Why I Wrote… In The Absence of Powder
- cepmurphywrites
- 1 hour ago
- 8 min read
By Alexander Rooksmoor
Like a lot of children of my generation who were interested in history, I grew up with a fascination with the Napoleonic Wars. I remember seeing Waterloo (1970) one Sunday afternoon (I rewatched parts of it when working on this novel), I did a school project on Napoleon when in Year 6, and my parents got called to the school when I pointed out to our teacher that the Battle of Waterloo had not been fought where Waterloo Station was located on the edge of Central London, as she was teaching in class. I had thought it was in France, so I was also wrong but by far fewer miles. I have no idea what she thought about the Battle of Trafalgar!
It was an era when Airfix models were everywhere and this included various sizes of plastic soldiers not for assembly, but for painting and playing with. I had large numbers of the 1:76 scale Napoleonic soldiers of different types. That scale, in contrast to the 1:32, was too small to do detailed painting so they tended to get painted all blue, red or black depending on which country that particular soldier fought for. I also had the 1:76 La Haye Sainte farmhouse for them to fight over. To play with them, I made use of Rules for Wargaming (1971) by Arthur Taylor and Napoleonic Wargaming (1974) by Bruce Quarrie which came out under the Airfix banner. Quarrie’s book in particular was quite a stimulus for considering counter-factual outcomes for the Napoleonic Wars, notably the chapter on campaigns which features a map of Ireland divided between France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia.
My historical interests shifted as I got older, but in the 21st Century I was an irregular attender at the annual Wellington Lectures held at the University of Southampton and some of these talks really stood out. I particularly remember Brendan Simms, author of The Longest Afternoon. The 400 Men Who Decided the Battle of Waterloo (2014), speaking about how it was still not known why the men holding La Haye Sainte could not be resupplied with ammunition. A member of the audience, who had accessed the University’s Wellington archive, pointed out the differing calibres used by different units and that there had been correspondence on particular shortages going back to the start of the campaign. Kudos for Simms for keeping his cool in that context!
With this background it is probably no surprise that sooner or later I would write not simply on different outcomes for Napoleon – I did analysis of some of these in Down Other Tracks (2012) – but something specifically on the Battle of Waterloo. The particular technological counter-factual may have come from Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington himself. A quote which is attributed to him saying he would have been better off having a corps of archers at the Battle of Waterloo rather than more men armed with muskets. It does sum up the inefficiency of smooth-bore muskets in almost universal use at the time. This was a sufficient seed for writing a story where this could have happened.
I had written a technology ‘lag’ alternative history novel with Eve of the Globe’s War (2017). It is set in 1938 but in a world where technology had not been permitted to advance roughly beyond the 1780s-1800s. I also watched the Alternate History Hub video on the issue of a world in which gunpowder was not invented: Interestingly it made me see that even with such an apparently large change to history, many events would still have run as they did in our world, such as the fall of Constantinople in 1453. This led me to decide to write a parallelist novel – more on that later.
In terms of logistics of the era, as shown in Warfare in the Age of Bonaparte (1980) by Michael Glover, they differed little from how they had been in the Middle Ages, so the speed advances and feeding soldiers & horses needed no modification. It was the weaponry which needed attention. Even then, for example, the claymores used by Highland troops needed no modification from what they carried at the battle in our history.
Without gunpowder weapons, more medieval weaponry and armour would have continued. It meant I had to somehow dismiss the use of air guns. They had been developed in the 16th Century and the Austrian Army issued 1779-80 model Girardoni .44 calibre air rifles to its Jäger troops 1792-1800. Rather than single-shot muskets these guns had magazines and were naturally smokeless and almost silent when firing. However, they were seen as an ‘assassin’s weapon’ and armies in general refused to use them. A classic case of a ‘better’ technology being eschewed on cultural grounds.
Even researching the use of medieval weaponry threw up some difficulties. There is certainly no agreement, for example, on how far a medieval crossbow could throw a bolt or quarrel and the differences between effective and maximum range. People are often bemused by why onagers, which had a shorter range, replaced ballistae, neglecting that it was far easier to manufacture and repair an onager than a ballista. Thus, I worried that the presence of onagers on the alternative battlefield would be challenged.
Despite such issues, I enjoyed looking at the different units in the battle and seeing what the equivalent armour and weapons would be if gunpowder was not available. The Guards, as an elite unit, ended up with longbows, as they need dedication over many years and continued use distorts the body. Napoleon made extensive use of skirmishers, the voltigeurs; so given his like of Roman iconography, they have become javelin-throwing velites. On the British side, the equivalent were the Rifles. In their place I have used arbalesters, firing heavy crossbows that, like rifles, had long range and penetrating power, but (also like rifles) are slow to load.
One thing that has always attracted wargamers to the Napoleonic period is the wealth of different uniforms. As it was, some French cavalry helmet designs mimicked Classical forms. In our world, French cavalry wearing metal breastplates were called cuirassiers. However, this comes from “cuir” meaning leather after the boiled leather breastplates of the Classical world. In my alternative, a lot of soldiers in all arms would wear such armour, so those in real metal breastplates have been given the title ferassiers from the French word “fer” for iron.
To highlight what impact the technological difference would have made, I decided for everything else to follow a parallelist approach: one in which there was a big difference to our world, but in which people got to (roughly) the same position as in ours and followed similar, if not identical, policies. The approach is challenged with people arguing that it leads not to a 'proper' alternate history story, but rather simply a 'thought experiment'. This is because it is assumed that the moment you introduce such a change there are numerous ripple effects, meaning that no-one would end up doing the same thing as in our world and many of the historical figures we know would not have been born. I feel, in contrast, that by only altering one aspect but maintaining the others, you can really test whether that change would have made a small difference, a major one, or effectively no difference at all.
If I had substituted other men for Wellington and Napoleon, let alone all their generals, neither myself nor the reader could be certain whether the outcome portrayed would have been the case due to there being no gunpowder or due to some flaw or skill of these different commanders. In addition, most common attitudes and behaviour of individuals born in the 18th Century, let alone the families whose sons could have risen in high in the military, would not have been altered by there being no gunpowder. Naturally, I did not vary the extreme weather which affected the region in which the battles were fought and had significant impacts on the course of the four days of fighting.
I kept all the people who were at our world’s version of the battle, though the different weaponry did mean the battle ran differently. Our history’s Battle of Waterloo did see a large number of deaths among high-ranking officers. These would not have necessarily been avoided with pre-gunpowder weaponry in place but it may have done, especially for those who fell to cannon fire.
The battle has been thoroughly researched and detailed so you can find out a lot about genuine people who took part. Thus, while researching for an alternate history, I uncovered a bit of a historical mystery. Different sources have Lieutenant Colonel John Fremantle, one of Wellington's aides-de-camp, being born in 1780 or 1790 or 1792 and dying in 1845 or 1847 or even 1854! If he had died in 1847 at the age of 55 as his gravestone apparently stated (it was destroyed in 1944 by bombing), it means he would have joined the Coldstream Guards in 1805 at the age of 13, supposedly, according to some, having already attended both the Royal Military College and Lüneburg University! I can accept he might have been a 23-year-old lieutenant colonel at the Battle of Waterloo, given ranks could be bought and a Guards captain would serve as a lieutenant colonel when seconded to other units, but some sources say he was a Major General or even a Lieutenant General. (This second confusion may be explained by the fact the Guards generally held two ranks, a lower one among themselves and a higher one when serving with other units.) Despite asking historians, I have been unable to get anyone to reconcile these discrepancies. Thus, this is a classic example of when people say you must write the actual history, that it is not always easy to do!
For the narrative approach, I decided to cover the four days of the Waterloo Campaign, so including not just the main battle, but also those at Quatre Bras, and, to a lesser extent in my novel, at Ligny. I was influenced by Iain Gale's straight historical novel of the Battle of Waterloo, Four Days in June (2006). To show different aspects of the context to the reader, Gale’s book has five characters that he switches between. However, I was conscious of criticisms of my book Scavenged Days (2018) in which I similarly used a multiplicity of characters in order to show a range of changes experienced in that alternative. Instead, readers made it clear that largely want just one main character and expect that you will also write all the details of the minor characters' stories right to the end.
Consequently, I adopted a single point of view character, Cornet Rupert Aske. To allow him to see as much as possible of the similarities and differences between our version of the battles and the alternative, Aske is a 'galloper': one of Wellington's battlefield messengers. He is sent to various parts of the battlefields and witnesses what the Duke of Wellington and other commanders were doing as well as seeing how the ordinary soldiers were faring.
With all these elements clear in my mind, I was ready to write the novel.
One question you might ask, given all the parallelism, is how different this alternate battle would have turned out. I suggest you read the novel. However, for a start, observe that there would be no attackers emerging ‘out of the blue’ of extensive gunpowder smoke fogging the battlefield…