'A valuable addition to the material available about this campaign ... this is a detailed and well researched analysis of the campaign with many extracts from previously unpublished sources, which make it of considerable interest to the serious historian, and it will doubtless provoke much debate.'
'Hofschröer acts as Wellington's prosecuting counsel, arguing that The Iron Duke deceived his Prussian ally Blucher during the Waterloo campaign. My response is that in coalition warfare, it was ever thus. Even in the Anglo-American alliance during the Second World War, arguably one of the closest and most effective coalitions of sovereign states in history, it was not all sweetness and light. ... the value of Hofschröer's book lies in the fact that he makes a great deal of information about Wellington's German allies available in English.'
'Without doubt, for me the most enjoyable part of the book was the narration of operations once the French offensive began. The descriptions of the frontier battles and the battle of Ligny using accounts by Prussian soldiers that fought there is masterful ... Throughout, Hofschröer builds on his central theme that the Duke of Wellington was caught off guard by Napoleon's advance and deceived the Prussians into believing that he would come to their support when he knew he could not. More controversially, he suggests documents were suppressed and others forged in the years after the battle to obscure this, and to protect The Duke of Wellington's reputation. He systematically constructs his case during the course of the book in a remarkably lucid and methodical way, leading up to the final chapter, devoted to this theme, and entitled Mine Enemy The Prussians. Hofschröer's clarity of thought and expression are impressive; he takes apart a complex and confusing sequence of events involving many individuals and documents in order to reveal his explanation and support his thesis. Appendices of timetables of events, message logs, comparisons of units' locations reported and their actual locations, assist in following Hofschröer's theory. In my view this treatise achieves its objective. I found Hofschröer's hypothesis convincing and meticulously supported by fact. This is a work obviously based on the most painstaking and methodical research in many German, British and Dutch archives, much of which has never been published before. Hofschröer has also covered the political, logistical, intelligence and communications aspects of the allied campaign well.
These aspects are crucial to an understanding of the Waterloo Campaign and are usually ignored by other writers. The author is to be admired for his diligence in conducting research to the depth necessary to write a book of this calibre, and thanked for making German sources available to English speaking readers. There is no doubt that he has added significantly to our understanding of the Waterloo Campaign. I consider it is a great shame that attention has concentrated on the controversy associated with this publciation, which I estimate comprises about 10 to 15% of the book, to the detriment of the rest. In this respect some of the reviews that have been published have been unbalanced, and again have detracted from the indubitable academic significance of this volume. ... Published at £25 by Greenhill Books, this is excellent value for the serious student of the Waterloo campaign – which should include all of us – and of the German armies that participated in it. I enjoyed this book; it is one of the very best I have read about the campaign and I have no hesitation in commending it to any member of the association. I am eagerly looking forward to Volume Two.'
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