Waterloo: Four Days that Changed Europe’s Destiny
By Tim Clayton,
Little, Brown, 608 pages, £25
Waterloo: The Aftermath
By Paul O’Keeffe,
Bodley Head, 400 pages, £25
At about 3pm on June 18, 1815, Colonel Frederick Ponsonby’s 12th Light Dragoons charged a body of French infantry. As they did so, they came under murderous “friendly fire” from their own side. Then, after they hacked through the enemy infantry and emerged on the other side, they were charged in their turn by French chasseurs.
In this savage, chaotic melee Ponsonby received lacerating sabre blows on both arms. His horse, no longer under his control, carried him towards the French guns. The disabled Ponsonby was knocked off his horse and fell to the ground unconscious. He came to and managed to stand up, only to be speared in the back by an enemy lancer. The lance pierced his lung; blood filled his mouth and his breathing became difficult. Soon afterwards the position was occupied by French skirmishers, who plundered the grievously wounded colonel of his coins and cigars.
One of the skirmishers used the colonel’s prone body as a barricade and kept up a running commentary on the battle. There is an especially bloody quality to the Battle of Waterloo. An area amounting to six and a half square kilometres was contested by 200,000 men, 60,000 horses and 537 guns. Towards the closing stages of the battle, when the French army was on the brink of breaking Wellington’s line, piles of dead bodies in redcoats marked the positions where the defensive squares had recently stood; nearby, the corpses of French cavalrymen and their horses lay in leaps. “I had never yet heard of a battle in which everybody was killed,” said a British rifleman, “but this seemed likely to be an exception, as all were going by turns.” Battles are like balls, the Duke of Wellington once remarked. In a furious clash of arms, like a dance, people remember disjointed details, he said: “But no individual can recollect the order in which, or the exact moment at which, they occurred, which makes all the difference as to their value and importance.” For a battle so intensively studied and discussed, Tim Clayton writes, it is remarkable how much remains obscure, unknown or contentious.
Blinded by smoke, deafened by cannon fire and terrified by the slaughter, it is a truism to say that a soldier or officer would know little more than what occurred before his nose. What actually happened had to be pieced together later from the memories of survivors. Often these fragments were confused, contradictory, self-serving or downright false. A veritable battalion of books is being published to mark the bicentenary of Waterloo next summer. Clayton’s account is a good place to start. He marshals a vast body of evidence — much of it only recently published in books or online — to reconstruct the battle almost minute by minute and revaluate the key events. This is a tale told from multiple perspectives: from the point of view of officers and men; from Dutch, German and French accounts as well as the more familiar British ones. One of Clayton’s strengths is that he makes the fog of war central to the narrative; we are pitched into the chaos and din of Waterloo and, crucially, the three days of manoeuvring and fighting that preceded it. We experience it as Wellington or Napoleon or an ordinary soldier would have done: a series of isolated, terrifying events, shrouded in smoke and confusion. The protagonists respond to crises and improvise their way through; rarely are they in control.
The moment of Napoleon’s final defeat is the starting point for another invigorating take on the battle. Paul O’Keeffe’s book concentrates on the aftermath. This brings us back to Frederick Ponsonby. He assumed he would die in his position as an involuntary sandbag and that the allies would be defeated.
But then in the evening, when they were on the point of victory, the French were forced to flee with the arrival of the Prussian army. Wellington’s triumph did not help Ponsonby: he was trampled under the hooves of the Prussian cavalry. After that, he was robbed by the advancing Prussians. Ponsonby was left with a raging thirst, alone among as many as 40,000 dead and wounded men. Moonlight reflected off the thousands of sabres, helmets and breastplates that littered the field. The ground was white with paper — sheet music from the bands, playing cards, letters, prayer books, novels, collections of popular ditties and so on that had been ripped out of pockets and discarded by frenzied looters. As O’Keeffe points out, victorious armies typically went in pursuit of the enemy. After Waterloo the exhausted British forces spent the night “in the middle of the shambles they had helped to create”. Around them local peasants and soldiers systematically stripped the dead and the dying of their clothes. Ponsonby survived only because he bribed a scavenging British private to remain with him. Many soldiers were temporarily deafened by the noise of cannon fire. That was lucky, for the battlefield at night was haunted by the shrieks of dying men and horses. There was another sound equally horrific, an incessant clink, clink. It was the noise of hammers and chisels wielded by entrepreneurs who had travelled with the armies and waited for the end of hostilities. They were removing the teeth of dead soldiers, which would be sold to London dentists. The rich crop of June 1815 — “Waterloo teeth” — would be in demand for years because they came from the young and healthy rather than from the old and diseased. O’Keeffe’s chilling descriptions of the night after Waterloo is particularly effective. It is the starting point for a wider discussion of the ramifications of the battle. We learn how news of Waterloo was received in London and Paris. We follow the Prussians in their “murderous euphoria” as they pursued Napoleon’s army out of Belgium and into France. We revisit Waterloo as a tourist attraction thick with voyeuristic sightseers eager to buy grisly souvenirs from local looters. The more human remains and bloodied weapons these people saw, the happier they seemed. There was another draw for tourists in 1815, and that was Brixham in Devon. It was there that Napoleon was kept on board a ship, awaiting his final exile. Thousands went out on boats to catch a glimpse of the great man. When his linen was sent to town to be cleaned, people paid the laundress for the chance to don the former emperor’s shirts and fondle his bed clothes. Both books contain many such anecdotes that lodge in the mind. That is what makes them so compelling.
–The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2014
Ben Wilson is the author of “Empire of the Deep”.
