Good companion in the field

After a year and more of Trafalgar it is perhaps time to turn once again to Waterloo. By comparison with the feast, or glut, of Nelsoniana, there is something of a paucity of safe accounts of 18 June 1815. Besides Andrew Roberts’s ultra-compact Waterloo: Napoleon’s Last Gamble, an impressive overview of both the battle and campaign, there has not been a straightforward narrative in many years. The German historian Peter Hofschröer’s two-volume history (both reviewed in these pages) was an attempt to discredit the Duke of Wellington and claim the battle honours for the German-speaking people, and as such stands as substantial but indigestible, as well as wrong. In truth, for a really humane and thoughtful account of the battle there has been little to beat David Howarth’s A Near Run Thing published some 40 years ago.

Alessandro Barbero is Italian. There were Italians on both sides at Waterloo, as there were Irish and a good many others. And, of course, Buonaparte himself could claim Italian blood. Italy, as the rest of Europe, had a keen interest in the outcome of the battle, if perhaps a somewhat ambivalent one. Professor Barbero holds a chair in mediaeval history at the University of Piemonte Orientale, but his Napoleonic scholarship is well established, and he is a winner of the prestigious Strega prize for a work of historical fiction set in the period. The Battle, a bestseller in Italy, has, as fashion requires, a subtitle: ‘A New History of the Battle of Waterloo’. However, while it is new in the sense of being mint-new, it really says nothing new. This is hardly surprising since there surely can be nothing new to say about that day, as opposed to saying it with a different emphasis. Nevertheless, Profes- sor Barbero’s new history is very much to be welcomed, for it is probably the most lucid, comprehensive and balanced narrative of the battle in years, an extremely thorough commentary.