Good companion in the field

After a year and more of Trafalgar it is perhaps time to turn once again to Waterloo. By comparison with the feast, or glut, of Nelsoniana, there is something of a paucity of safe accounts of 18 June 1815. Besides Andrew Roberts’s ultra-compact Waterloo: Napoleon’s Last Gamble, an impressive overview of both the battle and campaign, there has not been a straightforward narrative in many years. The German historian Peter Hofschröer’s two-volume history (both reviewed in these pages) was an attempt to discredit the Duke of Wellington and claim the battle honours for the German-speaking people, and as such stands as substantial but indigestible, as well as wrong. In truth, for a really humane and thoughtful account of the battle there has been little to beat David Howarth’s A Near Run Thing published some 40 years ago.

Alessandro Barbero is Italian. There were Italians on both sides at Waterloo, as there were Irish and a good many others.