Читать книгу Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 6

WHY ANOTHER BOOK ON Waterloo? It is a good question. There is no shortage of accounts of the battle, indeed it is one of the most studied and written-about battles in history. From the close of that dreadful day in June 1815, everyone who took part in the slaughter knew that they had survived something significant, and the result was hundreds of memoirs and letters describing the experience. Yet the Duke of Wellington was surely right when he said that a man might as well tell the history of a ball, meaning a dance, as write the story of a battle. Everyone who attends a ball has a different memory of the event, some happy, some disappointing, and how, in the swirl of music and ball gowns and flirtations, could anyone hope to make a coherent account of exactly what happened and when and to whom? Yet Waterloo was the deciding event at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and ever since men and women have tried to provide that coherent account.

There is an agreed story. Napoleon attacks Wellington’s right in an attempt to draw the Duke’s reserves to that part of the battlefield, then launches a massive attack on the Duke’s left. That attack fails. Act Two is the great cavalry assault on the Duke’s centre-right, and Act Three, as the Prussians arrive stage left, is the desperate last assault by the undefeated Imperial Guard. To those can be added the subplots of the assaults on Hougoumont and the fall of La Haie Sainte. As a framework that has some merit, but the battle was far more complicated than that simple story suggests. To the men who were present it did not seem simple, or explicable, and one reason to write this book is to try and give an impression of what it was like to be on that field on that confusing day.

The survivors of that confusion would surely be bemused by the argument that Waterloo really was not that important, that if Napoleon had won then he would have still faced overwhelming enemies and ultimate defeat. That is probably, though not certainly, true. If the Emperor 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 is a turning point of history, and to say history would have turned anyway is not to reduce the importance of the moment it happened. Some battles change nothing. Waterloo changed almost everything.

Military history can be confusing. Roman numerals (IV Corps) march to meet Arabic numerals (3rd Div), and such labels tend to blur in the non-military mind. I have tried to avoid too much confusion, though perhaps I have added to it by using the words ‘battalion’ and ‘regiment’ to mean the same thing, when plainly they do not. The regiment was an administrative unit in the British army. Some regiments consisted of a single battalion, most had two battalions, and a few had three or even more. It was extremely rare for two British battalions of the same regiment to fight alongside each other in the same campaign, and at Waterloo only two regiments had that distinction. The 1st Regiment of Foot Guards had its 2nd and 3rd battalions at the battle, while the 95th Rifles had three battalions present. Every other battalion was the sole representative of its regiment, so if I refer to the 52nd Regiment I am meaning the 1st Battalion of that regiment. I sometimes use the term Guardsman for clarity, though in 1815 the privates of the British Guards were still referred to as ‘Private’.

All three armies at Waterloo were divided into Corps, thus both the British–Dutch army and the Prussian army were divided into three Corps. The French had four, because the Imperial Guard, though not referred to as a Corps, was effectively the same thing. A Corps could be anything from 10,000 to 30,000 men or more, and was intended to be an independent force, capable of deploying cavalry, infantry and artillery. In turn a Corps was divided into divisions, thus the French 1st Army Corps was divided into four infantry divisions, each between 4,000 and 5,000 strong, and one cavalry division with just over 1,000 men. Each division contained its own supporting artillery. A division might then be further split into brigades, thus the 2nd Infantry Division of the 1st Army Corps contained two brigades, one of seven battalions, the other of six. Battalions were split into companies; a French battalion had eight companies, a British had ten. The most common term in this book will be battalion (sometimes called a regiment). The largest British infantry battalion at Waterloo had over 1,000 men, but the average battalion, in all three armies, was around 500 men. So, in brief, the hierarchy was Army, Corps, Division, Brigade, Battalion, Company.

Some readers may be offended by the usage ‘English army’ when plainly the reference is to the British army. I have used the term ‘English army’ only where it occurs in original sources, choosing not to translate Anglais as British. There was no such thing as the English army, but in the early nineteenth century it was a term in common usage.

The battles of 16 June and 18 June 1815 make for a magnificent story. History is rarely kind to historical novelists by providing a neat plot with great characters who act within a defined time-period, so we are forced to manipulate history to make our own plots work. Yet when I wrote Sharpe’s Waterloo my plot almost entirely vanished to be taken over by the great story of the battle itself. Because it is a great story, not only in its combatants but in its shape. It is a cliffhanger. No matter how often I read accounts of that day, the ending is still full of suspense. The undefeated Imperial Guard climbs the ridge to where Wellington’s battered forces are almost at breaking point. Off to the east 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. We might know how it ends, but like all good stories it bears repetition.

So here it is again, the story of a battle.