Today I got a lot accomplished; forms were filled in (and out), appointments were made (and kept), shirts were purchased (not worn), a haircut was obtained, and I’m now the proud owner of a copy of Thor Heyerdahl’s The Kon-Tiki Expedition, which I’ve always thought sounded terrific but which I kept forgetting to check out. I also managed to leap another hurdle in the effort to get a new apartment, and things appear to be going pretty smoothly there.
However, there’s something rather more important for me on the horizon.
Today is June 18th. The glorious 18th. W-Day.
It was on this day in 1815 that the combined forces of the Seventh Coalition – the Duke of Wellington’s mainly British army and Gebhard von Blücher’s Prussians – fought their legendary day-long action against Bonaparte’s forces in the fields of Waterloo. Some forty-five thousand men perished that day, and an empire that had once spanned Europe was broken forever. In the enormous consequences of it for all involved, in its mingled glories and blunders, its acts of courage and of hesitation, and in the importance it has to the national character of the victors no less than to that of the defeated, the Battle of Waterloo stands as a sort of microcosm for warfare in general, from its heights of skill and bravery to its depths of unnecessity and slaughter. If anything good may be said of the military endeavours of mankind, it may be said of Waterloo; if any condemnations may be made of the obsessions, hatreds and utter stubbornness that time and time again have thrust us into such conflicts, they may surely and justly fall upon Waterloo as well. It was Great in every sense of the word, and only rarely have we come up to its example since.
Some of my colleagues (not all) have gently condemned my interest in such things as being too much in line with the tendency to view “history” as nothing but an unbroken line of kings and battles. Fair enough; it would be foolish to have such a view, especially when it comes to literature (which is our business, after all), and I certainly don’t hold to it. However, as is so often the case, this effort to be broadly inclusive of all important historical detail has most practically resulted in a growing and in some cases complete exclusion of military detail from our understanding of past cultural outlooks. In discussing some of my favourite events with my fellow students in recent years, a few have been astonished to discover that there were any English military ventures of note in the 19th century between the fight against Napoleon (which everyone knows about) and the Boer War (which is an infamous example of cultural hegemony, so naturally they’ve all heard of that). Some of the ones most surprised were those who had in fact made it their business to study 19th C. English literature and the culture that produced and consumed it. For those in a generation that came of age on 9/11, and who know very well what that sort of disaster can do to a people (for both good and ill), it was a matter of some interest to learn of things like the disastrous retreat from Kabul in 1842 or the Battle of Isandlwana in 1879. What must it have been like to hear the news of such things? My generation only has the one touchstone for that; a man living in England during the right years might conceivably have lived through news of the massacre of Elphinstone’s army (1842), the terrible charge at Balaclava (1854), and the destruction of the column at Isandlwana (1879). We hear about Balaclava through a poem and shudder; what must it have been like for those who heard about it through the newspaper and shouted from the streets?
Anyway, it interests me. I’m also somewhat surprised that the sinking of the Titanic doesn’t occasion more interest from literary and cultural scholars, but I imagine it’s rather dwarfed by the Great War. That, at least, is in no danger of being forgotten.
All of this is just a long prelude to the announcement that I’m not going to write anything else today, and will instead relax with some dark beer and watch Sergei Bondarchuk’s Waterloo (1970), the greatest war movie ever filmed. If the thought of Rod Steiger and Christopher Plummer as Bonaparte and Wellington appeals to you, the film literally has no equal. If the prospect of the battle simply being recreated using thousands upon thousands of extras and the entire Soviet cavalry in period costume intrigues you, well, there’s really only one other film that could stand up to it – the same director’s adaptation of Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1968), an eight-hour epic that recreates the Battle of Borodino using 120,000 extras and which remains, adjusting for inflation, the most expensive movie ever produced. See them both, if you have the opportunity. I see Waterloo at least once a year, but War and Peace is a bit more difficult.
Whatever you end up doing, tonight, at least, you should raise a glass to the victorious Wellington, and to Blücher, and even to the Corsican Tyrant, who had his moments (many of them, in fact). It’s a day that only comes around once a year. Make sure it’s enough.
