Waterloo: A Near Run Thing PDF
Preview Waterloo: A Near Run Thing
WATERLOO A NEAR RUN THING DAVID HOWARTH ‘Probably the most exciting account ever written of one of Britain’s greatest victories’ Noel Barber David Howarth read physics and mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge. After graduating he worked for John Logie Baird, the inventor of television. This led him to join the BBC in its early days where he worked, often in tandem with Richard Dimbleby, as a presenter. In the Second World War he became a war correspondent for the BBC, reporting the chaos of Dunkirk, but with the fall of France he joined the Navy and was posted to Scapa Flow. From there he came under the command of the Special Operations Service running clandestine operations between Shetland and Norway. For this he was awarded the Norwegian Cross of Freedom and was created a Knight in the Order of St Olav, 1st Class — the highest honours that Norway could bestow upon a foreigner. In peacetime David Howarth remained in Shetland where he owned and ran a boatyard which built the traditional fishing boats peculiar to the islands. It was then that he started his writing career with the publication in 1951 of The Shetland Bus, a book about his wartime work which became a bestseller. Later books included Dawn of D-Day, Trafalgar: The Nelson Touch, The Greek Adventure, 1066: The Year of the Conquest and The Voyage of the Armada. He also wrote and presented BBC documentaries, notably a portrait of Nelson in the ‘Great Britons’ series and ‘Graf Spee’. David Howarth died in 1991, at the age of 78. By David Howarth Waterloo: A Near Run Thing Trafalgar: The Nelson Touch The Voyage of the Armada 1066: The Year of the Conquest The Greek Adventure Sovereign of the Seas The Golden Isthmus The Desert King The Shadow of the Dam Dawn of D-Day The Sledge Patrol We Die Alone The Shetland Bus Waterloo A Near Run Thing DAVID HOWARTH ‘It was a damned nice thing, the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life. ’ Phoenix A Windrush Press Book A PHOENIX PAPERBACK First published in Great Britain in 1968 by Collins as A Near Run Thing This paperback edition published in 1997 by The Windrush Press Reissued in 2003 in association with The Windrush Press by Phoenix, an imprint of Orion Books Ltd, Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin’s Lane, London WC2H 9EA Phoenix Paperbacks Sterling Publishing Co Inc 387 Park Avenue South New York NY 10016-8810 USA The Windrush Press Windrush House 12 Adlestrop Moreton in Marsh Glos GL56 OYN Second impression 2003 Copyright © 1968 by David Howarth Published by special arrangement with Stephen Howarth, Literary Trustee to the Estate of the late David Howarth The right of David Howarth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. isbn 1 84212 719 5 Typeset at The Spartan Press Ltd, Lymington, Hants Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc CONTENTS vii Introduction xiii List of Illustrations, Plans and Maps 1 Dawn Morning 29 Noon 63 Afternoon 95 Evening 133 Night 179 Index 197 INTRODUCTION ‘After the publication of so many accounts of the battle of the 18th of June, it may fairly be asked on what grounds I expect to awaken fresh interest in a subject so long before the public.’ This was written by Sergeant-Major Edward Cotton in the preface of his book about Waterloo, which was published over a hundred years ago. Since then, a great many more accounts have been written, and now the question may even more fairly be asked. So I must answer it. Waterloo was a most ferocious battle, an experience both harrowing and thrilling for the men who survived it: the total defeat of an empire, inflicted in a single Sunday afternoon on a field of battle only two miles long and two-thirds of a mile across. It was also a controversial battle. After the fighting was over, Napoleon blamed his marshals for the disaster, Prussians and British bickered over their shares of the victory, and officers of rival regiments argued about each other’s claims of glory. I think too much has been written about the arguments, and too little about the experience. The earliest accounts of the battle, in prose and verse, were written in a heroic style that many people even then, including the Duke of Wellington, knew was far from reality. Later, there were technical accounts, written by officers who were there, and read, one can only suppose, by officers who were not. Then, after the last survivors were dead, the controversy became the main topic, and many books, especially since the turn of the century, have analysed the orders given by Wellington and Napoleon, viii WATERLOO: A NEAR RUN THING and the marshals’ actions and the movements of regiments, in the smallest detail. That kind of critical analysis is the essence of military history, and it has an intellectual interest of its own. But it is not the essence of a battle: it does not describe a human experience. Historians can see a battle calmly as a whole, but no soldier in battle sees anything of the sort. He is half-blinded by gunsmoke, half-deafened by noise, and either half-paralysed by fright or driven to a kind of madness by exaltation and the hope of glory. The more thoroughly you analyse a battle, in the light of after knowledge, the harder it becomes to remember what it felt like to the people who were in it. And criticism, I think, can go too far. Every high commander at Waterloo, except perhaps Marshal Blücher, has been accused of blunders by armchair critics: not only Napoleon and his marshals, who lost, but Wellington and some of his generals, who won. It seems to me absurd that anyone nowadays, however learned he may be, can persuade himself he would have known better than they did at the time. All commanders make their decisions on the experience and information they possess, and it can only be legitimate now to say that they made mistakes if their own colleagues said so there and then, like the Prince of Orange’s colleagues, or if they said so themselves, like Lord Uxbridge. I am only surprised that anyone in the thick of a battle like Waterloo can make any wise decisions at all. Ney’s judge ment, for example, may have been less than perfect; but he had five horses shot under him during the afternoon. However, the Napoleonic Wars were the first in which it is still possible to see a battle from the soldier’s ground-level, smoke-shrouded point of view, because they were the first in which enough of the soldiers were literate. Many junior officers, sergeants and even privates wrote reminiscences or letters after Waterloo, some very soon after, to reassure their families, and some many years after, to occupy their old age. These soldiers’ stories have nothing to say about strategy and not very much INTRODUCTION ix about tactics, and so they are only sparsely used, on the whole, in the critical histories. But some of them give very clear impressions of the tiny part of a battle which is all that a soldier sees. In this book, I have tried to go back to the beginning, as it were, to describe the battle as it appeared, on the day it was fought, to the men who fought in it. The book only tells the soldiers’ story, without any scholarly afterthoughts: what they saw and heard and felt, the little that they knew, the trivialities they remembered afterwards, and their elementary idea of what it was all about. I have not quoted directly very much of what they wrote, because masses of quotations are tedious to read, and because their style seems quaint, which is only a distraction. They were not quaint at all. Behind their stilted prose, and underneath their peacock uniforms, they were much the same kind of people as their descendants are today. One can still understand their feelings. Among all the accounts of the vast historic drama, my favourite was given by a very small British soldier on the morning after. ‘I’ll be hanged if I know anything about the matter,’ was all he could find to say, ‘for I was all day trodden in the mud and ridden over by every scoundrel who had a horse.’ It is not my business to praise or blame them: I have tried to see them as they saw themselves. But also, I have tried to use my own understanding of people, such as it is, to discover why they acted as they did. Here and there, this has led me beyond the limits I meant to set myself: for example, I have put in some speculations about Napoleon’s health. Napoleon did make mistakes, he was not himself: his generals knew he was making them, and said so, and wondered what was wrong with him. At that time, they could not guess, but now one can. The questions they asked themselves were part of the experience of the day, and it would have been foolish, I think, to report the questions without the most probable answers. This is not a work of scholarship, so I have not dignified it with
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