To War with Wellington
Page 41
* Napoleon was to act promptly to abolish the slave trade when he returned to power the following spring. He saw it as a neat way of securing the support of liberal sentiment for his restoration.
* It might be wise to take this quotation with a pinch of salt: Wellington’s Peninsular Campaign had hardly ‘saved the world’ in the eyes of the Russian Tsar, who had seen Napoleon retreat from Moscow in 1812 and whose army had helped push the French Emperor back to Paris in 1814. William Fraser, who recounts the story, is however a credible source. He was twenty-six when Wellington died. His father was on the Duke’s staff at Waterloo, and Fraser himself conducted interviews with the 2nd Duke.
* General Sir Stapleton Cotton, who became Lord Combermere, reckoned it was the Prince Regent who had vetoed him from the cavalry command. Combermere believed that the Prince had never forgiven him for his ‘share in spreading about the story of the Prince’s nocturnal visit to [his mistress] Mrs Fitzherbert’ several years earlier (Combermere, vol. 1, p. 321).
* Copenhagen was the foal of a mare ridden at the siege of the Danish capital in 1807. Wellington bought him in Spain and rode him through most of his battles from Vitoria to Waterloo. The horse had great stamina and was steady and fearless on the battlefield. Wellington took him home to Stratfield Saye, where the horse died at the age of twenty-nine in 1836.
* Winchester later befriended the wounded Frenchman and spent some time with his family in Paris.
* Napoleon had good grounds for insisting that he was poorly served that day. Soult was no substitute for his former chief of staff Alexandre Berthier, his stalwart right-hand man through two decades of campaigning, who failed to join him on his return from Elba and then mysteriously fell to his death from a window on 1 June 1815. During the day Napoleon asked Soult yet again whether he had sent for Grouchy. Soult replied that he had despatched ‘un officier’. ‘Un officier!’ exclaimed Napoleon, and turning round to his suite he said: ‘Un officier … ah my poor Berthier, had he been here he would have sent twenty’ (Stanhope, p. 65). Three prominent generals mentioned in this book ended their lives by falling (or being thrown) from windows: Berthier, General Erskine in 1813 and General Junot later in the same year.
* One story has it that a French eagle lost at the Battle of Borodino in 1812 was discovered inside the corpse of a dead horse on the battlefield. Its dying bearer had stuffed it up the horse’s anus to conceal it from the Russians (Adkin, p. 201).
* There was already a colourful mix of fugitives leaving Brussels for fear of French occupation, as one eyewitness recalled. ‘Amidst the crash of wheels, the volley of oaths, and the confusion of tongues, the mistress of the hotel, with a countenance dressed in woe, was carrying off the most valuable plate in order to secure it, ejaculating as she went, the name of Jesus incessantly’ (Eaton, p. 40).
* The carriage, which had bullet-proof doors, ended up in Madame Tussaud’s waxwork showroom in London and was lost in a fire there in 1925.
* The Duke’s letter is now framed on the wall of the bedroom in which Gordon died in Wellington’s headquarters, now the Wellington Museum, in Waterloo. The room also contains the bed in which Gordon died and the wooden leg Uxbridge used after his amputation.
* Costello’s account of the depth to which his fortunes sank at one stage makes colourful reading. Desperate for money he was about to rob two men on the road to London until he discovered one was a fellow rifleman (See Costello, pp. 231–4).
Table of Contents
List of Maps
Introduction
1. First foothold
2. You must have bribed Junot
3. Scum of the earth
4. The obstinate old Gentleman
5. Damned with might and main
6. Unpardonable butchery
7. A dangerous hour for England
8. Now, lads, for the breach
9. The town’s our own. Hurrah!
10. Marmont est perdu
11. One step forward, two steps back
12. I saw them fall like a pack of cards
13. The finger of God is upon me
14. Extraordinary news
15. In the Elysian Fields
16. Duchess, you may give your ball
17. Blücher has had a damn good hiding
18. Hard pounding
19. Now, Maitland, now’s your time!
20. See the Conquering Hero Comes
Author’s Note
Notes
Bibliography