The Longest Afternoon
The 400 Men Who Decided the Battle of Waterloo
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
From the prizewinning author of Europe, a riveting account of the heroic Second Light Battalion, which held the line at Waterloo, defeating Napoleon and changing the course of history.
In 1815, the deposed emperor Napoleon returned to France and threatened the already devastated and exhausted continent with yet another war. Near the small Belgian municipality of Waterloo, two large, hastily mobilized armies faced each other to decide the future of Europe-Napoleon's forces on one side, and the Duke of Wellington on the other.
With so much at stake, neither commander could have predicted that the battle would be decided by the Second Light Battalion, King's German Legion, which was given the deceptively simple task of defending the Haye Sainte farmhouse, a crucial crossroads on the way to Brussels. In The Longest Afternoon, Brendan Simms captures the chaos of Waterloo in a minute-by-minute account that reveals how these 400-odd riflemen successfully beat back wave after wave of French infantry. The battalion suffered terrible casualties, but their fighting spirit and refusal to retreat ultimately decided the most influential battle in European history.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For history readers who appreciate grainy, detailed battle accounts, this fine book concerns the carnage, heroism, and occasional stupidity that occurred around a single Belgian farmhouse at the center of the battlefield at Waterloo during a few hours in 1815. Normally, images of Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington are conjured when thinking of that conflict when the deposed French emperor tried to retake his imperial throne after a triumphal return from Elba. But as usual, these historical giants had much less to do with the battlefield than their soldiers, many of whom on the British side hailed from the German kingdom of Hanover. With the aid of astonishingly-preserved and vivid contemporary accounts, Simms (Europe), of Peterhouse College, Cambridge, brings these soldiers' actions brilliantly alive. From battlefield records two centuries old, he's extracted moving scenes of their courage, bravery, and initiative. In the end, there's no question that the shape and history of 19th-century Europe owes a debt to these 400-odd warriors, who withstood repeated waves of French forces and prevented Napoleon's breakthrough. It's a remarkably detailed book, which is both its greatest strength and greatest weakness. Nevertheless, Simms shows that without these troops, Great Britain and the German states would have been deeply imperiled.
