This volume of French eyewitness accounts of Waterloo, published for the first time in full in English, completes Andrew Field's pioneering work on the French experience in this decisive battle. These vivid recollections add a new dimension to our understanding of what happened on 18 June 1815. Readers will now be in a position to come to their own conclusions and they can compare the French accounts with those of soldiers from the allied armies, in particular the British, which have largely determined our assumptions about the battle for the last 200 years. They will also gain a heightened insight into the trauma that the French eyewitnesses went through on the battlefield and afterwards as they tried to explain and come to terms their loss. This second volume features graphic descriptions of the battle as it was remembered by men of the 2nd and 6th corps, cavalry, artillery and Imperial Guard and medical services of Napoleon's army. Their words give us not only a telling inside view their actions during that extraordinary day, but they also record in graphic detail what they saw and show us how they reacted to Napoleon's historic defeat.

For almost 200 years, the British perception of the Battle of Waterloo was that it was a great British victory gained over the French tyrant Napoleon which was achieved in spite of, rather than because of, the allied contingents in the Duke of Wellington's army. Eyewitness accounts by British soldiers, encouraged by the doubts expressed in Wellington's despatches, denigrated and vilified the courage and prowess of these allies. But in the last twenty years modern historians, with better access to the accounts and archives of the allied nations, have tried to put the record straight, and their efforts have been rewarded by changing attitudes and a greater understanding of the significant part the allies played. Andrew Field, in this the latest of his series of pioneering books on Waterloo, makes a powerful contribution to this continuing debate by analyzing in forensic detail the records of these allied forces throughout the campaign. In his balanced, nonpartisan reassessment he describes the make-up of these forces, their training and experience, and their military capability. Included are graphic accounts of their actions and performance on the battlefield. His work is essential reading for all students of the Waterloo campaign.

The story of the Battle of Waterloo - of the ultimate defeat of Napoleon and the French, the triumph of Wellington, Bl cher and their allied armies - is most often told from the viewpoint of the victors, not the vanquished. Even after 200 years of intensive research and the publication of hundreds of books and articles on the battle, the French perspective and many of the primary French sources are under-represented in the written record. So it is high time this weakness in the literature - and in our understanding of the battle - was addressed, and that is the purpose of Andrew Field's thought-provoking new study. He has tracked down over ninety first-hand French accounts, many of which have never been previously published in English, and he has combined them with accounts from the other participants in order to create a graphic new narrative of one of the world's decisive battles. Virtually all of the hitherto unpublished testimony provides fascinating new detail on the battle and many of the accounts are vivid, revealing and exciting. .

Andrew Field, who has published four best-selling books on the Battle of Waterloo, has established himself as one of the leading experts on the French perspective of the campaign. Using selected extracts from French eyewitness accounts that haven't been published before in English, he has added a new dimension to our understanding of what happened on the battlefield on 18 June 1815\. Now he takes his pioneering work a step further by publishing these accounts, with all their vivid and personal detail, in full. For the first time readers will be in a position to make their own interpretations of them and compare them to the recollections of soldiers from the allied armies, in particular the British, which have largely determined our assumptions about the battle for the last 200 years. They will also gain a heightened insight into the trauma that the French eyewitnesses went through as they tried to explain how the French lost a battle they claim they had been on the point of winning. This, the first of two volumes of the French accounts, features Napoleon's own description of the battle, those of his immediate household and the Imperial headquarters, and those of members of 1st Corps. Napoleon's own version of events, one of the first to be published in France, was used as the basis of many subsequent histories that ignore or gloss over his many dubious claims. His account of his actions and his view of what happened on that decisive day, and those of his close associates, make fascinating reading.