Waterloo and its creation of the British myth

Went The Day Well? Witnessing Waterloo by David Crane (William Collins, £20)

Depend upon it, he who pretends to give a general account of a great battle from his own observation — believe him not,” wrote the horse gunner Cavalié Mercer some years after Waterloo. “He can see no farther (that is, if he be personally engaged in it) than the length of his nose.” There will be many general accounts of the Battle of Waterloo in this bicentennial year — but it will be hard to match the sheer verve and brilliance of David Crane’s evocation of Britain and the landscape south of Brussels on June 18, 1815.

It was a Sunday — and as Crane remarks, the battle was one of the most bloody acts of Sabbath-breaking for the times. Hour by hour through that day we are shown the communities that sent their boys and men to spill blood at Quatre Bras, the château at Hougemont, the farmstead of La Haye Sainte and in the corn and rye fields between.

Frame by frame, like a great stop-motion film, we see the Methodist congregations enduring hours of serial worship, Highland communities on the brink of extinction, the impoverished workers of Altrincham on the edge of the moors suffering the ravages of early Industrial Revolution recession. Heroes, villains, the innocent, the fortunate and damned, and the merely damned lucky, are picked out in a string of individual portraits running throughout the story. The privates and corporals are celebrated as much as the great captains of Wellington’s scratch army. Most vivid is Corporal Jack Shaw of the Life Guards, prize-fighter and heroic artist’s model in his spare time, who goes down after slashing and slaying a dozen at La Haye Sainte.

If Waterloo was a close-quarters brawl, then Jack Shaw was your man. “In a battle so utterly devoid of finesse, variety, tactics or movement — a stand-to ‘milling’ of ‘hard pounding’ in which the only qualities were courage, strength and endurance — the Jack Shaws of the army came into their own.” “Milling” is the five-minute exercise of no-holds-barred unarmed combat in the training of young paratroopers in their “P Company”, an esoteric term learned no doubt from Crane’s father, a distinguished RSM and officer of the Parachute Regiment.

For the business of Waterloo, it is le mot juste. In the Britain on display on the day of Waterloo and its aftermath, with its motley army and mixture of barbarity and taste at home, we see a society that is barely nation and hardly a state. Yet Waterloo, more than Trafalgar, fuelled a national myth of snobbery and patriotism of Britishness to this day.

How British was it all? Slyly, Crane suggests that just over one in 10 of all the combatants in the battles of June 1815 was British. The crucial decision to block the initial French advance at Quatre Bras was taken by the Dutch; and on the day itself the knockout blow was delivered by Blucher’s Prussian legions to Napoleon’s right. Adopting the technique of 24, the US TV thriller series, Crane weaves hour by hour diverging and coalescing human dramas of the day with deft originality. Here literary art trumps television drama at its best. It paints a brilliant continuous action drama of Britain then, and in doing so suggests an awful lot about Britain, its tastes and foibles, today. As Corporal Jack Shaw might say, it is a book to die for.

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