I only want to touch on one thing, secondary sources. Take a look at just about anything written in English these days and you'll find them filled with secondary sources of every flavor. To my knowledge, nothing written on Waterloo in the last 20 years has not used dozens of secondary sources and I doubt many of them have ever gotten near a primary source. Hofschroer's two books being the only exception. Oh, and there was one written by an individual whose initials are H-W, where the archival references in footnotes were completely fraudulent. Anyway, you are not doing anything that is wrong when you use secondary sources. This does not diminish the quality or significance of your work, as you can always provide an analysis or insight that no other author has performed. You can add value to the program using secondary sources.

Back to Waterloo. I'm talking about those works that focus on the English very specificially. I don't remember the particular Waterloo book, but it was by an Englishman. When I went through its bibliography EVERY source document he used was a secondary source, all were in English and, apparently, the book sold quite well. My opinion of the work, which used only sources from one side of the fight is that the author ran the risk of developing a very biased perspective of the battle. So, we've returned to the language problem, which is probably insurmountable, unless you can find your sources in translation.

We can still get past the bias by the careful application of logic. You need to read the passage and ask yourself if it's reasonable. This is where one has to look back at their reading of military history and compare what you just read with what you've read elsewhere and if they are consistant. This is probably the trickiest part of writing military history.

George