It all started with my picking up another TLS at Waitrose a week or so ago. Once home, it did not look very promising at all, starting with 3 pages of poetry. Some of them about 1,300 pages of Robert Herrick from OUP for a modest £250. I think even the reviewer was a bit puzzled about this: who on earth was going to wade through all this stuff, even supposing some academic library (said to be so short of money) was going to stump up the necessary.
Followed by a rather mixed bag, including a review of what sounds like tripe from the punk called Johnny Rotten and a further page about medieval poetry. But there was some stuff of interest in the bag and shortly after two pages on a collection of not very remarkable sounding books about matters Wellingtonian (a touch early for the Waterloo bicentennial) there was a puff for Georgette Heyer's 1937 novel about the Waterloo Campaign, as a result of which it was rapidly downloaded onto my kindle for the grand sum of £2.62 and is now read. And it was, indeed, rather good, It might even get BH going on the kindle as I now learn that she did quality time on Heyer as an adolescent.
Very much like 'La Bataille' by Patrick Rambaud, a widely and deservedly praised account of the rather earlier, if equally sanguinary Battle of Aspern; perhaps the beginning of the end of Napoleon's reign, when slogging matches replaced cunning strokes. Like Rambaud, Heyer tells the story from the point of view of a staff officer, a handsome young colonel, one of Wellington's aides. This makes it possible to flit around the battle, taking in various people, places & points of view and to introduce a bit of love interest. And despite the flatness of the prose, which rather reminded me of that of Agatha Christie, she can tell a good story and I got quite excited at the climax of the battle, despite knowing roughly how it went and certainly knowing the outcome, if for no other reason than that of having passed through the memorial railway station thousands of times.
I quite liked the love interest going no further than a couple of scandalously see through ball gowns; no blood, sweat or tears. And she probably did not need to invent the gowns as I recall reading in Adam Zamoyski's account of the Vienna Congress, which was interupted by Waterloo, of the English ladies there who liked to sport a lot more naked flesh than was considered proper in Vienna, despite the otherwise loose morals which prevailed.
She brings to life all the difficulties Wellington faced with a polyglot army, mostly Dutch, Belgian and German (and this not counting the Prussians) and with most of his own Penisular veterans overseas and out of reach.
She points out that Wellington liked personable and able but young men as his aides. Men who were intelligent enough to know what he was about but too young to have experience and to have opinions of their own. They were content just to do what they were told. Not that different to our own ministerial offices in Whitehall.
She makes something of Wellington's capacity for work, sustained for some months before the battle and then for the very long two or three days of the battle itself. On her story, the thin red line held in the early evening of the big day, when things were looking a bit sticky and the Prussians were yet to arrive in force, in part because of the personal energy & example of the Iron Duke, He managed to get everywhere and to put a bit of spirit back into troops who were frightened & flagging after long hours of being shot at and worse.
On her account, Wellington was very concerned that Napoleon should not turn his western flank and cut him off from the ports which linked him to England. For this reason he held enough troops in the west to seriously weaken his centre, which left him vulnerable to Napoleon's thrust north, designed to split Wellington away from Blucher on his eastern flank. A nice illustration of the problems and puzzles faced by commanders.
She makes it all into a very close run thing. If we had not held Hougomont, which the French could and should have taken, if the French had not got their set-piece attacks wrong, if a chance cannon ball had put the Duke out of action or if the Prussians had not arrived when they did, things might have turned out rather differently. And one could go on, But we did win - and I remember reading somewhere that it is that hard fought battles of this sort which are apt to end in the total rout of one side or the other, as was the case at the Battle of Hastings. Certainly this one big battle was the end of the 100 days. The French no longer had an army fit for battle.
Perhaps next I shall turn up my two volume biography of the man by Sir Herbert Maxwell Bart., a biography which provided some good maps in support of Heyer. Nice to know roughly where all these places she goes on about are.
Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/tls.html. I can report that I have at least started reading the Scott Moncrieff translation of Proust (very good it is too) and I did read the hawk book and posted it at reference 2. Two hits from one issue not bad.
Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/goshawk-white.html.
I learn today from wikipedia that the Maxwell mentioned above is an ancestor of Gavin Maxwell, the naturalist.
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