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Publisher's Summary

From the New York Times best-selling author comes the definitive history of one of the greatest battles ever fought - a riveting nonfiction chronicle published to commemorate the two-hundredth anniversary of Napoleon's last stand.

On June 18, 1815, the armies of France, Britain, and Prussia descended upon a quiet valley south of Brussels. In the previous three days, the French army had beaten the Prussians at Ligny and fought the British to a standstill at Quatre-Bras. The Allies were in retreat. The little village north of where they turned to fight the French army was called Waterloo. The blood-soaked battle to which the town gave its name would become a landmark in European history.

In his first work of nonfiction, Bernard Cornwell combines his storytelling skills with a meticulously researched history to give a riveting chronicle of every dramatic moment from Napoleon's daring escape from Elba to the smoke and gore of the three battlefields and their aftermath. Through quotes from the letters and diaries of Emperor Napoleon, the Duke of Wellington, and the ordinary officers and soldiers, Cornwell brings to life how it actually felt to fight those famous battles as well as the moments of amazing bravery on both sides that left the outcome hanging in the balance until the bitter end.

Published to coincide with the battle's bicentennial in 2015, Waterloo is a tense and gripping story of heroism and tragedy - and of the final battle that determined the fate of nineteenth-century Europe.
©2015 Bernard Cornwell (P)2015 HarperCollins Publishers
France Germany Great Britain Western Naval Forces Individual Wars
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Profile Image for carl801

Not a close run thing!

Bernard Cornwell asks in the first few lines, "Why another book about Waterloo?" It's a good question and it has a very easy answer: If Cornwell wrote it, that's reason enough for me. In his hands, the story comes alive again in a way historians only rarely achieve.

Clearly, Cornwell has been researching the Napoleonic era all of his life. From the lowest private to the commanding generals, the story is told from the viewpoint and in the words of the participants. The battle descriptions are classic Cornwell, but it is the descriptions of the strategies of the battle captains, Wellington and Napoleon, that was most interesting to me.

I have only one criticism: Cornwell should have narrated the entire book himself. Not that the narrator did not do a great job, he did. But Cornwell's own voice is clearly that of a passionate author and actor. Usually I prefer that authors not read their own work, but in this case I have to say we would have been better served if he had.

41 people found this helpful

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Profile Image for Jefferson

A Concise, Vivid, Absorbing, & Suspenseful Account

At the start of his Preface to Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies, and Three Battles (2014), Bernard Cornwell asks, "Why another book about Waterloo?" It is, as he says, a good question. His answer is that, in addition to being "a cliffhanger of a battle," it was "the deciding event" or "turning point" of the 19th century that led to French decline and British domination. Furthermore, the battle was so complex, and there were so many firsthand accounts of it, and there have been so many different (often contradictory) histories written about it, that Cornwell would like “To give an impression of what it was like to be on that field on that confusing day," and, though he doesn't say so, I think to synthesize the best available evidence so as to clarify some of the confusion.

Cornwell begins by recounting Napoleon's escape from exile on Elba to stunningly resume his interrupted rule of France as "Emperor" in March, 1815, causing the French king to flee France. Rather than wait for Great Britain, Prussia, Russia, and Austria to attack him on French soil, Napoleon decided to preemptively strike north in Belgium against the two closest allied armies, those of Great Britain and Prussia, planning to divide and conquer them one by one. The action begins with the simultaneous battles on June 16 at Quatre Bras (the French fighting the British-Dutch to prevent them from joining the Prussians) and at Ligny (the French fighting the Prussians to destroy them).

Cornwell then turns his attention to June 18 and Waterloo. He establishes the layout of the three-square-mile battlefield (fields of man-high rye, commanding ridge, and strategically situated ad hoc "fortresses" made of two farms and a small village) and the objectives of both sides: the British-Dutch had to defend their positions in the fortresses and atop the ridge (or on its reverse slope) long enough for the Prussians to join them, while the French had to punch through the British-Dutch line before the Prussians could arrive. There follows a day of appalling carnage as the French repeatedly attack, always wastefully avoiding basic 19th-century combined arms tactics by which infantry, cavalry, and artillery were to support each other.

Throughout the book Cornwell provides interesting details on early 19th-century armies and warfare. In addition to explaining the paper-scissors-rock strengths and weaknesses of lines, columns, squares, cavalry, artillery, and skirmishers, he compares French and British cavalry, surgeons, muskets, artillery, and so on. He incorporates vivid eyewitness accounts. "One officer described the air as 'undulating' from the passage of the shells and roundshot," and soldiers said the great guns heated the air like an oven. One man wrote of a French cannon ball speeding right at him, hitting men beside him, and then flying off overhead. Cornwell highlights some mini-stories, like a British cavalry officer who survived despite being saber-gashed on the head, lanced in the arms and chest, trampled by horses, used as a gun rest, and pillaged and left for dead, and an anonymous, beautiful woman found in a French cavalry officer's uniform lying dead beneath a pile of British corpses. He convinces us that "Waterloo was such a vast battle, so overwhelming in its intensity and drama."

Cornwell introduces dramatic figures like Marshal von Blucher, the 74-year old Prussian commander ever trusting in Wellington, "Slender Billy," the Prince of Orange, ever "a thorn in Wellington's side," and Marshal Ney, "the bravest of the brave," a man capable of stunning errors in judgment while leading Napoleon's army. And he contrasts the Duke of Wellington and Napoleon, both 46, both brilliant and charismatic war leaders, but while Wellington disliked war and tried to fight defensively in order to spare his limited numbers of British soldiers, Napoleon loved the glory of war and didn't care how many of his soldiers he lost as long as they achieved his objectives. Cornwell's account feels unbiased, but he may quote more British eyewitnesses, and he portrays Wellington as the superior general, riding about the battlefield to raise the morale of men at crisis points and writing clear battle orders, while Napoleon remained out of the action writing contradictory and confusing orders for the marshals who led his army.

It was a "dreadful day" of "slaughter" leaving 12,000 dead: blood spouting, bowels spilling, brains spattering, bodies being cut in half, heads and limbs being blown off, lances penetrating through eyes into jaws, swords whacking, bayonets impaling, musket butts bashing, artillery deafening, smoke obscuring, canister shot spraying, shrapnel flying, howitzers immolating, horses trampling. . . Many of the 30-40,000 wounded lay suffering on the battlefield for days. Local peasants stripped corpses naked and yanked out their teeth to sell for dentures. It took ten days to burn all the French corpses in pyres fueled by human fat. The allied dead were buried in shallow mass graves, enabling tourists to pick through them for souvenirs. Wellington said afterwards, "Next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained." And "I always feel wretched after. . . there is no glory." Although Cornwell details the horrific nature of war, however, he does it as a novelist story-teller, making us admire heroism and scorn incompetence more than see the whole thing as human folly.

The reader Dugald Bruce Lockhart is fine. But Cornwell is also an excellent reader, and it's his book, so I almost wish he'd read the whole thing, instead of only the Foreword, Preface, Aftermath, and Afterword.

Readers interested in the Napoleonic Wars or gripping accounts of turning point battles full of heroism, cowardice, brilliance, and folly in any period should like this book, though in my ignorance (not having read other accounts) I suspect that readers familiar with Waterloo may not find too much new here.

17 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
Profile Image for Milton Soong

Rocking story even if it offers no new information

Solid retailing of the Waterloo campaign from a mainly British pov. The author knows how to turn a phrase (and he is the narrator). Recommended if you want a highlight reel of the battle.

8 people found this helpful

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Profile Image for Robert K. Severn

Great history writing.

All of Cornwell's storytelling combined with exhaustive research. Good reading job by the author! Best Waterloo book I have seen.

7 people found this helpful

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Profile Image for Jean

Both vivid and scholarly

There is nothing dull about this book; I could not put it down. Cornwell used his novelist skills to tell the story of Waterloo through the words and experience of the soldiers’ letters, diaries and memoirs. He brought the battle to life from both the French, British, Dutch, Flemish and German soldiers’ viewpoints.

For the 200th anniversary of the battle of Waterloo, Bernard Cornwell published a non-fiction book on the subject. A number of years ago he had written a historical fiction book about Waterloo in his Richard Sharpe series. This battle was so complex and the result of the battles so far reaching that one could spend their life studying it.

France was the dominating global power prior to this battle. Britain emerged the dominant global power of the 19th century as a result of winning this battle. Cornwell dramatically shows the consequence of the battle, the scale of slaughter and suffering that took place in the fields ten miles south of Brussels remains shocking. The entire battle took place in a five mile area.

Cornwell show how the British forces consisting of English, Dutch and Belgium soldiers and the Prussian army fought against the French army. Cornwell is the master of battle scenes in his historical fiction books. Because of that he brings the battle to life for the average reader.

Cornwell did an enormous amount of research preparing to write this book. He used diaries, letters, memoirs, military records and reports as well as newspaper reports. The author helps clarify the complex battle for the non-scholar. It would be great to read this book just before visiting the Waterloo site. I am going to buy the hardcover edition for the maps and pictures. Dugald Bruce Lockhart narrated the book.

20 people found this helpful

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Profile Image for G. Eytcheson

Needs a map

This book is a very dense and difficult to follow. It would benefit greatly from a map or similar reference to be able to picture a location in reference to another.

I’m a great fan of Bernard Cromwell, and his book Agincourt is superior in every way to this one.

2 people found this helpful

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Profile Image for Fly Reader

Buy and Listen

This is an outstanding text and narration to either begin or further your knowledge of Wellington, Waterloo or Napoleon.

7 people found this helpful

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Profile Image for Jim

Enjoyable Armchair Generalship

Battle buffs, here is a popular history better than most. Mr. Cornwell is quite an accomplished writer of descriptive prose, practiced in his historical novels. His most famous is the Sharpe’s Rifles series. Although this book is non-fiction, Cornwell plies a lucid narrative. He’s considerate of his readers. For example: the text follows certain individuals through the action, as is common in histories—Cornwell briefly recounts what persons said or did in earlier chapters as a memory aid; I appreciated that because I lose track of names. French quotes were followed immediately by their English translations. Cornwell’s choice of excerpts from participants’ letters and diaries was cogent. I certainly understood why he quoted the Duke of Wellington, who said that to tell the story of a battle is like trying to describe the goings-on at a grand ball. Quoting him, Cromwell was setting out the proposition that any battle history must be artificial; things do not happen in sequence and there are many events and personalities meshing together in different places, overlapping at any given moment. That’s a truth few academic historians bother to note. Given Waterloo’s essential uproar of confusion, the author went to some trouble not to lose his reader, although the event was complex. Among his artifices he used the trick of simplifying through imagery. Think of the little valley where Wellington and Napoleon met as shaped something like an asymmetrical eye, with the English-Dutch and French occupying the high ground of either eyelid. On both sides of the center sets a rustic house bristling with muskets, and the fire from these two squeeze the French lines marching past into center concentrations, which British artillery pummels. Got it. Cornwell implied that the battle actually began two days previously, when Marshal Ney fought for the crossroads at Quatre-Bras, to gain control of the road connecting the English to the Prussians, at the same time Napoleon was defeating the Prussians at the Battle of Ligny. With a day out for maneuver and rain, the bloodletting at Waterloo then continued these actions.
Mr. Cornwell reads the Introduction while the bulk of the text is read by Dugald Bruce Lockhart, who does a fine job and handles French quite well. My only criticism is that sometimes the narrator’s pace is too fast, but I believe that was a director’s decision. Buy the book for an entertaining, clear, informative text about the battle that made Great Britain the dominant power in Europe for a hundred years. It is well written by a practiced and talented storyteller who specializes in the Napoleonic Wars.

4 people found this helpful

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Profile Image for Christian

Bloody good. love the details.

Exceptional from beginning to end. i can now properly place Wellington in history, an important man!

4 people found this helpful

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Profile Image for mrieke

Cornwall is a great story-teller

After reading all the Sharp novels, I
expected another great story and got one. And his deep, raspy voice added to the atmosphere the story created. I hope he looks for more non-fiction to write. The maps and pictures were great additions.

4 people found this helpful