Antoine De Courten

Canada 1812-1814: Swiss Regiments Antoine De Courten

This little book about some aspects of the War of 1812 in Canada has two distinct purposes:

The main body, the account on the raid on Oswego and some anecdotes, aim at providing an easy lecture to the public visiting the Niagara battlegrounds.

The Appendices are meant to give a better historical understanding of some events of that conflict. Events such as the planning and conduct of the operations on the Montreal front in winter and spring 1814, as well as those on the Niagara in the summer of the same year. No doubt the Diary of Major General de Watteville, the Capitulation and the Manual of the de Watteville Regiment represent a valuable documentary contribution as far as they were unpublished or hardly accessible to researchers.

The tactical level of the battles on the Niagara, Châteauguay, La Colle and Richelieu Rivers appears to be easily understandable. We observe that the orders, the principles of combat and the risk/opportunities management are not very different to what modern classic forces do nowadays.

As regards the Diary, it does not show Lt General Prevost in the usual dulled light many historians used to shed on him.