What Cornwall is doing is repackaging the work of one of the foundational Napoleonic scholars, Charles Oman (or historians that have repeated Oman). Charles Oman was one of the preeminent Napoleonic scholars of the early twentieth century (although he started publishing in the Victorian era) and wrote some of the major texts on the British Army in the Peninsula. His massive tomes on the Peninsular War were groundbreaking, and like a lot of pathbreaking scholarship, his seven-volume work set the tone for subsequent historians. Unfortunately, this meant that Oman helped cement certain paradigms that were rather faulty. The column v. line was one of them. In a lecture to the British Academy, Oman outlined the idea that the column was an expedient formation caused by the French Revolution to make up for deficits in discipline and training among mass-levied conscripts. The column, Oman holds, was effective, but could be defeated by a line formation. The latter was much harder to maintain, but if the troops were professional and motivated, they could reliably defeat the column. In addition to the battles in the Peninsula War, Oman cited the Battle of Maida in Italy as the test case of how the "long red wall" became the perfect counter to the French column. The line allowed for much more concentrated firepower, and if cohesion could be maintained, a firm bayonet charge.

As the above indicates, this thesis dovetails nicely with the type of drama Cornwall writes - cynical and methodical French vs. plucky and professional British- and Oman's somewhat nationalistic prose found a fairly wide audience. Along with Oman's contemporary John Fortescue, this tactical picture became one of the dominant images of the Peninsular War. The problem, of course, is in the details and even Oman recognized this. He tried to backpedal in later writings on Maida in his 1912 Wellington's Army when he discovered that the French did deploy into a line, so it was a line v. line battle. Although this discovery did not put a stake in the whole debate, it was a sign that the battlefields in the Peninsula were much more complex than reducing them to the clash between two tactical systems.

Wider trends in Napoleonic scholarship have reexamined this issue and found the formations were far more complex. David Chandler took up the whole historiographic issue in an paper "Column versus Line: The Case of Maida, 1806" later published as a chapter in his anthology On the Napoleonic Wars. In the paper, Chandler parsed out both Oman's initial evidence and traced how he came to his erroneous conclusions. Chandler then mapped the path of this idea, even after Oman revised his view of Maida, into other scholarship including Chandler's own work. In a multi-part essay on the website Napoleon-series.org, James Arnold wrote A Reappraisal of Column Versus Line in the Peninsular War that extends the critique of the column v. line thesis to the Peninsula. According to Arnold, the formations the French used in the Peninsula were more complex than a simple column and Wellington's string of tactical victories was much more his use of the line and reverse slope tactics. Arnold concludes that declining troop quality, geography, internecine conflicts between French commanders, and a whole host of other problems plagued the French in the Peninsula.

All of this is not to say that column v. line clashes did not happen in the Peninsula, but rather that the tactical picture of these battles was more fluid. Pace Wellington's adage "they came on in the same old way..." newer historiography on the Peninsula has found the French were much less willing to engage Wellington in frontal attacks after having received sharp lessons at his hands. Historians like Rory Muir have also suggested that the superiority of the British line in Spain was not so much its ability to bring bullets and bayonets to the enemy, but rather the morale and psychological factors that a line supported. While a simplified version of column v. line makes for a good narrative device, the reality on the ground was much different.