Peter Hofschröer’s Wellington’s Smallest Victory isn’t about the battle of Waterloo, but about a huge, nine-inch-to-the-mile model of it made 15 years later by Captain William Siborne. The model-maker’s quest opens with an anecdote and some factoids from the actual battle’s aftermath:
News of the Battle of Waterloo was rushed to London by Harry Percy, Wellington’s only surviving unwounded ADC. He carried the despatch in a velvet handkerchief sachet an admirer had thrust into his hand as he hurried from the Duchess of Richmond’s famous Brussels ball on the eve of battle. He had no sleep that night, nor the five nights following, and had to row himself ashore from the middle of the Channel. His scarlet and gold tunic was still torn, dirty and blood-stained when he burst into a St James’s ballroom, a captured French standard in each hand, and dropped to one knee before the Prince Regent. It was Shakespearean.The battlefield became a tourist attraction almost before the corpses were cold. Most were buried in mass graves and later disinterred, their bones crushed into fertiliser; teeth were recycled as dentures, known as “Waterloo teeth”.
Waterloo teeth. Ewwww.