A Model Victory

A vivid retelling of the Battle of Waterloo, based on unpublished soldiers’ written accounts. There were fifty thousand casualties on the single bloody day of the Battle of Waterloo: killing on the scale of the First World War. In this electrifying account, Malcolm Balen combines extraordinary first-hand accounts of the battle with the story of William Siborne, an officer who wanted to capture the moment of victory by making the perfect model. Siborne gathered together eyewitness accounts that read as if the battle was fought yesterday. But his quest for truth came up against the might of the British establishment. Who had won the day? Was it Wellington's forces or Blucher's Prussians? Malcolm Balen tells how two battles of Waterloo were fought – for Europe's future, and for the control of history.