Abel on Dawson, 'Waterloo: the Truth at Last. Why Napoleon Lost the Great Battle'

H-War Abel on Dawson, 'Waterloo: The Truth at Last. Why Napoleon Lost the Great Battle'

Review published on Saturday, June 2, 2018

Paul L. Dawson. Waterloo: The Truth at Last. Why Napoleon Lost the Great Battle. Barnsley: Frontline Books, 2017. 547 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-5267-0245-6.

Reviewed by Jonathan Abel (Command and General Staff College, Ft. Leavenworth) Published on H-War (June, 2018) Commissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air War College)

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=51957

Paul L. Dawson’s provocatively titled Waterloo: The Truth at Last: Why Napoleon lost the Great Battle seeks to provide a new narrative of the event and to weigh in on the many historiographical controversies, large and small, that continue to roil the field of Waterloo studies. This builds on Dawson’s previous works, including Napoleon and Grouchy (2017) and Marshal Ney at Quatre Bras (2017), completing a trilogy. Dawson’s approach relies on primary-source documents and archival material to craft his argument, especially muster rolls and casualty reports from the latter. The resulting work falls somewhere between a data book and a narrative, providing valuable statistical information to the specialist while attempting to entice the generalist with novel arguments and conclusions.

Dawson’s stated purpose is to demonstrate that “despite a plethora of books on the subject, the hard strategic reality is that Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte were sideshows compared to the French and Prussian combats at Plancenoit and Papelotte” (p. ix). He thus dedicates much of the work to the gritty urban combat around the villages of Papelotte and Frischermont as the French, British, and Prussian armies traded possession of them. These chapters illuminate his main thesis, that the battle- deciding action took place on the French right with the Prussians and only a portion of the British forces. He concludes with the oft-repeated argument that the failures of Marshal Emmanuel, marquis de Grouchy, to contain the Prussians provide a major explanation for the French defeat.

A secondary theme of Waterloo: The Truth at Last, as the name suggests, is contributing to historiographical debates of the much-analyzed battle. The chapter “Legros, Bouche, or Bonnet” debates the identity of the French soldier, perhaps mythical, who smashed the gates at Hougoumont. Similarly, a portion of “Defeat” analyzes the role of General Pierre Cambronne and his infamous mot. These arguments, as well as the time-worn debates over the competencies of Grouchy; Jean-Baptiste Drouet, comte d’Erlon; Marshal Michel Ney; General Honoré Reille; and Napoleon himself are likely unavoidable in any work on Waterloo, and Dawson’s opinions continue to stoke their historiographical fires.

Ostensibly, Waterloo’s strength lies in its sourcing. Dawson relies on the printed sources for much of his narrative, including extensive block quotes throughout. His mastery of casualty reports and figures occupies the remainder of the book, often in bulleted lists or charts detailing the minute facts of individual engagements, drawn from French archives. This portion forms the most valuable

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Abel on Dawson, 'Waterloo: The Truth at Last. Why Napoleon Lost the Great Battle'. H-War. 06-19-2018. https://networks.h-net.org/node/12840/reviews/1887229/abel-dawson-waterloo-truth-last-why-napoleon-lost-great-battle Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-War contribution of the work to larger historiography. He argues that casualty figures illustrate the pace of the action and illuminate many historiographical debates, for example going so far as to state that “in order to assess the battlefield performance of the 6th Corps at Waterloo, we turn to the total losses sustained” (p. 334). However, Dawson’s sourcing fails in other areas. For example, he includes block quotes from both Lord Castlereagh and Sir Francis Burdett in his introduction, yet his citations are not from the works of either man, but rather from the author’s own lecture presented in 2015 (pp. 2-3). In addition, many footnotes cite “personal communication,” including citations of data, rather than archival material (pp. 35, 52, 70, 117, 119, 141, 151, 305, 309, 311). Perhaps most significantly, Dawson does not appear to have consulted German-language sources, nor mined German archives for source material, a necessity in a work focused on the Prussian role in the battle.

As Waterloo is likely the most examined Napoleonic battle in Anglophone literature and historiography, the ultimate measure of a book on the great battle is its novelty in a field crowded by thousands of similar works. Dawson attempts to locate his work via the use of casualty figures in his narrative, which does represent a fairly novel approach. However, the reader is struck by the similarity of Dawson’s work to a data book. As noted, large sections of his narrative consist of tables of casualty figures, bulleted lists of casualty descriptions, and vignettes drawn from muster rolls. Dawson contends that these records “have never before appeared in print” (p. 448). However, the bulk of the statistics, at least as aggregated in tables, appear in works like Digby Smith’sThe Greenhill Napoleonic Wars Data Book (1998). Perhaps Dawson intends to say that his figures do not appear, as a whole or in quasi-narrative form, in print, but the distinction is lost in the stridency of his arguments.

Dawson is at his best when he combines his deep examination of archival muster rolls and casualty tables with firsthand accounts of Waterloo. In doing so, he provides valuable arguments about the tactical engagements that composed the battle, particularly in addressing many small myths that have accreted over the centuries since. However, it does not rise above the level of its own argumentation. Dawson sets out to provide a unique and novel work that uses casualty figures and muster rolls to show the importance of the Prussian contribution to Waterloo. While Dawson may have technically achieved this in a single volume, other works have trod the same ground. To provide one example, much of Peter Hofschroer’s career has been dedicated to illuminating the Prussian role in the battle, in contrast to William Siborne and others. Statistical studies like the aforementioned work by Smith provide many of the same casualty figures on which Dawson positions his thesis. His conclusion, that Napoleon lost the battle through his own incompetence and that of his subordinates, is hardly novel to the field either.

This leaves Dawson’s Waterloo in an awkward historiographical position, and its audience seems nebulous. His reliance on block quotes from memoirs, despite his stated reservations about them, makes for a choppy narrative, particularly for readers put off by long quotations. A reader not familiar with the battle, its tactical details, and especially the historiographical debates major and minor that surround it, will quickly become lost in Dawson’s prose. Therefore, the casual reader would not pick up Dawson’s work as an introduction or clear narrative of the battle. A specialist, hobbyist, or historian seeking data and statistical analysis might do just as well with Smith’s work or a similar one, or even blogs dedicated to archiving such material. However, his historiographical debates will be welcomed by an audience always eager to rehash the great battle. Ultimately, Dawson must be credited with bringing casualty statistics into a quasi-narrative single volume, which

Citation: Jonathan Abel. Review of Dawson, Paul L., Waterloo: The Truth at Last. Why Napoleon Lost the Great Battle. H-War, H-Net Reviews. June, URL:2018. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=51957

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.