If you would like to submit a review, please contact NapoleonSeries.org . The Fatal Knot Tone, John Lawrence. The Guerrilla War in Navarre and the Defeat of Napoleon in Spain . It is one thing to eulogise John Tone's, The Fatal Knot as one of the most important works of Napoleonic scholarship ever written, but it is quite another thing to defend such a position against cherished favourites and so-called 'definitive' surveys. What is so special about The Fatal Knot is that Tone is doing something very rare in Napoleonic, or indeed any military history, and that is to contribute something entirely new to the field.
Historians generally tend to sneer at military history.
Frankly, one unfortunate reason for this is that military history often doesn't measure up to professional scrutiny. History is fundamentally about why something happened, as it is already given that it 'has' happened. Therefore countless re-constructions of events don't cut much ice in the field. This is not to say that the retelling of events is not worthwhile in the form of a survey. After all, Oman's History of the Peninsular War is often ranked second only in importance to Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as an historical work in the English language.