Waterloo Memoir

I just realized that the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo (June 18, 1815) is this week.

Do you like history? If so, I highly recommend the following:  “The Autobiography of Lieutenant-General Sir Harry Smith Baronet of Aliwal on the Sutlej.” This memoir is part of the public domain. If you go to this link, you can read it for free!

General Harry Smith started his military career in the British Army during the Napoleonic Wars.  He fought under the Duke of Wellington during the Peninsular War. He was part of the British Army that burned down Washington, D.C. in 1814 and he was also at the Battle of New Orleans. He then served under Wellington again at the Battle of Waterloo. He spent several more decades in the military and became temporarily famous for his victory at the Battle of Aliwal in India.

However, I only know about General Smith because I read an MSN Valentine’s Day article about the love stories of famous couples. Harry Smith and his wife Juana Maria de los Dolores de Leon Smith were one of the couples.

I decided to find more information about Harry and Juana Smith (and thus I found Harry’s autobiography) for several reasons. First, Juana claimed to be a direct descendant of Ponce de Leon. (I love reading about Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth.) Also, when Juana first married Harry, she was a (Catholic) teenaged war refugee who spoke Spanish and French. She followed her husband’s regiment around Spain and slept in an army tent. She had to learn English from a tutor after Harry left her alone in London during the war with the United States. She eventually joined the Church of England so that her religion wouldn’t harm her husband’s military career. Finally, Harry Smith eventually became a governor of South Africa, and the town of Ladysmith in South Africa was named after Juana. (The Battle of Ladysmith happened in this town in 1899 during the Boer War.)

I didn’t write this blog entry so that I could endorse British colonialism. However, I really enjoyed Harry Smith’s accounts of his life as a British officer in the Napoleonic Wars and at New Orleans. This is the link to the chapter (Chapter XXIV) about Waterloo from (then Major) Harry Smith’s point of view. However, the very next chapter is the one that Harry asked Juana to write about her own experience during Waterloo. (If you go to the link that I just posted and scroll down to the chapter after it, you will find Juana’s account of Waterloo.) Juana accompanied her husband to Belgium in spring 1815 and she was with him up until just before the battle started. Juana’s chapter describes her evacuation with other British military families and her fear of being captured by the French.

I am really impressed that Harry Smith, a British general in the 1800’s, asked his wife to write her own chapter in his autobiography. Furthermore, in Chapter VIII he referred to his marriage as “the whole happiness of my life for thirty-three years.” (Harry and Juana Smith’s marriage eventually lasted for 48 years.)

Georgette Heyer based her novel “The Spanish Bride” on the first section of this autobiography.

Anyway, Harry Smith’s sense of humor comes out over and over in “The Autobiography of Lieutenant-General Sir Harry Smith Baronet of Aliwal on the Sutlej.” However, if you read only one section of this, please choose the chapter about Waterloo that Juana wrote.