A Model Victory - Malcolm Balen

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under his absolute control. Siborne had started his project with a naïve belief that he was doing nothing other than bringing credit on the army he so admired, and the generalship of Wellington of which he stood in awe. But as the Model progressed, and he found himself at war with the authorities, his weapons were his doggedness, his obsession with the demands of historical accuracy, his determination to make his precious Model so exact, so meticulously accurate, that the soldiers he so admired would marvel at his powers. Both attributes, his naïveté and his determination, blinded him to the gradual process of obstruction and denigration which came to undermine his finances and his health. Unwittingly, he was challenging the Duke’s Despatches, and taking on the state, by adhering to the simple, if democratic, dictum that history should consist of the properly weighed claims of eyewitnesses, whatever their station in life.

      Dublin

      8 March 1834

      My dear General,

      Surely it will be conceded that officers may be able to give a very good version of what passed before their own eyes, as far as relates to themselves and their own corps.

      Fortunately, there still exists a considerable number of eyewitnesses of the Battle of Waterloo and it appears to me that the principal utility and advantage of constructing a Model … is to secure, before the favourable opportunity is gone for ever, a well-authenticated representation and record of the positions and movements of the troops engaged…

      The only mode of arriving at accurate conclusions essential for such a purpose, is to weigh and compare the statements of those eyewitnesses …

      I cannot proceed upon any other principle – it would be useless to trust to the very imperfect unsatisfactory accounts that have hitherto been published, which though they might serve the purpose of the general historian, or of the designer of a battle-piece, become of little or no value to the modeller, who, from the nature of his work, especially when that is constructed upon an unusually large scale, can make no progress without correct data – accuracy, not effect, being the sole object of his labours.

      I remain,

      My dear General

      Your very faithful servant

       WS

      By the year’s end, a weary Lord Fitzroy Somerset had made his one and only concession, replying tersely, through the chief clerk in the commander-in-chief’s office: ‘Then let him issue his circular and the Lord give him a safe deliverance.’ It was a concession he would bitterly regret, as Siborne’s evidence-gathering reached epic proportions, with dangerously democratic results. With the building of William Siborne’s Great Model of the Field of Waterloo, a new conflict had broken out – the Battle of Waterloo’s history.

      Why this should be so is a mystery that lies in the eyewitness accounts which Siborne gathered, and in the separate version the commanders wished to tell. It lies deep in the course of the fighting itself, in the twists and turns of battle, and most importantly of all, in the fragile and sometimes fractious alliance of armies which came together to face the greatest soldier of the age. It is the story of how William Siborne decided how much credit should be awarded to the Prussians, rather than the Duke of Wellington, for the victory which defined the age.

       III

       To the Secretary at War, Edward Ellice

       From Sir Hussey Vivian, Commander-in-Chief in Ireland

      Dublin, 20 August 1833

      My dear Ellice,

      I send you a memorandum on the subject of a great national work undertaken under the authority of the general Commander in Chief – a model of the Battle of Waterloo.

      Mr Siborne is a very intelligent and clever person. He has taken great pains with this work and has been at a great expense – he was many months on the spot surveying the ground. It is impossible for any thing to be more correct than it is.

      Under these circumstances I hope he will not be allowed any longer to remain under pecuniary difficulties, but that the means he proposes may be taken to supply him with the sum requisite to finish the Model.

      Ever my dear Ellice,

      Very faithfully yours,

      Hussey Vivian

      War had come to threaten Europe so quickly, it was hard to believe it was less than four months since the emperor had returned from his island exile. It was harder still to remember that, when Napoleon had landed at the end of February, his invasion force had consisted of eleven hundred soldiers and a fleet, if such it could be called, of three ships. Not that the size of his army had mattered when he set foot on French soil. Many thousands of French soldiers, ranged against him at Grenoble, had simply laid down their arms and cheered their emperor’s return. Soon the miniature army, swelled by deserters, was built upon an altogether grander scale and a country which contained an emperor and a king could not hold both within its boundaries. Within a month, Louis XVIII had fled the country and the French monarchy had collapsed. But that was not the end of Napoleon’s ambitions, and his enemies knew it. Europe’s political masters, whose representatives had gathered at the Congress of Vienna, realised it was only a matter of time before war broke out. Now it had actually happened, but still Napoleon had managed to take everyone by surprise.

      Through the brilliance of his manoeuvres, Napoleon was able to dictate the course of events, and to scatter the two armies, of Britain and Prussia, which had hoped to unite against him. In doing so, he not only gave himself a chance of victory which would have been denied him if they had joined forces, but he placed their alliance under a strain which nearly broke it. In this way, he so undermined the little trust that the two armies placed in each other that the British military authorities would give little or no credit to the Prussians for the victory they came to win. The seeds of this discord lay in the speed of Napoleon’s attack which kept Wellington’s army and the Prussian forces apart until the very end of the Battle of Waterloo. As William Siborne discovered, the eventual result of their separation was to infect the battle’s history beyond his cure.

      When the first dozen regiments of French cavalry thundered through the countryside, it was not yet dawn, and Wellington had no idea that his enemy was on the move. The horsemen, brass-helmeted, spurred on their charges, and barely noticed the land as it fell away behind them. Their road led north, and soon it brought them to a small river which marked the frontier of France and Belgium. A hundred hooves, followed by many hundreds more, came crashing through the river at its shallow fording-place, so that spray was sent high into the air, to hang for a moment in the half-light. The horses climbed up and over the riverbank and took their thunder with them. The River Sambre resumed its gentle course, and the birds returned to their resting place in the trees. But the world was no longer at peace. The enemy had crossed the border and there were thousands more waiting to follow the bridgehead they had made. It was 15 June 1815 and the invasion had begun.

      If Napoleon was to narrow the odds against him, he had to catch the enemy off-guard. To take on the Duke of Wellington, who was undefeated in battle, was one matter, even though the Emperor did not rate his tactical abilities: too slow, too cautious, and no flair, he thought. But to take the Anglo-Allied army on at the same time as the Prussian army of old Blücher was military madness. The Emperor must keep the two sides apart or else be hopelessly outnumbered. That was why speed was all. His spies had told him that it would take many hours to bring together Wellington’s scattered army, and many hours more for the two armies to become one force. If he could take on each army separately, then they might never unite. And that was entirely their own fault.

      Wellington and Blücher had first met only six weeks earlier to discuss their joint campaign. They met again in Brussels at the end of May, where Blücher had been granted the rare honour of inspecting some of the Duke’s cavalry. Their discussions had led to them to agree that their armies would cooperate in battle, but their pact was incomplete. United by a common enemy, the two armies were not brought together

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