The site was not far from Flanders fields, where other battles would rage a hundred years on, but it was 1815, not 1915. Some 200,000 soldiers had crowded into a few square miles of rural Belgian terrain. A multinational army of Belgian, Dutch, Hanoverian and British – Welsh, Irish, Scottish, English – troops under the command of the Duke of Wellington stood ranged against a French army led by a Napoleon returned from exile and bidding to dominate Europe once more. The place, of course, was Waterloo, and the date was June 18, one of the most famous days in world history.
Waterloo was not the biggest or bloodiest clash of the Napoleonic Wars – the Battle of Leipzig in 1813 involved half a million men, with some 92,000 casualties – but it was nonetheless a ghastly affair. A little over eight hours of fighting left a shocking sight: fields literally running with blood; thousands of dead, wounded and maimed men, and not only men – horses suffered too, the agonised whimpering of dying animals mixing with the groans of injured soldiers.
The battle’s toll prompted Wellington’s famous remark that “the next greatest misfortune to losing a battle is to gain such a victory as this”. But the famed commander was resolute under fire, almost shockingly so. (Several of his staff were killed or wounded on the day.) When one of his officers asked that his devastated regiment be relieved, Wellington bluntly messaged back: “Tell him what he asks is impossible: he and I, and every Englishman on the field must die on the field we now occupy.”
Waterloo marked the apotheosis of Wellington’s military career (he would later serve as Britain’s prime minister). Both the steadfast general and the battle have become cherished icons of British history, and the approaching bicentenary of the historic date has seen a flood of new works on Waterloo and its consequences. (It is ironic, given Britain’s ever-vexed relationship with the European Union, that the battle was fought only a short distance from Brussels.) Historians have debated and dissected how the campaign unfolded, to an almost minute degree – there is, for example, a forthcoming volume on the battle’s last half hour.
The British contribution, some have suggested, has been exaggerated. It's a fair point – less than half the troops under Wellington's command were from the British Isles. In The Longest Afternoon: The 400 Men who Decided the Battle of Waterloo, historian Brendan Simms highlighted the furious efforts of one battalion of the King's German Legion (KGL), composed of Hanoverians loyal to King George III, to hold La Haye Sainte farmhouse, which occupied a crucial spot on Wellington's line. Others point out that it was General Blucher's Prussian army, who stormed in from east as night fell, wot won it for the allies.
Standard military history is not the business of David Crane, whose new book, Went the Day Well? Witnessing Waterloo, is an eccentric, uneven contribution to the bicentenary studies. Though the first half of his book is ordered in hour-by-hour chapters, his book is less about witnessing Waterloo than describing the condition of Great Britain, circa 1815. (He often takes licence with his time frame, going back into the past and forward to events after 1815). Ranging from the rugged Scottish Isles to the backstreets of London to the battlefield itself, Crane tells a series of stories about British society – its legal system, its politics, its upper classes, its writers (Byron, William Hazlitt), its artists (Benjamin Haydon) – as it was configured when Wellington took the field against Napoleon.
This is an angry, at times unhinged, book: Crane suggests that the Britain Wellington’s men were fighting for was rotten to the core, brutally unfair and politically broken. These arguments founder on Crane’s vehemence. He is better, for example, when he relates incidents from the days before the battle, when the panicked denizens of Belgium wondered where Napoleon would strike. The parties, however, went on: Wellington (along with most of his top officers) was at a lavish ball the night before his troops made first contact with the French at Quatre Bras on June 16, a bloody draw that set the stage for the main event.
Crane introduces us to several fighting men who provide his text with pungent commentary. William Wheatley, a British officer attached to the KGL, could have been speaking for soldiers from any conflict. Shortly before the fighting started, he mused, “it is an awful situation to be in, to stand with a sharp-edged instrument at one’s side, waiting for the signal to drag it out of its peaceful innocent house to snap the thread of existence of those we never saw, never spoke to, never offended. On the opposite ascent stand hundreds of young men like myself … and yet with all my soul I wished them dead as the earth they trampled on and anticipated their total annihilation.” Few have expressed more eloquently the contradictory feelings of men who kill in war.
Wellington had placed his troops in defensive positions on a low ridge along a front that ran for about 5,500 metres. The Anglo-Allied Army began the day with a pronounced disadvantage – many of its number were inexperienced. The odds favoured Napoleon. Crane sums up the strategic dilemma that faced the opposing commanders like this: “Wellington had never been a gambler in the same way that Bonaparte was, and yet in choosing to fight his battle where he did he was making the same sort of calculations as his opposite number, reckoning that he could hold his ridge until the Prussians arrived just as Bonaparte thought he could wrap up the British before Blucher’s reinforcements could swing the balance the allies’ way.”
Wellington famously commented that Waterloo “was the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life”. And it was. The attacking French infantry swarmed around the Haye Sainte farmhouse and Hougoumont, a chateau that British troops held at great cost. Both places saw epic confrontations within the larger battle, and have gone down in military legend. Welsh ensign Rees Gronow of the Guards vividly described the hellish situation around the chateau: “the dead and wounded positively covered the whole area of the orchard, not less than two thousand men had fallen there. The apple-trees presented a singular appearance; shattered branches were seen hanging about their mother trunks … every tree was riddled and smashed in a manner which told that the showers of shot had been incessant. On this spot I had lost some of my dearest and bravest friends, and the country had to mourn many of its most heroic sons slain here.” Such scenes point forward to the wars of the 20th century.
Crane captures the ebb and flow of the day with such eyewitness accounts. He describes the agonies of a British officer, Frederick Ponsonby, wounded and captured by the French. An enemy officer gives him brandy to slake his thirst. The charge of cavalry units; the thud of cannon fire; the chaos and smoke of battle all afflicted soldiers on both sides. There are bloody images here: an armless British commander, reins in mouth, leading his horse. Shattered limbs and mangled bodies were everywhere as darkness descended on the battlefield. In the aftermath, “soldiers wept openly in the streets and the world – British, Belgian – looked on with an appalled, compassionate, classless, nationless sympathy at the broken, wounded and emasculated wrecks of victory”.
When Crane sticks to the details of Waterloo itself, his book is solid if oddly cadenced. However, he suggests it was all barely worth it. He homes on the plight of Eliza Fenning, accused of poisoning the family she worked for. Her case became a cause célèbre of the radical reformers of Regency England. For Crane, her trial, conviction and execution stand as a charged symbol of the powerful interests of the ruling class, who conspired to crush dissent and keep the lower classes and their political allies in their place. Crane’s tone in these sections reaches a pitch of barely contained fury.
Waterloo became a cornerstone of British imperial identity. Crane notes that if you read contemporary British accounts, you won’t learn of the role played by the Dutch at Quatre Bras, “or the overwhelming impact of the Prussians’ arrival, or that British troops scarcely numbered more than one tenth of all the soldiers on the field”. These are facts worth pointing out. In light of David Cameron’s plan to put Britain’s EU membership to a referendum, it also worth pondering how Waterloo, a fundamentally European battle, was distilled into the very essence of Britishness itself.
The book is available on amazon.
Matthew Price’s writing has been published in Bookforum, the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe and the Financial Times.