Waterloo holds an enduring, international appeal, with greater attention than ever focusing on the event as the bicentenary approaches in 2015. Accounting for this fascination amongst scholars, students, lay readers, historical re-enactors and wargamers poses little challenge, for few battles combine so many separate, but each compelling, struggles within a greater contest of arms: the stubborn defence of Hougoumont; the fight for the little farm of La Haie Sainte, the charge of the French heavy cavalry against Wellington’s centre, the bitter street-fighting in Plancenoit, the attack of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard and a host of other remarkable episodes whose outcome in nearly every case remained in the balance until evening.
Waterloo offers a glimpse into the events of a single day whose salient features appear to bear little resemblance to the experience of combat familiar to us today. The ‘invisible battlefield’ – that eerie environment shaped by the lethality of fire which so often separates combatants to the extent that they become effectively unseen – has brought a cold, impersonal detachment to what the soldiers of 1815 understood as a very intimate business of killing. The pathos associated with men deployed shoulder-to-shoulder, following a strict evolution of drill in order to load and fire their muskets in volleys at their geometrically arranged opposites from harrowingly short distances; and the dramatic spectacle of horsemen, resplendent in impractical but superbly colourful uniforms, wielding sword or lance, holds a particularly romantic appeal to those who, with considerable justice, believe that war since 1914 has reduced mankind to new depths of inhumanity – even barbarism – sullied by the substitution of machines for men, by the horrors associated with the mass destruction of civilians from 20,000ft and by conflicts waged for less honourable motives than those of an apparently lost, halcyon age.
The act of men standing opposite one another, blazing away like rival firing squads until the steadiness of one side or the other breaks under the pressure of fire or the impact of a bayonet assault somehow sparks the imagination, reminding us of the extraordinary courage required of soldiers who could, quite literally, see the whites of the enemy’s eyes. Waterloo marked the beginning of the end of chivalry, with 1914 signalling its final demise, as Andrew Roberts observed:
‘Ghastly as the carnage at Waterloo undoubtedly was, thenceforth wars were to be fought with the infinitely more ghastly methods of trenches (the Crimea), barbed wire, railways and machine-guns (the American Civil War), directed starvation (the Franco-Prussian War), concentration camps (the Boer War), and mustard gas and aerial bombardment (the First World War). By the time of the Great War, chivalry was effectively dead as an element of war-making.’
Roberts, Waterloo, p.15
Eyewitness accounts of extraordinary devotion to duty abound – adding further to the appeal of this subject. Sir Edward Creasy, the Victorian author of The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, related a number of examples of this spirit:
‘Never, indeed, had the national bravery of the French people been more nobly shown. One soldier in the French ranks was seen, when his arm was shattered by a cannon-ball, to wrench it off with the other; and throwing it up in the air, he exclaimed to his comrades, ‘Vive l’Empereur jusqu’ à la mort!… [A]t the beginning of the action, a French soldier who had both legs carried off by a cannon-ball, was borne past the front of Foy’s division, and called out to them, ‘Ce n’est rien, camarades; Vive l’Empereur! Glorie à la France.’ The same officer, at the end of the battle, when all hope was lost, tells us that he saw a French grenadier, blackened with powder, with his clothes torn and stained, leaning on his musket, and immovable as a statue. The colonel called to him to join his comrades and retreat; but the grenadier showed him his musket and his hands; and said ‘These hands have with this musket used to-day more than twenty packets of cartridges: it was more than my share: I supplied myself with ammunition from the dead. Leave me to die here on the field of battle. It is not courage that fails me, but strength.’
Creasy, London, 1877, p.614
Little wonder Waterloo continues to grip the imagination.
On a grand strategic level, it signified the end of an era – of over a century of conflict with France, with whom Britain would never again cross swords. Indeed, the two nations would co-operate in the Crimea forty years later and, of course, again in the two World Wars. It also marked the end of any further French attempts at territorial aggrandisement in Europe – which largely accounts for it also signifying the end of a long period of Anglo-French hostility which dated from the great conflict against Louis XIV which began in 1689 – though some may trace it back to the Hundred Years War if not to the Norman invasion. The comprehensive nature of Waterloo led to Napoleon’s final downfall and the re-drawing of the map of Europe, with central Europe rationalised into a few dozen, instead of a few hundred states – thereby setting the stage for German unification later in the century. As Andrew Roberts put it: ‘…it ended forever the greatest personal world-historical epic since that of Julius Caesar…’. Waterloo not only ended a generation of conflict, it put paid to such a blood-letting as Europe had not experienced since the religious wars of the seventeenth century and ushered in a hundred years of comparative peace. True, there were wars yet to be fought – the Crimean and those of Italian and German unification; but these paled into insignificance as compared with the sheer scale of the conflicts unleashed on Europe by the French revolutionaries in 1792, belatedly but definitively crushed in Belgium twenty-three years later. It was not for nothing that contemporary Britons referred to this period as ‘The Great War’ a century before the term was applied again in another, far more horrifying context.
Waterloo is not significant as representing a passing era of warfare and the beginning of a new phase, for the weaponry arrayed there bore a great deal in common with that deployed by the Duke of Marlborough’s army over a century earlier, and warfare on land would not undergo any genuinely significant change until the 1850s, with the application of rifling to small arms and, later, artillery, followed rapidly by the advent of breech-loading technology. But if the subtle differences between the weapons employed on either side at Waterloo did not palpably contribute to its outcome, the tactics employed there certainly did. In the absence of any great flanking movements on the battlefield, Waterloo amounted to a great slogging match, with the balance between victory and defeat depending heavily upon the degree of French determination to press home the attack and the stubbornness with which the Anglo-Allies were prepared to receive that attack. The fact that both sides fought with remarkable energy and spirit contributes all the more to the appeal of a subject which remains a great epic in the history of the British Army. Not for nothing Waterloo remains one of history’s greatest battles.