Book review: The Waterloo Archive, Volume II: German Sources

Although Germans actually constituted the majority of troops that Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington led at Waterloo, their participation and their role in the final victory tended to be overshadowed by the British. One reason, as Nicolaus Furst Blücher von Wahlstaat mentioned in his introductory letter to Glover, was the meaninglessness of Germany as a united state in 1815. German was a language common to a myriad of independent states besides Prussia, including Nassau, Brunswick and Hanover, as well as the British Army regiments making up the King's German Legion (KGL).
 
The second reason was the language itself. English-language memoirs of KGL officers like Colonel Christian Friedrich Wilhelm von Ompteda and Ensign Edmund Wheatley have been published. Herbert Siborne published two letters by Lieutenant George Drummond Graeme. Ludlow Beamish included a small number of officers' letters in his history. Gareth himself published the remaining Siborne letters in his book Letters of the Battle of Waterloo in 2004. But the majority of the important book Belle-Alliance: Reports and Information of the participation of German troops of Wellington's Army in the Action at Quatre-Bras and in the Battle of Belle-Alliance, by Dr. Julius von Pflugk-Harttung, Privy Archive Councilor at the State Archive in Berlin, were published in Germany in 1915, but remained unpublished in English.
 
To translate the material for Volume II of The Waterloo Archive, editor Gareth Glover, a former navy officer and foremost authority on British archive material, began a correspondence with Martin Mittelacher, an American resident of German extraction and an expert on the Waterloo campaign. From the reports and letters of German soldiers that make up this volume, we learn things that change the common view on some well known pages of the battle. We learn, for example, that troops of the 1st Battalion of the 2nd Nassau Regiment were initially the only defenders of the buildings at Hougoumont and that they did not retire, but remained throughout the battle, repelling a second French breakthrough into the farm complex – something that has been missed by many previous historians who exaggerated only the courage of the British Guards.
 
Of equal courage were soldiers like rifleman Friedrich Lindau of the 2nd Light Battalion, KGL in the defence of La Haye Sainte. Seriously wounded on the back of his head and ordered to go to the rear he replied, “No, as long as I can stand upright I will stay at my post.” He kept fighting through all the battle, at one point being captured but managing to escape his captors and finally rejoin Major Georg Baring, who had at least 100 soldiers around him after the battle had finished. That clearly contradicts the common statement that only 42 men escaped from the farmstead with Baring.
 
The light that The Waterloo Archive, Volume II sheds on these and other examples of long-overlooked material should prove of special interest to for all the historians and laymen with an interest in the seminal battle in particular and the Napoleonic Wars in general.