DURING PREVIOUS WARS, letters written home by eyewitnesses were either rare or non-existent; indeed, even during the late wars in Spain and Portugal they still remained a rarity, because of the difficulties of the post and the costs involved.
However, something changed significantly at Waterloo, as the archives of Britain, Europe, indeed the whole world, testify. It would seem that virtually every officer who survived the battle or who escaped with only a minor injury was soon writing home, both to allay the fears of their families, but also to give their version of events, from their limited field of vision in a heavily smoke-laden atmosphere. Officers were almost always guarded in their comments, not wishing to cause offence by criticism and often guilty of embellishing their own role, knowing that what they wrote would often appear in the public domain via the newspapers or at least be discussed within polite society.
A new phenomenon also began to appear: letters from the lower ranks in quite significant numbers. Non-commissioned officers were required to be able to read and write to carry out their administrative duties, and therefore their correspondence might be expected, but it is generally assumed that the simple privates were largely unable to read or write well and therefore that few of them wrote home with their experiences. But, by the time of Waterloo, this belief is simply wrong: a significant number of letters and journals written by private soldiers have been discovered during the last decade.
Date of production:
23 September 1815
Location:
Archive of the Household Cavalry, Windsor, UK
Letter from Susan Clinton, wife of Lieutenant General Sir Henry Clinton, who was at Brussels during the campaign.
The rise in education in Britain, mainly driven by the church schools, was a major influence on this situation and it is estimated that the country had a literacy rate of around 60 per cent in 1815. It is also clear that many adults had had to learn to read and write to aid them in their Bible studies, as the rise of Nonconformism and lay preaching took hold, especially in the army – much to the concern of the Duke of Wellington, who was worried that the egalitarian influence of Nonconformism would lead to a lack of discipline in the ranks. The particular joy of the accounts written by the ordinary rankers is their bold and honest criticisms and usually very modest claims of their own actions – something we also associate with veterans of more recent wars.
Such a plethora of first-hand reports, written before they could be tainted by the accounts of others, is of course of inestimable value to military historians wishing to study the battle. Incredibly over 500 previously unknown eyewitness accounts of the battle have been published in English for the first time in the last decade, which has radically changed our understanding of many aspects of the battle as traditionally told.
It is assumed that there may be many more still to be discovered, kept lovingly within families, and it is hoped that the 200th anniversary will see many of them come to light.