by Foster, R E
7
Battling into Posterity:
Wellington and Waterloo 1901–2015
In December 1903 Queen Victoria’s grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II, attended a dinner to mark the centenary of the raising of three Hanoverian regiments. Wellington, he claimed, would have been lost without them. It was they who, ‘in conjunction with Blücher and the Prussians at Waterloo, saved the British army from destruction’. His remarks were very widely reported in the British press. The Times called them ‘unfortunate […] an absurd over-statement’. It cited Wellington’s Waterloo Despatch as proof that the British Army had not been as imperilled as the Kaiser maintained. The German press responded by accusing the British of being hypersensitive.523 In terms of wider contemporary Anglo-German relations, it was a trivial incident; it was nevertheless indicative of a developing trend of hostility that would reach its tragic conclusion in 1914.
In the short term, the outbreak of war made improper and impractical any plans to celebrate the centenary of the 1815 campaign. More importantly, the First World War would finally eclipse Waterloo as the national reference point for collective endeavour, military achievement – and horror. In the age of mass democracy, the common man would be duly commemorated. This did not bode well for the reputation of Wellington, a man popularly presumed to consider the common man the scum of the earth and universal suffrage as anathema. Conversely, the Duke’s generalship, part of which was the careful husbanding of the human resources at his disposal, was likely to compare well set alongside the record of his Great War counterparts. Ambivalences about his proper place in history, in academic circles at least, were therefore set to persist. This would be even truer of the Waterloo campaign. The First World War destroyed the last vestiges of the European order created at Vienna in 1815. In 1919, the peacemakers who met at Versailles forged a Europe whose succeeding century would be characterised principally by further conflict and division. Those seeking greater European unity and stability could be forgiven for looking to the earlier period for inspiration. Much later, as the 200th anniversary of Waterloo loomed, it was not just historians who found it of continuing relevance.
In the minor Waterloo controversy unleashed by Wilhelm II in 1903, it was, in a significant irony, the French who came to Britain’s aid. In a leading article, the Débats described the Kaiser as ‘a little grasping. The heavier side of the scale, although only by little, is incontestably that in which is thrown the unconquerable tenacity of the Iron Duke’. Its comments were amplified by the heavy artillery that was Henry Houssaye. His view was that prior to the arrival of the Prussians, both the Anglo-Allied and French armies were exhausted. ‘But it was the British who up to that moment had kept the victory in suspense. The result is due to the Prussians, but the glory remains with the English.’ Without the Prussians, they would have been beaten and ‘probably annihilated’. But it was not true that the German troops in Wellington’s army alone saved it from destruction.524
Houssaye (1848–1911) had pursued a career as a classical scholar before his fascination with Bonaparte led to his becoming better known for his work on the Napoleonic period. His 1899 account of Waterloo had made him the greatest living authority on the battle. He was quite prepared to admit that Napoleon had made errors in 1815: he should have forced the allies farther apart on 15 June; he should have ensured that the Prussians were destroyed at Ligny; Wellington should never have been allowed to retreat from Quatre Bras during 17 June. At Waterloo the next day, an early start would have won the battle by 1 p.m. Even as matters unfolded, ‘had not the approach of the Prussians paralysed a portion of the army, it is probable that the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean would have been carried by them about five o’clock’.525 Events determined otherwise. In reading Houssaye’s account of them, British readers would discover greatest vindication in the detail of his extensive endnotes. For though Houssaye wrote, with respect to whether it was the British or the Prussians who caused the French to be routed, that ‘both manoeuvres took place almost simultaneously, the discussion might be carried on for ever’, he judged that British actions alone were responsible for bringing about the disintegration of two-thirds of the French line.526
Houssaye thereby contributed his own small part to the making of the Entente Cordiale, the series of agreements concluded by Britain and France in April 1904. They reflected the new orthodoxy at the Foreign Office that Germany was now regarded as the main threat to the British Empire. Winston Churchill, newly in cabinet, told an audience in Manchester in May 1909 that:
The wonderful century which followed the battle of Waterloo and the downfall of the Napoleonic domination, which secured to this small island so long and so resplendent a reign has come to an end. We have arrived at a war time […] strange methods, huge forces, larger combinations – a Titanic world – have sprung up around us. The foundations of our power are changing.527
When the Lord Mayor of London, Sir William Treloar, visited Berlin in June 1907, Sir Edward Grey cautioned him that ‘the Foreign Office had heard that the Germans intended to call attention to the fact that June was the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo in order to annoy France, and, if possible, to create bitterness between the English and the French’. If they did, it was unsuccessful; the Kaiser was the new Napoleon.528
Even so, deteriorating relations notwithstanding, when members of the British and German chambers of commerce met together in January 1906 it was pointed out that, ‘Both countries would in nine years be fraternally celebrating the centenary of the battle of Waterloo.’ On the eve of the event, The Times reflected wistfully on the ‘wide public celebration’ that was to have taken place. Recent historians, too, have asserted that, had it not been for the outbreak of war in August 1914, the 100th anniversary of Waterloo would have been celebrated in grand fashion.529 In Britain, at least, it is by no means clear that this would, in fact, have been the case. As late as October 1912, in a parliamentary question, Sir Hildred Carlile MP asked what national celebrations the government was planning, ‘particularly in view of the fact that there was no memorial to the nation’s arms as a whole on the field of Waterloo’. Replying for the War Office, Colonel Seely stated that there was nothing official planned; nor was the government endorsing any private venture. His admission prompted the perhaps mischievous, though not untruthful observation, from an Irish Nationalist MP, Mr J.G. Swift MacNeill, that ‘the celebration of Waterloo was discontinued many years ago in deference to the wishes of the highest authority in order to promote feelings of peace and to let bygones be bygones’. German observers might have done well to note this evidence of the strength of the Anglo-French Entente.530
But the centenary would not have gone completely unmarked. In November 1910, it was agreed that a British Dominions Exhibition would be held at the Crystal Palace in 1915. Plans were well advanced by the end of 1913. These would at once have neatly marked the year, whilst linking back to the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the themes of Waterloo as a harbinger of progress and empire without explicitly offending French sensibilities. The lead for commemorating Waterloo per se was taken by a centenary committee established in Belgium by 1911. Its approach was in marked contrast to the national chauvinism that had characterised Europe’s fiftieth anniversary events. Representatives from Holland, Britain, Germany and France were invited to join them. The main project was an international memorial. It would ‘consist of a mass of dark porphyry on which the principal group, carved in white marble, will stand out in relief, with bronze figures round it representing the various nations’. Remarkably, for bones were ‘daily unearthed by the plough […] the victims of a scandalous trade with tourists’, it would also need to serve as a mausoleum. Both symbolically and practically, it would ‘in a measure become the tomb of all who fell at Waterloo’.531
Britons taking an interest in the Waterloo battlefield were generally more inclined to see it preserved unaltered than blight it through the addition of new structures. Edward Moon, a former MP who reconnoitr
ed it on 4 June 1914, voiced concern at what he termed the ‘outbreak’ of monuments. These included the Wounded Eagle monument to the French, dedicated in 1904, and a large column to Victor Hugo, just over 200 yards south of La Belle Alliance, still under construction as Moon toured. Interestingly, he did not take exception to the Lion’s Mound, which ‘serves at once as a memorial, a trophy and a tomb’: age, as it would for the contemporary monuments he complained about, presumably conferred legitimacy. He reserved his special ire, however, for the hotels and refreshment outlets at its base and along Wellington’s ridge, ‘hopelessly interfering with the dignity and quiet of the place’. One of them even displayed a giant advertisement for Blackpool. Also near the mound, he objected to what he could only describe as the gasometer housing a panorama of the battle, over a hundred yards in length, by the Swiss artist, Francois Dumoulin, completed in 1912. Walter Guinness put it more politely in writing that, ‘The painting is stated to be lifelike and animated, but regret is expressed that some other site has not been selected.’532 He did not, however, dissent from Moon’s view that the best act of commemoration for the centenary would be a ‘clean sweep’ of buildings.
A law to stop any development likely to interfere with the characteristics of the battlefield was passed in Belgium on 26 March 1914. Just a few days previously, a meeting of the committee of the ‘Fund for the preservation of the Battlefield of Waterloo’ took place in the Waterloo Gallery at Apsley House. The 4th Duke of Wellington presided with Field-Marshal Lord Roberts as treasurer. Representatives from the Belgian Waterloo centenary committee were also in attendance. Presumably unpersuaded that the new law would be a failsafe, those present voiced concern that speculators would build on the battlefield for 1915. To prevent it, they hoped to raise £10,000 to buy the building rights to 1,347 of its acres. A public appeal for the money was launched in April. The intention was that any surplus would be diverted to the preservation of Hougoumont and the planned international memorial. By May, however, the fund had raised less than £4,800. This was judged a poor response, one which ran the risk that ‘the ground on which heroes fought and died and in which they lie buried should be desecrated by the erection of shoddy buildings’. Edward Moon suggested that if government declined to help, MPs, who since 1911 had been paid £400 per annum, might like to surrender 25 per cent of their salary ‘to some really national object’.533
Days later, all talk of parliamentarians’ altruism and acts of international commemoration was rendered irrelevant by the outbreak of war. By 18 June 1915, the campaign fields of a century before were in the German sector of the Western Front. In Brussels, Blücher’s heirs celebrated alone. In a speech near Wellington’s 1815 residence, Belgium’s new German Governor-General, General Moritz von Bissing, declared that ‘we are the conquerors. It is thanks to the strength of our arms that we stand here.’ Sixty miles away, near Ypres, Sir John French, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, made no public reference to Waterloo, but spent part of the day reviewing units from the 3rd Cavalry Division, praising their recent endeavours in face of ‘dastardly gas attacks’. Back in Britain, in a tone reminiscent of that struck at the time of the Crimean War, The Times declared that the landmark date ‘must necessarily pass very quietly’. The nation’s French allies must not be affronted. Thus, although Leicester Galleries continued with its exhibition of Lady Butler’s pictures of the Waterloo campaign on behalf of the Officers’ Families Fund, annual regimental dinners were cancelled. A projected Waterloo display at the Royal United Services Institute was similarly abandoned. Wellington College decided to replace its annual speech day with one commemorating the nearly 200 former pupils who had already fallen in the new war. Part of it involved the 4th Duke planting an acorn from the oak tree planted beside the grave of Copenhagen at Stratfield Saye. Another involved the College’s army corps parading across its playing fields. How many of them were amongst the 707 former Wellingtonians who would perish in the war by 1918?534
Elsewhere, recorded acts of centenary commemoration were relatively few and far between. They included bouquets adorned with tricolours left by a French lady at the figures of both Wellington and Napoleon at Madame Tussauds. Someone placed a wreath on the Wellington statue outside Apsley House, unveiled in 1888 to replace the one ignominiously removed to Aldershot. The Royal Artillery commemorated their forebears by placing a wreath on the grave of Cavalié Mercer in Devon. Amongst the living, the most notable celebrant was the Reverend W. T. Kingsley. The eighteenth of June marked his 100th birthday; his father had been an army surgeon at Waterloo.535
As it had in 1865, The Times offered its readers a substantial article on the campaign of 1815.536 ‘A hundred years ago today,’ it began, ‘the fate of the world was decided on the field of Waterloo. Today, after the lapse of a hundred years, the Low Countries are the scene of a mightier struggle, and once more the fate of the world hangs upon the issue; but the foes of a hundred years ago are brothers-in-arms against a common enemy.’ Claiming, unconvincingly, that, ‘It is very long since Englishmen thought of the Battle of Waterloo primarily, if at all, as a national victory,’ it was on surer ground in saying that it had enduring appeal as an epic romantic drama in which circumstance had brought down Napoleon. The thesis that it wished to advance, however, was one of Waterloo launching a hundred years of Anglo-French amity, the two nations bound together by their common belief in allowing ordered liberty to develop. Wellington was praised less for his military genius, therefore, than for his statesmanship. He had waged neither a war of conquest, nor saddled France with a vindictive peace. His approach contrasted sharply, it was argued, with the brutal approach to both war and diplomacy preferred by the Prussians in 1815, one that had been given substance when France was forced to cede its provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany in 1871 at the close of the Franco-Prussian war.
Though not entirely bad history, the article was clearly better propaganda, a nice example of how Waterloo continued to be reinterpreted to inform the present. It was, unsurprisingly, neither the first nor the last Waterloo allusion during the First World War. In apologising for an attack by Berliners on the British Embassy following Britain’s declaration of war in August 1914, the Kaiser’s emissary told the British ambassador ‘how deeply the people felt the action of England in ranging herself against Germany and forgetting how we had fought shoulder to shoulder at Waterloo’. As the Germans advanced into Belgium, Douglas Haig recorded in his diary that ‘another great battle’ might be imminent in the fields between Waterloo and Charleroi.537 In September 1914, news of the Scots Greys in action near St Quentin prompted the inevitable headline ‘Waterloo Recalled’. It was later claimed that the 70-year-old son of an ensign in the 28th, who had carried the regiment’s colours at Quatre Bras, tried to get himself sent to Flanders when he heard that the Gloucester Regiment, its descendant, was near Waterloo. In 1915, Sir John French’s wife was presented with a pistol supposedly carried by Wellington in the battle. Later that year, the Prussian standard that hung on the walls of St Paul’s near the Duke’s tomb was removed.538
As the war deepened, and casualties mounted – Lord Richard Wellesley, son of the 4th Duke, was amongst many descendants of Waterloo fathers to be killed – the memory of Waterloo was enlisted in new ways. The ‘Anglesey leg’, for example, patented by a John Potts of Chelsea and advertised in 1914, would soon be needed in tragically large numbers. The Red Cross, which held auctions to raise money for those with wounds of any description, included original editions of 1815 newspapers in its catalogues. With the flood of volunteers failing to keep pace with the demands of Total War, Captain Cecil Battine recommended ‘conscription as our best method of celebrating the anniversary of Waterloo’.539 Most salient, however, were the reminders of Prussian brutality from the 1815 campaign. The 1,500 German soldiers in Belgium in 1915 reported to be making plans to demolish the Lion’s Mound were the uncivilised descendants of those who Wellington had prevented from blowing up the Jena Bridge in Pa
ris a century before. The story was pure propaganda, one implying that vileness was part of the Hun’s genetic make-up. But it played well. In 1916, the press reproduced extracts from a July 1815 letter written by the publisher, John Murray, describing Prussian excesses in Paris. As the war was entering its final weeks, Henry Lucy was reminding people of a Robert Southey letter from October 1815 on the same theme. ‘The Prussian,’ Lucy added with ironic superfluity, ‘is the same, whether trained under “that abominable Frederick” or living under the pious Kaiser Wilhelm.’540
The end of the war, too, prompted Waterloo associations. In November 1918, the 1st Royal Dragoons and 10th Royal Hussars, both regiments whose forebears had participated in the 1815 campaign, were reported to have ridden over the battlefield in their advance towards Germany. The armistice saw George V address MPs in the Royal Gallery flanked by Maclise’s picture of Wellington greeting Blücher. For one well-read individual, James Simpson’s once popular account of the earlier conflict, specifically his description of everybody shaking hands with everybody in Edinburgh when the news of Waterloo arrived, was reminiscent of ‘a touch of the hilarity of Armistice Day’.541 The First World War, however, as for so much else, drew a final line under the Waterloo century. For all that comparisons were made between the 1815 and 1914–1918 campaigns, there were enormous differences, most obviously the human cost. In 1815 this had, rightly, been judged to be horrendous. But when the Prince of Wales unveiled a cross in Exeter to the men of the Devons in 1921, it was remarked that they alone had sent about twice the number of men to the 1914–1918 war as there were Britons in Wellington’s 1815 army; they had also incurred roughly twice the casualties. And in the new democratic age of mass citizen armies, the ordinary British soldier received individual burial. Not for him the large pits of 1815 or his remains suffering the gross indignity of being traded to tourists. Where those remains were unidentifiable or lost, his name at least, as Charles Williams-Wynn and William Thackeray would have approved, was inscribed on memorials such as the Menin Gate at Ypres or the memorial to the missing of the Somme at Thiepval.542 It was indicative of how the 1914–1918 conflict would thenceforth supplant that of 1793–1815 as a reference point in the national consciousness that it should even appropriate its moniker of the Great War.