But these are the musings of a historian, who has the luxury of the long view and can make decades fly past his fingertips. For the men who fought on the battlefield at Waterloo, and for the majority of their contemporaries, life would have been altered had the battle ended differently. At the time, everyone in western Europe who heard the news and comprehended its significance felt intense emotion, which they were not long in attributing to a powerful symbolic force. Once great events are incised so deeply in the collective memory, they take on a life of their own, despite the changes wrought by time; this is the reason that today, nearly two centuries later, and without even knowing exactly why, we all continue to be fascinated by the name Waterloo.
NOTES
1 Apparently, conversations between Prussian officers and British officers were held in French, the international language of the time, even though it was the enemy’s language, too.
2 This observation should put an end once and for all to debates about the importance of the Prussian contribution to Napoleon’s defeat. (As for the emperor himself, he never had the least doubt in the matter.) “Ah! He ought to light a fine candle to old Blücher,” he said, speaking of Wellington one day on St. Helena. “Without him, I don’t know where His Grace, as they call him, would be; but as for me, I certainly wouldn’t be here.”
3 They were not mistaken: A few weeks later, the regimental commander and one of his captains were killed at Waterloo, and shortly thereafter, four of the junior officers had their promotions.
4 Lady Frances’s father.
5 French infantry regiments were known as Régiments d’infanterie de ligne (often shortened to Régiments de ligne), or “line regiments.” The regiment in question, for example, was the 85ème de ligne.
6 Sir Andrew was a man who liked to live well. He went to war accompanied by his French chef, a prisoner taken at Salamanca, and was capable of downing three bottles of wine at dinner. He was, moreover, one of the most popular officers in the army.
7 The regiments of the Prussian Landwehr were designated by an ordinal number and the name of the province where the unit was recruited—in this case, the electorate (Kurmark) of Brandenburg.
8 In fact, not even Waterloo served to change the emperor’s opinion of his adversary, though the defeat made it rather awkward for Napoleon to express that opinion aloud, and he preferred to speak of Wellington as little as possible. As Las Cases noted on St. Helena, “I’ve noticed that the emperor is generally loath to mention Lord W …” But when coaxed into discussing the duke, Napoleon abused him mightily.
9 By a dynastic fluke the army of the Netherlands comprised—in addition to around 4,000 Belgians and 9,000 Dutch—a little more than 4,000 men recruited inside Nassau, so that Wellington’s army contained, all told, some 30,000 Germans.
10 This, at least, was Napoleon’s assertion; according to Carl von Clausewitz, however, the division “was unequivocally forgotten.”
11 The British manual included instructions for the skirmisher, should he find himself in such a situation, but they weren’t very reassuring; the principal piece of advice was to play dead.
12 Twenty-nine years old, he would be condemned by a Bourbon tribunal for high treason and shot by a firing squad outside of Paris exactly two months later.
13 As noted, Gneisenau had little faith in Wellington, and the Prussian chief of staff had written to Müffling again that morning: “I beg you to discover with the utmost certainty whether the Duke really intends to give battle in his present position or whether he is simply making a demonstration, which could cause our army great harm.”
14 All three of these officers were British, which was the case with more than a few of the KGL’s junior officers after the heavy losses it suffered in Spain.
15 But Captain Blaze, a French veteran who had seen it all, assures us that in Napoleon’s army, “When it’s time for troops to advance, everyone from the commander in chief to the corporal uses the same formula: ‘Sacré nom de Dieu, en avant, en avant sacré nom de Dieu!’ They never say anything more eloquent than that.”
16 This is one of the possible versions; according to another, Napoleon said, “Stop all that bowing, we’re not at the Tuileries!”
17 In an attempt to regain his lost honor, the ex-colonel purchased a commission as an ensign in an infantry regiment, restarting his career from scratch and rising to the rank of captain. But good society never forgave him, and Portarlington sank into alcoholism, dissipated his entire inheritance, and died penniless in a London slum.
18 This was the episode that Victor Hugo was later to interpret in his own fashion in a famous passage of Les Misérables.
19 The news of his death cast the British sporting world into mourning. Sir Walter Scott, who was one of Shaw’s fans, had his body transferred to England; a plaster cast of Shaw’s skull was displayed in the Windsor Museum.
20 In this case, too, the nature of the ground rendered impossible the headlong gallop dear to printmakers.
21 The only Italian officer in Wellington’s army, Prince Ruffo di Castelcicala, fought with the Inniskillings and many years later became the ambassador of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in London.
22 And perhaps also by memories of the dead boys; there were three very young officers with the rank of cornet in the Grays, and all three were killed at Waterloo.
23 Not coincidentally, the number of lance-armed regiments increased in all armies during the course of the nineteenth century; by the eve of the First World War, all European cavalry, including cuirassiers, were issued lances.
24 Sporting slang for a boxer not afraid of a slugfest and willing to take a beating rather than give up.
25 A short time later, the boy took a ball in the throat and lay unconscious until night, when the stretcher bearers gathered him up and brought him to a hospital; against all expectations, he survived, and some years later the Prince of Saxe-Weimar encountered him, recognized him, and gave him a decoration.
26 All eyewitness statements regarding the time of day are unreliable, and it was surely much later.
27 In this description, the ensign finds no fault with the sergeant’s behavior, but he nonetheless feels the need to justify it. Later, when the men were on their feet again, a shell passed close above their heads, and many instinctively ducked. The regimental commander, Sir John Colborne, cried out, “For shame! For shame! That must be the Second Battalion, I am sure.” This Battalion was made up of recruits.
28 On the march from Wavre, the men had torn off their collars because of the heat, an episode that earned the regiment the privilege of wearing pink collars after the Battle of Waterloo.
29 This dialect name for the steel-producing city of Birmingham was slang for bayonet.
30 Curiously, Ryssel himself was a native of Saxony, and he had made his career in the Saxon army, an ally of Napoleon; in 1813, before suddenly finding himself a Prussian subject, he had received the Legion of Honor.
31 There should have been fourteen, but one of them, the 1/1st Chasseurs, had been left behind at Le Caillou farm with the imperial baggage and treasury.
32 In 1844, Sergeant Cotton, who made his living as a tourist guide to the Waterloo battlefield, met this French officer, who confirmed that he had indeed deserted, because he was a thorough monarchist; according to Cotton, he belonged to the Second Carabiniers à Cheval. Although speaking from hearsay, Captain Duthilt also states that “this infamous criminal” was a captain in the mounted carabineers.
33 In the Imperial Guard every battalion was commanded by a brigadier general.
34 In spite of everything he would have a long career in military service and lead an entire English army to annihilation in Afghanistan thirty years later.
35 Only once had his courage found a limit: At the assault on the fortress of Ciudad Rodrigo in 1812, a ball entered his right shoulder and lodged in the bone, in a spot that the surgeons were apparently unable to reach; some months later, when the wound began to suppurate, an oper
ation nevertheless became imperative. “The pain he suffered in the extraction of the ball was more even than his iron heart could bear,” Smith recalled. “He used to lay his watch on the table and allow the surgeons five minutes’ exertions at a time, and they were three or four days before they wrenched the ball from its ossified bed.”
36 Ney was mistaken in only one particular: Six months later, a Bourbon tribunal had him shot. D’Erlon, too, was condemned to death, but he escaped abroad and lived long enough to become governor of Algeria and a marshal of France under Louis-Philippe.
37 So much so that there was a great deal of ironic waggery in military circles about how Sir Hussey Vivian won the Battle of Waterloo.
38 For many years, Blair remained persuaded that this man was a French officer in the service of Louis XVIII and never got over his amazement at recalling that in such an hour Wellington’s only companion had been a Frenchman; but in fact he was the Conte di Sales, an envoy of the king of Sardinia.
39 In later years, Barton, somewhat embarrassed, let a voluble French officer convince him that the grenadiers à cheval had not been engaged at any point in the battle and that therefore it had been a good idea not to come to blows with them; but it’s instructive to compare Barton’s account with Captain Mercer’s, which gives the impression that the grenadiers had been practically annihilated while charging his battery.
40 Amazingly, the general escaped capture, reached Paris alive—after undergoing the amputation of his right hand along the way—and lived for another twelve years.
41 Shortly after the battle, the splendid blue-and-gold imperial coach, with its bright red wheels and bulletproof glass, was acquired by a British entrepreneur, and soon it was being exhibited to the public in London, where for the price of a few shillings any curious person could experience the emotion of sitting inside it.
42 A print published in London in 1817 shows peasants engaged in stacking wood under a heap of naked bodies in the courtyard at Hougoumont.
43 A month later, he explained to Lady Shelley, “While in the thick of it, I am too occupied to feel anything; but it is wretched just after. It is impossible to think of glory. Both mind and feelings are exhausted.”
44 Later, on St. Helena, Napoleon remarked, “I certainly made him spend un mauvais quart d’heure [a bad quarter of an hour].”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The bibliography for the Napoleonic period is notoriously immense and practically impossible to master. For general orientation, one can begin with D. D. Horward, Napoleonic Military History: A Bibliography (New York and London, 1986) and J. Tulard, Nouvelle bibliographie critique des mémoires sur l’époque napoléonienne (Geneva, 1991); but now works of this type have been conveniently replaced by references found on the Internet (see Web sites below). The primary and secondary sources hereinafter cited are only those that are most useful for reconstructing the Battle of Waterloo, with particular emphasis on those that have been chiefly utilized in the present book.
PRIMARY SOURCES
British Sources
By far the most valuable collection of British eyewitness accounts of the battle is H. T. Siborne, ed., Waterloo Letters (London, 1891), to which should be added the letters originally excluded by Siborne and recently published by G. Glover, ed., Letters from the Battle of Waterloo (London and Mechanicsburg, Penn., 2004).
Wellington’s official correspondence is published in The Despatches of Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington, ed. J. Gurwood, 13 vols. (London, 1837–39) and Supplementary Despatches and Memoranda of Field Marshal Arthur Duke of Wellington, ed. A. R. Wellesley, 15 vols. (London, 1858–72).
Enormous numbers of memoirs, letters, and combat diaries were published in the course of the nineteenth century. Many of these works have recently been reprinted, especially by Ken Trotman at Cambridge, even though they are indicated in the following list with their original publication date. Most of these accounts were written by officers; the most important of these are the following, listed in alphabetical order by author:
Letters of Colonel Sir Augustus Frazer. Ed. E. Sabine. London, 1859.
Letters and Journals of Field-Marshal Sir William Maynard Gomm, GCB. London, 1881.
The Reminiscences and Recollections of Captain Gronow. London, 1862.
Hay, W. Reminiscences under Wellington, 1808-1815. London, 1901.
Hope Pattison, F. Personal Recollections of the Waterloo Campaign. Glasgow, 1870.
Jackson, B. Notes and Reminiscences of a Staff Officer. London, 1903.
Kincaid, J. Adventures in the Rifle Brigade. London, 1830.
Leach, J. Rough Sketches of the Life of an Old Soldier. London, 1831.
Leeke, W. History of Lord Seaton’s Regiment at the Battle of Waterloo. London, 1866.
Macready, E. N. In Colburn’s United Service Magazine, vol.1 (1845), pp. 388–404, and vol.2 (1852), pp. 518–30.
Mercer, A. C. Journal of the Waterloo Campaign. London, 1870.
The Autobiography of Sir Harry Smith, 1787-1819. London, 1910.
Letters of Captain Thomas William Taylor. Tetbury, 1895.
Tomkinson, W. The Diary of a Cavalry Officer. London, 1895.
The Reminiscences of William Verner. (1782–1871), Ed. R. W. Verner. London, 1965.
The Wheatley Diary, Ed. C. Hibbert. London, 1964.
Another fundamental source is the anonymous account titled “Operation of the Fifth or Picton’s Division in the Campaign of Waterloo,” published in theUnited Service Journal, June 1841; the author, usually referred to simply as an officer in Picton’s division, belonged to Pack’s brigade, and internal analysis makes it a certainty that he was a junior officer in the 3/1st (Royals).
Eyewitness accounts written by enlisted men are rarer and therefore particularly interesting. For Waterloo, the most relevant of these are the following:
Anton, J. Retrospect of a Military Life. Edinburgh, 1841.
Clay, M. In The Household Brigade Magazine, 1958.
Costello, E. Adventures of a Soldier. London, 1841.
Farmer G. and Gleig G. The Light Dragoon. London, 1844.
The Autobiography of Sergeant William Lawrence. London, 1886.
Morris, T. Recollections of Military Service. London, 1845.
Journal of Sergeant D. Robertson, Late 92nd Foot. Perth, 1842.
The Letters of Private Wheeler, Ed. B. H. Liddell Hart. London, 1951.
Similarly irreplaceable are accounts that have come down to us from civilians who were closely acquainted with the Duke of Wellington; of particular use are The Creevey Papers, ed. L. Gore (London, 1963) and the letters of Thomas Sydenham to his brother Ben in The Waterloo Papers: 1815 and Beyond, ed. E. Owen (Tavistock, 1997).
Allied Sources
Waterloo memoirs written by German, Dutch, and Belgian authors were not as numerous as those produced by their British allies, and the same can be said of letters and official reports. The destruction of archives during the Second World War further diminished the available material. Much of it has been published only in part, generally in historical studies specifically dedicated to the contribution of the Allied armies. From this point of view, the following works are particularly valuable: N. L. Beamish, History of the King’s German Legion (London, 1837); D. C. Boulger, The Belgians at Waterloo, with Translations of the Reports of the Dutch and Belgian Commanders (London, 1900); J. von Pflugk-Harttung, Belle-Alliance (Berlin, 1915); and F. Schirmer, Nec aspera terrent. Geschichte der Hannoverschen Armee 1617–1866 (Leipzig, 1937).
Equally rich in firsthand sources, some of them never previously used, are two works by P. Hofschröer—1815, the Waterloo Campaign: Wellington, His German Allies and the Battle of Quatre Bras (London, 1998) and 1815, the Waterloo Campaign: The German Victory: From Waterloo to the Fall of Napoleon (London, 1999)—as well as the series, still in progress, edited by B. Coppens and P. Courcelle, Waterloo 1815. Les Carnets de la Campagne (Brussels, 1999–).
Among the individually published eyewitness accounts, I fou
nd the following especially useful:
Baring, G. von. In the Hannoversches militärisches Journal, 1831. English translation in Beamish, N. L., History of the King’s German Legion, Vol. 2, Appendix 21. London, 1837.
Müffling, F. C. von. Aus meinem Leben. Berlin, 1851, translated into English as Memoirs of Baron von Müffling. London, 1997.
Reiche, L. von. Memoiren, ed. L. von Weltzien. Leipzig, 1857.
Scheltens, C. Souvenirs d’un vieux soldat belge. Brussels, 1880.
Scriba, von. Das leichte Bataillon der Bremen-Verdenschen Legion in den Jahren 1813–20. Hameln, 1849.
Thurn und Taxis, A. von. Aus drei Feldzügen, 1812 bis 1815. Leipzig, 1912.
French Sources
The official documentation on Napoleon at Waterloo is available in La Correspondance de l’Empereur Napoléon 1er, vols. 28–31 (Paris, 1868-70); orders and official dispatches can be found in (G. Le Doulcet de Pontécoulant), Napoléon à Waterloo, ou Précis rectifié de la campagne de 1815 (Paris, 1866). Napoleon’s own, highly subjective view emerges in his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de France en 1815 (Paris, 1820), as well as in the transcriptions of his conversations that were made while he was in exile on the island of St. Helena: E. de Las Cases, Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène (Paris, 1823), and G. Gourgaud, Sainte-Hélène. Journal inédit de 1815 à 1818 (Paris, 1899).
Many of the best French memoirs were written by military men who were not present at the Battle of Waterloo. We nevertheless cite these texts, as they are invaluable for their insiders’ portrayal of Napoleon’s army: E. Blaze, La Vie militaire sous le premier empire (Paris, 1837), translated into English as Military Life under Napoleon: The Memoirs of Captain Elzéar Blaze (Chicago, 1995); Les Cahiers du capitaine Cognet (Auxerre 1851–53), translated into English as The Note-Books of Captain Cognet (London, 1897); and Souvenirs du Capitaine Parquin, 1803-1814 (Paris, 1892).
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