WATERLOO ECHOES STILL WITH HEROES
Ihave walked all of Wellington’s battlefields. Assaye, in India, is the least changed – a place where you can still kick musket balls out of the furrows where the Highlanders of the 74th suffered so grievously. I have climbed the Arapiles of Salamanca in Spain, perhaps the most beautiful of all the Duke’s battlefields, and marvelled at the grim walls of Badajoz where so many were to die in a night of slaughter, yet none of those places is as evocative as Waterloo.
The field of Waterloo has not been well kept. The damage began early when the Dutch made the Lion Mound, that great decaying monstrosity which marks the spot where the young Prince of Orange was wounded. My favourite moment of all the Sharpe books comes in Sharpe’s Waterloo when our hero does so much for the British cause by shooting the Prince who was, by far, the least capable commander on the field, yet whose monument now dominates the landscape.
To make the mound – a 120ft conical, hill – it was necessary to scrape the soil all along the right centre of Wellington’s position, so that today the ridge is appreciably lower than it was on June 18 1815. The buildings along that portion of the ridge are tawdry, while farther east a new road cuts across the rear of the British position, obliterating the ground where so many French cavalrymen died in Marshal Ney’s frantic assault against Wellington’s right.
Hougoumont, the farm at the centre of the battle, which was ceaselessly attacked by the French, has decayed, though happily an effort is now being made to conserve what remains. Yet despite the decay, despite even the vandalism that has disfigured the field, it is the most haunting of the Duke’s battlefields.
“Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts”, wrote Shakespeare of Agincourt, and every battlefield demands that we use imagination to fill the landscape with men, horses and weapons.
That is easy at Waterloo because all the action took place in such a small area. Nearly 200,000 men struggled in a space little more than three square miles. To understand the battle of Fuentes d’Onoro, in Spain, you need to walk or drive some miles, similarly at Salamanca, yet by standing at Wellington’s crossroads at Mont St Jean, or beside La Belle Alliance close to where Napoleon watched the combat, you can see almost all the battlefield.
“They came on in the same old way,” Wellington said dismissively of his opponents, “and we saw them off in the same old way.” The simplicity of the day’s tactics again help us to see in the mind’s eye what, 200 years ago, was obscured by showers and fogged by smoke.
It is a simple battle, one frontal assault after another, and that simplicity makes it easy to comprehend. The battle might be simple, but it is enormously significant.
This shallow valley on the road to Brussels was the scene of a startling drama. In the spring of 1815 no one in Europe would have had any trouble naming the two greatest soldiers of the age, an age that saw so many great generals and so many bloody conflicts.
The two, of course, were Napoleon and Wellington, yet in two decades of warfare they had never faced each other in battle. The emperor, though he had suffered disastrous defeats, was acknowledged as the supreme strategist, a master of war who had dazzled his enemies and whose presence on the battlefield, Wellington reckoned, was worth 40,000 men.
He had led armies from Madrid to Moscow, he had written his name in blood across Europe, but he had never faced the Duke who, in turn, had never lost a battle. Two giant reputations would meet at last.
The rivalry between Napoleon and Wellington was personal, yet they fought not just for reputation, but for the highest stakes.
You could argue that Wellington’s stunning triumph at Salamanca was unimportant, that the territorial gains made that day were all to be lost within months, and that if the battle had never happened the course of history would scarcely be different.
Some historians have made similar claims for Waterloo, asserting that if Napoleon had forced the ridge of Mont St Jean and driven Wellington back into a precipitate retreat, he would still have had to cope with the mighty armies of Austria and Russia that were marching towards France.
Yet that did not happen. Napoleon was stopped at Waterloo, and that gives the battle its significance. It marks the climactic end of over 50 years of warfare to determine whether France or Britain would be the dominant power.
That struggle began with the Seven Years War, continued through the American Revolution and was fought to an end in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars.
Waterloo shattered French hopes and to say history would have reached the same conclusion anyway is not to reduce the importance of the moment it happened. Some battles change nothing. Waterloo, like Trafalgar, changed almost everything.
The slaughter at Waterloo was horrific. “I had been over many a field of battle,” wrote the Rifle officer Harry Smith, “but... I had never seen anything to compare with what I saw. At Waterloo the whole field from right to left was a mass of dead bodies. The sight was sickening.”
That too we must now imagine, peopling a landscape with men engaged in what the Duke himself admitted was “a desperate business”.
And to understand that business we must first know what happened on June 18 and where it happened. There are many excellent guides to the fighting, though I would recommend David Buttery’s brilliant Waterloo, Battlefield Guide. At Waterloo you will stand where one of history’s greatest dramas unfolded and, like all great dramas, the story has a cliffhanger ending.
The fighting has raged all afternoon, but in the evening the undefeated Imperial Guard climb the slope to where Wellington’s battered forces are almost at breaking point. Off to the west the Prussians are clawing at Napoleon’s right, but if the Guard can break Wellington’s men then Napoleon still has time to turn against Blücher’s arriving troops. It is almost the longest day of the year, there are two hours of daylight left and time enough for one or even two armies to be destroyed. To know the story and to stand where it took place is to be filled with admiration for the heroism of the men who fought there.
Dutch, French, Belgians, Prussians and British – a true battle of nations fought in a place that even now holds echoes of their ordeal. Waterloo, 200 years later, is unforgettable.