Wednesday Jul 05, 2023

[From the archive] Bernard Cornwell: The Battle of Waterloo (1815)

It's time to revisit our archives. In this episode one of the world’s great historical novelists takes us back to one of the most dramatic and consequential moments in European history. Bernard Cornwell is our guide to the Battle of Waterloo.

Waterloo. That single word is enough to conjure up images of Napoleon with his great bicorn hat and the daring emperor’s nemesis, the Duke of Wellington. Over the course of twelve or so hours on a Sunday at the start of summer, these two commanders met on a battle in modern-day Belgium, to settle the future of Europe.

For a battle so vast is size and significance, it still has some elusive elements. Historians cannot agree on when it started. The movement of the troops is still subject to debate. Wellington, who might have been best qualified to answer these riddles, preferred not to speak of Waterloo. His famously laconic verdict was simply that it was ‘the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life.’

Few people are as qualified to analyse this tangled history as Bernard Cornwall. For forty years he has been writing about this period of history through his ‘Sharpe’ series of books.

As Cornwall publishes his first new Sharpe novel for fifteen years, we take the opportunity to ask him about the battle that was central to all. Over a brilliantly analytical hour, he walks us through the battlefield, in three telling scenes.