On 18 June 1965 the British army held a spectacular parade in the grounds of Hougoumont farm, south of Brussels in Belgium, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. In those days the British army was twice the size that it is now and all the regiments that had fought there sent their regimental colour party, a guard of honour and their band. This author, then the tallest subaltern serving with the Gloucestershire Regiment, attended as the bearer of the regimental colour.
The 1965 influx of the largest number of British troops seen in Brussels since the liberation in September 1944 was not lost on the population. Contingents were billeted in Belgian army barracks, last refurbished in about 1880, and as the Belgians, with the possible exception of the Norwegians, are the only Europeans who actually like the British, any British soldier in uniform entering licensed premises in Brussels found he could quaff to his bladder’s content without having to pay. Inevitably cells in guardrooms were rapidly filled up with Scottish soldiers returning to barracks bare-bottomed, having sold their kilts to a local. On the battlefield, preserved in the main by the Belgian equivalent of green-belting, there was little, if any, sign that the British had ever been there. Memorials to French grenadiers, statues of Napoleon, plaques bearing eulogies penned by Victor Hugo and taverns with names reminiscent of the Armée du Nord there were aplenty, but not so much as a modest mention of the Great Duke. The Belgians have long lived through an identity crisis. In the past 300 years they have been subjects of Spain, of Austria, of France, of Holland, and only since 1831 have they lived in their own independent state, albeit one that is still riven by racial and linguistic tensions. In the eastern part of the country, regardless of who actually ruled them, the inhabitants have generally considered themselves to be French, or at least francophone. In 1815 they were pro-French, if only as a better alternative to being part of the Dutch Netherlands, and while today they have no quarrel with the British, who did, after all, create their nation, they still lean towards France. Now, largely thanks to comments arising from the 1965 affair and the efforts of the British Waterloo Committee, there are British memorials on the battlefield, but the shop in the (post-1965) visitor centre sells mainly Napoleonia and re-enactors prefer dressing as chasseurs à pied rather than as privates of the 33rd Foot. Even the premier British scholar of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the late Dr David Chandler, regularly appeared in the uniform of a colonel of the Imperial Guard.*
Whether the 200th anniversary of the great battle in 2015 will be commemorated with quite the flair, panache and effort that went into the 1965 event is a moot question: will political correctness disapprove of the glorification of blood and slaughter? Will the British government want to avoid offending the French? Can Britain afford it? What is certain is that, with the exception of the Guards and the Household Cavalry, there is not a single British regiment that retains the name it had in 1815, or in 1965, such has been the pace of run-down and amalgamations of the British infantry.
In 1965 the Allies of 1815 were invited and contingents from Austria, West Germany, Holland, Belgium, Spain and Portugal were on parade, as were the Russians, despite this being the height of the Cold War. As the occasion was officially, if not in reality, a commemoration rather than a celebration, the French too were invited. Not unnaturally they declined to attend, and the story doing the rounds was that their president, the Anglophobic General de Gaulle, had refused on the grounds that he was too busy preparing for the 900th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings the following year.* As de Gaulle was not known for his sense of humour, the tale is almost certainly apocryphal, but it combines the two occurrences in British history that are indelibly engraved on the minds of every schoolboy: 1066 and the Battle of Waterloo. They all know the date 1066 but are unsure of what happened then, and they all know there was a battle at Waterloo but don’t know the date.
In the long history of the British army there have been many battles that involved more men, lasted longer and had more casualties than the Battle of Waterloo, fought on one day in about two miles square of cramped farmland fifteen miles south of Brussels. Yet Waterloo creates more interest, claims more attention and has more words written about it than the Somme, Alamein and Normandy put together. It is not even that it was a purely British victory: the British were a minority of the Anglo-Dutch army, which was in turn smaller than the army of its ally, Prussia, and while the overall commander, the Duke of Wellington, was British, in truth it was not a battle in which great tactical acuity was a requirement. Rather, what was needed was the perceived British virtue of sticking it out until help arrived, a task that any number of available British generals would have been perfectly capable of overseeing.
Today Waterloo is seen as a stunning British victory against almost overwhelming odds. Perhaps in reality it was an Allied victory against odds that weren’t all that bad. True, Napoleon’s forces outnumbered those of Wellington, but not by anything like the three-to-one ratio generally considered necessary for a successful offensive. While much of Wellington’s army was indeed ‘infamous’ (by which he meant ‘not famous’), many of the British units had served in the Peninsula; and while he did not have the staff that he might have wanted to serve him, all of his divisional commanders and many of the brigade commanders had served under him at some stage in Portugal or Spain. They were well known to him and they knew and understood his methods.
When the contemporary accounts of the battle were written, most gave full credit to the Allied contribution – that of the Dutch-Belgians, the minor German states and of course Prussia – but very quickly fact began to be obscured by myth. In the case of the French, the result of the battle was supposedly decided not by Napoleon’s failures, but by incompetence and betrayal by others; in the case of the British, the contribution of other Allied nations was progressively belittled or ignored altogether. It took Colonel Charles Cornwallis Chesney, Royal Engineers, professor of military history at the Royal Military College Sandhurst, and later at the Staff College, Camberley, to restore the balance. On taking up his appointment in 1858, Chesney found the study of the history of their profession by army officers to be at best scanty and at worst seriously twisted. Most of the few recommended works for students were written by French authors in French, many had little basis in historical fact, and there was no attempt to encourage students to engage in a critical analysis of wars and campaigns. Chesney determined to change all that, and his examination of the American Civil War while it was still in progress stands out even today. He insisted on objective and unbiased examination of the history of warfare, and his essays on the Waterloo campaign, published in 1868, gave full credit to the Prussians (hitherto lacking in most accounts in English) and were the standard work on the subject for many years, having been translated into French and German.
Then, after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, in which the French suffered humiliating defeat, British perception began to shift back to an Anglocentric view of Waterloo. While perhaps not becoming pro-French, opinion gradually became less pro-German: Napoleon III and his ex-empress were given sanctuary in England, their son was killed in the Zulu War serving with the British army, and the Kaiser’s vocal support for the Boers in the South African War all roused suspicion of German intentions in British minds. Later, the naval arms race and then the First World War squashed any concept of Germany having a share of the victory of Waterloo. Indeed, British soldiers on the Western Front were astonished to find themselves opposed by German infantrymen wearing the battle honour ‘Waterloo’ on their sleeves: what on earth, they asked, had Waterloo got to do with the Boche?
Between the world wars and both during and after the second, there was little incentive to credit the Germans with anything, and, although one or two books in the 1960s did try to depict the battle as having been won by a multinational coalition, most pandered to the heroic myth of the gallant British, outnumbered and outgunned, holding off the foe until at last defeating the mighty emperor and saving the world by their efforts. That perception has changed, at least among historians, but it is a pity that the leading proponent of putting the Prussian contribution in its proper perspective, who has delved into various German archives and produced a number of well-researched books as a result of his findings, has made himself a figure of fun by proposing all sorts of unlikely conspiracy theories and threatening to sue anyone who disagrees with him.
That Waterloo looms so large in British historiography cannot be due to its military value alone; rather, it is seen as the beginning of the ‘British Century’ and the last throw of a French imperial era – the last chance that the Bonapartists had of creating a unified Europe under French hegemony after twenty-two years of almost continual warfare. In the long years of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars the one unchanging factor was British resistance to French ambitions. All the other powers, and many states that were not powers in the contemporary sense, were at one time or another conquered by France, occupied by France or temporarily allied to France. Only England, protected by the Channel and her navy, stood in constant opposition, supporting the seven Allied coalitions that were formed between 1793 and 1815 with her money, her navy, her industrial capacity and, where she could, her troops. Had Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo he would still have lost the war: the difference is that England would not then have had the influence that she did have in drawing up the post-war boundaries in Europe and in forming a system of checks and balances that kept the peace, more or less, for a century.
Waterloo does not stand in isolation but must be considered in the context of an age that began with the first attacks on what the revolutionaries later named l’ancien régime in 1770 and ended with Napoleon’s landing on the lonely Atlantic outpost of St Helena in 1815. The declaration of war by France on England in 1793 (and had she not done so England would eventually have declared war on her) began the most prolonged period of hostilities in modern British history, and until the events of 1914–18 when men talked about the ‘Great War’ they meant the war against France. In an age when, in the West at least, military operations that last for more than a year or so are increasingly subject to public suspicion, if not downright opposition, it is noteworthy that the great majority of the British public supported the French war for twenty-two long years. While Britain was not then a democracy in the modern sense – in that the idea of universal suffrage would have been regarded by most as an extraordinary aberration – she did have freedom of speech and the press, the rule of law, the absence of conscription and no restrictions on the free movement of labour, and she was probably nearer to the ideal of a free country than any other, with the possible exception of the fledgling United States of America – although, unlike in America, slavery in the home country was forbidden. British governments were unquestionably the king’s governments, but they had to take account of public opinion, with a plethora of highly critical newspapers, tracts and orators to ensure that they did. In no other European country could a member of parliament constantly and very publicly oppose the war, deride the government’s war aims, continually call for a negotiated peace, demand the exoneration of Napoleon and accuse the Secretary of the Navy of corruption, as Samuel Whitbread of the brewing family did.* It is inconceivable that in the midst of a war a Prussian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish or even Dutch prince of the blood could be put on trial accused of financial peculation in the sale of army commissions as the Duke of York, second son of King George III, was in 1809, albeit that he was acquitted (and probably rightly). It is perhaps because of these very freedoms to criticize that the British government could pursue a war that often looked like becoming a disaster, and had the broad backing of the people in so doing.
Most wars encourage technical progress – better weapons and medical advances being the obvious examples – but by 1815 there was very little in the hands of the army or the navy of any of the players that was not available in 1793, albeit that artillery had vastly improved, much other equipment had been refined and experience had produced more skilled usage of nearly everything. As far as the British were concerned, the war undoubtedly encouraged true professionalism in the pursuit of a military career, and while the British army of 1793 was not quite a mob of flogged criminals led by coffee-house fops, as its detractors alleged, it was certainly not the finely honed killing machine that it had become by the end of the war. By the first French surrender in 1814, British officers knew their business, all-arms coordination, with the infantry, the artillery and the cavalry all working together, was commonplace, and the army could rely on a logistic system that was the envy of the world.
That the British army was a victor on land was not necessarily to its advantage in the long term, however. Armies that are beaten ask why, as did the Prussians after Jena in 1806, reform themselves and produce something better. Armies on the winning side see no need to change the ways that brought them victory, and thus are in danger of stagnation. The initial British administrative disasters in the Crimea forty years after Waterloo must be laid at the door of complacent soldiers and uncaring politicians secure in the view that all was well and nothing needed altering. As for the French, who undoubtedly were beaten, the leadership of the army after 1815 remained in the hands of the same men who had led it for Napoleon, then briefly for the restored Louis XVIII, and then for Napoleon again until the final defeat of the Hundred Days. It is true that one marshal – Ney – was shot and a few others were exiled, but most simply turned their coats yet again and carried on as normal. There was thus little incentive to examine the reasons for defeat, or even to accept that military defeat, as opposed to political betrayal, had actually happened, and the French army of the Second Empire, organized, equipped and led in ways very similar to that of the First, went down to defeat yet again to the old enemy, the Prussians, in 1871.
Napoleon died on St Helena in 1821. His body was returned to France in 1840 and placed with great pomp and pageantry in the Chapelle Saint-Jérôme in Paris, and then reinterred in a magnificent specially built mausoleum in Les Invalides, where it still is. His tomb remains a place of pilgrimage for French army officers to this day, and it has to be asked whether the French army’s craven performance in 1870, its insistence on constant frontal attacks in the First World War and its lamentable performance in the Second are somehow related to its clinging to an outdated ideal of military élan – and Napoleon certainly gave them much glory – while at the same time ignoring the lessons of ignominious defeat.
The sources, meanwhile, for the examination of the Battle of Waterloo and what led up to it are many and varied. From the historian’s point of view these wars were fought – for the first time – by a literate soldiery. From previous wars we have the accounts of senior officers but little from the ranks. Now we have a multitude of letters and accounts penned by junior officers and Other Ranks, giving us a more complete picture of what life was like in the early nineteenth-century armies, on both sides. Secondary sources are almost inexhaustible and the National Archives at Kew, the British Library at St Pancras and the newspaper library at Colindale are invaluable research assets, with their ever helpful and long-suffering staffs. The French military archives at Vincennes and the national archives in Paris (currently on the move to a purpose-built building) are essential – if one can access them. An English historian wishing to research in the French archives is met by the presumption that the point of the search is to find something that will make the French look silly. There is thus a lack of cooperation other than that required by job description. I have tried claiming to be Canadian (not entirely a lie, as my mother was Canadian) but was then faced with a French-Canadian speaker, and while my modern French is reasonable, the Canadians speak a form of French little changed from the time of the Seven Years War. Currently, I claim to be Irish (again not entirely a lie: I was born there) and, as the assumption is that the Irish hate the English, willing assistance is instantly forthcoming.
It might be asked why there should be room on the bookshelves for yet another book on Waterloo. The answer is simple: the battle and those who took part in it continue to fascinate and the interpretations of it vary widely. Personally I do not subscribe to the oft-touted criticisms of British army officers of the time being a bunch of chinless wonders. In fact, apart from the Guards and some of the smarter cavalry regiments, most army officers came from stout middle-class backgrounds. The knighthoods held by so many colonels during the period were nearly always rewards for military service, rather than inherited, and the majority of ennobled generals were peers of first creation. Nor do I accept that the purchase of commissions and promotion was necessarily the iniquitous system that it would seem to modern eyes, for in fact it worked and it worked well once the abuses were removed by reformers like the Duke of York.
In the past some of my readers have questioned my use of the term ‘England’ when discussing the politics of the time – surely I should refer to Britain, or the United Kingdom? I make no apology for using England. The facts are that it was England where the government was, England where the industry was, and England where the money was. Napoleon did not order Marshal Masséna to ‘drive the mangy British leopards back into the sea’; rather, he referred to mangy English leopards. England, not Britain, was a nation of shopkeepers, and it was the English whom Napoleon said had been the most gallant of his enemies, not the citizens of Great Britain and Ireland. In global influence it was England that mattered, and while the Welsh, Scots and Irish unquestionably played a part, in politics and international relations it was England that directed. The army, however, was a different matter: it undoubtedly was British, with a large proportion of its soldiers of Irish extraction and around a quarter of its officers Scottish. Why this was so will be discussed later in this book.
I also make no apology for my frequent use of ‘may’, ‘seems’, ‘perhaps’, ‘around’, ‘probably’ and similar words in my account of the battles of 1815. Contemporary sources are legion and most disagree. This is hardly surprising: most people who were there knew what was happening to them and to those around them, but did not necessarily comprehend the bigger picture. Memoirs penned long after the event can be distorted, not necessarily deliberately, and in the case of at least some accounts what was published depended on cash on the table. In attempting to make sense of widely varying versions of events I have tried to describe what seems to me to be the most likely, although I accept that I may not always have got it right.
As ever, I have a great number of people to thank for their help in getting this book onto the shelves. Angus MacKinnon and Ben Dupré, who have once again been my editors and have saved me from prolonged litigation in the libel courts, and Lauren Finger, James Nightingale and Margaret Stead at Atlantic are all deserving of huge thanks, as are the staffs of the National Archives, the British Library and the Prince Consort’s Library. As always my wife has done her best to prevent me from getting too pompous, not always successfully.
Publishing is going through a revolution unimagined since the monkish calligrapher was replaced by Mr Caxton’s printing press. The power of Amazon, with its ability to massively undercut the traditional publisher, and the advent of the electronic reader, which eliminates the need for paper, are seen as a massive threat to the traditional printed book. We may browse in Waterstones, but we buy from Amazon; we no longer need an extra suitcase to carry our reading material on the move, but can take a whole library on our Kindle. But, I hear you cry, we like the feel of a book, the smell of a book, the thrill of opening a new book. Quite. So do I, but the digital generation is untrammelled by the conventions of the past, and no doubt there were many in ancient Rome who averred that the manipulation of a papyrus roll would never be overtaken by the new-fangled book. The digital book, the e-book, is here to stay. At present, however, while it is fine for fiction, it does not cope well with non-fiction. Footnotes and source notes are clumsy, plates and maps do not reproduce well, but this will improve and in a very short space of time the quality and ease of reading will surely bear favourable comparison with the conventional printed book. Will there still be a place for the book as we know it? Probably yes, but in libraries and places of reference rather than on the bookshelf at home. What of publishers? They will survive, but only if they come to terms with the digital revolution and embrace it. As for printers, they may, sooner rather than later, go the way of the typesetter and the printer’s devil, joining the crossing sweeper and the lamplighter in the list of professions that no longer exist. In practice, they will reduce their staff, move to smaller premises and concentrate on printing newspapers and magazines, visiting cards and wedding invitations, all of which are unlikely to be superseded, at least not just yet. Suffice it to say that I am grateful for the faith that my editors and my publisher have shown in me by their willingness to publish another book of mine in the traditional format – although doubtless as an e-book too.
As for Waterloo, it does not stand alone. Rather, it was the culmination of a long period of military development and political manoeuvring that made Britain a world power – indeed the only world power for a century to come – and while the war-making aspects of Waterloo are of interest, they cannot stand alone, but should be explained as part of a great global sweep of linked military, economic and political development that culminated in a muddy field in Belgium on a Sunday afternoon 200 years ago. That I have attempted to do.
* It has, of course, to be admitted that the French uniforms of the period were rather more glamorous than their British equivalents, lending weight to this author’s theory that the best-dressed army always loses.
* Although, perhaps surprisingly, a French naval contingent did turn up for the 200th anniversary of Trafalgar.
* When he committed suicide in July 1815, it was said, rather unkindly, that his heart had been broken by the victory at Waterloo.