Victims of War: Battlefield Casualties and Literary Sensibility

Abstract

After the Battle of Waterloo, the London printseller Edward Orme produced a number of engravings for a public eager to purchase representations of Wellington’s victory. A particularly revealing one is Waterloo, the Day After, engraved by Matthew Dubourg from an aquatint by John Heaviside Clark, known as ‘Waterloo Clark’ for the many sketches he made immediately after the battle (see Illustration 3.1).¹ The engraving is consistent with the characteristics of military art analysed by Philip Shaw that exemplify a nationalistic and class-based representation of the aftermath of the battle, foregrounding the British officers and devising pictorial ways of ennobling them.² However, more noticeable in this image are non-military details: the emotionally depicted figures of the woman grieving for her dead husband and child for his father, and the proximity of a dwelling house (as in the comparable scene in The Horse Guards at the Battle of Waterloo engraved by Dubourg from a sketch by William Heath). The scene is one that can be found in words to describe post-battle fields in Romantic poetry of the period and sentimental novels dating back to the American War of Independence. As Shaw points out, we can observe a prevailing ambivalence in the depiction of the British soldiers, adverting equally to nobility and suffering, but the presence of the wife and children provide a more generally affective note, suggesting the tragic consequences even of the most glorious victory.