Paul L. Dawson. Waterloo: The Truth At Last: Why Napoleon Lost the Great Battle. Barnsley: Frontline Books, 2017. 547 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-5267-0245-6.
Reviewed by Jonathan Abel (Command and General Staff College, Ft. Leavenworth)
" Dawson’s approach relies on primary-source documents and archival material to craft his argument, especially muster rolls and casualty reports from the latter. The resulting work falls somewhere between a data book and a narrative, providing valuable statistical information to the specialist while attempting to entice the generalist with novel arguments and conclusions.... Dawson’s stated purpose is to demonstrate that “despite a plethora of books on the subject, the hard strategic reality is that Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte were sideshows compared to the French and Prussian combats at Plancenoit and Papelotte”...He concludes with the oft-repeated argument that the failures of Marshal Emmanuel, marquis de Grouchy, to contain the Prussians provide a major explanation for the French defeat....Ultimately, Dawson must be credited with bringing casualty statistics into a quasi-narrative single volume, which provides the utility of Waterloo: The Truth at Last—it serves as an imperfect bridge from the casual reader of militaria to the more dedicated specialist works that already fill a very crowded historiographical field."