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    Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies, and Three Battles
    Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies, and Three Battles
    Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies, and Three Battles
    Audiobook8 hours

    Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies, and Three Battles

    Written by Bernard Cornwell

    Narrated by Bernard Cornwell and Dugald Bruce-Lockhart

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    About this audiobook

    From the New York Times bestselling author comes the definitive, illustrated history of one of the greatest battles ever fought—a riveting nonfiction chronicle published to commemorate the two-hundreth 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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateMay 5, 2015
    ISBN9780062400857
    Author

    Bernard Cornwell

    BERNARD CORNWELL is the author of over fifty novels, including the acclaimed New York Times bestselling Saxon Tales, which serve as the basis for the hit Netflix series The Last Kingdom. He lives with his wife on Cape Cod and in Charleston, South Carolina.

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    Reviews for Waterloo

    4/5

    178 ratings18 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Sheds some new light and examines some popular traditions on the battle. I picked up on a few details not covered by other authors.
    • 5/5
      Really enjoyed it, a very detailed narrative that explains the characters, tactics, and progress of the battle. The author goes into great lengths to describe attack and defense formations and how the compare to each other. This is vital to understanding the battle.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      It was expected to be a lively account, and it was. The mapping is quite good, and the references are adequate. Cornwell does take advantage of many eyewitnesses' accounts, and has grace enough to place some caveats in the text were there are large discrepances between the various sources. His assumptions of the processes of Napoleon's thinking on that day are reasonable, and he assumes Napoleon was in relatively good health, and free of mental confusions. His view of the relationship with the Prussians as seen by wellington, seems reasonable, though a bit on the pro-Duke side. A good read, and it does convey a good feeling of being present on that abused farmland in the brief moment of the history of the period.
    • 2/5
      I usually don't get much from blow-by-blow battle descriptions. For one thing, the maps are hardly ever enough to know what's going on. The positive reviews of Cornwell's "Waterloo" convinced me that this would be different. It mostly wasn't. Still, there were some very entertaining descriptions, as well as light discussions of points of controversy around the battle of which I had not been aware. > Napoleon’s riposte is famous: Because you’ve been beaten by Wellington you consider him to be a good general! And now I tell you that Wellington is a bad general, that the English are bad soldiers, and that this affair will be over before lunch!> The bore was smaller, and this meant that French infantry could not use British cartridges which they might find on their dead or wounded enemies, while British troops could, and did, use scavenged French ammunition. French powder was of significantly worse quality than British, which led to quicker fouling of the barrel and touch-hole. The normal way to rid a barrel of caked powder was to swill it out with hot water, but urine was almost as effective.> It marched at dawn and almost immediately it ran into problems because a baker lighting his oven in Wavre managed to set his house and shop on fire. The only road wide enough to take the guns and ammunition wagons ran past the burning house. The town’s two fire engines, manual pumps, were dragged to the scene, and Prussian soldiers assisted in extinguishing the flames, but the fire delayed the march by at least two hours because the inferno was too hot to allow the ammunition wagons to pass safely> The whole campaign was predicated on an alliance, on the knowledge that neither Wellington nor Blücher could defeat the Emperor alone, and that they must therefore combine their armies. By exposing Blücher to defeat the Duke ensures the defeat of his own army. In the event Blücher was defeated, but the campaign survived by the skin of its teeth because the Prussians were not routed and so lived to fight another day. Victory came because Blücher made the brave decision to retreat to Wavre instead of Liège, which he would only have done if he was convinced Wellington was prepared to fight, and because Wellington made a desperate defence of the ridge at Mont St Jean, which he would only have done if he was convinced Blücher was coming to his aid. In brief the campaign was successful because Blücher and Wellington trusted each other, and to suggest that Wellington would have risked that trust by deceiving his ally is to fly in the face of probability and everything we know about Wellington’s character. So did he promise to come to Blücher’s aid at Ligny? The answer is simple, yes, but only if he was not attacked himself. He was attacked and so there was no possible chance to help the Prussians.
    • 4/5
      Cornwell is very good at doing the punchy narrative. This book really moves along. I'm giving it 4 stars, though, because I find Cornwell's prose a bit too purple. I prefer David Howarth's "Waterloo: A Near Run Thing".Cornwell's book is also good in the sense that it gives a thorough description of the trials and triumphs of Blucher and the Prussians. I think Howarth's book goes light on the importance of the Prussians in the battle.
    • 4/5
      June 1815 - Napoleon Bonaparte escapes his Elba prison, returns to France and rapidly draws to him one last Grand Armee as he once more tries to seize power & control of Europe. Cornwell's book is a really superb account of the most vital land battle in Western Europe in the early 19th Century: the victors of Waterloo laid the foundations of the map of Europe & its ruling elites for the next half a century and beyond - Bonaparte had made his mark storming across Europe from Lisbon to Moscow & back & France is as it is today in no small part due to the 'conqueror'. Thus, Bonaparte's vanquishers at Waterloo, the victors Wellington (Britain & mixed European allies), and Blucher (Prussia) are names that have never dimmed in the Military & geo-political Historical record. Not until WW1 Western Front were battles of similar Historical impact to occur.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this military history of the battle of Waterloo. This battle is not a part of our history in the States, but the word "Waterloo" in Europe seems to carry as much weight as the word "Gettysburg" carries here. Important. Bloody. A battle of attrition. Determining the future.

      Those last four phrases are why I read this book. I wanted to know more of the military history of this great battle. Cornwell's take (from a British perspective) is well-researched and detailed by the letters of soldiers from all three countries involved in this fight (Prussia, Great Britain, and France). Unfortunately for me, I do not know French. I listened to the book on audiobook, but I am unable to convert the French words (about the location in Belgium) into letters.

      Cornwell describes the battle as a series of formations. The outcome was merely a product of these formations fighting against one another, provided that the manpower of the troops was there. Prussia and Britain both deserve credit for the victory, even as both sides have griped throughout history about giving the other credit. Wellington, to Cornwell, still deserves the most credit for the victory and the title of "conqueror of the world's conqueror." Prussia provided significant and necessary help at the right time, but the ever-present Wellington willed British troops towards the decisive victory in the middle of the battle.
    • 4/5
      In the forward, Cornwell (one of my favorite authors of historical fiction) poses the question, "why another book on Waterloo?" It is, after all, one of the most studied and written about battles. Given that he poses that question, we would expect he has something meaningful to add to the volume of literature on the subject. Does he?Well, not really. Perhaps some of the accounts and anecdotes quoted are from sources not previously used by other authors, but there are no really profound insights. It's not a bad book on the subject -- indeed, it's a fine choice for someone with a casual interest in the battle, since Cornwell does bring his story-telling chops where others might be drier, more technical accounts. Napoleon's failure to compensate for the egregious tactical failures of Ney and Grouchy ultimately decided his fate -- his grand-strategy was spot-on and even with mistake after mistake being committed, the French had a chance to prevail at the end.Cornwell does not engage in speculation of what might have been -- and that's a shame since I'd be interested in hearing such thoughts from him. As Waterloo books go, this one is fine, just a little too indistinguishable from the rest.
    • 3/5
      Very detailed account of the Battle of Waterloo. Almost too detailed. But interesting nonetheless. Sadly, total carnage. I'm amazed anyone survived.
    • 5/5
      If you've ever read or seen a "War and Peace" not Piece. :), you'll understand why I had to read this story.
      This was such a great retelling of a famous battle and it shone the light not just on famous names that fought it but some infamous as well.

      It was pure genius to bring us the recounting of this battle through multiple view points, using real words of the soldiers on all sides of the war, through their correspondence.
      The author literally painted the carnage of this battle in so vivid of detail that it brought tears to my eyes.

      I highly recommended to all that are interested to know in what it took to pull the victory over Napoleon.

      Melanie for b2b

      Complimentary copy provided by the publisher
    • 5/5
      I loved Waterloo: The History of Four Days, but its appeal is probably limited to those who are interested in (1) the battle at Waterloo; (2) the Napoleonic Wars; (3) war in the early 1800s; or (4) anything Cornwell writes. This is really well done - his only nonfiction book so far. It has the page-turning character of a novel.The battle took place in fields just south of Brussels in June, 1815. Around 200,000 men (and at least one disguised woman) fought each other in a five mile square area. The Duke of Wellington squared off with the genius Napoleon, and Wellington became known as the Conqueror of the Conqueror of the World. However, it was a brutal battle, or really three battles, with around 50,000 dead or wounded by the end. Three battles: there was Wellington vs. the French and slow-to-act General Ney at nearby (and crucially located) Quatres Bras, the French successfully attacking the Prussian army at Ligny the next day, and then the battle of Waterloo with Wellington's Anglo-Dutch forces eventually being joined by the Prussians against the French.Telling the story well had to take discipline and persistence. Wellington himself said: “The history of a battle is not unlike the history of a ball. Some individuals may recollect all the little events of which the great result is the battle won or lost; but no individual can recollect the order in which, or the exact moment at which, they occurred, which makes all the difference as to their value or importance.”Cornwell does a superb job of telling that story. He has honed his storytelling skills in many historical novels, including the famous Sharpe series, and this is his first venture into nonfiction. He had told the story through Sharpe's eyes in Sharpe's Waterloo, but this is much more in-depth. He has drawn on a huge archive of letters and diaries written by soldiers from all three armies at the battles. Some of the most riveting material comes from those archives. For example, the perspective of a surviving Ensign recently graduated from Eton College:"You perceived at a distance what appeared to be an overwhelming, long moving line, which, ever advancing, glittered like a stormy wave of the sea when it catches the sunlight. On came the mounted host until they got near enough, whilst the very earth seemed to vibrate beneath their thundering tramp. One might suppose that nothing could resist the shock of this terrible moving mass. They were the famous cuirassiers . . . "Part of why the Waterloo battles are so famous is that the outcome was very much in doubt throughout. Cornwell aptly points out many "what if"s - what if a Dutchman, Major-General Rebecque, hadn't recognized the strategic significance of Quartres-Bras, and disobeyed orders in order to protect it? What if French General Ney hadn't inexplicably waited so long to attack Quartres-Bras (probably due to wariness of Wellington's strategic reputation), allowing reinforcements to arrive? There are many of these moments described by Cornwell which could have turned the tide the other way. Napoleon's often brilliant strategy is explained, but it was subject to the vagaries of battle and at times erroneous execution by his staff in chaotic circumstances. We also get to see the bravery and clear-headedness of many, especially those who eventually turned the battle into the allies favor.The devastating loss of lives and the awful injuries are unstintingly portrayed, with Wellington professing his hope that he would never go to war again. This is a page-turning account of the famous battle, and a great place to start in understanding it.
    • 5/5
      This is Cornwell's first foray into actual history, and this book is every bit as readable as his Sharpe or Starbuck novels. He goes into considerable detail without being tedious, and gives the reader a real sense of the violent intensity of this well-documented battle. Well worth a read.
    • 4/5
      Very easy to read book which covers the battle in a remarkable amount of detail given how much of a page turner it was!
    • 4/5
      Bernard Cornwell is the author of several historical novels featuring Richard Sharpe, an English soldier during the Napoleonic Wars. Waterloo is his first attempt at nonfiction, published just in time for the 200th anniversary in June 2015 of that climactic conflict. Cornwell has done his homework, and although he has little or nothing to add to the voluminous corpus of Waterloo information, he is an adept story teller who provides a riveting recap of the series of battles that has come down to us as “Waterloo.” The decisive battle pitted against one another the two most outstanding military leaders of their era: The (Iron) Duke of Wellington for the British and Napoleon Bonaparte for the French. Napoleon had recently escaped from his banishment on the Isle of Elba, and had resumed the power of Emperor of France. The British, Prussians, Austrians, and Russians feared he would once again dominate Europe, and so they organized a coalition to remove him from his throne. The British and Prussian armies arrived on the scene first, and invaded France from the north and east, respectively. Napoleon raised a formidable army in record time, and sought to prevent the allies from combining their armies by defeating them in sequence. In the event, the allies were able to combine their powers only on the fourth and last day of the battles, but that was enough to effect a catastrophic defeat for the French. While no one knows how many actually died at Waterloo because the French Army never had a chance to make a count, the best estimates suggest that of the 200,000 or so who fought there, some 50,000 lay dead or wounded at the battle’s end, along with 10,000 horses dead or dying. The results were even more momentous than a consideration of the casualty numbers. Waterloo brought the career of Napoleon Bonaparte to an end; no small matter. It led to a redrawing of the map of Europe, and to the Concert of Europe, a balance of power that restored peace and enabled Britain to grow to be the dominant global power of the 19th Century. Warfare tactics in Napoleonic times were much like the game of Rock, Paper, and Scissors: infantry (in cohesive formation) defeats cavalry; cavalry defeats artillery; artillery defeats infantry. Weaponry was crude by today’s lethal standards: the muskets carried by most infantry men were not rifled, and were very inaccurate. Accordingly, the alignment maintained by infantry formations was crucial to their efficacy. Cornwell explains clearly the advantages and disadvantages of arraying “in line” versus “in column.” A brigade “in line” was disposed in a wide formation only two (British) or three (French) deep. The front line fired their muskets while the back line(s) reloaded. This maximized the fire power of the formation in the direction it faced, but made it vulnerable to cavalry attacks on its flanks. Thus, it was a strong defensive position, but was suicidal to move so formed across open country when cavalry was nearby.A brigade “in column” was arrayed in a more oblong shape, sometimes like a square. Such a formation could protect itself from cavalry from any direction, but could not match the shear fire power of an equal number of men arrayed “in line.” Thus to attack an enemy who was positioned some distance away, infantry had to approach it “in column” across country, and then reform “in line” when it came near to the defenders. Being a writer of fiction, Cornwell seeks to make the battle come to life. In doing so, he frequently switches from the past tense to the present tense in his narration. That technique seemed a little odd at times. Cornwell clearly sympathizes with the British—he is, after all, English. His version of the battle has a different flavor than that written by Andrew Roberts in his recent Napoleon, A Life, a very sympathetic biography of the French hero. I recommend reading the two books in fairly close sequence. Note: The hardback edition is quite nice, and includes a number of color prints and maps.(JAB)
    • 4/5
      Once again Bernard Cornwell has shown his depth as an author. Waterloo is a very easy read not dry or boring as a lot of books about battles can be. It is well written and not biased in the telling of how the battle progressed from start to finish. Very good book.
    • 5/5
      This is an excellently written and lavishly illustrated account of the famous battle, which I started reading on the day of its 200th anniversary. This is Cornwell's first attempt at non-fiction. He is probably best known for his fictional Sharpe series set during the Napoleonic wars, which I have not read, though I have read most of his other novels. This book covers the lead up to the day of the battle as well as, in great depth, the events of Sunday 18 June 1815 itself. The fighting itself is described in great and bloody detail, but so are the strategy, the relations between the great leaders Wellington, Napoleon and Blucher, and the experiences of soldiers at all levels in all three armies, through numerous eye witness accounts. The noise, smoke and chaos of the battlefield come across very clearly, with huge scope for misunderstandings of the true position and therefore very different accounts of the same events. The battle was a close won thing and the sometimes fragile understanding between the British and Prussians could have led to disaster for the allies, while at the same time the French effort was hampered by misunderstandings between Napoleon and Marshal Ney, whose inactivity at key moments cost his Emperor's cause dearly. After the defeat in the gathering darkness of the summer night, the Emperor was defeated and was soon on his way to his final exile in St Helena. A great book.
    • 5/5
      An excellent portrayal of the defining battle of the 19th century. Skillful use of existing memoirs and a careful selection of the many paintings spawned by this famous battle enable Cornwell to provide us with a compelling version of this oft told tale. He is a very skilled teller of stories and provides us with this notable book to celebrate the bicentennial of this brief but epic struggle.
    • 5/5
      Bernard Cornwell branches out into non-fiction with this description of the Battle of Waterloo.He is of course well known for his series of 'Sharpe' books about the period and he now turns his attention to the facts of the matter.If you want a no-frills,well-written account of the battle,then you could do much worse than read this book.