The skirmishes of opinion as they reached their Waterloo

Napoleon and Wellington

The Battle of Waterloo and the Great Commanders

Who Fought It

Andrew Roberts

Simon & Schuster: 350 pp., $27

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In recent years there has been a spate of books with a similar approach -- the depiction of parallel lives -- and seldom have they been successful. A portrait of two lives is not necessarily more interesting than that of one life, especially when they are forcibly put next to each other. One of the worst was Lord Alan Bullock’s “Hitler and Stalin,” in which this eminent historian neglected an important matter: their relations, opinions and perceptions of each other.

In “Napoleon and Wellington,” Andrew Roberts has done the very opposite. “This is not a joint biography,” he writes, “but rather a study of beliefs and rivalry, propaganda and rancor.” The two protagonists ended up despising each other but that, too, was not a simple matter. The Duke of Wellington’s public statements about Napoleon Bonaparte were different from what he said privately on many an occasion. Moreover, their opinions regarding each other kept changing. And, in the end, what they thought and said about each other revealed their own characters. Roberts’ book amounts to more than a portrait of their relationship; it adds considerably to our knowledge of the two men.

There were certainly parallels in the lives of Napoleon and Wellington. They were born in the same year and both had fathers who died when they were very young. Each had four brothers and three sisters and both got decisive help from brothers at turning points in their careers. Neither had much interest in where he was born (Napoleon in Corsica, Wellington in Ireland); both were successful generals. But they never faced each other. For nearly six years, Wellington marched up and down Spain and Portugal, battling French generals, yet never Napoleon. They didn’t meet in battle except, of course, at Waterloo. There, at one moment, they may have been not more than a quarter of a mile from each other; but whether they actually saw each other is doubtful. Yet each imagined and talked about how he saw the other plenty of times, both before and after Waterloo.

Their characters differed greatly: one the supreme egoist, the impetuous Corsican who aimed and succeeded at becoming a brilliant Frenchman; the other supremely self-centered, a cold and snobbish native of Ireland who succeeded at becoming a paragon of an English aristocrat. Napoleon seldom said anything good about Wellington; Wellington admired Napoleon as a soldier but despised his character. Some time after Waterloo, this duality disappeared. In a private letter in 1835, Wellington wrote that “Bonaparte’s whole life, civil, political and military, was a fraud.” Ten years before that, Wellington, who was not a dedicated writer, decided to write a 53-page analysis of Napoleon’s 1812 Russian campaign. As Roberts writes, “The emperor who emerges from Wellington’s account is a bumbling, procrastinating, heartless fool, far removed from the man Wellington continued to laud in public.”

Yet Wellington collected a vast hoard of Napoleonic memorabilia, including the giant nude statue of Napoleon by Canova that stands in Apsley House to this day. “Short of having the emperor himself in an iron cage ... ,” Roberts writes, “Wellington could hardly have had more trophies of the man he had defeated.” In turn, there is Napoleon’s summation of Wellington while on St. Helena: “a man of little spirit, no generosity, without grandeur of the soul ... a narrow-minded man.” In his will (never executed), Napoleon bequeathed a small sum to a Frenchman who had attempted to kill Wellington in Paris. In sum, whatever respect they may have had for each other disappeared after Waterloo.

Roberts is an excellent writer, with a thorough knowledge of the mass of literature pertinent to his difficult subject. His understanding is as good as his knowledge, as when he writes that “the denigration of Wellington by French writers is as ludicrous as his deification by some British writers.” He knows not a few curious details (for example the existence of a “Wellington-Napoleon” high school somewhere in Missouri) as well as the not unimportant fact that Wellington’s army at Waterloo of 68,000 men included fewer than 24,000 British and Irish soldiers (the rest were Dutch and other continentals). One thing entirely missing is a description of Wellington’s beautiful, unfortunate and sad wife, although there are pages and pages describing two courtesans in Paris whose favors both Napoleon and Wellington probably enjoyed.

Roberts concludes with a regret: “There is some irony in the fact that Waterloo was fought a mere twelve miles from Brussels, the capital of today’s European Union. For, although Wellington won the battle, it is Napoleon’s dream that is coming true.” That is arguable, because Napoleon’s “dream” of a united Europe was entirely different from the bureaucratic confection at Brussels, a capital of Belgium but not of a Europe that in reality does not exist. There is a more stunning historical coincidence that Roberts did not mention: Charles de Gaulle joined Winston Churchill in London to proclaim France’s resistance to Hitler’s Germany on June 18, 1940, exactly 125 years after the day of Waterloo.

Wellington was a great commander but, like other great British military heroes -- the Duke of Marlborough, Gen. Douglas Haig, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery -- not a likable man. Wellington was not modest, and his character was not particularly attractive. “Britain’s greatest military hero,” Roberts writes, marked by his “nepotism, racism and snobbishness ... saved Europe from despotism.” Having read, enjoyed and profited from this valuable and well-balanced book, I faced a dilemma: where to put it in my library, on the French or on the English history shelves? I chose the latter.

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From “Napoleon and Wellington”

The Emperor Napoleon seemed confident of victory when he breakfasted with his senior generals at Le Caillou farmhouse on the Charleroi-Brussels road at eight o’clock on the morning of Sunday, 18 June 1815. He had feared that the Anglo-Allied army under the Duke of Wellington might have withdrawn from its defensive positions on the ridge of Mont St. Jean during the night, but dawn had revealed it still in place. The meal was served on silver plate bearing the imperial arms, and once it was cleared away maps of the area were spread across the table and the council of war began.

“The army of the enemy is superior to ours by one-fourth,” Napoleon announced.... “We have nevertheless ninety chances in our favor, and not ten against us.”