Bonaparte's Last Stand

...Seeing Milhaud's cuirassiers attack, the cavalry general Charles Lefebvre-Desnottes followed on . . . by the same time the force crossed the west side of the Charleroi-Brussels road it numbered forty-three squadrons of heavy cavalry...

...it was confidence in what a successful soldiery under brave subordinate commanders could accomplish— armies that had heretofore rarely failed their commanders...

...Wellington pointed at a British private idling nearby...

...The 12-pounder cannon (this is the weight of the solid-shot cannonball) employed the same technology of the 18th century—its effectiveness at Waterloo drastically limited by the saturated ground over which the battle was fought...

...artillery, cavalry, and infantry at Waterloo...

...Watching over the whole, coolly directing the disparate elements of his army, moving from one end of the British line to the other, indifferent to enemy fire, the Duke of Wellington proved himself, on this day, Napoleon's superior...

...It all depends on that article, whether we do the business or not...

...Modern readers are equally challenged by the sheer density of military narrative accounts of such battles, by their thick geographical references, unfamiliar names, titles, points of reference: "General le Comte Milhaud's IV Cavalry Corps set off on their doomed charge towards the Anglo-Allied infantry, with Ney at their head...

...Napoleon's determination to engage the Anglo-Allied army and its Prussian cohort bears comparison to Robert E. Lee's conviction that Gettysburg must be fought on the ground where the armies found themselves on July 1, 1863...

...The commonplace observation, honestly employed but denatured by overuse, records the writer's ability to walk across such fields without ever touching the ground...

...He said, "There...

...They usually fail, viz: "The field of battle, after the victory, presented a frightful and most distressing spectacle...

...Roberts makes the point that though Waterloo was fought a seventh of the way into the 19th century, it was prosecuted with artillery and small arms of roughly the same capabilities as those of 1745—indeed, of 1715...

...Another, by a participant, suggests that the disastrous attacks by the French cavalry under Marshal Ney, late in the afternoon of June 18, had been set off prematurely by simple movements on the right of the French force trying to come into proper alignment with other units...

...Within a month, Napoleon had surrendered his person to an English frigate...

...BY JOSIAH BUNTING III The Battle of Waterloo, on June 18, 1815, has been picked over as thoroughly as the corpses that littered its battlefield and muddy roads of retreat on the evening that ended the slaughter...

...A participant remembered: "I have seen nothing like that moment, the sky literally darkened with smoke, the sun just going down, and which till then had not for some hours broken through the gloom . . . the indescribable shouts of thousands . . . every man's arm seemed to be raised against that of every other . . . the mingled mass ebbed and flowed, the enemy began to yield...

...Communicating such horror is impossible...

...of whom, however, like most military history, it demands self-conscious alertness, access to good maps, biographical references sources, and some knowledge of 18th-century, weaponry...

...Give me enough of it, and I am sure...

...Two letters are reproduced in the book's appendix: one by a young English officer to his father, and written several days after the battle...

...And in the prosecution of both battles, the attackers suffered poor coordination among the different arms (artillery and infantry at Gettysburg...

...Helena...

...The battle's butcher bill, including Josiah Bunting III, president of the Guggenheim Foundation and former superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, is working on a biography of George C. Marshall...

...a few weeks later he began his long and terminal exile at St...

...Still, Wellington's army, given the nature of the ground it defended and the professionalism of its soldiers, and Wellington's métier as commanding general, and the strangely disconnected character of the French tactical offensives, made the victory an outcome more likely than less...

...It is lucid and eloquent— perhaps the best short account available to the general reader...

...Accounts of the appearance of the "field"—Waterloo was a compact battlefield—differ little in their verbiage from similar accounts of Shiloh and the Somme, of Gettysburg and the Meuse-Argonne...

...prodromal engagements and skirmishes on the two days before, was 120,300 killed and wounded...

...The movement was misinterpreted by a cavalry squadron nearby, who now believed the order to charge had been given...

...The language is Andrew Roberts's from a new, brief, general account of the battle...

...The massive assault failed disastrously...

...Andrew Roberts quotes the great Dutch historian Pieter Geyl: History is a continuing unresolved argument...

...Surviving participants grope for language equal to their horror and disbelief...

...It reproduces faithfully the ambience and easy confidence, bordering on insouciance, of the British Army in Brussels...

...It was not arrogance...

...In each case there was a tacit underestimation of enemy strength, capability, and— above all—the advantages terrain provided...

...The standard infantry weapon on the British side was the Brown Bess musket, by 1818 already 70 years in use...

...On June 18, the Duke had just enough of it (the reductionist "it" is important), facing the final French charge of the Old Guard, at 7:30, to win the most important battle of the 19th century...

...Each fresh generation must look at Waterloo according to new evidence and its own preoccupations...

...A week earlier, out for a walk in the park in Brussels, he had found himself in conversation with the journalist/diarist Thomas Creevey, a kind of Dominick Dunne of his day...

...Many of the ablest regiments of the British Army missed Waterloo: They were still in America, dealing with General Jackson...