TOM SHIPPEY: A REVIEW OF “WATERLOO” BY BERNARD CORNWELL
http://www.wsj.com/articles/where-napoleon-met-his-fate-1434144205
A History of Waterloo More Gripping Than a Novel
Where Napoleon Met His Fate Wellington singled out James Macdonell as the bravest man at Waterloo.
The battle of Waterloo, fought on June 18, 1815, was unquestionably one of the decisive battles of history. It put an end to the Anglo-French wars that had been rumbling along for almost five centuries. It also, by smashing the counterweight of French power, opened the gate for the German domination of Continental Europe, which has lasted, with intermissions, to the present day.
That is the only unquestioned fact about it. National pride is still too deeply involved for objectivity. Belgium produced a Waterloo design for a two-euro coin, which the French, not surprisingly, declared unacceptable. Some French historians still argue that Waterloo should be declared a victory for Napoleon, presumably on grounds of superior style. Their German colleagues, by contrast, see the turning point as the late arrival on the battlefield of the Prussian troops led by Marshal von Blücher, while Dutch and Belgian writers complain that the British give no credit to anyone but their own troops and the King’s German Legion.
Waterloo
By Bernard Cornwell
Harper, 352 pages, $35
The numbers game at least is clear, as is the grand strategy. Napoleon’s total of 125,000 men and 350 cannon were outnumbered by the Allied 212,000 and 430. But Wellington’s army and the Prussians were widely separated—“spread across a hundred miles of country,” as the historical novelist Bernard Cornwell notes in his enthralling nonfiction account “Waterloo.” In the days leading up to the battle, Wellington was still anticipating a French advance through the town of Mons when he discovered that Napoleon was in fact coming through Charleroi, 20 miles to the east, with Blücher’s Prussians well east of that. If Napoleon smashed through the center of the Allied front, he could defeat the smaller British-led army, turn on the Prussians, then glide on to Brussels.
“Napoleon has humbugged me, by God!” cried Wellington when he realized what was happening. The Prussians had known earlier but passed the message on, Wellington alleged, by sending the fattest officer in their army to carry it. Blücher’s chief of staff did not like or trust the British.
The day was saved by a delaying action at the vital crossroads of Quatre Bras, on June 16, though the French’s eventual seizure of it meant that Blücher—who had meanwhile fought his own battle at Ligny against a French corps—then had to move his men and two-ton guns across muddy country tracks and defiles, to support his allies blocking Napoleon’s march on Brussels.
So on June 18 the main French blow fell on 30,000 British troops, 22,000 Hanoverians, and 40,000 Dutch and Belgians. Even in veteran British regiments half the men, like most of the Hanoverians, were new recruits. Napoleon’s army had far more experience in the ranks.
Once the day began, one crisis followed another. A stone farmhouse at Hougoumont was a major block in the French path, and the fight for it raged all day. One desperate moment came when the French broke into its central courtyard, led by the gigantic Sous-Lieutenant Legros wielding a pioneer’s ax like a berserker. Lt. Col. James Macdonell of the Coldstream Guards forced the gate shut again, and Legros and all his men—except for the little drummer boy—were killed in a savage melee. Wellington later singled out Macdonell as the bravest man on the field that day, though the colonel shared a privately funded cash award with one of his men.
Then there was the charge of the British cavalry; the repeated charges of Marshal Ney’s men, breaking on the rocks of the British infantry; and the final act, when Napoleon sent forward his invincibles of the Imperial Guard. They advanced in dense columns up the slope. At the ridge they met the British Guards and the 52nd Oxfords, who delivered a smashing volley to the Imperial flank. Up went the cry “La Garde recule!” (“The Guard is retreating!”) among French troops panicked to see the elite Guard in disarray. That was that for Napoleon.
Many such moments are commemorated in famous pictures splendidly reproduced in Mr. Cornwell’s book, like the charge of the Scots Greys with the Gordon Highlanders hanging on to their stirrups. “Those terrible gray horses, how they fight!” commented Napoleon, from a safe distance.
But to make sense of it all one needs more than romance, and here lies Mr. Cornwell’s skill. There is no writer better than he is at capturing what makes one battle different from another, whether it be Agincourt in 1415 or (in his 2010 novel “The Fort”) the American reverse in Maine in 1779. “Waterloo” is packed with tactical and operational detail, to go with the eyewitness accounts, maps and artists’ impressions.
For Waterloo, he argues, you have to imagine a game of rock/paper/scissors. The rocks were infantry in square, a formation that was invulnerable to cavalry (the scissors). Horses would not charge into the front-rank hedge of bayonets, and the rear ranks could shoot down horse and rider.
Rock blunts scissors, then, but paper wraps rock. The paper was cannon, hurling roundshot into the static targets of the infantry squares. The slow-loading cannon were themselves vulnerable to charging cavalry. So, too, were infantry in line formation, which maximized their firepower but denied them their protective hedges of bayonets.
Readers of Mr. Cornwell’s novel “Sharpe’s Waterloo” (1990) will recall that not knowing how to play this game was the disastrous fault of the 23-year-old “Slender Billy,” aka Crown Prince William of Orange, a hopelessly over-promoted stripling who commanded a corps in Wellington’s army. Again and again he ordered his wretched infantry out of square and into line, to be massacred by cavalry he had failed to spot.
Incompetence was, however, the rule of the day, with the exception of the presiding figure of Wellington, always close to the action as Napoleon was not. Marshal Ney wasted time and then wasted men riding around squares. Lord Uxbridge’s British cavalry put in one devastating charge and then rushed heedlessly on like fox hunters, to be countercharged, their horses blown. Bad staff work kept French Marshal Grouchy’s corps from even arriving, and Napoleon’s brother Jerome threw more and more men against the Hougoumont farmhouse when they were needed elsewhere.
But who can be sure? You can no more write the history of a battle than you can describe every dance at a ball, declared Wellington. There is smoke, deafening noise, everything happening at once across miles of front and, above all, fear. Yet if anyone can both do justice to confusion and descry underlying pattern, it is Bernard Cornwell. At the end of “Waterloo,” readers will feel that they could command a battalion themselves. With historical accounts like this, who needs novels for excitement?
—Mr. Shippey regularly reviews science fiction for the Journal.
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