by Andrew Uffindell and Michael Corum
Published by Greenhill Books 25 pounds

The first book I bought on the Battle of Waterloo was Jac Weller's Wellington at Waterloo in 1967 which, passé though it most certainly is now, I still rate as one of the most readable, warts and all. Over the following thirty years or so, I suppose at least a dozen more have appeared. On the whole they are a pretty mediocre bunch, each being little more than repetitions of those that have gone before them, indeed, it is possible to suggest with a degree of confidence, that no original research has been conducted on this campaign for, probably, a hundred years.

If one cannot share Henry Ford's view that "history" in its entirety "is bunk", the accusation is not without merit where much of the recent material on the Waterloo campaign is concerned. Under the circumstances one can, therefore, sympathise with those who slip into life-threatening comas when they receive news of the publication of yet another book about the Hundred Days. One automatically tends to ask the question, do we really need another book on Waterloo? The answer is that we probably do, so long as it is not like all the others the Waterloo 'industry' has inflicted on us in recent years.

On the Fields of Glory does not contain any new material but it does attempt to present the account from a number of different angles insofar as the reader is entitled to infer from the title that it is about the battlefields of the 1815 campaign specifically. Unfortunately the book is badly misnamed in this respect. The approach attempted by the two authors is also not dissimilar to that used by Paul Britten Austin in his recent account of the 1812 campaign, which apart from Anthony Brett-James' 1964 treatment has not, as far as I know, been done before with the 1815 campaign.

However, they only succeed in parts. Finally, On the Fields of Glory attempts to be a guide to the ground on which the events it describes took place. In this last respect the book does succeed and is probably as good, and as expensive, an English language guide book to the Battle of Waterloo as you will find.

The Six Parts of Glory

The book is divided into six parts, each of a varying number of chapters, that seem to follow a logical progression. However, bearing in mind that the full title is On the Fields of Glory - The Battlefields of the 1815 Campaign, the reader will be immediately disappointed. Ligny and Quatre Bras are dealt with in the opening pages in a fashion that does not even do justice to the word superficial. A mere 10 pages of text covering the entire opening phases and the two initial battles, which determined the entire nature of the rest of campaign and, furthermore, involve probably more controversy than the rest of the Hundred Days all put together, is simply not good enough by a very long way indeed. So, in this context On the Fields of Glory does not even fall at the first fence, it hardly makes an attempt to crawl over it and the authors have missed a golden opportunity.

By Chapter 2 we are at Waterloo with a description of the site today and some anecdotal material and, thankfully, the book starts to improve. Parts Two to Four, entitled Wellington's Sector, Napoleon's Sector and Blucher's Sector respectively, deal with the battle itself and at this point the book improves by leaps and bounds. Here it is actually very good and becomes a thoroughly entertaining account.

There are lots of "you are now standing.....", and "if you look to your right you will see.....", and the like. Unfortunately for me I was not standing where the authors intended me to be, which is not their fault, but combined with a well constructed narrative which is strung together by numerous eyewitness accounts and anecdotes, this approach does indeed put the reader "in the middle of the fighting" in the most entertaining, informative and readable way. The text is accompanied here by a number of excellent diagrams and maps that compliment and amplify the written word very well and which will suggest numerous scenarios for the wargaming reader. 'Lost for words see picture' is a something I wish a few more authors would bear in mind.

Book as Guide

If, however, we were using the book as a guide, the end of Part Two would find us in the centre of Wellington's position having repulsed the attack of the Middle Guard, after which we are taken back to the start of the battle in Part Three and invited to visit La Belle Alliance and other salient features of Napoleon's sector and his initial deployment, soon only to return to Hougoumont which we already visited six chapters earlier when looking at Wellington's sector. Sitting in my armchair my reaction was that a chronological approach, looking at it from both sides at once, would have been a better option. As a guide I feel, on reflection, that the method adopted by the authors is probably the most economical on shoe leather.

Part Four, Blucher's Sector, suggests that we move to Wavre and follow the route taken by the Prussian's to Waterloo. This is logical enough but the entire story of the Prussian advance and part in the battle is dealt in less than thirty pages, which does not bear comparison with the space given to the French and Allies. Part Four is generally less substantial than Parts Two and Three and although it seems to use some German sources, by far the majority are not.

From here, unfortunately, it is all downhill. Part Five contains a chapter about Brussels in June 1815 which, bearing in mind that On the Fields of Glory will be bought on the promise of The Battlefields of the 1815 Campaign, seems a somewhat incongruous change of subject. This is followed by a chapter on the Evere cemetery and the British monument there which is neither particularly interesting, I thought, nor appropriate.

Part Six returns to the battlefields theme with a chapter on the Battle of Wavre, Namur and Grouchy's retreat based, it appears, entirely on sources other than Prussian, but at least the book is back on track again however briefly. We are then given a final chapter called Echoes of Waterloo which, amongst other things, discusses streets, town, bridges and other places world-wide that bear the name Waterloo, including Waterloo Station in London, a comprehensive list of states in the USA that have towns named after the battle, and the burial places of a number of Waterloo veterans. What possible relevance to the battlefields of 1815 is it, that there is somewhere called Waterloo in Sierra Leone or that Lt Crummer is buried at Port Macquarie in New South Wales ? Why stop there? The authors' might as well have given Abba a mention. The Swedish band did, after all, win the Eurovision Song Contest with a tune called 'Waterloo'.

This chapter closes with an entirely inappropriate account, since we are now in England and no longer even on the same continent as the battlefields the book purports to be about, of the KGL's association with Bexhill-on-Sea, including a street map of the modern seaside town but no mention of the Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler of Bexhill-on-Sea or, indeed, the Goon Show generally. I'm sure with a little effort a Waterloo connection could have been found. This last chapter is largely turgid irrelevance.

If the book as a whole looses its way, so does the text at times. The 'purple prose' that the British Army Review complained about in its review of Andrew Uffindell's book on Ligny, The Eagle's Last Triumph, is still there. At one point, for example, a connection is traced from the Polish Lancer squadron that accompanied Napoleon to Elba to the fall of the communist government of Poland in 1989, via 1939, Hitler, D-Day, Stalin and the Soviet "evil spider's web of tyranny"! The "leaders of the modern world" are then told that they "owe it to their (the Polish Lancer squadron's) memory never to let Poland be trampled on again". My reaction to this ludicrous diversion is that they are round and they bounce and I don't mean the variety fired from cannon!

Appendices

Finally, there are the appendices. The obligatory order of battle is at Appendix 1 and opens with the statement that units strengths are approximate but doesn't actually give any. Appendix 2 is a useful list of museums with opening times and so on. Appendix 3 is called 'Sources'. I hope the authors really mean bibliography because it lists the notorious Hamilton-Williams' discredited account, particularly when the reader is told that Appendix 3 includes "some of the best titles" on the subject. Furthermore, conspicuous by their absence are John Codman Rope's The Campaign of Waterloo and Col Charles Chesney's Waterloo Lectures - A Study of the Campaign of 1815 which, together with Siborne's History of the Waterloo Campaign, are probably the best accounts ever produced in the English language. The final pages comprise the index which seems comprehensive enough.

Summary

In summary, this book just does not live up to its title. It claims to be about the battlefields of the 1815 campaign but it only deals with Waterloo satisfactorily. Quatre Bras and Ligny barely get a mention and the treatment of Wavre almost seems an afterthought and is disappointing. On the Fields of Glory fails to adhere to one of the most important principles of war, and most other human endeavours for that matter - maintenance of the objective. Although it is well written and easy to read, it drifts off at a tangent into areas, though not without interest they sometimes are, that have nothing to do with the battlefields it claims to be about in the title.

This is a very great pity indeed because the three principal parts on Waterloo itself are very well presented, different in approach, informative and entertaining. If only the authors had concentrated on what the title implies and maintained their apparent objective of describing all the battlefields of the 1815 campaign, in the same way as they did with Waterloo itself, then On the Fields of Glory - The Battlefields of the 1815 Campaign could have been a book to reckon with. A real opportunity has been missed, in my view, because what promised to be a unique treatment of a well worn subject degenerates into a series of disconnected essays and ends up as a glorified guide book with associated material tagged on when, it appears, the authors have run out of other things to say.

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