Waterloo
The following was produced at the request of Norm Geras and originally ran at his site in November 2006 as a book review, though it was as much an ode to war and an exploration of the experience as anything. Today, on the 193rd anniversary, here’s ”The Battle,” with some art and links added:
A couple of times a year, some old warriors I know get together, a small group of friends. They are men who have seen heavy combat, including, for two of them, a day at the Ia Drang in 1965, when a third of their battalion’s men were killed and another third were wounded in the space of a few hours. But they held, giving better than they got.
Forty years later, they fight tears when they talk about absent friends. They remain intensely interested in war in all its aspects, and when we meet, we talk about war. The old wars and today’s wars, how they are being fought and where they will take us. Courage and cowardice, the timeless misery of infantrymen, and the cleverness and failings of officers. The endless wealth of subjects revolving around war, from the politics and generalship, to weapons and tactics, to the personal business of taking and returning fire, the killing, down through the ages. When we talk about war, it is war like wine. A terrible, captivating wine.
There is one constant of war through time, and that is the base experience of it. Technical aspects may change, but the gut feelings remain the same, and in varying degrees of intensity are shared by everyone who has done this. They are conflicting feelings of horror, fear, commitment, despair, camaraderie, discipline, honor, fatalism, hilarity, sacrifice, bloodlust and the desire to prevail, elements of which combine to carry us through, carry us away or destroy us. For all those emotions, war remains a cold business of will, endurance and deftness. A balance of what is known, what will be found out, and luck.
Once you have experienced any of this, it never leaves you. You will recognize it in others, and you may find yourself studying it, at the risk of obsession. We honor the accomplishments and losses of those who fought when we look back at what they did, though I don’t think that is most often why we do it. We are compelled to keep filling our glasses. There are some bloody vintages that stand out among all others. One of them, one of the more exquisite fields of death on which history ever turned, endlessly worthy of mulling and picking apart, or just staring at in horrified fascination, has been brought back to the table. Waterloo.
An Italian professor of history, Alessandro Barbero, has produced a magnificent work he calls The Battle, in a class with the best of the new popular, but throughly academic military histories.
You know more or less how it goes. As Napoleon tried to resurrect his shattered empire in 1815, nearly 200,000 men engaged on a few square miles of Belgian woods and farmland. The British and their allies, battered two days earlier in several actions in the vicinity of Quatre Bras, had stopped on a ridge of Mont St. Jean while falling back toward Brussels.
At the end of a daylong duel of infantry, cavalry and artillery, with fierce hand-to-hand at the chateau Hougoumont and the farmhouse at La Haye Saint, the British squares had held the center, and the Prussians arrived on the French flank. Napoleon, having failed to move his infantry soon enough to disrupt the squares, saw his own troops broken and routed. Exactly how many British, French, German, Dutch and Belgian soldiers died on June 18, 1815 is unknown, but estimates range to about 20,000, with twice as many missing or wounded. The future of Europe hinged on it, and two magnificent generals, the greatest of their age and artists of war, faced each other.
Barbero’s work, translated by John Cullen, takes us through each phase of the 10-hour battle, as experienced by the generals, the foot soldiers, the cavalry and the artillery, made immediate with graphic first-person accounts of the conditions and the action. Those start with the rain and mud through which tired Allied infantrymen retreated and in which they slept fitfully the night before the battle. We see and know what Wellington and Napoleon knew and saw as they planned their battle that morning.
Wellington’s disregard for fire and his presence in different parts of the battlefield inspired his troops.
Here’s one view of Napoleon at Waterloo:
Though by Barbero’s account, he was tired, uninspired, not his old self. Maybe more like this:
As the day unfolds in Barbero’s work, each fateful action is revealed in the battle’s ’slow burn’, from D’Erlon’s advance on the weak British left, to Ponsonby’s successful yet disastrous cavalry charge, through the bloody, drawn-out contests for the strongpoints at La Haye Sainte and Hougoumont, and the prolonged battle of wills when the French cuirassiers charged the British and Allied infantry squares. Barbero reviews the exhaustive scholarship on what ultimately remain elusive truths about Napoleon’s misjudgments about the Prussians and his failure to send infantry against the squares.
These standards of Waterloo history are clarified by detailed discussions of the massed-fire infantry and cavalry shock tactics of the time — not just of the Napoleonic Wars, but how they had evolved and were applied at the moment of the battle. Barbero also devotes significant attention to the specific weapons — muskets, rifles, sabres, artillery and lances — each unit employed, their likely rates, range and volume of fire, and the advantages and disadvantages that were the demonstrable result. Just as critical, and laid out in remarkable detail, is information on a unit-by-unit basis about the combat experience, level of training, terms of service, average age and morale of the British, French, German, Dutch and Belgian regulars and militia that took part in the battle.
It is a level of detail that renders the highly complex battle along the ridge at Mont St. Jean intelligible, while leaving intact the sense of mystery in the turning of what Wellington famously referred to as a ‘close run thing’. Then there is the experience of the participants, death and horror almost beyond imagination.
Almost, if death and horror were not such common things, the experience of them in combat renewed on a regular basis.
In one of our late night conversations about combat, about the gut memories that remain, one of the old Ia Drang vets said, ‘I’ll never forget the order to fix bayonets. I couldn’t believe it. I thought the lieutenant was out of his fucking mind.’ This was not the most intense of his experiences. He wears an eyepatch because there wasn’t enough of his eyesocket left to hold a glass eye after the North Vietnamese came through finishing off the wounded, when his platoon was overrun at the Ia Drang. But that was later, and he still remembers the gut feeling of the order to fix bayonets, leaving cover and moving forward into fire. ‘I still don’t know how I did it,’ he says.
It is a common refrain among old soldiers. Barbero quotes Sgt. William Lawrence of the 40th Foot, on being ordered to bear the regimental colours.
This, although I was used to warfare as much as any, was a job I did not at all like: but I still went as boldly to work as I could. There had been before me that day 14 sergeants already killed and wounded while in charge of these Colours and officers in proportion… This job will never be blotted from my memory; although I am now an old man, I remember it as if it had been yesterday. I had not been there more than a quarter of an hour when a cannon-shot came and took the captain’s head clean off. This was again close to me, for my left side was touching the captain’s right, and I was spattered all over with his blood. The men in their tired state began to despair, but the officers cheered them on continually throughout the day with the cry of ‘Keep your ground, my men!’ It is a mystery to me how it was accomplished, for at last there were so few left that there was scarcely enough to form a square.
It’s nearly 200 years, but that’s not so much time. It could be yesterday.
I think about Capt. Wolford’s radioed order to pour on speed for the assault as we came out of the desert at dawn, an armored column charging a dug-in enemy of unknown strength at Hindiyah. Sgt. Lustig’s radioed report, “We have contact,” followed shortly by shock waves. An Iraqi woman covering her child with her body under machinegun fire, and a teenaged soldier’s dead eyes staring at nothing. The RPG ambush south of Baghdad, when we shouted and then begged the 25 mm gunner, strangely silent up in the turret, to ‘just light up the fucking woods!’ The life leaving a man’s face, as a .50 caliber gunner mowed down Iraqi soldiers in front of the palaces in Baghdad. The strangers and the men I know who didn’t make it home. A couple of weeks ago, when I had finished reading about Waterloo, my father, who is an old man now, told me his mother’s great uncle had been there. This was a revelation. Name of Matthews, nothing else known. Except maybe the shared gut memory of combat, and a vague sense that all of this is somehow tied together.
(The above with minor modifications was written two weeks before I began this blog. Some of the themes and characters may be familiar if you’ve been a regular reader. Which probably makes the subject matter more of an obsession than an exploration. It is also about the fallacy of history as a concept, the idea that something so immediate could be anything but recovered memory, or news elaborated upon, nothing dead or distant about it. I’ll be meeting the same group of friends Friday, by the way. Guess what we’ll be talking about. Among them this time may be a veteran of 3/7 Cav with whom I shared the road to Baghdad but did not meet at the time, so that could be interesting. In other business, I’m very much enjoying analog life, thanks, and the fitting out of the shed is proceeding in satisfactory fashion.)
Related links:
Amazon, ”The Battle: A New History of Waterloo,” by Alessandro Barbero.
A detailed Web history of Napoleon’s 100 Days campaign here.
The Battle of Waterloo, BritishBattles.com
“My Ancestor Fought at Waterloo.” Lerwill on George Whyburn and the 40th Foot.
“The Field of Waterloo,” Sir Walter Scott.
Topics: Britain, Europe, France, history, military
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 3:45 am Comments (7) on Wednesday, June 18, 2008
7 Responses to “Waterloo”
Leave a Reply
Trackback URLYou must be logged in to post a comment.
June 18th, 2008 at 10:16 am
http://www.qohldrs.co.uk/html/piper_mackay.htm
Folk who don’t get why such men are respected wont get it, no matter how much is said or done to show why it is so.
June 18th, 2008 at 10:55 am
The French are still sulking about it.
June 18th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
Vacation over?
June 18th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
I became fascinated in my early youth (late 60’s to early 70’s) with the battle by reading the American Heritage Book on the battle of Waterloo. It was a coffee table size book with great illustrations and crisp descriptions of the battle. I checked it out so many times from my elementary school library that I think the school thought it was my book and I was leaving it for others to read every once in awhile.
The British cavalry charge and fighting around the square pictures in the post were in the book.
Here’s a question. If Napoleon had won that day would the Brits & Prussians called it a day or would they continue to fight? My bet is the Brits would continue and the Prussians go home.
June 18th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Re over: Non.
June 20th, 2008 at 7:40 pm
It is a fascinating battle for so many reasons, some of which you explore here Jules. Napoleon is obviously a fascinating man for his great strengths, great accomplishments, and great flaws. Wellington is less well known in depth, but no less fascinating for both his accomplishments and his equally deep weaknesses.
June 21st, 2008 at 8:35 am
Those friends are a treasure, Jules.