Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles was published by HarperCollins in 2014 for the bicentenary of the battle. This is Bernard Cornwell’s first sustained work of narrative nonfiction, and it draws on his decades of research into the Napoleonic Wars — research that had fueled the Sharpe novels since 1981 but never before been deployed in a straightforward history.
The book covers four days: June 15–18, 1815. Napoleon has returned from Elba, reassembled his army with astonishing speed, and marched north to destroy Wellington and Blücher before they can unite their forces. On June 16, the French fight two battles simultaneously — Ligny, where Napoleon defeats the Prussians, and Quatre Bras, where Ney fails to defeat Wellington. On June 17, both Allied armies retreat, converging on the position Wellington has chosen south of the village of Waterloo. On June 18, the battle itself unfolds across a gentle valley in Belgian farmland, and by nightfall Napoleon’s Grande Armée is destroyed.
Cornwell’s account is distinguished by its reliance on primary sources — letters written that night, diaries kept during the campaign, memoirs composed in the decades afterward. He quotes extensively from participants on all three sides: French, British (and allied), and Prussian. The effect is immersive in a way that academic histories rarely achieve. You hear the sounds, smell the powder smoke, feel the confusion.
The Battle
The narrative is structured chronologically and switches between perspectives — from Napoleon’s headquarters to Wellington’s ridge to Blücher’s Prussians struggling through the mud to reach the battlefield. Cornwell is particularly strong on the tactical details: why Hougoumont mattered, how d’Erlon’s great infantry assault was repulsed, the catastrophic French cavalry charges against unbroken infantry squares, and the final advance of the Imperial Guard — Napoleon’s last reserve — which was met by a volley from the British Guards who had been lying in the corn, stood up, and fired at forty paces.
The chapter on the French cavalry charges is among the most vivid battle writing Cornwell has ever produced. Roughly 9,000 French horsemen charged Wellington’s line repeatedly for over two hours, but Wellington’s infantry formed squares — dense rectangles of bayonets that no horse would charge home against — and the cavalry, unable to break the squares and lacking infantry support, rode themselves to exhaustion.
Critical Reception
Reviewers praised the book for its clarity and momentum. The Sunday Times called it “probably the best book ever written about the battle,” which is debatable given the competition (Alessandro Barbero’s The Battle and Peter Hofschröer’s revisionist two-volume study), but the praise reflects Cornwell’s gift for making complex military operations comprehensible to general readers. Military historians noted occasional simplifications — the role of the King’s German Legion gets less attention than it deserves, and the Prussian contribution, while acknowledged, doesn’t receive the weight that German historiography gives it.
Collecting Waterloo
First edition (HarperCollins, London, 2014): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $25–$60
- Very good: $10–$30
- US first edition (Harper, 2015): $15–$35