William Siborne, brought up in a country perpetually at war and proud of his father’s exploits in Spain, devoted himself to a military career, too: while still fourteen, he became a gentleman cadet at the Royal Military College, first at Great Marlow and then at Sandhurst. He was one of the first professionally trained staff officers, and he was educated in mathematics, languages and military drawing. He was commissioned as an ensign in the same regiment as his father, the 9th Foot, in 1813, but he was too young for the great Napoleonic battles of his era, serving, somewhat less glamorously, at Chatham and Sheerness. The nearest he came to fighting was in the year after he had passed out from Sandhurst with distinction: in 1815 he joined his father as a member of the army of occupation in Paris, once the Battle of Waterloo had been fought and won. If the son ever felt the need to win the approval of higher authority (and, at the end, he came to resent it) his father’s distinguished battlefield career may have played its part. Perhaps it made the son feel that while his father had seen action, his role was merely to record it, a task which made him feel part of the glorious whole which was the victorious British army, but left him curiously unsatisfied as a man.
We know what William Siborne looked like from a single surviving portrait. For this we must thank a man of many parts – Samuel Lover, sometime novelist, musician, and painter. Granted, the pose is a touch mannered, too ornamental even, as if, through the surrounding objects, the artist is trying to invest him with a status which he does not yet possess. In his blue military undress coat, William Siborne leans on a prop, a tiny cannon, and his left hand holds a plumed hat. He has a high forehead framed by brown curls; a pair of steady eyes; a long, large nose, and a round jaw, which in combination with the domed forehead, make his face seem curiously egg-shaped. A precise, exact, soft face, of which the most certain feature is the mouth: a small, pursed mouth, resolute and hard-set. It says he is a determined man; an exact man; a man who likes order; a man who likes things just so.
Fittingly, for such an exact man, the killing-fields of Waterloo were divided into areas of geometrical precision.
A large triangle with Brussels at its northern apex is formed by two long roads, one running south to Nivelles, the other, which lies further east, heads to Charleroi. The triangle’s base is a shorter road which runs between the two. Heading south from Brussels, the Charleroi road cuts through the Forest of Soignes, emerging from dense wood at Waterloo, then heads for the village of Mont St Jean. Leaving Mont St Jean, a traveller can journey along a smaller triangle of roads, by stopping at the crossroads of Quatre Bras, turning west to Nivelles, and then returning north to where he started.
The base of another shape, an imperfect rectangle, is formed by the road which runs east from Nivelles to Namur, with Ligny just outside it; the Brussels to Charleroi road forms its western side, while its eastern side runs from Louvain, twenty miles east of Brussels, to Namur. In the centre of the rectangle lies Wavre. Quatre Bras, Ligny, Wavre and Mont St Jean: four places linked by the battles which determined the fate of Europe in four days of June, though all were overshadowed by the name which was given, imprecisely, to the last, the most famous conflict of them all: the Battle of Waterloo.
Waterloo has earned its lasting fame by virtue of being one of the bloodiest and most decisive one-day battles in European history. Never before had armies deployed a mixture of old and new forms of warfare with such destructive consequences. Men rode to war on horseback, their swords flashing, or formed themselves into protective squares of infantry to resist attack, but guns and shellfire were deployed too, to devastating effect. Rarely had there been slaughter on such a scale.
Though the glory of the victory soon came to overshadow any notion of its gore, nearly fifty thousand died or were wounded in the single bloody day which it took to conclude the business. A few weeks afterwards, one visitor, Charlotte Waldie, recalled how she had seen a long line of burial pits: ‘the effluvia which arose from them … was horrible; and the pure west wind of summer, as it passed us, seemed pestiferous, so deadly was the smell that in many places pervaded the field. The fresh-turned clay which covered those pits betrayed how recent had been their formation. From one of them the scanty clods of earth which had covered it had in one place fallen, and the skeleton of a human face was visible. I turned from the place in indescribable horror.’
It was fitting, then, for such a bloody confrontation, that victory brought with it such a conclusive prize, an outcome which defined the course of the nineteenth century. Waterloo was one of the most conclusive armed confrontations of the century, the crucible in which modern Europe was fashioned. It saw Britain and Prussia emerge triumphant, the two countries eclipsing the shattered might of France. It also marked the military and political end to the career of the greatest soldier of modern times, the soldier who dared to become an emperor.
Over the years, the horror of the battle had diminished, eroded by the passage of time and the growth of legend, which dwelt more on the triumph than on the cost in flesh and blood. It is here, in this cleansed landscape, that Siborne tried to make order of the ground which had played host to the carnage, mapping the land as exactly as he knew how, an academic exercise imposed on human slaughter. First, he prepared his drawing-board as if he was following a recipe in the kitchen, to guard against the expansion and contraction of the paper in the atmosphere. ‘Lay upon that side of the sheet of paper which is to be fixed to the board the white of an egg well beat up,’ he told students of his methods. ‘Press the paper gently and gradually down upon the board from one side to the opposite one, and paste the edges which hang over to the under part of the board.’ Not even a downpour would put him off. ‘With drawing-boards thus prepared,’ he declared solemnly, ‘I have stood with an umbrella over the instrument during heavy showers of rain, without the slightest alteration taking place in the smoothness or firmness of the paper.’
If Siborne had followed the exact sequence of the battles as he mapped the countryside, and it would have been in character, he would have started at the River Sambre, with Napoleon’s unexpected crossing into Belgium, so sudden and brilliant a manoeuvre that, by noon on the first day, the town of Charleroi had fallen. The topographer in Siborne would have noted how rapidly the terrain changes, falling away into the valley of the River Orme, between Genappe and Gembloux. Within five miles, the land is broken up into hills and valleys around the River Dyle, and as the river meanders north to Louvain, the country becomes close and wooded.
Then comes the landscape of the final battle. Near the hamlet of Frischermont, there is a crossroads where a lane becomes a track, and about four hundred yards later it dips into a slope which leads, through a long hollow, to the village of Plancenoit, near the Lasne stream. Both the French and Allied positions can be seen from here, perhaps the finest general view of Waterloo that Siborne could have obtained, indeed a clearer view than the participants gained for themselves, surrounded as they were by battle-smoke and the head-high crops. At the church at Plancenoit, a few battalions of the French Old Guard held off thousands of young, inexperienced Prussians, until the Prussians finally won the day. Further north still, and the road from Braine l’Alleud to Ohain follows the crest of the Mont St Jean plateau, which formed a natural obstacle along the entire front of Wellington’s army. A lone elm tree on the ridge, on the west side of the crossroads, marked Wellington’s position during much of the battle. But it is the Duke’s advanced defences which stand out for inspection – the farm of La Haye Sainte, and the château of Hougoumont. La Haye Sainte was the centre of the Allied line, from where Major George Baring’s small band of men threw tiles at the attackers, and where, the night before the battle, they tore down the great barn doors for firewood, unaware that they would have