A Model Victory. Malcolm Balen

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СКАЧАТЬ the years ahead, Siborne was sent the first sign that he had become an irritant, and that the military was beginning to wish it had not sanctioned his project. He received this letter from Maj.-Gen. Sir James Charles Dalbiac, the Inspector-General of Cavalry and a Peninsula veteran himself. It was the beginning of years of cuttingly formal exchanges with the country’s bureaucrats.

      34, Cavendish Square

      5 March 1834

      My dear Siborne,

      Since the receipt of your letter, I have had several conferences with Lord Fitzroy Somerset.

      We think that it would greatly increase your difficulties rather than lead to elucidation to write a circular for information to different general officers who commanded brigades and who from a variety of circumstances must give such very different versions of what passed before their eyes …

      Yours faithfully,

      J. Chas Dalbiac

      Siborne, convinced of the accuracy of his methodology in matters both topographical and historical, would not take the hint. At one point he asked Lieutenant Samuel Waymouth, of the 2nd Life Guards, who was wounded at Waterloo and had been one of the very few officers to be captured by the French, to approach Fitzroy Somerset on Siborne’s behalf. Waymouth reported back: ‘he cannot conceive the possibility of your being able to attain to accuracy, considering how conflicting are the statements one continually hears from persons, all whose testimonies one considers undeniable. If you succeed in giving a tolerably correct representation, it is all you can expect.’

      But Siborne was as determined to follow his own course as his portrait by Samuel Lover suggests. His mouth was hard-set against change. His dogged determination blinkered him to ways which might smooth his path ahead to achieve his overall objective, so that he was not in the slightest bit sensitive to recognising any of the political niceties which Somerset raised. Nor was he moved by the idea, put forward by Lord Fitzroy Somerset, that he should give the finished Model to the Duke of Wellington, refusing to realise that such a gesture might win him the necessary political support for its creation.

      The result was that Fitzroy Somerset did not receive the most diplomatic of responses. From this point on, conflict was inevitable and Wellington was forced, as on the battlefield, to try to keep events 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 СКАЧАТЬ