Famous Battles and How They Shaped the Modern World, 1588–1943 by Beatrice Heuser Athena S. Leoussi

Author:Beatrice Heuser, Athena S. Leoussi [Beatrice Heuser, Athena S. Leoussi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Military, General, Modern, 19th Century, 20th Century
ISBN: 9781526727428
Google: SZzSDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
Published: 2018-11-30T22:30:29+00:00

Britain and Waterloo

Memories of great battles are often wreathed in nostalgia as they become a central part of a nation’s patriotic narrative, a heroic moment in a victorious past. Waterloo, like Trafalgar before it, has risked being engulfed in this kind of narrative. It was portrayed as the moment when Britain took on the greatest army Napoleonic France could muster and defeated it, so soundly, indeed, that Napoleon never again posed a threat to Britain’s shores or to Britain’s imperial glory. Some will add that it was one of the proudest moments in the history of the British army and of the regiments that fought there, and that Wellington’s tactics drew on the particularly British strengths of defensive grit and resilience. But this narrative is somewhat mythical, since the British were a minority of the Allied troops on the battlefield; Peter Hofschröer has even argued that it was more a German than a British victory.19 Waterloo has always been put to good use by patriots and nationalist propagandists. For nineteenth-century Britons it was the final pulverising victory in an Anglo-French rivalry for power and empire that had produced heroes on both sides, from Fontenoy to the Heights of Abraham and from Yorktown to the Nile. It was also the last great battle between these two warring nations, ushering in a period of international collaboration and heralding the years of the Entente Cordiale.20 Like other countries which have suffered relative decline on the world stage, a substantial segment of the British public seek solace in a past that seemed always more glorious, more representative of what they regard as true British values. As one writer has pertinently phrased it in the context of the recent campaign against Britain’s membership of the European Union, it is ‘snorting a line of that most pernicious and debilitating Little English drug, nostalgia’, part of a desire to ‘shuffle back to a regret-curdled inward-looking yesterday’.21

But why was Waterloo celebrated so effusively in Britain? What was it about this battle that distinguished it from the many others in which British troops had been involved across the centuries or lent it to such strong identification with what were taken to be supremely British military qualities? At first glance it might seem a strange choice. Waterloo was a decisive battle, certainly, in that it finally effaced the last possible revival of a Bonapartist France and exiled the former Emperor to the island of Saint-Helena in the South Atlantic. But it was in many ways a codicil to the great campaigns that had preceded it – including the war in the Peninsula in which Britain had played a major role. The Napoleonic Wars had already ended with Napoleon’s first abdication and exile to Elba in 1814. The Congress of Vienna had set out the basis of a new balance of power in Europe. The Waterloo Campaign of 1815 followed on from the major conflict, a united response by the Allied powers to Napoleon’s escape from Elba and his charm offensive on the French people.

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