Costumes of the Armies engaged at Waterloo

This fourth volume concludes the series on the ‘Uniforms of the Armies at Waterloo’. After the previous volumes presented the Allied side, this fourth part deals with its opponents, the French Armée du Nord under the command of Napoleon I. This Northern Army, despite its short existence after Napoleon’s return to France’s imperial throne, consisted of numerous, experienced soldiers from his earlier campaigns, with the caveat that its uniforms did not always comply with regulations due to the army’s rapid mobilization. As in the three previous volumes, the two editors Markus Gärtner and Markus Stein take the opportunity to evaluate Charles Lyall’s uniform plates by using the current knowledge of how the French troops actually appeared in 1815. Due to the special status attributed to the French Imperial Guard, especially in England, numerous Lyall plates deal with Guard units. However, some of the units depicted had already been disbanded before 1815 but the editors decided to publish them in this volume as well, along with a short commentary. As in the other volumes, to complete the visual images in the plates, this one provides the order of battle as well as supplementary descriptions of the organization and uniforms of the Northern Army’s units deployed in the Netherlands. Finally, the description of the Battle of Waterloo, begun in the first volume and continued in the following volumes, is taken up again and continued until the end with the French retreat from the battlefield. This description is accompanied by two more maps from William Siborne’s Atlas to History of the Waterloo Campaign.