Editor's Note:  As Gordon Berg often reminds our group, there are books about related topics that Civil War buffs would enjoy.  Consistent with that spirit, included is the following review of a book about the Battle of Waterloo, which provides a overview of certain misconceptions about the length of the war, the problems (and benefits) with Napoleonic tactics, and the key errors made in the movement of troops, some of which have analogues in the Civil War.

Waterloo: The Battle of Four Days, Three Armies, and Three Battles

By Bernard Cornwell
Published by William Collins, 352 pp., UK £25.00, Can. $44.99

Review by Carl Frank

As an initial matter, I recommend that you only buy the hardback edition. Don't even think of downloading it in electronic form.  This is a gloriously handsome book with with far more color (excuse me, colour) plates and maps than in similar works. For example, it includes Lady Elizabeth Butler's "Scotland Forever" (see wikimedia/wikipedia link), though Cornwell explains it is inaccurate.

Such "Saxon Tales" storytelling of a Napoleonic battle isn't for everyone; it is marred upon occasion by over-dramatic storytelling hardly necessary for the most consequential land battle of the first half of the 19th Century (and perhaps the entire Century).  I have a feeling this book will annoy more knowledgeable readers, but it is a good basic introduction, and a wonderful reference for those of us old enough to have bookcases.

My prior familiarity with Waterloo came in two or three biographies of Napoleon. So I'll have to read another to see whether the pattycake approach obscured fact. For me, the key insight was Cornwell's "scissors, paper, stone" analogy ("rock, paper, scissors" in North America) to Napoleonic land warfare: cavalry could attack infantry, whose defense was the square, which was vulnerable to artillery--but to win, the timing of the attack had to be perfect. Napoleon's and Marshal Ney's wasn't. 

"They had expected a swift victory over the ragged armies of Revolutionary France, but instead they sparked a world war which saw both Washington and Moscow burned."

"A few weeks before Waterloo[, the Duke of Wellington] was walking in a Brussels park with Thomas Creevey, a British parliamentarian, who rather anxiously asked the Duke about the expected campaign. A red-coated British infantryman was staring at the park's statues and the Duke pointed at the man. 'There', he said, 'there. It all depends upon that article whether we do the business or not. Give me enough of it, and I am sure.'"

French officer Captain Pierre Cardon was summoned along with all the infantry regiment. The stood in two ranks "asking each other what was going on? What was there? In the end we were filled with worry. [Then, his Colonel appeared] holding in his hands, what? You would not guess in a hundred years. . . Our eagle, under which we had marched so many times to victory and which the brave Colonel had hidden inside the mattress of his bed. . . . At the sight of the cherished standard cries of 'Vive l'Empereur' could be heard; soldiers and officers, all overwhelmed, wanted not only to see, but to embrace and touch it; this incident made every eye flow with tears of emotion… we have promised to die beneath our eagle for the country and Napoleon."

Napoleon believed he could push the Prussians around, then turn his attack to the British. It was all going to plan and the Emperor would take breakfast in Brussels's Laeken Palace on Saturday morning.

“Except Ney had still not captured Quatre-Bras."

Alarmed, the Emperor delayed the attack until he discovers the identity of these newly arrived troops. They turn out to be his own men, but in the wrong place, “so a messenger rides to d'Erlon ordering him to turn northwards and assault the Prussian flanks, but just then yet another courier arrives, this one from Marshal Ney, demanding that d'Erlon return to Quatre-Bras immediately.”

Facing two conflicting orders, D'Erlon assumes that Ney is in the more dire straits, so turns his Corps around and retraces his steps for Quatre-Bras. The Emperor launches his great attack, but by the time he realizes d'Erlon is not engaged, the 1st Corps has vanished.  Many say Waterloo was lost because  22,000 men spent Friday marching between two battlefields and helping neither. D'Erlon “could have swung either the battle at Ligny or the fighting at Quatre-Bras, had achieved nothing. It is the French equivalent of the Grand Old Duke of York, except d'Erlon spent his day halfway between two fights, neither up nor down, and his prevarication denied Napoleon the crushing victory he expected."

"[The Duke of Wellington] was not loved as Blücher was, nor worshipped like Napoleon, but he was respected. He could be sharply witty; long after the wars were over, some French officers pointedly turned their backs on him in Paris, for which rudeness a woman apologized. 'Don't worry, Madame,' the Duke said, 'I've seen their backs before.'"

At Hougoumont, Macdonell, saved the Allied right flank by realizing that killing Legros, the French Sous-Lieutenant who axed-open the door to that house, was irrelevant.  The key to the fighting was to shut the gate, denying entry to any more of the French.  So he and a small group bypassed Legros and his men and forced the huge gates shut.  The heaved against the pressure from outside while Legros tried to kill them inside.   

“Wellington once remarked that closing the gates [at Hougoumont] was the decisive act of battle and, later, when an eccentric clergyman wanted to arrange an annuity for 'the bravest man at Waterloo' and requested the Duke to make such a difficult judgement, Wellington chose Macdonnell. Macdonnell, in turn, insisted on sharing the money with Sergeant James Graham, an Irishman who had been at his side in those decisive moments, the pair did receive the annuity for two years before the generous clergyman lost his money, but it is significant that Wellington, forced to make a decision, nominated Macdonnell and, by association, Graham."

At his point, Napoleon now faces a dilemma. Wellington's army is in front of him, and he knows a heavy force of Prussians was approaching to his right.  The two, together, greatly outnumber him.  Yet he still thought he could defeat them in detail.  “This morning we had ninety chances of winning,' the Emperor told Soult, 'we still have sixty."

French cavalry climbed the crest of the ridge, and they may have thought victory was imminent—bodies lay everywhere, and an enormous baggage train was heading toward the rear.   But then redcoats popped up from below the military crest of the ridge – a Wellington favorite – and formed square.  This was almost perfect protection from cavalry, but vulnerable to French infantry volleys.   Scissors, paper, stone.

“The British were not running away. Wellington was not disengaging and trying to withdraw his forces. Yes there were men and wagons on the road, but most of the British-Dutch army was still on the ridge and they were ready to fight. . . So it was horsemen against Infantry, and every cavalryman must have known what Captain Duthilt had written, that 'it is difficult, if not impossible, for the best cavalry to break infantry who are formed in squares', so while at first the cavalrymen seemed to have pierced the British-Dutch line, instead they were faced with the worst obstacle a horseman could encounter. The wide plateau of the ridge top was packed with squares, at least twenty of them, in a rough chequer pattern so that if a horseman rode safely past one square he was immediately faced with another, and then encountered more beyond.  And each square bristled with bayonets and spat musket fire.”

And then the British cavalry joined the battle.

"[T]hat was the great disadvantage of the formation the French had chosen to use. A column made of successive battalions in line looked magnificent and, given the chance, might have spread into a formidable line to give devastating volley fire, but it would take a battalion in a three-rank line a lot of time to form square, and they would be hammered by the battalions in front and behind while they did. There was neither space nor time to form square. Major Frederick Clarke, who charged with the Scotland Greys, reckons the enemy was trying to form square, but 'the first and nearest square had not time to complete their formation, and the Greys charged through it.' So the British heavy cavalry drove into the panicking columns and [Louis] Canler tells what happened: ' A real carnage followed. Everyone was separated from his comrades and fought for his own life. Sabers and bayonets slashed at the shaking flesh for we were too close packed to use our firearms.' . . .There was no time to form square, so his unit was cut to ribbons."

Artillery could have smashed the British squares, had Ney managed to bring more guns close to the line, or deployed French infantry.  “That was the scissors, paper and stone reality of Napoleonic warfare. If you could force an enemy to form a square you could bring a line of infantry against it and overwhelm it with musket fire, and very late in the afternoon Marshal Ney at last tried that tactic, ordering 8,000 infantry to attack the British squares. . . Their task was to deploy into line and then smother the British squares with musketry, but the British would only be in square if the cavalry threatened and the French cavalry was exhausted. They had charged again and again, they had shown extraordinary courage and too many of them were now dead on the hillside. There was no charge left in them."

Eight thousand men were defeated at best, dead at worst, in minutes.   The French fled down the slope, away from Waterloo, bypassing dying men and horses, and grounds littered withed discarded cavalry swords, scabbards and breastplates.   And blood.   After that, the famous French "Imperial Guard” tried its turn, but also was too late.   The charged straight up the center of the hill, to win or die.  

"Wellington rode back towards the centre of his line. Leeks had seen him just before the 52nd marched out of line to destroy and Emperor's dreams. The Duke's clothes, Leeke said, 'consisted of a blue surtout coat, white kerseymere pantaloons, and Hessian boots. He wore a sword with a waist belt, but no sash.' The plain blue coat and black cocked hat made Wellington instantly recognizable to his men, and now, as the French began to flee, he watched from the ridge's centre for a few moments. He saw an enemy in panic, a retreating enemy that was dissolving into chaos. He watched them, then was heard to mutter, 'In for a penny, in for a pound'. He took off his cocked hat and men say that just then a slanting ray of evening sunlight came through the clouds to illuminate him on the ridge he had defended all day. He waved the hat towards the enemy. He waved it three times, and it was a signal for the whole allied army to advance."

Waterloo was an allied victory. Wellington would never have stood his ground had he not thought the Prussians would appear at his left wing. Blücher would never have marched over rock and stream had he thought Wellington would cut and run.  True, the Prussians were late to the party, but that turned out well for the Allies, fooling Napoleon into believing he could defeat each army in detail.  As it turned out, when the Allied forces joined, “The Emperor was not just defeated, he was routed."

"An easier question to answer than 'who won the battle?' Is 'who lost the battle?', and the answer must be Napoleon. The Duke and Blücher both offered leadership, but Napoleon left the conduct of the battle to Marshal Ney, who, though braver than most men, did little more than hurl troops against the most skillful defensive general of the age. The French had the time and the men to break Wellington's line, but they failed, partly because the Duke defended so cleverly, and partly because the French never coordinated an all-arms assault on the allied line. They delayed the start of the battle on a day when Wellington was praying for time. They wasted men in a time-consuming assault that lasted much of the afternoon. And why Napoleon entrusted the battle's conduct to Ney is a mystery; Ney was certainly brave, but the Emperor damned him as 'too stupid to be able to succeed', so why rely on him? And, when the French did achieve their one great success, the capture of La Haie Sainte, which enabled them to occupy the forward slope of Wellington's ridge, the Emperor refused to reinforce the centre and so gave the Duke time to bring up his own reinforcements. Finally, when the Imperial Guard did attack, it was too few and too late, and by that time, the Prussians were on the French flank and threatening their rear."

That’s Corrwell’s story of Waterloo—Rock, Paper, Scissors.  And timing.  This is no book for a Napoleonic expert.  But an excellent start for anyone wanting to dip a toe into the end of the last great French vs. Britain war.  

The Battle of Ezra Church 
and the Struggle for Atlanta

Earl J. Hess

University of North Carolina Press, 2015, 304 pp., $35.00
        

Review by Gordon Berg

Few historians possess more knowledge of the terrain of Civil War battlefields and the tactics employed on them by the contending forces than does Earl J. Hess.  From Pea Ridge to Petersburg, Hess has studied the deadly game of feint, maneuver, attack and defense.  He brings his lifetime of expertise to the deadly red dirt dance macabre performed by Union and Confederate forces in the campaign for Atlanta.  He rightly concludes that the Battle of Ezra Church, fought July 28, 1864, was an intense, but underappreciated, battle in that campaign. 

Hess divides the Atlanta Campaign into two parts: the first from Chattanooga to the Chattahoochee River pitting Union Major General William T. Sherman against the ever-cautious Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston; and the second south of the river to the gates of Atlanta between Sherman and newly appointed and offensive-minded Confederate commander John B. Hood.  Ezra Church was the third engagement between Sherman and Hood but, as Hess pointedly observes, "the primary tactical context was the domain of division, brigade, and regimental commanders."  Although generally considered a decisive Union victory, Hess maintains "The Confederates came closer to victory at Ezra Church than they had a right to expect" and only the grit of a thin blue line on the Union right possibly prevented a decidedly different outcome.

In setting the stage for describing the battle, Hess emphasizes the many command changes that occurred in both armies, somewhat unusual in the midst of an ongoing campaign.  "The shake-ups in blue and gray," he writes, "were now over just hours before the battle of Ezra Church began."  Both commanding generals had good, if somewhat complex, plans.  But, Hess reminds, "all plans are dependent on the players and the decisions they make at critical junctures in the flow of events."  And the major players--Union Major General Oliver O. Howard, just appointed the new commander of the Army of the Tennessee, and Confederate Lieutenant General Stephen D. Lee, who took command of Hood's old corps only the day before the battle-- were new and inexperienced at the tasks before them.

Sherman planned a flanking movement to the right, a favorite move that he employed with success against Johnston.  The Army of the Tennessee would move from the far left of the Union forces and swing around to the west, aiming for the last open rail line south of Atlanta at East Point.  In spite of strenuous efforts at secrecy, Hood learned that the Federals were on the move.  Hood was no Joe Johnston and "The army commander intended to strike at Sherman before the Federals could reach the vital rail link between Atlanta and Macon."  Hood knew if Sherman broke this lifeline, he would have to abandon Atlanta.  The focal point of Hood's planning was The Lick Skillet Road at the end of the Confederate defensive line.  That road intersected with a road that ran past Ezra Church, just three miles south of Atlanta.  Stephen Lee had the responsibility of holding that vital road juncture while other Confederate forces would attack the Union flank and rear.  Hood planned to open the ball the morning of July 29.

But, after heavy skirmishing, Lee jumped the gun.  Against explicit orders, he attacked on the 28th.  Hess calls it a tragic mistake and comes down hard on Lee.  "He [Lee] had scant information about the main Union position and did not know the terrain," Hess writes.  "He did not even know his own troops, and he did not bother to inform Hood of his decision, much less ask his advice about the matter."  Hess concludes that Lee "failed to obey his orders and exercised far too much latitude in taking a course of action that would kill and wound thousands of his men in a battlefield endeavor with dubious prospects."  To make matters worse, Federal observation posts detected the movement of the large Confederate force and "had sufficient warning of trouble to be ready for it."

Battle narratives, of which Hess is a master, can easily devolve into a litany of names and numbers.  Good maps and lots of them can mitigate this tendency.  As good as he is, Hess could have benefited from additional, and more descriptive, maps.

Most historians characterize Ezra Church as a clear-cut Union victory, and the body count bears that out.  Of just over 9,000 engaged, Howard lost 632 men.  On the other hand, of almost 11,500 Confederates involved, Lee lost about 3,000.  Nevertheless, Hess agrees with Henry Wright of the 6th Iowa, who argued Ezra Church "was the most stubbornly contest and bloodiest battlefield of the campaign."  Hess maintains that "[d]espite the disjointed nature of Lee's attacks, the Confederates mostly conducted the battle with a deal of spirit and came closer to success than one had a right to expect."  The soldiers who fought there--both blue and gray--would probably agree.

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.

Sherman's Ghosts 
Soldiers, Civilians, and the American Way of War

Matthew Carr

The New Press, 2015, 352 pp., $26.95
        

Review by Gordon Berg

Popular military historian Victor Davis Hanson opines that "the entire notion of American strategic doctrine," right up to the present, shows the distinct influence of a mercurial, fiery-tempered Union general who cut a devastating swath of destruction through the South during the Civil War.  Ever since, William Tecumseh Sherman has remained one of the most revered, despised, controversial, and influential military figures in American history.  Matthew Carr declares that his intention is to decipher "What exactly did that strategy consist of and to what extent have America's subsequent wars followed the template that Sherman created."

In  pursuit of his quest, Carr has written a unique, albeit oddly frustrating, book.  He clearly is not interested in writing a conventional military biography or a "myth and memory" exegesis.  Indeed, much of the book deals with military events occurring long after Sherman's death.  Carr find's Sherman's ghosts haunting American military policy and actions from the Spanish American War to Iraq and Afghanistan as part of what historian Russell Weigley has called "the American way of war."  Throughout the book, the reader is challenged to consider whether Sherman is the "Great Destroyer" and maker of war on innocent women and children as portrayed in Southern Lost Cause mythology or "the first modern general" on a moral crusade using methods that sought to avoid needless slaughter of his soldiers while adumbrating modernity's propensity to wage war on civilians in an attempt to break their morale behind the lines, thus weakening military operations at the front. 

Or perhaps Sherman was that rare personage who defies categories because, in fact, he is greater than the sum of his parts.  Carr posits a bold conclusion and uses a broad landscape in his attempt to establish the roots of America's modern war machine in Sherman's invasion of the old Confederacy.  For Carr, "Sherman embodies a very specific use of military force as an instrument of coercion and intimidation that has often replayed by the U.S. military and also by other armies."  Understanding the evolution of this doctrine, Carr maintains, can "tell us a great deal, not only about the Civil War and American war making, but also about the evolution of modern war into attacks of unprecedented violence against civilians."

The first third of Sherman's Ghosts summarizes his modus operandi.  In a September 1863 letter to Union Chief-of-Staff Henry W. Halleck, Sherman declared his intention to wage war not only against opposing armies but also against Southerners who "stand by, mere lookers-on in this domestic tragedy, they have no right to immunity, protection, or share in the final results."  Clearly, warfare inflicted upon civilians was nothing new; it had been practiced at least since the Trojan War.  Indeed, Zachary Taylor's volunteers savaged civilians during his invasion of Mexico in 1847.  Sherman, however, made destruction of civilian property and its effect on morale an integral part of his overall military strategy.  Property, not lives, was Sherman's objective.

Part Two of Carr's book attempts to deal with Sherman's legacy in the 20th century and beyond.  Here's where things get muddled.  In America's first post-Sherman war (leaving aside the genocide committed against Native Americans on the western plains) occurred in the Far East against another people of color.  The Philippine War of 1898-1902, Carr posits, "bore the direct imprint of Sherman's campaigns in terms of both strategy and personnel."  This may be true in terms of Sherman's harsh tactics against Southern guerrillas early in the war, but it certainly is a stretch to compare the wanton destruction of property and torture of fighters, suspects, and sympathizers of the armed insurrectos of Emilio Aguinaldo's Army of Liberation to Sherman's march through Georgia and the Carolinas.  It's hard for even Sherman's harshest critics to imagine him saying (as Brigadier General Jacob H. Smith alleged to a subordinate during "pacification" operations on Samar and Leyte): " I want no prisoners.  I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn, the better it will please me."  The perversion of Sherman's dictum that "war is hell" is evident in the statistics.  In the last major military operation of the war, 4200 American soldiers died.  In contrast, 16,000 to 20,000 guerrilla fighters died.  Civilian deaths, Carr maintains, "has been variously estimated from 200,000 to a million, either as a direct result of military operations or from war-related hunger and disease."  This may have become America's way of war, but it certainly wasn't Sherman's.

Carr rightly maintains that "The particular hellishness of the Vietnam War owed more to the innovations in U.S. counterinsurgency strategy than it did to Sherman's campaigns."  There, like in the Philippines, body counts and kill ratios were the determinants of success against an enemy fighting an unconventional war.  Even in so-called conventional wars, Sherman's strategy of destroying an enemy's economic infrastructure, clearly his intent in Georgia and the Carolinas, became twisted in America's military psyche.  In an attempt to avoid the bloody stalemate on the Western Front in World War I, military strategists sought an economic solution similar to Sherman in Georgia and Sheridan in the Shenandoah Valley.  British military theorist B.H Liddell Hart, a Sherman fan, authored The Strategy of Indirect Approach and opined that Sherman was the first modern general to fully grasp this strategy.

Sherman equated his campaigns in 1864-65 as great raids, emphasizing movement and the capture of strategic economic and command-and-control positions over the destruction of enemy armies.  Sherman's model was Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest.  Carr describes how Sherman became the model for World War II tank commanders Erwin Rommel for Germany and George S. Patton for the U.S.  But Sherman's goal of breaking civilian morale translated into wholesale civilian slaughter at the hands of World War II's air marshals, such as Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris in Great Britain and General Curtis LeMay in the U.S.  Their legacy became Dresden and Tokyo where tens of thousands of civilians died under their high explosives and napalm.  Again, not Sherman's way of war.

Carr has written an anti-military military treatise.  What holds true from Sherman's time to the present, Carr concludes, is "the continued acceptance of this principle of collective responsibility by both state armies and 'non-state' actors."  Sherman's willingness to wage against civilians as well as armies is his real legacy for modern warfare.  How it will morph in future conflicts is limited only by man's ability to imagine and conceive ways of inflicting destruction and death.  Sherman's ghosts will continue to haunt because, as he prophetically said, war is "part of the grand machinery by which this world is governed."  War is part of us.

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Gordon Berg is a past President and member of the Civil War Round Table of the District of Columbia (www.cwrtdc.org).  His reviews and articles appear in the Civil War Times and America's Civil War, among other publications.