Dr. Kate Lister

He identified with Napoleon very, very strongly.

He collected Napoleon memorabilia.

despite that being regarded as very unpatriotic at the time.

So he goes off to Greece, and by this time, he is a very wealthy man because for the first few years, he didn't take any money for his poems because he's a gentleman and he just don't pay me to write poems.

I'm a gentleman.

But eventually he starts taking money from them and then he's got a lot of money.

So he goes over to Greece and invests himself in this fight for Greek independence and pours money into this.

So he gets this kind of little commission in the army.

But again, it's not what he thinks it's going to be.

He thinks it's going to be war.

the romantic hero charging in and saving the day.

But what he's got is a sort of a ragtag band of mercenaries that endlessly need training.

And the weather in Greece is appalling and it's just raining and muddy.

And he doesn't see any war.

He's just involved in training exercises and he finds it all quite tedious.

It's not what he thought it would be.

No.

Disease.

Yeah.

Almost inevitable, I think, because the conditioners were so bad where he was living and trying to train these soldiers, were they?