Wellington was very ungracious with regard to who should receive the proposed Waterloo medal; especially as concerned the Royal Artillery. Consider the following letter written by Wellington to Lord Musgrave on December 15th: (translated from the German in Karl Bleibtreu's book, Englands grosse Waterloo-Luge, (circa 1905) pages 475-476): "To say the truth, I was little pleased with my artillery. They received the order not to shoot against the enemy's guns, only against his troops. It was difficult to get them to follow this order. (Also) as the French cavalry formed to charge they did so at the same height as our artillery, in most cases only a few yards from the guns. We could not expect them to stand and die there, instead the officers and men were ordered to retreat to the squares (like I and my staff), until their cavalry was driven away. "... But they did no such thing. They ran from the battlefield, took with them the slow match, ammunition, and everything else. After we beat back the enemy's attacks and could have made good use of the artillery, we had no gunners. Actually, I would have had no artillery at a/1 for the second part of the battle if I had not formed a reserve at the beginning. "... it is because of these little stories, and they will be known some day, that I am against the proposal to write about it, or what is called a history of the battle." Bleibtreu continues in his own words: "Some batteries did not get the order to retreat to the squares (and were killed there). This is bom out when you see that the British artillery lost 31 officers (the French lost 20 officers from the line artillery and 12 from the Guard). " In reference to the above it should be first noted that we had to translate Wellington's letter from Bleibtreu's German text that was translated from the English original. If any reader has this letter in the original we would love to see it, because the structuring of the sentences may change the sense of what the Duke is actually saying here. However, if Bleibtreu is giving us the true (no pun intended) sense of Wellington's letter to Lord Musgrave we find that: 1) Royal Artillery gunners that ducked into squares in the face of the French cavalry charges and then returned to serve the guns again once the charges had passed were the exception and not the rule, and may have been the honor belonging to a single gun crew (see Brett-Jame's The One Hundred Days, page 137 and the letter belonging to Capt. Samuel Rudyard). 2) Wellington refused to write a history of the battle not because the nature of a battle makes it impossible to make any sense out of it for the reader, but because if he had, he would have had nothing good to say about several of the participants who were at that moment being celebrated as heroes, fallen or otherwise. Of course the Duke could have been wrong in his observations. He was known to have made a number of statements concerning particular events at Waterloo that differ from what has come down to us. Two that immediately come to mind; the fall of La Haye Saint being one of the early events in the battle; and that the meeting between Blucher and himself at the close of the battle occurred more toward the town of Gennappe, or nowhere near La Belle Alliance. Back to Art of War Issue #31 Table of Contents Back to Art of War List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2002 by Clash of Arms Games. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com