The Waterloo Letters

review by Ned Zuparko, Napoleonic Editor

Edited by H.T. Siborne. (A reprint of the 1891 edition), 1983, Arms and Armour Press, London. ISBN 0-85368-561-4. Price fifteen pounds.

This book is an absolute must for the Napoleonic wargamer. For years it has been very difficult to obtain, but now, thanks to Arms and Armour Press, it has been reprinted and available to all. The editor's father was William Siborne, who constructed a model of the Waterloo battlefield for public display. William sent a circular letter to officers who participated in the battle to obtain as much information as he could. He received so many replies that he was not only able to construct the model, but also to write his famous history of the Waterloo campaign. His son, Major-General H.T. Siborne, took the opportunity of the 75th anniversary of Waterloo to publish what he considered to be the most interesting of the hundreds of letters he had inherited from his father, along with some explanatory maps.

WATERLOO LETTERS is thus a collection of primary source material. it has the disadvantage of any primary source of occasional errors in fact, or contradictory recollections by participants. However, this is far outweighed by the richness of detail to be found in these personal accounts. Readers won't find a grand account of the entire battle from start to finish (there are already hundreds of books that do that) but will find much of the raw material from which such books derived. The reader will learn about what the officers thought was happening, and why, and what formations they adopted or orders they gave and received. The perspective of the participant, and his judgement of what is important and what is not in battle can be very illuminating for the player used to pushing lead figures around on a model Napoleonic table. It may well lead him to re-examine some of the aspects of the way his current game models Napoleonic warfare, or, at least his understanding of Waterloo.

It is fascinating, for example, to trace the British chain of command for the cavalry. One can hear from Uxbridge about the orders he gave, from the ADC who carried the orders and what he thought of them, and from the Generals who received the orders and how they interpreted them; each with a different point of view. Wargamers used to decision-making after looking at the table from their "aerial" point of view, will see how much different it was from historical ground level. Here, "minor" dips in the ground, which are often ignored in our games, could have drastic effects on visibility and battlefield events.

I highly recommend the addition of WATERLOO LETTERS to your Napoleonic bookshelf. Now, if we could only get Arms and Armour to reprint the entire collection of Waterloo maps from Siborne's "Aflas"...!

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