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Lead book review

An old soldier sees through the smoke of Waterloo

A review of Waterloo: A New History of the Battle and its Armies, by Gordon Corrigan. Elbow the author out of the way and what you will find is a vigorous account of the famous campaign

21 June 2014

8:00 AM

21 June 2014

8:00 AM

Waterloo: A New History of the Battle and its Armies Gordon Corrigan

Atlantic Books, pp.341, £30, ISBN: 9781848879289

There is a very nice story of a dinner for Waterloo veterans at which Alexandre Dumas — ‘Dum-ass,’ as the Antarctic explorer Taff Evans would have him — was for some reason present. I can’t remember now the exact wording of the exchange between them, but Dumas had clearly spent so much of the evening sounding off about the battle as if he knew what he was talking about that a French general at the far end of the table could finally take no more.

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