Book review: Waterloo - Four Days That Changed Europe’s Destiny
Four Days That Changed Europe’s Destiny
Tim Clayton
Little, Brown, €21
TO FRENCH novelist Victor Hugo it was “not a battle, but a change in the direction of the world.” When news of it reached England the previously Republican Poet Laureate Robert Southey and fellow Romanticist William Wordsworth danced around a bonfire on the Lake District mountain Skiddaw singing “God Save the King” and feasting on “roasted beef and boiled plum puddings.”
For the Irish Major Mick O’Dowd in Thackeray’s enduring satire Vanity Fair it was “a ball danced . . . as some of ‘em has never heard the chune of.”
And for Byron, never the most reliable barometer of public opinion, the defeat of Napoleon by the united nations of Europe at Waterloo was deeply depressing, occasioning him less than a year later to travel from Ostend to the battlefield in a replica of the Emperor’s coach.
There he wrote the opening verses of the third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage lamenting the defeat of enlightenment at “this place of skulls.”
When the bi-centenary of Waterloo (or Mont Saint Jean as the French know it) takes place this summer there will be no great public commemorative event in Britain, the nation that has taken credit for the defeat of Bonaparte.
Any such mass celebration has been ruled out by the Department of Culture although, in an election year, as a delicious irony, it could play well with UKIP supporters who are, if anything, less keen on their nearest continental neighbours than their forebears of two centuries ago.
There will be exhibitions, including one curated by the author of this magisterial and immaculately researched book at the British Museum, opening on February 5, a service at St Paul’s, one or two pageants and banquets, a Regency Fair in St James’s Square (pass the syllabub) but no grand event which emphasises the importance of these four days in June 200 years ago when 200,000 men were engaged in a struggle which laid the foundations of contemporary Europe.
Given what was taking place 100 years later on the Western Front it is unsurprising that there was no co-ordinated recognition in 1915 of a coalition victory which was achieved, in great part, thanks to the contribution of the Prussians and Hanoverians (some 45% of Wellington’s army were German-speaking).
But 200 years later, the low key nature in which it is being marked (compare this with the explosion of activity around The Great War) bespokes the intrusion of contemporary politics into historical perspective.
When Napoleon escaped banishment from Elba off the coast of Tuscany in February 1815 he was fulfilling a promise to supporters made the previous April. He would, he said, “return in the violet season”.
The violet was his favourite flower. Followers took to wearing it instead of the banned tricolour cockade of the Empire and greeting each other in code “Aimez-vous la violette?” A Bonapartist would reply not in the affirmative but with “Eh bien?” to which the correct response was “Elle reparaitra au printemps.”
Few believed this to be other than myth-making so the shock when the 46-year-old exile landed near Cannes with 551 Grenadiers of his Old Guard, 94 Polish lancers, and 301 Corsican light infantry in a total expeditionary force of 1,026, was seismic.
The charismatic figure who had dominated world affairs since 1799, and who held powers of dictatorship which were to be unknown again until the rise of Adolf Hitler, was back after fewer than 10 months during which the veteran soldiers of his opponents had been stood down and dispersed.
Napoleon began his “100 Days” with a fast 150-mile march north to Grenoble where a strong garrison barred his way. The reinstated Bourbon court sent a battalion to stop his advance. Bonaparte walked towards the assembled musketry, threw open his trademark greatcoat, and declared: “Soldiers of the Fifth — you recognise me. If there is one among you who wishes to kill his Emperor, I am here.”
“Vive l’Empereur” was the response as they tore off their white Royalist emblems and rushed forward to embrace their old colleagues of the Imperial Guard.
And “Vive l’Empereur” and the words of the Marsellaise was the soundtrack as a swelling tide of men and supporters in train rolled into Paris and on towards a crossroads 15km south of Brussels where the destiny of the old world was to be decided between the 16th and 19th of a rain-soaked June, with the decisive encounter taking place on Sunday June 18 with the Duke of Wellington praying that “either night or the Prussians must come.”
Arrayed against the resurgent Bonaparte and his 78,000 troops who had a superiority in artillery and cavalry was an alliance of the Netherlands, the British, and the sovereign German states of Prussia, Hanover, Brunswick, and Nassau totalling 118,000 men under the control of Wellington and General Blucher.
Crucially many of the British troops who had repelled the Bonapartists in the Peninsular War had been redeployed to North America or were needed to discourage anti-Corn Law protests at home.
His army in Belgium may not have been “the scum of the earth” but they were not the seasoned warriors with which Wellington had prevailed in Portugal and Spain two and three years earlier.
Alcohol consumption was universally high, discipline harsh, most commissions were purchased (compared to the French where three quarters of officers had worked their way through the ranks). Up to a third of the men in English infantry regiments were Irish, and there was also a high proportion of Scots.
The mortality rate of Waterloo — one in every four combatants was killed — was shocking even by the standards of the American Civil War and the First World War.
When the English painter Joseph Turner visited the killing fields in 1817 he produced one of his most memorable landscapes, a vision of a charnel house at night, a mountainous pile of corpses and decaying lumps of flesh, the ground slippery with blood and mud, with relatives searching for loved ones.
It was said that the stench of Waterloo pervaded for months and when Turner hung his masterpiece at the Royal Academy one year later it was as brave and blatant an example of anti-war sentiment as it was possible to achieve.
The gory ground of Waterloo accelerated several important changes in the management of mass manoeuvre armies.
Until Waterloo battlefield medical provision was non-existent. Survivors had to return to Brussels by any means possible, or lie untended for days or, in the case of French casualties, for up to a fortnight.
Even then they ran the risk of being pillaged by civilian looters searching for gold watches and rings. Spectacle frames were removed from the dead and dying.
Even teeth were extricated and returned to London for the manufacture of dentures. Souvenirs such as buckles and badges were hawked for years. Battlefield tourism became a new phenomenon.
Surgeons used saws and knives for amputation without washing them, or their hands, and antiseptics were unknown. Many of the non-fatally injured were to die anyway through septicaemia.
The fighting was a catalogue of miscommunication and misunderstood orders.
Battalions and companies could not find their generals or their officers, attacked the wrong enemy at the wrong time, and, as with the famous charge of the Royal Scots Greys, became carried away after their initial success in breaking a French infantry square, depriving their commander of important heavy cavalry resources later in the day. Desperate things, done in a desperate hurry.
The lessons of the campaign improved hygiene, signals and led to 40 years of peace after 22 years of conflict with the French until the Crimean War of 1854.
Twenty-two years of opposition to French Republicanism cost the British £850m, and earned a £700,000 bonus for the Iron Duke who was the foremost soldier of the century, and a prime minister in waiting.
Wellington also oversaw the use of rockets for the first time in a European war, although he thought them as dangerous to friend as to foe.
Napoleon’s attempt to flee to the United States was intercepted and he was exiled, this time to the fastness of the South Atlantic on St Helena where he died.
The last word on his lips was “Josephine.” But the laconic personality of Wellington was the glue that held the coalition together. Detested in France, and proud of it, he revelled in their enmity.
At a ball in Vienna, when his hostess apologised because the French had turned their backs upon his entry he simply smiled and said: “ ’Tis of no matter, your Highness. I have seen their backs before.”
It’s a sentiment which many English still cherish.
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