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The National Army Museum has obtained three important archival collections containing soldiers’ first-hand accounts of the Napoleonic Wars.
The first is an account of the Waterloo campaign by Lieutenant and Captain Henry Weyland Powell. In it, he details events from the fierce fighting at Quatre Bras on 16 June 1815 up to Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo two days later. The document is accompanied by a battle map sketched by Powell himself.
The other two collections comprise more than 800 pages of letters written by Lieutenant Colonel Charles Wood to his brother between 1809 and 1826. They span the Peninsular War and the Waterloo Campaigns, as well as Wood’s military mission to Germany with Lord William Steward in 1814. These accounts offer dramatic insights into the heart of the action, as well as discussing Wood’s fellow officers, politics, strategy, and war news. In one particularly personal letter, he gives a matter-of-fact description of being wounded at Waterloo: ‘I got hit just as the Duke moved to attack them and bled like pig’. In another, he mourns the death of his commanding officer, killed at the Siege of Ciudad Rodrigo in 1812, concluding: ‘You cannot conceive how much the men lament poor Craufurd’.
Justin Saddington, Archives and Library Curator at the NAM, said, ‘These collections allow us to hear directly from the soldiers who experienced the Napoleonic Wars. Their letters capture moments of fear, resilience, and humanity that rarely survive in official records, helping us better understand both the battles and those who fought them.’
The acquisition was made possible by the support of the Friends of the Nations’ Libraries (FNL) and a group of donors assembled by Napoleonic historian Gareth Glover, who now hopes to transcribe and publish Charles Wood’s account. A small selection of documents was placed on display at the NAM this summer, while the rest are undergoing further cataloguing.
Text: Amy Brunskill / Image: courtesy the National Army Museum
