Horne

When I was a child I read a history of the first world war battle - or perhaps siege - of Verdun by one Alistair Horne, a book which impressed me so much that the 5/- Penguin paperback from 1964 survived the various vicissitudes, culls & cuts in the half century since and sits in our bookcase to this day, albeit a little battered. I can't remember when I last looked inside it.

But quite recently, I think at the book stall at the entrance to the museum at Bourne Hall, I came across another book by the same Horne called 'How far from Austerlitz?', a history of Napoleon's battles from Austerlitz to Waterloo with the theme being overreach and eventual failure after Austerlitz, a stunning victory which made Napoleon too big for his boots. A snip at £1.50, just 6 times the price of the first book.

I started out being rather irritated by the easy going style. And by error in the accounts of Trafalgar and Waterloo, battles of which I had some prior knowledge. But after a while I decided that the errors did not really bear on the main story and could be overlooked. The main story was a good one, the irritations dissipated and the story of Austerlitz in particular became interesting.

Taking my cue from 'War and Peace', I had vaguely thought of Austerlitz as being a stunning victory, over in little more than minutes and not involving huge casualties. It turns out to be a far larger affair, involving a march from Boulogne-sur-Mer to southern Germany, reminding me of the march by Marlborough to the battle of Blenheim a century or so previous. It was also a long and complicated battle with considerable casualties, particularly on the Russian side. A foretaste of the carnage to come in Napoleon's later battles; slogging matches with tens if not hundreds of thousands of participants and hundreds if not thousands of cannon - and with casualties on the same scale. A battle which also, for me, added to the discussion of the 'what if' branch of history, the subject of some derision in some quarters, it being argued that the proper matter of history is what actually happened, not what might have happened - with me being a proponent of the value & interest of whatifery: see, for example, the entry for November 27th 2010 in the other place - an entry which, as it happens, mentions Austerlitz.

But today I am thinking of soldiers. Soldiers pore over old battles to try and learn how to conduct new ones. Napoleon pored & worked over his plan for Austerlitz before the event and tried to think of all the things that the enemy might do in response to his moves and how he would respond to their response. He tried to put himself in their place and to put baits in his traps which they would take - with the catch that the baits had to be substantial. He had to take real risks to tempt the Russians to make fatal mistakes - and these real risks meant that he might have come unstuck. In all of this I think one is indulging in entirely reasonable whatifery. Whatifery which is probably much more interesting in a battle of this era where not only does planning really count for something but one also has the chance of making a difference during the battle, of  making a decisive and winning decision. Something which I gather was not usually possible in the olden days when once battle was joined the generals might just as well chuck generalling and muck in with the rest of them in the mêlée.

In the course of all this I wondered how a writer could check all the facts in a book like this and decided that it was difficult. One could hire an assistant to have a go at it, but I think one has to rely more on careful writing. One does not write down a fact about which there is reasonable doubt without checking it, with the time of writing being the right time to do the checking as it is too easy to miss things at any other. And if the fact is important, difficult or contentious, footnote it with the source. In short, the discipline of a professional historian - which is all made so much easier with the advent of word processing programs like 'Word'. I think I would fail the test, putting too much faith in my formerly reliable memory.

So a good and improving  read, although probably unwise to rely on the details. And the maps are poor. The book would have been much improved by better and larger maps of the battles, preferably of the fold out variety one sees so rarely in modern books.