Loretta reports:
Today is the 200th Anniversary of the battle known as
Waterloo, a major event in European history, in which an army of allies led by the Duke of Wellington & Gebhard von BlĂĽcher defeated Napoleon once and for all (this was his comeback attempt). Though we Nerdy History Girls prefer to focus on social history rather than the politics and wars so many associate (and not happily) with the study of history, this, like posts dealing with remembrance days, touches on the human side of war, and thus falls well within our purview. I didn’t think I could do better than re-posting the following.
~~~
Some years ago, in
Miss Wonderful,
I had a hero suffering from what’s now called Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder. This was a result of my sticking him in the middle of the
Battle of Waterloo and subjecting him to something very like the ordeal
that
Colonel Frederick Cavendish Ponsonby, against all odds, survived.
Since,
over the years,
Colonel Ponsonby turned up more than once in my
reading, I can’t say exactly when or in what book he first caught my
attention. In Richard Rush’s
A Residence at the Court of London,
a gentleman “tall but limping” is identified thus: "Colonel
Ponsonby; he was left for dead at Waterloo; the cavalry it was thought
had trampled upon him.” Elizabeth Longford’s
Wellington: The Years of the Sword,
summed up in a few unforgettable lines what Ponsonby endured:
“Frederick Ponsonby, desperately wounded first by French sabres and then
by Polish lances, ridden over and tossed by the Prussians, robbed, used
as a musket-rest by a tirailleur and as a place to die on by a mortally
wounded soldier, but later found alive by a British infantryman who
mounted guard over him till morning...”
I added a bit
of another officer's experience to my hero’s, and made up my own account
of how he survived injuries that should have killed him several times
over (no antibiotics!!!—he'd been stabbed all over the place, & the
doctors treated him by bleeding him some more!!!)—but the great kernel
of truth is there, and the credit belongs to
Colonel Ponsonby (later a
General and Sir Frederick), one tough gentleman.
Ye
of the Nerdy History persuasion can easily imagine how thrilled I was
recently to find, not a summary of his experience in a book by or about
someone else, but his very own account—all thanks to the magic of Google
books— in
Ackermann’s Repository of arts, literature, fashions of 1817. You can
read the whole story here.
I
think the just-the-facts, ma'am approach makes it all the more
poignant, and conveys in a powerful way the experience of being in the
middle of that battle. What with the rumors flying about who was
winning, who was losing, who was dead, who wasn’t, I wondered all the
more how anybody knew what the devil was going on anywhere.
Loretta reports:
Some years ago, in
Miss Wonderful,
I had a hero suffering from what’s now called Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder. This was a result of my sticking him in the middle of the
Battle of Waterloo and subjecting him to something very like the ordeal
that
Colonel Frederick Cavendish Ponsonby, against all odds, survived.
Since, over the years, Colonel Ponsonby turned up more than once in my
reading, I can’t say exactly when or in what book he first caught my
attention. In Richard Rush’s
A Residence at the Court of London,
a gentleman “tall but limping” is identified thusly: "Colonel
Ponsonby; he was left for dead at Waterloo; the cavalry it was thought
had trampled upon him.” Elizabeth Longford’s
Wellington: The Years of the Sword,
summed up in a few unforgettable lines what Ponsonby endured:
“Frederick Ponsonby, desperately wounded first by French sabres and then
by Polish lances, ridden over and tossed by the Prussians, robbed, used
as a musket-rest by a tirailleur and as a place to die on by a mortally
wounded soldier, but later found alive by a British infantryman who
mounted guard over him till morning...”
I added a bit of another officer's experience to my hero’s, and made up
my own account of how he survived injuries that should have killed him
several times over (no antibiotics!!!—he'd been stabbed all over the
place, & the doctors treated him by bleeding him some more!!!)—but
the great kernel of truth is there, and the credit belongs to Colonel
Ponsonby (later a General and Sir Frederick), one tough gentleman.
Ye of the Nerdy History persuasion can easily imagine how thrilled I was
recently to find, not a summary of his experience in a book by or about
someone else, but his very own account—all thanks to the magic of
Google books— in
Ackermann’s Repository of arts, literature, fashions of 1817. You can
read the whole story here.
I think the just-the-facts, ma'am approach makes it all the more
poignant, and conveys in a powerful way the experience of being in the
middle of that battle. What with the rumors flying about who was
winning, who was losing, who was dead, who wasn’t, I wondered all the
more how anybody knew what the devil was going on anywhere.
- See more at:
http://twonerdyhistorygirls.blogspot.com/2010/10/colonel-ponsonbys-waterloo-ordeal.html#sthash.0KWCrnSp.dpuf
Loretta reports:
Some years ago, in
Miss Wonderful,
I had a hero suffering from what’s now called Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder. This was a result of my sticking him in the middle of the
Battle of Waterloo and subjecting him to something very like the ordeal
that
Colonel Frederick Cavendish Ponsonby, against all odds, survived.
Since, over the years, Colonel Ponsonby turned up more than once in my
reading, I can’t say exactly when or in what book he first caught my
attention. In Richard Rush’s
A Residence at the Court of London,
a gentleman “tall but limping” is identified thusly: "Colonel
Ponsonby; he was left for dead at Waterloo; the cavalry it was thought
had trampled upon him.” Elizabeth Longford’s
Wellington: The Years of the Sword,
summed up in a few unforgettable lines what Ponsonby endured:
“Frederick Ponsonby, desperately wounded first by French sabres and then
by Polish lances, ridden over and tossed by the Prussians, robbed, used
as a musket-rest by a tirailleur and as a place to die on by a mortally
wounded soldier, but later found alive by a British infantryman who
mounted guard over him till morning...”
I added a bit of another officer's experience to my hero’s, and made up
my own account of how he survived injuries that should have killed him
several times over (no antibiotics!!!—he'd been stabbed all over the
place, & the doctors treated him by bleeding him some more!!!)—but
the great kernel of truth is there, and the credit belongs to Colonel
Ponsonby (later a General and Sir Frederick), one tough gentleman.
Ye of the Nerdy History persuasion can easily imagine how thrilled I was
recently to find, not a summary of his experience in a book by or about
someone else, but his very own account—all thanks to the magic of
Google books— in
Ackermann’s Repository of arts, literature, fashions of 1817. You can
read the whole story here.
I think the just-the-facts, ma'am approach makes it all the more
poignant, and conveys in a powerful way the experience of being in the
middle of that battle. What with the rumors flying about who was
winning, who was losing, who was dead, who wasn’t, I wondered all the
more how anybody knew what the devil was going on anywhere.
- See more at:
http://twonerdyhistorygirls.blogspot.com/2010/10/colonel-ponsonbys-waterloo-ordeal.html#sthash.0KWCrnSp.dpuf
One of us -- 
