Waterloo

I have now finished my third book by White-Spunner, this one about the battle of Waterloo. And the ninth item on our shelves to touch on Waterloo, listed below for future reference. Not the first to be written by a soldier, but the one which, to my mind, puts the most emphasis on the down sides to glory. A corollary of which being that he is not very keen on Napoleon, whom he holds responsible for the millions of deaths of his wars. Probably more than 3 million, of whom three quarters of a million were Spanish and Portuguese. And for animal lovers, maybe a million horses, shortage of which was to cost Napoleon dear when he came to fight the Waterloo campaign.

A very good read, despite my getting a bit lost in a fog of names and of letters home. And he managed to make the battle exciting, despite my knowing roughly what happened beforehand. As Wellington is said to have observed afterwards, a very close run thing. I share various snippets which caught my attention.

While it was true that both the allied armies and the French armies of 1815 were rather makeshift affairs, with the experienced armies of 1814 having been dispersed, it was not true that the British contingent was the sweepings from the jails. Furthermore, a lot of them were hand loom weavers, displaced by the march of the industrial revolution. And about half of them could read and write, which means that a huge number of contemporary letters and memoirs have survived, letters and memoirs which are, inevitably, more about the trees than the wood and which suffer from the defects of eye-witness accounts everywhere, that is to say they are not very reliable.

Napoleon's strategy at Waterloo was sound enough. Punch through the army led by Wellington, pushing him back on his supply lines to the west. Then smash Wellington and Blücher one at a time. But his execution at Waterloo was poor, not up to his standard of old, and Wellington, with his well drilled if rather raw infantry, managed to hold onto his ridge until Blücher turned up. And Napoleon was not helped by the heavy rain of the night before: attacking uphill, he could have done without the mud.

Uxbridge usually gets blamed for not pulling his heavy cavalry charges up in time, resulting in heavy casualties - but he gets praised here for seeing their moment, a moment when the French first attack came close to breaking through our line.

I was reminded of the weakness of infantry caught in the open by cavalry in the days of slow loading firearms. An infantryman who kept his nerve might pull a few men down off their horses, but a body of, say, 500 infantrymen, could easily lose half their number in minutes. And in the heat of the battle, the wounded were apt to be finished off and there were few prisoners. And with the British infantry further weakened by the weakness of their bayonets, all too likely to bend and get stuck.

For some reason, the British army of the day did not believe in lances. While the French army did, and their lancers took a terrible toll at Waterloo. But perhaps we learned our lesson too well, because in around 1972 I worked with a bricklayer who had done time with the lancers between the two world wars. He knew all about lance drill and the terrible things it did to the forearms - until, that is, you got the hang of it. As White-Spunner points out, winning big time at Waterloo and then having a long period of relative peace, meant that we got rather stuck there, with the lessons learned there, leading to trouble later.

A huge amount of damage was done by the artillery of both sides, this despite Wellington's cunning use of the reverse slopes behind the ridge which defined his position. And despite this, I did not see much talk of spiking guns. It seems that the cavalrymen were too far too busy hacking artillerymen to pieces with their sabres to stop to drive nails into the touch holes of the guns - a spiking which took less than a minute per gun. But I suppose that a minute is a long time in the circumstances.

After the battle there was much grumbling about the distribution of praise, gongs and pensions, with some thinking that the guards regiments did rather well. And Peninsular veterans who had slogged through years of fighting got nothing, while fresh recruits who put in just a few months at Waterloo (and who happened to survive) scored.

While the Belgians now seem to be very keen on Napoleon. Perhaps this is more the French speaking ones to the south, rather than the Flemish ones to the north.

Next stop reference 3, which I have read several times over the years and which will now pay reading again. Then reference 10.

PS: for once, there seems to be a role for historical fiction, something I am usually a bit sniffy about. Perhaps a big battle like this is such a messy affair that fiction is the only way to get a grip on it, without spending serious time. I am reminded of Simenon's remarks, noticed at reference 11, about the need to tidy up, smarten up the real world for lay consumption, with his real world being nothing like as complicated as the battle of Waterloo.

Reference 1: Of living valour: the story of the soldiers of Waterloo – Barney White Spunner – 2015.

Reference 2: Lieutenant General Sir Barnabas William Benjamin "Barney" White-Spunner, KCB, CBE. A former British Army officer who is currently Executive Chairman of the Countryside Alliance and Director of the Countryside Alliance Foundation. Whatever these last might be.

Reference 3: History of a Conscript of 1813 and Waterloo - Erckmann and Chatrian - 1864-5. Two stories from the point of view of the French army. The British army did not use conscripts at this time - while conscription was a major source of discontent in France and in its satellites, certainly towards the end.

Reference 4: Waterloo - Commandant Lachouque - 1972. Lachouque having been trained at Saint-Cyr, then having served in the first war until invalided out, became a very serious Napoleon buff. Interesting because he puts more emphasis on the non-British parts of the campaign, which just so happen to be the parts where the French did relatively well. While White-Spunner writes mostly of the British parts, from the British point of view.

Reference 5: De Boulogne à Waterloo, avec le 2e regiment de chasseurs à cheval - Gaëtan de Raucourt - 1999. A trophy from the old style military museum in Brussels, last visited in the margins of a meeting at the Commission about expert systems; all the rage at the time but not much spoken of now. Lots of weapons and other equipment from the time of Waterloo, lots of brown wood display cases.

Reference 6: An Infamous Army - Georgette Heyer - 1937. A novel for which Heyer is said to have done some serious background reading.

Reference 7: The Life of Wellington - Herbert Maxwell - 1900. Two volumes. Formerly the property of the Rev. R. W. H. Acworth, MA. 'Vincit qui patitur', loosely 'Stick in there to come out on top'. Very appropriate, as this is more or less what Wellington did at Waterloo.

Reference 8: Waterloo - Bondarchuk and Laurentis - 1970.

Reference 9: Sharpe's Waterloo - Bernard Cornwell and Sean Bean - 1997. Might be rollicking with Bean, but as far as I can recall, does not attempt the panorama of the 1970 film. Some years after writing the Sharpe version, Cornwell wrote a non-fiction account of Waterloo - so he clearly did his homework at some point. £2.44, postage and packing free, from Abebooks, so well on its way to becoming reference 10.

Reference 10: Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles - Bernard Cornwell - 2014.

Reference 11: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/03/les-memoires-de-maigret.html.