User talk:Tirailleur
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Hi Tirailleur,
You and I seem to be off to a rocky start. How much of that is due to miscommunications I am not sure. I am an American so where it comes to Waterloo I don't have a national Axe to grind. Let me be clear, I really could care less if the little green men from Mars fought the UFO Gray's on valamy ridge where Waterloo is concerned but if it happened I want it down and accurate.
If I have gotten irritated with you it has been about unsupported opinions. If you have problems with Peter please note where he is wrong. I've made mistakes and I will make more. I am guessing that Peter has too. Just note it cite the contra evidence and lets take a look at it. I don't like charges of bias thrown about unsupported which has been done over and over by you. If I am wrong ok show me where how and what evidence you have. Heck I am prepared to be wrong I just want to understand why I am. But I won't take that from an unknown keyboard stating that an author is full of it with no support whatsoever. After Essjay I am suprised that anyone would.
There are still lots of things to be worked out in the article and you are most welcome to edit to your hearts content. However if it isn't supported and cited it will be reverted. I don't get to do that and neither does anyone else on that article. Its just too watched to support that.
There are lots of folks that watch the edits on Waterloo, my contributions have been there for months, if I put one thing in there that was not correct I would have been reverted so fast my head would have spun. Every single thing I wrote I cited per page for checking. I've used more than one source and I continue to add sources. I will be adding more. If you have better sources then let me be very clear *I want you to bring them up and use them* we will all be better for it.
I find mistakes I am betting you can to and that is just fine with me. However when I find myself spending more time defending myself my actions and Peter H. against unsupported opinions that is trolling... and fellow you have done alot of just that. I want you to contribute but the talk page isn't an opinion page and wiki makes that clear. Attacking me, attacking Peter H, and anything you disagree with is getting old. I appologise if I have hurt your feelings but I feel like I have been run over by the opinion express. Tirronan 18:34, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
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"Let us select from our various school histories one of the best known, and see what is saild of the Prussian share in the victory of Waterloo. Of nearly a page devoted to the battle, just two short sentences are allotted to Blucher's part! 'When night approached, the heads of the Prussian columns were seen advancing to share in the combat.' 'The Prussians who were comparatively fresh continued the pursuit' [The French are described as broken entirely by Wellington's charge], and the army of Napoleon was virtually annihilated.'"What English lad could possibly surmise that the fiercest of all modern leaders of war was on the ground with part of his army at half past four, was hotly engaged with Napoleon's reserves 3 hours before dark, had brought 50,000 fine troops into action at the time of Wellington's grand charge, and had 7,000 of them killed or wounded that evening in vigorous support of our army" (Chesney Charles C.:Waterloo Lectures:A Study of the Campiagn of 1815 ISBN 1428649883 P3-4)
I am going to make an attempt here to get through where I am and what I think happened on Waterloo, you want opinions here is your chance...
- I don't think and I have never thought that the Prussians took the majority of the victory, they were not on the field for over half the battle.
- I don't think that it would have been a draw had the Prussians not shown up. Give Napoleon 16,000 to 24,000 more troops (still trying to get that one sorted out) and he probably wins mostly because Wellington left 17,000 troops behind in a covering position. Also Wellington states that he would not give battle without Prussian support.
- If Chesney is correct then 1st Corps rupture of Papollote of Durotte's division happened before the repulse of the Imperial Guard at the British center. Three authors (CCC, PH, DHW) call out the position of travel being Ohain, to Papelotte and La Haye, all three call out the buildings being next to each other, all three state that the movement began got called to Placenoit, and recalled by General Muffling, all three state that the whole of the 1st Corps Cavalry was passed through as well. Again I state this was through the interior of the French position. Most military folks would call that game over. (Chesney Charles C.:Waterloo Lectures:A Study of the Campiagn of 1815 ISBN 1428649883 P176-177)
- I don't know a thing about friendly fire incidents and I never stated a thing about them.
- I think that you are correct that a bloody draw was changed to a rout by the Prussians, there were simply too many places the French line failed to be able to recover. The French were totally overwhelmed by the number of troops on the field by the combinded armies and the only one to blame for that was Napoleon.
Tirronan 20:02, 5 April 2007 (UTC)
Hello Tirronan,
I think we have some crossed wires here. My initial objections to the Waterloo article (which is very much better as currently rewritten BTW) were that it contained inaccuracies, and that it was unbalanced in the relative amount of text given to the two forces involved on the Allied side. One particular inaccuracy is still there, namely the confusion about La Haye versus La Haye Sainte.
La Haye (or Haie in what I think is the modern spelling) is a village on Wellington's left which was contested all day by Netherlands and French forces until Ziethen's Corps arrived, engaging and defeating both of them, ally and enemy alike. It was Ziethen's approach which convinced Wellington it was safe to withdraw two cavalry brigades from his left and switch them into his mauled centre, where they followed up the defeated Imperial Guard.
La Haye Sainte is the farmhouse in front of the Wellington's centre. They aren't the same place.
I take your point about opinion versus citation, but TBH this is such a basic aspect of the battle that it's a bit like wanting a cite for Waterloo being in Belgium.
The lack of balance in the amount of text flows I think from the initial reliance on PH as a source. I don't particularly have a beef with PH; I attended a presentation he gave when his book on Ligny and QB came out, and he came over as meticulous, but as having an agenda. FWIW, yes it does appear that Wellington misled the Prussians as to his troops' whereabouts, but then he probably did so on the basis that "the check's in the post" and it really was. The point is that PH is one source with an explicit agenda, and the idea of wiki is that we present what the generally-held view is. There's a place for mentioning the revisionist views, but they should be described as such, however interesting and well-argued they are. In fact, especially if they are.
Where I think PH has it wrong (and I haven't edited this into any articles because it's just an opinion) is in 3 areas.
One is the curious idea that one can apply the modern boundaries of the German state to the political map of 1815 and infer a "German" stake in the battle. As far as I know, nobody else has yet come out to agree with this, so it remains the opinion of one historian.
The second is the idea that the Prussian contribution is undervalued in English-language histories. As you've shown, this misapprehension did exist but it was corrected 150 years ago.
The third is his insistence on Prussian military prowess. PH first came to my attention about 25 years go when he was writing wargamers' guides to Prussian uniforms of 1815. He joined a club that an acquaintance of mine attended and when asked "What are you interested in, then? Ancients? Mediaeval? World War Two?" he replied, "The Germans"; and this shows in his writing. If you look at the run of engagements between the French and the Prussians between 1813 and 1814, you get a picture of abject Prussian defeats by French forces that were short of everything, included a number of 15 and 16 year old soldiers, and yet managed to win all the time when they had the numerical edge and a lot of the time when they didn't.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Sixth_Coalition for details of what I mean: there are 19 battles there, or 20 if you include the siege of Danzig that the Prussians never concluded, of which the French won 11 despite being grossly outnumbered. If you go back to 1806-7 and forward to 1815 and include those, that adds seven more battles of which six were French victories (Saalfeld, Jena, Auerstadt, Eylau, Ligny, Wavre). Losing 17 out of 27 battles against a numerically inferior foe is not a stellar record, particularly when a number of them are on ground of your own choosing. All three commanders looked at the Ligny position and two out of three accuratelt predicted the Prussians would be defeated there. so the view that the Prussians were a redoubtable military force is very hard to stand up; when they did win it was unvaryingly with somebody else's major help.
This is what I meant by my comments re historiography - there is a reason why an account of events gets accepted and if one wants to overturn it it's not sufficient to disagree and present an alternative view. One must also show why all those forerunners got it wrong and in some cases how the evidence that persuaded them of their view came into being.
Anyway I didn't intend to be obnoxious and I apologise for those occasions where I have been. I am re-reading an interesting Austrian-written account of Wagram and when I get through with it I will welcome your comments on the rewrite I intend to do on the wiki entry. It's a bit cursory and it's also based wholly on Chandler, who is a good source but doesn't go into anything like as much detail. Tirailleur 17:06, 20 April 2007 (UTC)
You have nothing to appologise for I was half of the argument. Jena and Auerstadt were interesting mostly in what happens when you take liner formations that ossified into the entire line having to be locked together. The lack of command control was apparent and no prussian formation larger than a regiment ever practiced together. So you have a multi columiar coordinated set of corps (French) opposing a strict liner system where no one coordinated with another formation (Prussian). What I found interesting is the dreck that gets wrapped up around it. A liner formation isn't bad if you practice in large formations and can move, the Prussians couldn't and got there heads handed to them and should have.
Changes that I noticed after 1812 in the Prussian army:
- It could march fast and if they were near you could count on an attack.
- The end of battles of annililation, the would march off and often hand you your head if pursued too closely
- They got inter-arms cooperation better than most of the Allies
- They consistently cooperated with allies effectively
- Their Generals and Staff were better than the Russians or Austrians
victories Katzbach, Leon, Denniwitz, Mockern, they did pretty darn well. Nappy was a hell of a General and it showed. When I looked at the battles what I saw (as I remember) was that if Napoleon was on the battlefield mostly the French won (there were exceptions Blucher hammered Napoleon at least once and perhaps twice) and if Napoleon wasn't there they almost always won.
Ligny is interesting in the fact that it was winnable by the Prussians with what they had on the field. What I read and PH is the one to read on that battle, was that the French showed far more flexibility in deployment and use of its artillery (Borodino is another good example of this) than the Prussians. Prussian infantry use in urban warfare was critised even by Prussian officers as wasteful and ineffective. Blucher's inattention of his center with is left all but uninvolved is out right strange. The right was poorly deployed and strung out waiting for a British army that wasn't coming.
As for Wellington, I am not as harsh a judge as PH is on him (except his treatment of Siborn where I hold a very dim view of his actions). He simply didn't have as secure and accurate a spy network as he thought and got caught with his pants down. I am pretty sure he knew that he couldn't get to Blucher but asking any commander to sacrifice his command is something that isn't going to happen. Had the Prussians not stood their ground then things would have gotten grim for Wellington indeed he was simply too spread out to have effected a good defense and its hard to understand how he doesn't get trounced.
One of the more interesting aspects is why did the Prussians become aware so quickly and Wellington remain so in the dark?
I think that was Napoleon's real genius, he put his opponents in a position to lose before the battle ever began (Luzen, Butzen, and Wargram).
Peter is a pretty good guy like a lot of Germans he can be so brusk to put one off quickly but damned if I don't admire his work and he's been a pretty good friend over the years. I'll tell you this for truth, I've never caught him in a lie yet.
Take a few days and read his work, the Wellington issues he goes into sets my teeth on edge but he is brutal on the Prussians where they messed up. The 1st of the two books goes into the treatment of the Saxons and he isn't very impressed with Blucher's treatment of them. Kleist would have retained them. Most of the troops deserting were recent additions that didn't want to be part of Prussia with good reason.
As for the Prussian's I started studying them just to get a clearer view on the Eastern front (as it were) in the Napoleonic wars. I ended up being pretty impressed since it was a dirt poor country with no resouces and on its knees when it revolted. One thing escapes attention in the article 40% of the Prussian troops where milita (Landwere) and over 1/2 of the 4th Corps was Landwere at Waterloo. All in all not a horrible performance when you consider they fought veterans and guard units at Placenoit.
No hard feelings here and I learned some from this as well.
Tirronan 21:15, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
I will dig out his Ligny book and have another go at it, it's in the attic somewhere at the moment...you make a good point about troop quality though - the Prussians had basically the B Team at Waterloo. No guardsmen, no cuirassiers, and most of their cavalry "regiments" were irregulars about 200 men strong, so more like squadrons. Looking at the infantry, Ziethen brought 11 regiments to Waterloo, of which 2 were regulars, 5 were reserves and 4 were militia. For Pirch's Corps the corresponding figures were 2, 6, and 4, and for Bulow's, 2, 2, and 8. I know not all those guys made it onto the battlefield, and their numbers weren't equal either after Ligny, but nonetheless the army that marched for Waterloo on 18 June was nearly 50% Landwehr. Must have taken a lot of nerve to pit that lot against Napoleon in person.
Incidentally it is Haythornthwaite who says that Ziethen's men attacked and defeated Saxe-Weimar's troops in Papelotte just after they drove off Durutte, around 7pm. They had held Wellington's left all day. Their position adjoined that of Picton's division; those sources which say Highlanders joined Ziethen in driving Durutte back would be thinking of the 42nd, 79th or 92nd Regiments, which were all Highland, all in Picton's division, and quite hard to mistake for anything else.
Another interesting question I have seen discussed lately is whether the Old Guard was really still any good militarily. This seems to derive from the fact that the Grenadiers got routed by Belgian militia (Chasse's division). That is a bit embarrassing, but I think it's of a piece with French claims that Napoleon would have won if he hadn't been having an off-day, i.e it's finding excuses for them. In fact in French accounts of Waterloo I've even seen it characterised as Wellington versus Ney rather than Napoleon, which is really pushing it...I mean what do they think Napoleon was doing? :-) Tirailleur 22:35, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
Actually it is worse than that, a lot of the regular formations where ex Landwere albeit Landwere that had been fighting for 2 years. Most of the formations were still in threadbare 1813 and 1814 uniforms, fully half of the muskets being used were French as was half of the artillery. Most of the landwere cavalry would begin a charge but stopping once they started was hard at best. For all that they had excellent staff and Russian's place under their command accomplish a lot more than they would under their own commanders. Part of the attraction of study is that they accomplished so much with so little. When you compare it to the Austrians well eqquipped, well trained, and well supplied, its rather eye opening. I have always wondered why Napoleon didn't stay after the Prussians and count on Wellington never being able to catch up. All three armies admitted the British were pretty slow in getting it together for campiagn marches. You should see some of the letters between Wellington and Blucher during the march to Paris. Durotte advised Napoleon that Wellington's army would be hell on a battlefield but easy to out manuver.
The guard wasn't the guard of 1814 but it was still pretty darn good. Its just that once troops face elite troops and survive they get the idea that they can be beat and when out numbereding said elite units they can and will win. It was mostly Landwere that threw 10 battalions of guard out of Placenoit and 2 24th Musketeer battalions rousted 1/2 Ge out of the woods in a bayonet charge.
Hey do you know anything about the Nassau units in Papolotte they need to be included in the paragraph about Zeithen's advance but I don't have squat on them or the Highlanders they linked up with either.
One of the more irritating things about Napoleonic history is that "Napoleon can't make a mistake" you see it with Wellington to a lessor extent. He screwed up, warfare is harnessing chaos too many places for things to not mangle up. He sent Groucy with far too few troops to accomplish anything but deprive himself of their use. Further he counted the Prussians out when he watched them march away too many times bloodied and unbowed. He knew better. I think he was sick in some way because there were so many unexplained pauses where nothing was happening and he should have been ordering action. Tirronan 01:00, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
I've found some information on the friendly fire incidents. The 4th Corps mistook Nassau battalions (they were outfitted in French uniforms and used French formations) were mistaken for French and attacked. I am going to assume anything around them would have been shot up as well. Here is where it gets confusing, 2 books say they were driven off, yet there were at least 2 Nassau battalions operating with Ziethen's 1st Corp during his drive and were contesting for Papolette. The Prussians had no lost love for anything French and were known to be pretty violent in attack. I don't have much doubt they probably did inflict blue on blue but to what extent I am not prepared to say. I do know that advancing from Placenoit they held fire for fear of hitting Wellington's troops, I suspect from butt chewings about the Nassau troops they were more circumspect. Tirronan 19:11, 26 April 2007 (UTC)
I have 2 sources about the Nassau contingent, Haythornthwaite and Weller.
Haythornthwaite (Uniforms of Waterloo) says there were 8 Nassau battalions at Waterloo with a total initial strength of 7,180. That's a shade under 900 apiece on average. Their battalion organisation followed the French model exactly. 5 of the 8 were in Saxe-Weimar's 2nd Netherlands Brigade, which held a 1,000-yard frontage occupying La Haie, Papelotte, and Frischermont. The 5 were in two regiments, the 2nd Nassau Regiment (3 battalions) and the Regiment of Orange Nassau (2 battalions). The former wore dark green uniforms, with black facings and shako covers, and buff belts. He doesn't describe the latters' uniform.
Weller (Wellington at Waterloo) says that one battalion of the 2nd was detached to Hougoumont leaving Saxe-Weimar with 4, a force he says was about 3,300 men. That's plausible - they'd been in action at QB, and thus may well have been down to 825 men average battalion strength.
Durutte carried out a reconnaissance in force early in the day, and fought his way into Frischermont when the rest of d'Erlon's corps went forward. He left 2 battalions of 8 to guard the flank of the Grand Battery, and went at S-W with his other 6. D'Erlon's 4-division attack is usually said to have been 16,000 to 18,000 strong, so about 4,000 to 4,500 per division. If Durutte took three-quarters of his division forward, then he must have had 3,000 to 3,400 men with him - almost exact numerical parity with S-W, but of course the latter had a very defensible position.
When d'Erlon's other 3 divisions were repulsed, Durutte adopted a defensive stance as there were no unbroken French infantry for a mile.
By 7pm, as the Prussians approached, he was in effect fighting as Lobau's left flank rather than d'Erlon's right. The Prussians mistook S-W's men for French and S-W mistook Ziethen's for Grouchy, so they engaged each other, with S-W inflicting "fairly heavy casualties" before being driven back several hundred yards. Their position was not set up to meet an attack from the north-east.
The error realised, S-W's guys rallied but did not play a "significant" part in the advance. Which is not to say they didn't join in at all.Tirailleur 00:14, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
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[edit] 100 days
My did you ever imagine that I would be inviting you to help me edit a page? Well I am, this article is the biggest load of outright crap I have seen since I don't know when. come on over and help me out here!Tirronan 01:14, 24 June 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Battle of Waterloo nomination for Good Article status
Hi there. I've nominated Battle of Waterloo for GA status. In my opinion it has the makings of a Featured Article, but I think GA would be a good start. Anyway, it's been reviewed on the talk page, and quite a long list of suggestions for fine-grained improvements has been left there. I'll try to implement a few of them over the next few days, if I have time, but I figured, since you're more of a regular contributor to the article, you might be interested in bringing it up to GA. -Kieran 11:17, 29 August 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Something for you
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The Editor's Barnstar | |
| For your massive contribution to the Battle of Waterloo --ROGER DAVIES TALK 12:58, 22 September 2007 (UTC) |
[edit] Battle of Wagram
Hello there thanks for your contributions to the Battle of Wagram article. I'll be updating this as I get re-acquainted with my sources. It was pretty perfunctory to begin with and I think it should be feasible to get it to FA status, looking at the standard of the Austerlitz article. I was at Cambridge too. Pembroke, but a long time ago. Tirailleur 11:48, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
Great. Although, given that most sources bunch Aspern and Wagram together, I was wondering if you'd been interested in working on Aspern after rewriting Wagram. I personally have been recently mostly writing about the Neapolitan War, as well as the Saxon campaign (see Battle of Gefrees), which is almost completely finished. Centy – – 12:11, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
Yes, works for me, Rothenberg is good on both and there a lot of interesting new-in-English stuff in the Hollins / Osprey titles. Between those and Chandler we have French and Austrian perspectives covered. I was thinking to overhaul them in succession, while thinking about what they link to that also needs beefing up. Eg. it would be useful to be able to link to biographies of the various Archdukes and the subordinate Austrian personalities. Likewise the Austrian army of 1809 merits a decent-length article that discusses its improvements since 1805 and the impact of its 1809 performance (Napoleon re-equipped the carabiniers and brought in lancers, co-opted an Austrian Corps for 1812 and requested that Archduke Charles command it, and married a Habsburg). Your hussar edit was a good point since it was Hungary that invented them. I have put in an edit to the effect that other armies' hussars seem to have copied their wardrobe more than their ethos. I have never found a description of how the actual military role of hussars differed from that of light dragoons, chasseurs à cheval or indeed Austria's own chevau-leger regiments - have you? If you have come across any public domain likeness of Archduke Charles that would be a good addition to the article too. I haven't really looked I must confess. Tirailleur 13:40, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
With hussars, from reading into the Neapolitan War, the hussar was the Austrian preferred cavalry for advanced guard scouting and raiding. However, I think it may just be that the Hungarian hussar was simply their best light cavalry and was more successful given the appalling tactics the Austrian cavalry generals used to use. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that the Austrians would always misuse the hussar in battle by refusing to use hussars in conjunction with heavier cavalry.
Archduke Charles - do you mean a public domain image or text?
Finally you should definitely also mention that Wagram broke Archduke Charles' will and his subsequent retirement and don't forget to mention Napoleon also transferred several regiments Grenz infantry into his army after Austria was forced to transfer lands in the Balkans. Centy – – 13:50, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
Image:Archduke Charles.jpg Centy – – 19:15, 26 September 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Battle of Waterloo Featured Article nomination
Hi there. I've just nominated the Battle of Waterloo article for FA status. You can watch the nomination at Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates#Nominations. I'm hoping that, as one of the most knowledgeable and prolific contributors to the article, you'll be able to help out if there are only minor concerns standing in the way of the final status. Anyway, here's hoping... -Kieran (talk) 16:31, 1 May 2008 (UTC)
