A Model Victory. Malcolm Balen

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       IV

       To Lord Fitzroy Somerset, Military Secretary to the Duke of Wellington From Sir James Willoughby Gordon, Quartermaster-General

      PRIVATE

      1 November, 1834

      My dear Lord Fitzroy,

      It appears to me that the clearest point of view under which both armies could be represented on a Model upon a large scale would be that of their position at the commencement of the action, when each successive movement could best be followed up by an attentive study of the Duke’s Despatch – whereas if the action is to be represented as it stood at the close, and the information to be obtained from each commanding officer or perhaps from others even less informed, this must in great measure tend to weaken the high authority of the Duke’s Despatch and to substitute in its stead divers minor accounts and those too not detailed at the time but after a lapse of 20 years.

      This is the way in which the matter strikes me, and I merely throw it out for the better judgement of those who have thought more about it.

      Yours faithfully,

      J.W. Gordon

      The military authorities who came to oppose William Siborne’s Model had a simple reason for doing so. It was not that they objected in principle to his plans, but that they could not abide the practice. Partly this was because of their view of history: Siborne was gathering information about the Battle of Waterloo in greater detail than anyone before him, so that he was becoming a repository of knowledge and expertise which far outstripped that held by the military commanders. Yet history was held to be the preserve of those who led the soldiers into battle, rather than the rank and file themselves. When Captain Michael Childers, of the 11th Light Dragoons, forwarded a letter to Siborne from his commander, Lt.-Col. James Sleigh, he took the liberty of commenting that it ‘only shows how hopeless it is to expect (after such a lapse of time) an account from those who were actors in what then took place, in which we should all agree.’ Wellington could not have put it better. History was like an army: it had to be led, controlled and organised by those in charge.

      But armies have to adapt to events, and despite the unwelcome democracy of its evidence-gathering, Siborne’s project would have been supported by the military leaders who had sanctioned it, if they had not objected to his specific choice of which battle-scene to represent. He was determined to model the end of the battle, at which Prussian troops were present, and in doing so he unwittingly brought himself into conflict with the military authorities whose view of history was very different from his. That the defiance of Napoleon had lasted all day, without Prussian support, and that many glorious individual deeds were performed by British soldiers, only sharpened the desire for a model to celebrate the role of the British. In particular, the authorities wished William Siborne to model the ‘commencement of the action’.

      That the morning of 18 June 1815 provided a glorious spectacle, there is no doubt. On the easternmost side of the Anglo-Allied line, the officers of the 18th Hussars wore blue-grey overalls with scarlet stripes, as if they were trying to draw attention to themselves; gold or silver or crimson lace adorned the uniforms of the 11th and 12th Light Dragoons, and they had yellow and black stripes on their breeches; three cavalry regiments had dark blue facings and gold lace on their uniforms; four branches of the Royal Horse Artillery had blue and gold braided jackets and a white sash. Officers in the 23rd Light Dragoons sported turquoise jackets; for the rest, including the Foot Guards and the Corps of Royal Engineers, there was a theme of red and white.

      Then there were the hats – a vast, swirling, colourful array of military headgear. The Life Guards had a black and red woollen crest and a white plume curling over their helmets, like a squirrel’s tail; the Scots Greys wore bearskin caps with a red cloth patch bearing the white horse of Hanover. There were red shakos, bell-topped shakos, Belgic shakos covered with oilskin, stovepipe shakos and dark-blue shakos, bonnets and busbies. There were white pompoms and yellow pompoms, green pompoms and light-blue pompoms, white plumes, black plumes, green plumes and red plumes, red and white plumes and yellow and white plumes, and for officers in the Brunswick Lancer Squadron a vast, absurd plume of blue and yellow.

      Napoleon’s army was no less colourful than Wellington’s. Among the elite Imperial Guard, there were bright blue uniforms for the heavy cavalry, the Grenadiers à Cheval, and green for the Guard’s Dragoons, both edged with orange lace. The 1st and 2nd Carabiniers were dressed in white, with sky-blue collars and cuffs of red and white or sky-blue and white, while the helmets of their officers and troopers sprouted a vast red quiff. Then there were the red pompoms of the tirailleurs, and the green pompoms of the voltigeurs; the great black plumes of both the cuirassiers СКАЧАТЬ