[TO THE EDITOR OD THE "SPECTATOR. "]
Sin,—Published some thirty years ago, the Waterloo narrative of Fanny Burney, the epoch-making lady novelist of forty years earlier (see Spectator, January 9th), has no historic value ; but though its laboriously embroidered style would hardly have mollified the reviewer who had just performed the needless task of hanging and quartering the stillborn " Wanderer," it had the great merit of inspiring the Brussels chapter of " Vanity Fair." Perhaps the best answer to it is that of Wellington to Creevey the morning after the battle : " It has been a damned nice thing,—the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life."
Kincaid, as quoted by Mr. Hope, suggests the triple-headed criticism,—basket, bag, knapsack. What the "fisherman's tale" is to-day, the " traveller's tale " was a generation ago, and the " old soldier's tale" was after the great war. Harry Smith, Kincaid, Marbot, Bourgogne can never be taken quite seriously when their own exploits or those of their chiefs are in question. Otherwise, all are shrewd eyewitnesses, as, for example, Marbot when he sums up Waterloo. "The great generals were at Paris making bad speeches, the little ones lost their heads, and all went wrong." Dr. Rose is of the same opinion. " Had their [Ney's and Grouchy's]
places been filled by Soult and Davoust the result must have been different."—(" Revolutionary and Napoleonic Era.") This brings me to Mr. Keene's letter. He criticises Russell (i.e., Coote), and believes that Billow and Blucher entered the battle at opposite extremities of the field, and at far different periods. Sir Herbert Maxwell's recent letter to the Times is the shortest answer to this :—" About five o'clock Billow captured
Planchenoit A couple of miles behind Billow moved the Second Prussian Corps under Pirch ; while Ziethen's Third Corps was coming along the ridge from Ohain to join the left of the Allies." Earlier in the day Blucher was with Ziethen, but he preferred to be in at the finish at Planchenoit, the key of the French position. There was nothing in the Brussels Oracle that Napoleon did not know before he decided to fight. The Moniteur (of June 21st), which first describes the battle, states that the English force was estimated at eighty thousand men, and that it was expected that the Prussian Corps, which might be available towards evening, would be fifteen thousand strong. This was Billow's corps of fresh troops which had not fought at Ligny, and which Bonaparte never seriously expected Grouchy to stop. What was expected of Grouchy was that his victorious troops should never lose sight of Bluoher's beaten army, that no pause should be given to it, and that at all costs it was to be kept away from Waterloo. Instead of this, Grouchy dreamily wastes the 17th, delegates scouting to whomsoever it may concern, languidly sends word to Napoleon at 11 a.m. on the 18th that he will be available the following day, and half an hour later, as the first doomful volley reverberated from Waterloo, he leisurely sat down to a clejellner of strawberries. Strawberries ! • What greater contrast has history than Grouchy and Blucher on this day ? Grim old Vorwarts, battered by his fall, and bruised by the hoofs of galloping horses, saturated with his favourite nostrum of gin and sulphur, is up by daylight on June 18th, and with a deprecatory "Ich stinks etwas," embraces Colonel Harding, the British Commissioner attached to his army, yet so keen to keep his promise that, like a tableau vivant of Mrs.
Hemans' and Lockhart's Don Sancho, he was ready to be bound to his horse.
It was Ziethen and Pirch, goaded on by Blucher, who won the battle, but it was not till noon on the 18th that Gneisenau allowed this advance to begin. The Brussels paper that could foresee nearly twenty hours in advance what Lord Wolseley calls " Blucher's splendid audacity" must have been an "oracle" worth knowing. Billow, as Napoleon expected, came up and was beaten, but it needed Napoleon himself and the bulk of the Guard to effect it. Ney meanwhile wasted the best cavalry, but took La Haye Sainte, the key of our position. It was not till Ziethen's army was in touch with Wellington's army that the French stragglers, fleeing from the new enemy, entangled the last eight battalions of the Guard, deploying under heavy British fire, and lost the battle. " Wellington's final advance would have been most hazardous had not Ziethen's fresh corps then hurled itself on the French right. Blucher, von Billow, and Ziethen launched in all some forty-one thousand men against the French."—(Rose, " Revolutionary and Napoleonic Era.") What I cannot understand is why Dr. Rose is so much fairer to the Prussians in this book (August, 1894) than in his larger work ("Life of Napoleon I.," December, 1901). Is it too late to hope that he may yet rewrite on his original lines this inadequate chapter of his otherwise masterly history ? Mr. Keene is hard to follow when he speaks of Wellington's march on the 18th. The English army was in position on the evening of the 17th. Half an hour later Napoleon was on the opposite ridge, having himself, with his whole army, covered more ground pursuing the victorious English, contesting every foot of the way, than the strawberry-loving Marshal pursuing a beaten and invisible foe. I was well aware that Coote wrote Dr. Russell's last volume, but deleted it in my last letter as not of general interest. To me he, or rather his father, the publisher of Paternoster Row, has for long been an object of inquiry. I shall be genuinely grateful if any reader of the Spectator can tell me when this publishing business ceased to exist, and if the stock was burnt or otherwise destroyed about 1764.
Oaklands, Collegiate Crescent, Sheffield.
Previous page
