In the ranks of death

National Interest, The, Spring, 2004 by Martin Walker

Williamson Murray and Major General Robert H. Scales Jr., The Iraq War: A Military History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap-Harvard Press, 2003), 311 pp., $25.95.

Oliver North, War Stories: Operation Iraqi Freedom (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2003), 322 pp., $29.95 (includes DVD).

Todd S. Purdum, A Time of Our Choosing: America's War in Iraq (New York: New York Times Books, 2003), 319 pp., $25.

Martin Walker, ed., The Iraq War: As Witnessed by the Correspondents and Photographers of United Press International (Dulles, VA: Brassey's Inc., 2003), 225 pp., $19.95.

Sara Beck and Malcolm Downing, eds., The Battle for Iraq; BBC News Correspondents on the War Against Saddam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 216 pp., $27.95.

Sir John Keegan, ed., Daily Telegraph War on Saddam (London, UK: Constable & Robinson, 2003), 192 pp., 12.99 [pounds sterling].

Wesley K. Clark, Winning Modern Wars (New Yore PublicAffairs, 2003), 218 pp., $25.

Sir John Keegan, Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda (New York: Knopf, 2003), 387 pp., $30.

Abraham Rabinovich, The Yom Kippur War: The Epic Encounter that Transformed the Middle East (New York: Schocken Books, 2004), 543 pp., $27.50.

WHEN ASKED for his own account of the battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington replied that the very idea was foolish, that one might as well try to write the history of a ball. Perhaps he felt that his own official dispatch on the conflict should suffice for the ages (although the Duke went on to produce a further "Waterloo Memorandum" in 1842). And yet for almost 180 years, Waterloo was widely reckoned to be the most thoroughly described battle in history thanks to the pioneering work of Captain William Siborne, who sought to produce an exact model of the battle that ended the Napoleonic wars. He accumulated accounts and letters from many of the British participants, which probably introduced a certain bias, but by the time Thackeray sat down in the 1840s to write the Waterloo scenes of Vanity Fair, there was a massive body of eyewitness material to guide the novelist's imagination. And in the small Hotel des Colonnes overlooking the battlefield, where Victor Hugo wrote Les Miserables in 1861 with its famous account of the battle, there was a pile of French memoirs of the battle to hand.

Yet controversy still reigns, and not only in the bizarre new history by the French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, whose Les Cent Fours suggests that Napoleon's great defeat "gleams with an aura worthy of victory." In 1994, David Hamilton-Williams, an English historian, published Waterloo: New Perspectives, claiming to have delved in the Dutch, German and Belgian sources (and those nationalities provided the bulk of the Duke's army) to give a much fuller account of the battle, particularly on the Duke's left wing where few British troops were posted. He also claimed that Siborne, running out of money to finance his project, "traduced history" by soliciting funds from his wealthier sources, bending his history to suit the vanity of his more generous donors. Finally, and in defiance of the Duke's grumble that Siborne had given too much credit to General Blucher's Prussians, Hamilton-Williams suggested that Siborne was part of a British "conspiracy" to minimize the Prussian role in the joint victory.

In a series of devastating articles in the Napoleonic journal First Empire (numbers 23, 25 and 26) and in the Journal of Army Historical Research, Hamilton-Williams was accused of unfairly blackening Siborne's achievement and inventing his own sources. Visitors to the Hanoverian archives and to the Siborne archives in the British Library were unable to find some of the more dramatic materials he cited, including the private journal of Major George Baring, who commanded the King's German Legion defenders of the central farm of La Haye Sainte until their ammunition ran out and the farm fell. The late Colonel John Elting, West Point's sage on Napoleonic affairs, called the book an "outright fraud." The German military historian Peter Hofschroer (who really had gone through the Dutch and German archives to produce his 1815: The Waterloo Campaign), when asked to specify what was wrong in Hamilton-Williams's book, replied to one inquirer that "from the first page to the last" it was consumed with error.

SO IF A BATTLE as familiar and well documented as Waterloo--with nearly two centuries of hindsight and historiography to its credit--can continue to arouse such passionate dispute, what is to be expected of the new crop of instant books on the Iraq War? The first objection to all of the accounts listed above is that they are distinctly premature. Indeed, Williamson Murray and Robert Scales, the authors of the most conventional and in that limited sense the most successful of these books, frankly admit:

   As we put this book to bed in mid-August
   2003, it is not entirely clear whether the conflict
   that began in mid-March has actually
   ended.... Whether [the postwar] violence
   represents the death throes of an evil and pernicious
   regime or the first phase of a protracted
   guerilla insurgency it is impossible to say.