Meeting their Waterloo (again)

They come by the coachload to a field in Belgium, speaking of musket shot, blood and guts. Matthew Gwyther joins the battlefield tourists at a great re-enactment

SEVEN o'clock in the morning by the roadside in Bloomsbury, and it was all aboard what turned out to be the Eurosceptic Express to Waterloo in Belgium. We were off to shout for our boys in the 180th anniversary re-enactment of the famous victory against the French Menace. This was Midas Battlefield Tours' biggest outing yet. Four coachloads conveying nearly 200 military history enthusiasts to the scene where Wellington, the Iron Duke, finally dealt with the man who would unify Europe his way - Napoleon Bonaparte.

Three days before the mock battle, the parallels between 1815 and 1995 were already being drawn on the British side. As we pulled off down the A2 to Dover for the ferry, a large number of the noses on board were buried in the Daily Telegraph, which carried an editorial decrying the fact that the re-enactment of the battle of Waterloo was being presented as somehow symbolic of European Union.

"It is the inglorious standard of the European Union that will be flown at the end of the day, in place of the Union flag," it thundered. "The shades of Wellington, Uxbridge, Picton, Mercer and, yes, Blucher, must view all this cannon balls with lofty derision."

In Belgium, the man playing the part of Wellington, Tim Pickles, was already denouncing federalism and a common currency to anyone who would put a microphone in front of him. For his part, Waterloo's mayor, Serge Kubla, had protested that he wanted the re-enactment to be no "historical or emotional revival of the past" but an expression of the "European ideal". Not, doubtless, the kind of ideal Napoleon had in mind with himself as Emperor.

Midas Battlefield Tours is a highly specialised operator. Formed two years ago, it organises escorted tours to battlefields all over the world with an emphasis on pre-20th century campaigns. From the Zulu war to Agincourt, from the Ypres Salient to Thermopylae, its guides explain pincer movements and out-flanking manoeuvres, scorched-earth campaigns and bloodbaths. Bringing organised violence back to life from pounds 229 upwards is Midas's business.

To warm up the enthusiasts as we hit the autoroute from Calais into Belgium, a couple of martial documentary videos were put into the machine. First it was explained how Bonaparte got his nose bloodied on his Moscow campaign in 1812, and then - as the French "dogs of war were unleashed again" - received the final, knock-out punch from the plucky Brits three years later. Everyone seemed engrossed, and we proceeded at a speed-limited 65mph to thumping strains of "Mars" from The Planets by Holst on the documentary's soundtrack coming over the coach's speakers.

The first stop on Friday afternoon was at Quatre Bras, not far from Waterloo. It was here, in 1815, after landing in France from Elba on 1 March and arriving in Paris on 20 March, that Napoleon had his newly-raised army attempt to split in two the allied force under Wellington and the Prussians under Blucher, just south of Brussels. This became the battle of Quatre Bras on 16 June and Wellington spent the previous night reeling at the Duchess of Richmond's ball in Brussels. Many of his officers apparently fought still clad in their dancing stockings.

Quatre Bras was where our tour's star turn made his first appearance. Ian Fletcher is a 38-year-old, self-taught historian with nearly a dozen works of popular history to his name. They come with titles like In Hell Before Daylight, The Waters of Oblivion and Fields of Fire. (He financed the writing of his first book by working as a motorbike dispatch rider.) With only a couple of O-levels to his name, Fletcher is the sort of historian regarded with considerable sniffiness by the academic branch of the profession. He worked for 13 years carting books around the British Library for other scholars, and has learned history the hard way.

With an admiring audience gathered around him, his approach was brisk, anecdotal and laced with blokeishness: battles "kicked off"; Marshall Ney "came on"; Blucher was "well old and he had a real gripe with Napoleon". One young British hero wounded by a lance that went in his eye and came out of his mouth, "went off with a headache". When referring to a particularly fearsome English regiment, Fletcher commented: "These were the boys... you didn't mess about with these boys. They'd taken an eagle [enemy's flag] at Salamanca."

Right from the start of Fletcher's commentary there was no doubt who were the good guys and who the bad. He consistently referred to Napoleon's Grande Armee as "the Frenchies", with the same disdain Teresa Gorman used to reserve for Brussels bureaucrats. He was also unimpressed with some rumoured French foul-play during Quatre Bras, when they got caught "bayoneting and messing with the bodies".

You needed a bit of energy to bring Quatre Bras to life in your mind's eye. There's not much left there now except a pricey frites stall and some fields populated by a scattering of Belgian cows relaxing in the security of their milk quotas. The farmhouse on the crossroads, in which 1,000 allied wounded were laid out in the courtyard, is now The Enterprise Dance Ship disco and nightclub.

None of this worried our enthusiasts, whose imaginations had already been fired up by a lot of deep history-book reading since Calais. One shy chap in a baseball cap with a Waterloo badge confessed to me that he'd made the trip no fewer than six times."I can really see Picton's division," he breathed. "I really get the atmosphere... I sent the wife off to a health farm so I could come this time." There were not many women in our party, though one I met later told me she'd done dozens of battlefields all over the world, including the Falklands - though there, live mines had restricted her explorations of Goose Green and Bluff Cove.

Ian Fletcher part owns Midas and is confident that its matey, no-frills approach is superior to rival companies in the battlefield market. "They give 'em wine and gourmet food," he scoffed over breakfast. "We like to give 'em blood and guts all day long." (You do get wine with Midas's modest evening ration - a single glass, after which it was 100 Belgian francs, about pounds 2, a throw.)

On Friday night, camp was pitched at the Hotel Astoria in Brussels. In the dining room at 19.30 hours, it was time for Fletcher's centrepiece Waterloo lecture, with slide illustration. He was good on the haphazard nature of the unreliable weaponry. Apparently, the muskets used by both sides - the Brown Bess, the Baker and the Charleville - were wildly inaccurate; only one in 20 infantrymen was able to hit a target that was over 10 yards away. And that was if they managed to get the weapon to fire in the first place. Experienced soldiers knew the only way to unjam a musket fast was to urinate down the barrel. Inexperienced young men in the heat of battle would often pull the trigger, having forgotten to remove the ram-rod from the barrel first. This lack of efficiency had huge benefits: 75 per cent of battle participants of that era could normally expect to walk or run away unscathed - more than could be said of the first day at The Battle of the Somme.

It was the artillery with its cannon, however, that in Fletcher's words was the real "death dealer". Using one of his son's small footballs, he explained how similar-sized cannonballs could bounce off the ground and still tear through well over a dozen bodies, killing and maiming as they went. "You had fellas with their intestines hanging out, arms hanging off." Nor were there MASH units to sew the wounded back together, or Florence Nightingales to mop their brows. They were simply left behind on the field, and the locals picked at them like carrion. "Men would lie for days dying," said Fletcher, clicking up on the projection screen a strange contemporary medical illustration of a mutilated torso. "People would scavenge, looking for coins that soldiers might have sewn into their jackets to hide them. A piece of officer's gold braid could be a year's salary to a local peasant." The final insult after Waterloo occurred when a fertiliser entrepreneur started digging up the mass graves to make high-quality blood, fish and bone-style plant food.

A reminder of this aspect of war seemed a good idea as, up until then, things had veered toward bravado. Amid the machismo of heroic charges and steadfast defences, it was all too easy to lose sight of the indisputable fact that war, while sometimes interesting, is also the most unpleasant human enterprise going. I was musing on the significance of the fact that I hadn't spoken to anyone in the party who had ever been under fire. The original pioneers of battlefield tours, many years ago, had certainly experienced the results of war. The tours were set up for groups of bereaved visiting the unknown foreign fields where their husbands, sons and brothers had met violent ends.

Saturday was our tour's Waterloo battlefield preview day. The town of Waterloo has a good museum in the centre, housed in what was Wellington's HQ. Here we encountered Marcel Gerritsen, the secretary-general of the European Napoleonic Federation, already in his uniform ready for the next day. He was expressing alarm that a contingent of Russians - new arrivals on the re-enactment scene - had announced their intention to charge head-on into the British troops and make physical contact. "They need reminding that the most important thing in re-enactment is safety," said Monsieur Gerritsen. It turned out that the Russians' blood was up after they had been stopped for 24 hours at the German frontier by suspicious border guards. We then went to the town's permanent tourist complex to watch a strange film featuring children playing on the battlefield, inter-cut with clips of the 1970 movie Waterloo, starring Christopher Plummer and Rod Steiger. For true die-hards, there was also a laughably amateurish waxworks.

The battlefield's most famous original surviving site, however, is the Chateau of Hougoumont - the scene of one of the most heroic defences in British military history. Hougoumont, which was occupied by Wellington's troops, was an outpost well ahead of the massed allied lines and was held despite bitter, day-long fighting by the light companies of the Foot Guards. This was where Waterloo's first engagement took place, with an assault by Gerome Bonaparte - and at around 12.30pm the French forced open the doors of the north gates of the chateau. They were, however, driven out after some gallant defending led by Lieutenant Colonel James Macdonnell of the Coldstream Guards. The position was held for the rest of the day, despite most of the buildings being set on fire by French artillery.

"For me, this is the most evocative part of the battlefield," said Ian Fletcher, as we walked down a long lane next to a motorway to the surviving building. "It's an epic in itself." Standing in Macdonnell's gateway, Fletcher's imagination was also on fire. "Just imagine it. Macdonnell tear-arsing down the cobblestones to get those gates shut. But a hundred Frenchies get in. They're all killed, bar one drummer boy who gets tied up and told to behave himself. The courtyard was awash with blood. There was smoke, ash - not a pleasant place to spend your Sunday afternoon. It was like the Alamo and Rorke's Drift, all rolled into one."

Unfortunately, the present custodian of Hougoumont did not feel the same passion as his unwelcome visitors. Just as Fletcher was showing us around the main courtyard, we were thrown out of the grounds. "Miserable old sod," muttered one of our number. "Belgium didn't even exist until 1830," said another.

Sunday morning was the day of the mock battle itself. We all made an early start to ensure good viewing positions, as no fewer than 150,000 spectators were expected for the re-enactment. It is said in revisionist historical circles that the only reason the French lost at Waterloo was that Napoleon's haemorrhoids were playing up so badly that he couldn't sit on his horse. Thus, due to his diminutive stature, he was unable to see properly what was going on. At any rate, as the modern-day contestants filed on to the battlefield through knee-deep mud in their splendid costumes, there seemed a marked imbalance in the two sides' numbers.

In 1815, Wellington had 68,000 men, our Prussian ally Blucher 52,000 and Napoleon 69,000. In 1995, however, though there were a total of 3,000 re-enactors, it looked as if 2,500 had turned up in French uniform. Certainly in attendance were members of the Napoleonische Gellshaft from Germany, the Stato Maggiore Napoleonico Aoste from Italy, the Napoleonic Society of Marengo from Alessandria, and even the Napoleonic Association of the Ukraine. In these circles, the Napoleonic cult is such that playing a Brit appears to hold very little glamour for re- enactors. You might as well ask them to sport one of John Major's M&S suits at a re-enactment of a Euro-summit, the modern way of sorting out our little differences. In fact, large numbers of British re-enactors happily turned coats and donned the suave blue French uniform; the Iron Duke's small rabble of red coats was only made up by loyalist societies, with a little help from our transatlantic cousins.

"Apart from the odd Canadian or American, only Brits will ever play British troops," said Alan Rooney, Fletcher's partner at Midas. "Napoleon's victories have always been regarded as more glamorous than Wellington's. After Waterloo, Wellington just faded into obscurity. He had no concern for his own PR, and there was Napoleon writing his version on St Helena." Piles or no piles, the French were going to make sure they won this time.

However, things began badly for the French when the man playing Napoleon, a 60-year-old Belgian called Hector Sclaubas, suffered a real heart attack early on, and was taken away in a 20th-century ambulance. Once things got going, a little late, it was spectacular stuff. But despite the fact that thousands of rounds of musket-shot were fired, hundreds of cannon went off, cavalry charged, and dozens of sabres were bared, nobody on the field thought to re-enact dropping down dead or wounded. On this day in 1815, 30,000-40,000 men perished. When one contestant finally did fall over, Hollywood-style, and put his own bandage on his head, it drew huge applause from the grandstand.

In the original battle, even Napoleon's famed Imperial Guard was repulsed by the evening, leading to the most famous panic phrases in military history: "La garde recule!", followed by "Sauve qui peut" and a sprint back down the road to Paris. Here, the French retreat was reluctant and orderly. They walked back up the slope, turned round and scowled at the victors.

Our party returned to Brussels to prepare for one final day of battlefield visits on the Monday. I, however, jumped coach and, courtesy of Eurostar, made it from Waterloo to Waterloo London SE1 in four hours. Speeding out of Lille towards the Channel Tunnel at 188mph, enjoying a glass of champagne, one became quickly convinced that even the Iron Duke, like his spiritual successor the Iron Lady, would have found this example of Anglo-French co-operation a remarkably good idea. !

BATTLEFIELDS have always been a big attraction. Military commanders in particular have delighted in visiting the sites of their predecessors' triumphs. Napoleon, for example, was known for travelling to the scene of Frederick the Great's victories. Re- enactments are no more recent a phenomenon; Peter the Great had his own regiment of grenadier guards, who acted out battles for his pleasure. Today, re-enactments of almost every major battle take place worldwide.

Midas Battlefield Tours Limited (The Old Dairy, The Green, Godstone, Surrey RH9 8DY, tel 01883 744955) specialises in pre-20th-century history and organises re-enactments and tours. A "Brave Men's Blood" excursion in South Africa, to the battlefields of the 1879 Zulu War, costs pounds 1,899 (including half-board accommodation, travel and a qualified lecturer). An eight-day "Sharpe's Peninsula" tour to Spain, taking in the battle sites of the Peninsular War, costs pounds 1,299.

Holts' Battlefield Tours Ltd (Golden Key Building, 15 Market Street, Sandwich, Kent CT13 9DA, tel 01304 612248) organises trips to the US with a 13-day Old Wild West tour to Billy the Kid country, which includes visits to the desert battle scenes of Tombstone and Boot Hill, as well as to the Grand Canyon. A tour departing 7 October costs pounds 1,845 half-board, based on two sharing.

Tours of First World War battlefields began almost immediately after the Armistice, prompted by the desire of relatives and friends to visit the graves of lost ones; Thomas Cook began arranging tours in August 1919. Various companies continue to offer tours to northern France and Belgium. Galina International Battlefield Tours (711 Beverley High Road, Hull HU6 7JN, tel 01482 804409) offers various trips to the major First and Second World War battlefields, and is arranging a special Anzac Day anniversary tour this October. Tours are organised from various pick-up points around the country, and cost from pounds 159. Self-drive tours to Ypres and the Somme are available from Galina all year round.

Ruth Metzstein