Question

"The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing field of Eton". Justify the statement

with any five suitable arguments

Answer 1

While Carl von Clausewitz's classic work On War has been in print in its original German from its first edition in 1932 to its nineteenth, from the same Berlin publisher, in 1980, and in four different English translations, the same cannot be said of Clausewitz's critique of the allied performance at the Battle of Waterloo. On September 10, 1840, Charles C.C. Jenkinson, 3rd Earl of Liverpool wrote to Lieutenant Colonel John Gurwood, the editor of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington's dispatches, to notify him that he had translated Clausewitz's Waterloo analysis into English. Liverpool sent one copy to Wellington, but did not get a reply for nearly two years. The manuscript was never returned to him, and it has remained unexamined among Wellington's papers ever since – or at least until long-recognized Napoleonic scholar Peter Hofschröer got his hands on it. His translation into English brings an important essay to light more than 150 years after a jealous Wellington stopped its publication in England.