Two hundred years after the battle of Waterloo, fiction is not short of veterans from both sides of that conflict – heroic or bogus, tragic or triumphant, helping to define history or just confusedly caught up in it.
Fabrice del Dongo in The Charterhouse of Parma (1839)
At 17, Stendhal’s idealistic Italian aristocrat makes his way to Waterloo and fights unofficially for Napoleon, in a pioneering portrayal of war as chaos that would influence later writers.
Harold in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto III (1816)
Byron’s alter ego missed the fighting but the radical poet turns him into a quasi-veteran by having him visit Waterloo a year later in Canto III – allowing Byron to deliver mordant reflections on the battle - as in his free-standing anti-war poem “The Eve of Waterloo”, he saw the “king-making Victory” as a hideous sacrifice of lives in order to restore France’s Bourbon monarchy - that contrast with the celebratory Waterloo poems of Scott, Southey and Wordsworth.
George Osborne in Vanity Fair (1848)
Vain, foolish and a love cheat, the chancellor’s namesake is famously killed off by Thackeray in a subclause: “Darkness came down on the field and the city; and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet through his heart.” John Carey calls this “the most shattering sentence in English literature”.
Thénardier in Les Misérables (1862)
Looting bodies after the battle, rascally Thénardier (Sacha Baron Cohen in the recent film musical) saves a baron’s life by accident - an incident inevitably inflated in the telling into a mid-battle rescue - and later has the aristocrat’s son Marius (Eddie Redmayne) as a neighbour. In the novel, this loose link gives Victor Hugo his pretext for a long digression on Waterloo based on a visit to Hougoumont.
Brigadier Gerard in “The Adventure of the Nine Prussian Horsemen” (1902)
With the battle lost, Arthur Conan Doyle’s self-important French soldier steals Napoleon’s hat and acts as a decoy - leading a posse of Prussian cavalrymen off in the wrong direction - so the emperor can escape.
Charles Audley in An Infamous Army (1937)
Georgette Heyer combines another Regency romance – between Audley and Barbara, modelled on Lady Caroline Lamb – with a portrayal of the battle so thoroughly researched it was used on Sandhurst courses (Thackeray, she scornfully noted, did little research and hence made the mistake of assuming Waterloo’s cannons were audible in Brussels).
Ross Poldark in The Twisted Sword (1990)
In the 11th novel in Winston Graham’s series, middle-aged Ross is switched from spying to serving on Wellington’s staff just in time for the battle (although he misses most of the fighting while delivering a message), and is on hand when his son Jeremy is severely wounded.
Richard Sharpe in Sharpe’s Waterloo (1990)
Sidelined initially on the staff of the infuriatingly useless Prince of Orange, Bernard Cornwell’s hero later rejoins his British regiment and plays a leading part in repelling Napoleon’s Imperial Guard and pursuing the defeated French.
Lord Blackadder in Blackadder: Back and Forth (1999)
Rowan Atkinson’s character owns a time-machine in his pre-millennium, made-for-cinema final outing, and one of his trips is to Waterloo, to win a bet that he can steal Wellington’s wellingtons; but his machine crushes Wellington (Stephen Fry) to death before the battle, and returning to 1999 he finds he has altered history – Napoleon (Simon Russell Beale) won, and Britain has been a French colony since 1815.
Jonathan Strange in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (2004)
“If it had not rained,” wrote Hugo, “the future of Europe would have been very different”; and in Susanna Clarke’s novel that overnight rain is provided by the magician Strange, who has been Wellington’s “Merlin” since the Peninsular war.
