Using hundreds of eyewitness statements, the Model he created tried to capture the exact moment of victory, the Crisis of the Battle as it was called, with the precision only he could bring to such an enterprise. But models, of course, cannot show the great sweep of history; they cannot demonstrate the irresistible tide of events which flows inexorably in one direction, towards a single inevitable conclusion. They cannot make allowances for nuances of analysis. They cannot hedge or dissemble, or allow extraneous factors or influences to intrude upon the carefully crafted conclusion they have created. They are fixed in their certainty, frozen in time, their central characters immobile, as if paralysed by the mighty forces which they have unleashed. Such a fate awaited Siborne’s Model, because he dared to pose the central question: who won the Battle of Waterloo? Was it Wellington’s forces, or Blücher’s Prussians, or a combination of the two? Siborne was forced to provide an answer, and the question nearly destroyed him. The next decade, for Siborne, would come to be dominated by the need for money for his Model, and the military establishment’s growing opposition to the exercise in historical democracy it had unwittingly unleashed. These two forces would collide, undermining Siborne’s search for truth, eroding his atavistic belief in the army and his own view of the historical facts he had spent half his lifetime assembling.
‘What are you to do with the Prussians?’ asked the Waterloo veteran, Sir Richard Hussey Vivian, presciently, about the army of model soldiers the junior officer was assembling. His question would find an echo in the army, and among the political leadership of the country. It would reverberate among the high command and in the corridors of power. It would even tap uncomfortably at the door of the great commander himself. Sometimes tacitly, and sometimes overtly, Siborne’s obstinate search for the facts would be seen as the barrier to the further, official, funding of his Model. What was he to do with the Prussians? The question pursued Siborne to the grave.
When varying circumstances, witnessed at the time under great interruption, are sought historically after the lapse of many years, suggestion occurs as remembrance, surmise as fact; the difficulty then, with whatever veracious intention, is to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Lt.-Col. Henry Murray, letter to William Siborne, 27 December 1834
It would be the biggest, most detailed model the world had ever seen, but it was almost impossible to make. First, there was its size. Siborne’s creation would be so large, it would have to be made in more than thirty sections, which would have to dovetail perfectly, or it could never be moved. Then, too, there was the question of Siborne’s own experience. The project was far more ambitious than anything he had ever attempted. He was used to making relief maps, indeed he was quite brilliant at creating them, but never before had he attempted to fashion so many model soldiers or tiny buildings, all of which would be needed for a proper battlefield model of Waterloo. But when his superior officer asked him if he was up to the task, he had to accept the challenge. Apart from anything else, he must have thought it would be the making of his career.
Siborne needed the high profile the work would bring him, for the military had been slow to recognise his skills, and he had a wife, Helen, the daughter of a Fifeshire banker, and children to support. By 1830, when he mapped the battlefield, he had already been assistant military secretary to the commander of the forces in Ireland for four years. It was not the most prestigious post he could hope for, and he would have to remain in it for another thirteen years. It seemed the army was overlooking Siborne’s talents. One officer, quoted in W.M. Fitzpatrick’s The Life of Charles Lever, suggested that ‘he was a perfect gentleman and a most able officer. A man of fine intellect and judgement, truly unpretending in his manner and very well informed. Pity that the British Army was so constituted as to condemn a man like Siborne to an utterly subordinate and inadequate sphere of duty.’
Part of Siborne’s career problem was that mapping was a relatively new development, so his skills were not fully recognised by the army. The first large-scale survey of any part of the British Isles had been the military survey of Scotland, carried out in response to the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745/6, under the leadership of a civilian recruited from the Post Office, William Roy. But it had taken another half-century for the army to realise the importance of accurate maps in planning its military campaigns. At the start of the Napoleonic Wars, the only formal training in surveying was to be found at the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, where cadets from the Royal Engineers were taught, and at the Board of Ordnance Drawing Room at the Tower of London.
Siborne could see the need to improve the craft. His aim was to create a style of topographical drawing which ‘impresses at once upon the mind of the person viewing it as a correct image of nature’ so that even ‘the most fastidious will not require a greater approximation of perfection.’ He wrote two technical books on the subject, one of which he dedicated to his superior, the commander in Ireland, Sir George Murray. Siborne considered that Ordnance Survey work in England, then in its infancy, had been woefully executed, because the resulting maps, first of Kent and then of Essex, had been so badly drawn that they had failed to match the great skill with which the surveyors had carried out their task. He agreed with evidence heard by a parliamentary committee which was considering how to make a complete survey of Ireland. The engineer William Bald, who won later renown for designing the Antrim coast road to replace the dangerous Old Irish Highway, had told the enquiry that the mapping should be carried out so accurately that, from it, an exact model of the land it represented could easily be made.
Siborne quoted approvingly Bald’s dictum that a model ‘is the nearest approximation of art in representing the features of a country, and, for military purposes, superior to any map representation.’ And he put his mind to inventing a new system of topographical drawing, from which accurate models could be made. Models were ideal, he opined, for studying the tactics of past battles, according to the differing terrains on which they had been fought. Through a system of laying down lines and points, Siborne found a way to make maps which were easier to read and more accurate in their topographical detail so that the army could judge the suitability of the land for its different types of troops. He laid down complicated and detailed instructions to surveyors – on how to find the depth of an object; on how to find the angle of inclination of ground; on how to carry on work from one survey-sheet to another (‘always allow an inch margin upon your board, upon which you can determine any conspicuous objects which properly belong to the adjoining sheets’). There were even instructions on how to shade a map in diluted Indian ink to represent changes in the slope of the ground.
Much of this might have escaped the army’s attention. But in 1830, the twin skills of surveying and model-making were suddenly high on its agenda, for reasons of vanity and prestige. Fifteen years after their triumph at Waterloo, the country’s military leaders were still trying to find an appropriate way to commemorate the battle and to preserve its legend. They thought there should be a museum in London dedicated to the army and the navy, which should contain a suitable exhibit to celebrate Waterloo. Lord Hill, who as a lieutenant-general at Waterloo had gained Wellington’s complete trust, was deputed to find a modeller who could create a miniature version of the battlefield. The French had displayed them for years at Les Invalides, so why not the British?
Siborne had already made a model of the Battle of Borodino, in 1812, and his former colleague in Ireland, Sir George Murray, was now a cabinet minister under Wellington. Murray considered Siborne to be the ideal candidate to make a model of the Battle of Waterloo: he was held to be loyal, diligent, meticulous – and eager to get on. For the first time in Siborne’s career, preferment beckoned. He could not have