Gareth Glover - The Waterloo Archive Volume V: German Sources

The Waterloo Archive: Volume V

This edition published in 2013 by Frontline Books,
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Gareth Glover, 2013 Foreword Prince Michael of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, 2013

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The key to history lies not in history itself but in each individual.

THODORE JOUFFROY

Raise high the black flags, my children. No prisoners. No pity. I will shoot any man

I see with pity in him.

FIELD MARSHAL GEBHARD VON BLCHER AT WATERLOO, ADDRESSING HIS TROOPS

Having been asked, as a direct descendant of Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, to support volume V of the Waterloo archive, the above quotes came to my mind: they best depict what I felt, when I read the first volume of the Waterloo archive.

Many intelligent analyses were made on the battle of Waterloo, many considerations on its impact on the political development in Europe, on literature, on the arts and on daily life in the nineteenth century. Never ever has the voice of the simple soldiers who took part in this unbelievably cruel event, which changed the face of our continent, mattered. Never ever were those, who took part in the campaign, called into the witness stand of history.

The credit belongs to Gareth Glover that the voices of soldiers and officers of all fighting nations at Waterloo, documented through their very personal and private letters (mostly to their families), can now, for the first time, be heard by the public. The human facets the suffering, the heroism, the pity and the furore all this has been the missing link when trying to understand this historical event, the battle of Waterloo.

Prince Bernhard believed in his mission: the rescue of Europe from the devilish and ingenious parvenu Bonaparte. His 2nd Brigade of the 2nd Dutch Division was the first of the Duke of Wellingtons forces to arrive at the crossroads of Quatre Bras. Prince Bernhards brigade held those crossroads, preventing Marshal Michel Ney with the left wing of the French Arme du Nord from taking them before the Duke of Wellington arrived. The successful holding action by the two brigades (the 1st Brigade joined the 2nd later) of the Dutch 2nd Division was one of the most important actions by any of the coalition brigades in the whole of the Waterloo campaign. At the Battle of Waterloo Prince Bernhard commanded the allied forces holding the farms of Papelotte, Frichermont and la Hay, locations of high strategic importance, because from there Prince Bernhard could hinder the French from outflanking Wellington before the Prussians arrived.

Michael, Prince of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach

Duke of Saxony

A project of this complexity cannot be accomplished without the willing support of many others. First I must, of course, thank Martin Mittelmacher, who patiently and lovingly translated all of the copious material in the two German volumes, for which he has earned not only my heartfelt thanks but also my total respect for his incredible knowledge of the German troops at Waterloo. Particular thanks must also be offered in this volume to Michael-Andreas Tnzer, who very kindly copied to me a large number of very rare German publications for Martin to translate. My grateful thanks must also extend to the staff of the British Library, who have been incessantly bombarded by me for copies of various publications, and for their granting so freely permission to publish translations of the same. I must also thank Stefan Felleckner, archivist for the County of Gifhorn, for permission to publish the letters of Private Schacht and Lieutenant Hemmelmann of the Gifhorn battalion, originally published in Erinnerungen an Waterloo: Weg und Schicksal des Landwehrbataillons Gifhorn, published by Gunter Weinhold in 1985, and to Volkner Schwichtenberg, Managing Director of the Mnch Group, for kindly granting permission to publish translations of excerpts from Joachim Kannichts book Und alles wegen Napoleon: Aus dem Kriegstagebuch des Georg von Coulon, Major der Kniglichen Legion, und die Briefe seiner Frau Henriette 1806 1815 , published by Bernard & Graefe in 1986. Also to Guntram Muller-Schellenberg, for his permission to publish the extracts of Private Leonhard of the Nassau contingent, which he originally jointly published with the late Peter Wacker in Das herzoglich-nassauische Militar 1813 1866 (Schellenbergsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Taunusstein,1983). But more than anyone else, I must thank my wife, Mary, and children Sarah and Michael for their forbearance and encouragement, as always my work is dedicated to them.

I must also thank Philip Haythornthwaite for his expert help and suggestions regarding this text.

Gareth Glover

Readers of the previous four volumes of the Waterloo Archive will already be aware of the reasons why I have embarked upon this crusade to bring into the public domain such a mass of new material relating to the Waterloo campaign and the subsequent occupation of France by the allied forces from 1815 18; however, a short recap for new readers will not go amiss.

A huge amount of material has been written regarding the Waterloo campaign, perhaps more than on any other campaign before or since, so what can possibly be new, and is there anything more to learn? Having spent years surveying the existing material published over the last nearly 200 years, the answer will perhaps be surprising to many: a resounding yes.

In the previous volumes I have explored the archives of Britain and those of our ex-colonial brothers where much material including art works which have never previously been published were discovered, including some astonishing finds of truly historical significance and I will return to this treasure trove in the final volume, VI, in due course.

But what of volume V? This time I return to the German troops, who actually formed the majority of the forces present at the Battle of Waterloo including the troops of Nassau, a small German state, some of whose troops actually served in the Dutch army at the battle. Some record of the actions of the troops of the Kings German Legion, which was considered as an integral part of the British army and thus partly officered by British citizens, has therefore been published in English, but to a very limited degree. However, this tiny portion of German material has been virtually all that has been available to students of this campaign who did not possess a high level of German language skills until very recently and it is therefore not very surprising that early British histories of the battle have largely sidelined the achievements of the German troops and this stance has been regurgitated by most that have followed. This situation did not change at all until the 1990s, when Peter Hofschroer published his two-volume version of the campaign from the German perspective, which included numerous snippets of various German documents published for the first time in English to support his view of the campaign; but even this is not satisfactory, as it left much more still to be translated and published and did not provide the whole documents to allow further interpretation. There is, therefore, still a great need to provide an English version of much of the original German source material to aid historians redress this imbalance.