WITH CRÉCY & AGINCOURT
- A study of the most written-about battle in history, and of one of the best-preserved battlefields.
- This battlefield tour is prefaced by visits to Crécy and Agincourt.
The Battle of Waterloo in 1815 terminated twenty-three years of fighting which were at least as deadly as the First World War, and ushered in ninety-nine years of relative peace and political equilibrium. Waterloo can also be seen as marking Great Britain’s coming of age as a superpower. As an ingredient in British self-identity, the event became absolutely key, epitomising the championship of liberty over tyranny, victory of the weaker over the stronger, and the virtues of courage, composure, perseverance and discipline.
Despite its far-reaching consequences, Waterloo was very far from being the biggest battle of the Napoleonic Wars, or the bloodiest, or even, in terms of imbalance of battlefield casualties, the most decisive. It was not even a particularly British victory – two-thirds of the allied army was German, Dutch and Belgian, and that is without including the Prussians, whose intervention late in the day ensured allied success. Much of the enduring fascination of the battle – probably the most written-about in history – derives from the controversies which surround it and because it was ‘the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life’.
Wellington’s ‘infamous army’, though of similar size to Napoleon’s, contained a high proportion of inexperienced troops and citizen militia, and some who only a year previously had been marching under the imperial eagle. For much of the day the battle seemed to be going France’s way, but the allies fought heroically, or rather stood their ground tenaciously. This was Wellington’s ultimate test, his chance to measure his abilities against Bonaparte, whom he had never met in battle before. And his generalship proved to be the superior.
The unpredictability of the outcome, the well-honed tactics, the extraordinary bravery and gallantry and the unprecedented quantity of eye-witness accounts make Waterloo particularly rewarding to study, and it is wonderfully fortuitous that the terrain is so well preserved.
Amazingly, this is also the case with Crécy (1346) and Agincourt (1415), also scenes of British victories over superior French forces. Likewise, they are major ingredients in the fading national myth. But it is not jingoism which brings these three battles together in this tour, but the contingency of geographical proximity – that and their fame. As a trio of events in British (pre-Victorian) history, their combined resonance is unsurpassed. A proper study of the battlefields leaves little room for partiality; ‘Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won’.
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