Maj. Harry Smith, a vastly experienced British officer who had fought at
New Orleans and through some of the hardest battles of the Peninsular
War, wrote, “I had never seen anything to compare. At Waterloo the whole
field from right to left was a mass of bodies… The sight was
sickening.”
Thus writes
Bernard Cornwell in the New York Times. The
historical novelist is the author of
Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles.
We
have witness accounts of many battles, but nothing matches the sheer
volume of writing about Waterloo, and that huge archive gives us
privileged glimpses of the day.
John
Lewis, a British rifleman, was standing next to a man who was struck by
a French musket ball: “He just said, ‘Lewis, I’m done!’ and died.” A
half mile away, a French cavalryman, seeing a prostrate British officer
stir, exclaimed in surprise, “Tu n’est pas mort, coquin!” and stabbed
him with a lance.
Edward
Macready, a 17-year-old British officer, was clutched by a friend who
had just been wounded. “Is it deep, Mac?” he screamed, “Is it deep?” A
Prussian conscript, not much older than Macready, wrote to his parents
after the battle, “Tell my sister I didn’t soil my pants!” A French
officer had his nose severed by a sword cut and cried out pathetically,
“Look what they do to us!”
These
are voices from a battle long ago and they bring life to callous
casualty figures. Those figures were horrific. Johnny Kincaid, a British
rifle officer, said that he had “never heard of a battle in which
everybody was killed, but this seemed likely to be an exception.”
And
it was not only men who died. After the battle, a British officer, Lt.
Charles Smith, had the grim task of retrieving his unit’s dead, and
while disentangling a heap of corpses found a French officer “of a
delicate mould and appearance.” It was a young woman. We will never know
who she was, only that Lieutenant Smith thought her beautiful. 
I
surmise she could not bear to be parted from her lover and charged with
him to her death.
… Gen.
Baron von Müffling, the Prussian liaison officer to the Duke of
Wellington, watched the British line advance at the day’s end. The whole
army was supposed to join that attack, but von Müffling remembered only
small groups going forward, because “the position in which the infantry
had fought was marked, as far as the eye could see, by a red line
caused by the red uniforms of the numerous killed and wounded who lay
there.” It is a terrible image, a tideline of the dead and dying.
Wellington
set the tone for today’s commemorations when he wrote to a friend a
month after the battle, saying, “It is quite impossible to think of
glory. Both mind and feelings are exhausted. I am wretched even at the
moment of victory, and I always say that next to a battle lost, the
greatest misery is a battle gained. I am now just beginning to retain my
natural spirits, but I never wish for any more fighting.”
Update:
Courage and commerce -- which did more to enrich humanity (cheers to the
jaymaster):
We admire achievements in war, a negative-sum game in which
people get hurt on both sides, more than we do those in commerce,
where both sides win.
… We know almost nothing of the merchants who made ancient Greece
rich enough to spawn an unprecedented culture, but we know lots
about the deeds of those who squandered that wealth in war.
… in the very same year, 1815, George Stephenson, a humble,
self-taught engine-wright with an impenetrable Geordie accent (to
which he probably gave the name), put together all the key
inventions that — at last — made steam locomotion practicable. … The
year of Waterloo was an annus mirabilis of the
industrial revolution, putting Britain on course to dominate and
transform the world, whether we beat Boney or not.
