The Classic Account

History of the Waterloo Campaign. The Classic Account of the Last Battle of the Napoleonic Wars, H.T. Siborne, Frontline Books, Barnsley, 2016, hardback, £25.00, pp. 584, ISBN 9781848329614

Military historians and a wider range of readers enticed by the blood and thunder exploits of Bernard Cornwell’s Richard Sharpe in the Napoleonic Wars will welcome the publication of this new edition of Captain William Siborne’s classic account of the Waterloo Campaign first published in 1848, a year before the author’s death, under the title History of the War in France and Belgium in 1815. Focusing upon the Battle of Waterloo it also covers the Battles of Ligny and Quatre-Bras and is a valuable addition to Frontline’s Napoleonic Library in the year following the bicentenary of the Battle of Waterloo in 2015, with nearly 600 pages of text including a sequence of original graphic engravings by George Jones R.A., first published in 1817.

Captain William Siborne became an ensign in the 9^th (East Norfolk) Regiment of Foot in 1813 and was sent to France two years later as part of a battalion despatched to reinforce Wellington’s army. Having published his first book in 1819 he achieved an enduring influence on the interpretation of Waterloo by his construction of a scale model of the battlefield for which he carried out extensive research soliciting information from allied officers. Moreover, his model remains on display to this day at the National Army Museum in London. He also utilised the primary sources he collected for this project, the largest single collection of primary source material on the subject ever assembled, including his own correspondence with participants in the events he describes, to write this substantial account. It also draws upon his unrivalled topographical knowledge and remains one of the most detailed and extensive accounts of the battle utilising both British and Allied sources explaining how the battle was fought and won.

His perspective as a contemporary who had been extensively involved in the action was intensely nationalistic, concluding that ‘if one country more than any other required a lasting peace to enable her to recover from the effects of the immense sacrifices she had made, in life and treasure – sacrifices which proved, beyond doubt, the salvation of Europe – that country was Great Britain. Moreover he attributed Britain’s success unhesitatingly to ‘the rare talent, the untiring zeal, and practised skill’ provided by the leadership of the Duke of Wellington and ‘the inflexible courage, extraordinary endurance and the perfect discipline, of her sons’ who fought, what appeared to the author as Britain’s ‘last and ever-memorable struggle on the continent of Europe’, a conclusion no longer tenable from a twenty-first century perspective.