Jonathan Gillespie-Payne - Waterloo: In the Footsteps of the Commanders

Ever since I was a young boy, I have held an untamed curiosity for the events of 18 June 1815. Initially it was the splendour of the Napoleonic era, the uniforms, the romance, but as I have grown older, I have been captivated by the personalities and how they interacted. As a former soldier, and one who has known that gut-wrenching fear the individual feels when they face battle for the first time, the ability of the soldiers to withstand what they did that day is almost unfathomable. It was, therefore, only logical that one of the first ports of call when I went to live in Brussels for two years would be the battlefield at Waterloo.

I was bitterly disappointed when I first visited. The Belgians had built a huge memorial to the Prince of Orange and in the process had destroyed the sunken road and turned the centre of the Allied line around this monument into a cheap and tacky tourist trap selling expensive and shabby tourist trinkets. I can only agree with the Duke of Wellington when he declared after visiting Waterloo in the 1820s that they have spoilt my battlefield. I looked to buy a guide, one that was compact, readable, contained enough detail to satisfy my curiosity but not too much to bog me down and detract from my tour of the battlefield. The only guide I could find in English was evidently aimed at bus groups and had nowhere near the information I wanted or indeed already knew, so I decided to tour the battlefield alone with only my own knowledge.

By the end of the day, I was stunned and found myself asking who had won the battle anyway? The local preference for Napoleon was so strong, anyone who visited the place without prior knowledge would have assumed a French victory and assumed that this bloody field was the reason why the nations of Europe have come together to form a community that will eventually become one enormous common identity. Belgian self-promotion? Wounded French pride justifying defeat? British reserve unable to blow ones own trumpet?

I decided at that point the battlefield deserved a guide book, not only one that accurately placed, translated and explained the many memorials, explained the events of the battle both on 18 June and also in the greater context, but also took on a more personal angle. What exactly did the commanders see that day? The valley between the opposing armies must have been a dark, smoke-filled hell hole choked with blood and torn bodies and certainly would not have provided the sort of views one sees today. And who were the commanders? Wellington and Napoleon surely; this was the title fight, the two greatest captains of their day meeting for the first time. But it wasnt that simple. Napoleon had given command of his Left Wing to Marshal Michel Ney, the most colourful and probably most maligned of all of Napoleons twenty-six soldiers he promoted to the Marshalate. Ney was the French battle captain that day, responsible for the tactical handling of the army, leaving Napoleon to control the strategic level. It therefore makes sense to look at both Napoleon and Ney when touring the battle from the French command perspective. All three men were different; Wellington the consummate professional soldier, driven by duty; Napoleon the military genius whose ambition knew no bounds and Ney, the barrel coopers son who rose from the ranks with a Marshals baton in his knapsack and sought only the sort of glory that a schoolboy dreams of.

The result of my wanderings around the battlefield of Waterloo is this book, yet another in the in a long line of books about the most written about battle in world history. It was written for a reason, born out of frustration because of the lack of specific material for my needs. It is compact, hopefully easy to read and contains just enough detail to appeal to both the enthusiast and the uninitiated. My wish is you come away from the battlefield with not only a clear understanding of what happened, but why it happened and why events ordered by the respective commanders unfolded. I believe this guide needed to be written to give that understanding and because when 50,000 men become casualties at the rate of just under 100 per minute, they deserve that understanding from future generations.

JGP

Farnham

December 2003

PART ONE
The Protagonists

This is a man with whom I
shall have to deal