David Crane

An old soldier sees through the smoke of Waterloo

A review of Waterloo: A New History of the Battle and its Armies, by Gordon Corrigan. Elbow the author out of the way and what you will find is a vigorous account of the famous campaign

‘The Final Advance of the Guard’ by Nicolas Toussaint Charlet [The Bridgeman Art Library]

There is a very nice story of a dinner for Waterloo veterans at which Alexandre Dumas — ‘Dum-ass,’ as the Antarctic explorer Taff Evans would have him — was for some reason present. I can’t remember now the exact wording of the exchange between them, but Dumas had clearly spent so much of the evening sounding off about the battle as if he knew what he was talking about that a French general at the far end of the table could finally take no more. ‘But my dear Dumas,’ he protested, ‘it wasn’t at all like that! And remember, we were there!’ ‘Precisely, mon général,’ came back the reply. ‘You were there, so how could you possibly know?’

Gordon Corrigan is more than a chip off the old Dumas block. I can’t think of a history of Waterloo that makes so little direct use of quotation from eye-witnesses; but irritating as that might be, both men do have a point. In the immediate aftermath of the battle literally hundreds of accounts of the fighting were written by participants of every rank. But as Captain Siborne discovered in the 1830s, when he set out to build his great model of Waterloo, if you ask 50 officers where they were, or what crops were growing, or which units were alongside them, or what time something happened you get 50 different, conflicting and — with the passing of time — increasingly partisan and irascible responses.

A battle is very much like a ball, Wellington famously observed: no two people will see the same thing or recall it in the same way. And Waterloo was a ball with the smoke of 400-plus cannon to add to the general confusion. It did not really matter whether you were charging with the Scots Greys or in square behind the ridge, your battle would have been a very local and limited affair.

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