean-Roch Coignet found himself at the lengths and breadths of Europe, covering, like his fellow soldiers, enormous distances on foot, often under incredibly adverse conditions. He fought in Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria, Poland, Russia, Belgium, and even outside of Paris itself, as Napoleon's star waned. He was decorated and captured, starved, poisoned, and dined with aristocrats, kings, and emperors. He witnessed events that changed the course of world history, from the moment he, as a conscript, saw Napoleon change the regime in France and become the First Consul of the French Republic.

In his advanced age, Coignet decided to remember his stormy life and capture it on paper, along with the history of an entire continent. His memoirs reveal unknown aspects of the history of the Napoleonic Wars, the major and minor protagonists, and the terrible battles that shook Europe and turned almost all the other states of the Old Continent against France.

Even professional historians and researchers of the Napoleonic Wars will find many unknown details in Coignet's texts from that tumultuous era. However, the Notebooks of Lieutenant Coignet are such an exciting work that it is impossible not to attract the interest of any reader. It is a journey back in time, presented with disarming honesty and read without interruption.