Military Review English Edition July-August 2016 | Page 143

BOOK REVIEWS

and the sight of casualties as they stream away from the
field. This style continues throughout the book, immersing the reader into the events as they happen.
The author’s goal is not to offer a new theory on the
already well-studied battle but rather to provide a visceral experience that is often missing in history books.
His execution is superb. Twenty-two pages of notes and
eleven pages of a bibliography are woven together with
a narrative talent to bring the events to life. The author
makes extensive use of archived letters, newspapers,
and other firsthand accounts in the book. Covered in
detail are engrossing descriptions of the catastrophe on
the field of battle, the spreading of the news in England,
and the frantic retreat of the French army.
In a book full of excellent chapters, the last full
chapter, dealing with
Napoleon himself, is
perhaps the best. The
reader experiences
his flight from the
field, and his desperate withdrawal
to Paris. Gone is the
confident emperor that terrorized
Europe, and in his
place is a man who
seems to realize that
the end is near. As he
returns to Paris, instead of listening to his advisors and
proceeding directly to the Chamber of Representatives
to plea for their support, he draws a bath and rests.
Having lost the initiative, he shortly abdicates the
throne thereafter in favor of his son. Plans are made
to escape to America, but the English cannot allow it,
and he instead ends up on a British warship on patrol
in the English Channel. Despite his pleas for shelter in
the English countryside, the British government knows
that such a move is untenable and relegates him to his
final exile on the island of St. Helena. Although the end
of the story is known from the first word, the reader cannot help but see all the chances for a different
course, and a different Europe.
Analysis of history is often undermined by hindsight; readers know what happens in the end so the end
therefore seems inevitable. O’Keeffe manages to bring
the reader closer to the original experience through the
MILITARY REVIEW  July-August 2016

use of contemporary sources. He excels in showing the
tiny crossroads where history could have been dramatically different. His combination of scholarly and firsthand sources is excellent, creating narrative history at
its best. Waterloo: The Aftermath is highly recommended as an accompaniment to further study of Napoleon
and the end of the French Empire. However, one can
still enjoy the book with even a casual understanding of
the battle and its consequences.

Maj. Brian A. Devlin, U.S. Army,
Stuttgart, Germany

BOSWORTH 1485

The Battle that Transformed England
Michael K. Jones, Pegasus Books,
New York and London, 2015, 256 pages

R

egardless of who created the aphorism “history
is written by the victor,” not hing could be closer
to the truth than in the case of King Richard
III, the last Plantagenet king of England. Richard’s
grave, discovered under a parking lot in Leicester,
England, in 2012, helped rekindle an investigation by
some historians as to what kind of king he was. His defeat at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 ended an almost
five hundred-year Plantagenet reign and allowed for
future writers, such as William Shakespeare, to portray
him in a light that might not have been grounded totally in truth. Author Dr. Michael Jones first challenges the credibility of those portrayals by reexamining
primary sources of the time and coupling this research
with evidence gathered from the burial site of the king.
A second discussion, not as powerful as the first, argues
about where the battle really took place.
Jones argues early in his text that many of the authors who wrote about Richard III were doing nothing
more than attempting to paint the victor and survivor of the battle, Henry VII, in a positive light. Those
portrayals, and what ultimately has become accepted
history, ignore the need to be objective rather than
subjective in their nature. As a result, we have been left
with a history of Richard III that was written to make
him look more like a maleficent monster than a monarch—a king willing to sink to any level to maintain his
throne against a worthier contender.
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