Journal of the Waterloo Campaign, Vol. 2 (of 2): Kept Throughout the Campaign of 1815

Few firsthand accounts of Waterloo pulse with the raw energy and irreverent wit of Cavalié Mercer's journal. A British artillery officer who arrived at Quatre Bras as the fighting waned and spent June 18th commanding his guns on the ridge, Mercer writes not as a dutiful chronicler but as a sharp-eyed observer with a cavalry officer's jaunty disdain for convention. His descriptions of the battle's chaos are meticulous: the massive French cavalry charges breaking against British squares, the counter-battery duels, and his infamous disobedience of Wellington's direct order to avoid enemy fire. Volume Two follows the Allied army's grinding march through northern France after victory - the mud-choked roads choked further with troops and baggage, the tense encounters with Prussian allies whose discipline wavers, and the strange tableau of French peasant life continuing amid foreign occupation. Mercer captures the peculiar exhaustion of conquest: the beauty and tedium of the countryside, moments of unexpected hospitality, and the surreal passage of Louis XVIII returning to his throne. This is military history rendered with the immediacy of someone who was there, cannon smoke still stinging his eyes.