David Crane (Empires of the Dead) opens his history of the Battle of Waterloo by making a reference to Bruegel's painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, in which farmers plow their fields unaware of the boy falling from the sky. He offers the image as a metaphor for the way most people experience historical events--and for the approach he takes in Went the Day Well?: Witnessing Waterloo.
On June 18, 1815, Britons knew Napoleon was on the move across Europe, but they had no idea that the final battle of the Napoleonic Wars--and the defining event for a generation--was underway. At the heart of Crane's book lies the disjunction between the battle itself and the mundane details of that day in England.
The first section of the book is an hour-by-hour account, from midnight to midnight, of the day. Crane moves back and forth between Britain and Belgium, using diaries, newspapers and letters to give the perspective of poets, radicals, foot soldiers, officers and paupers. He introduces readers to a factory boy, a soon-to-be-widowed bride and a gothic novelist-cum-travel writer determined not to miss the most thrilling event of her time. The second, much shorter, portion of the book considers the aftermath of the battle, both for the individuals who appear in the prior section and for Britain as a whole.
Went the Day Well? is an unusual and illuminating account of Waterloo that will appeal to fans of the Napoleonic Wars and Regency history buffs alike. --Pamela Toler, blogging at History in the Margins