The four days of the title are the Battle of Waterloo, beginning with several less famous prior engagements, and culminating in the day of the battle itself. Writers of other Napoleonic historical novels have sometimes struggled to shoe-horn their heroes in to the sprawl of Waterloo – Cornwell’s Sharpe has to be a supernumerary officer who just happens to find himself at some of the crucial points of the battle, while Mallinson’s Matthew Hervey also manages to get about the battlefield rather more than is plausible. By setting out to write specifically about Waterloo, and picking five historical characters to follow rather than just one, Iain Gale has given himself an opportunity to encompass the broad sweep of the build-up to the battle, and the decisive day itself, from the perspective of the British-led Alliance army, the Prussians and their mutual foes, the French.

Gale’s protagonists are: an English officer who is a senior member of Wellington’s staff; a Scottish Colonel in the Guards; a Prussian General; the French Marshal Michel Ney; and most ambitiously of all, Napoleon himself. Given the necessity to accomodate the story arcs of five characters within one book, it is perhaps not surprising that the characters come across as somewhat stereotypical (at least the less famous ones). The Scot is brave and phlegmatic; the Prussian is straight laced and somewhat humourlesss; the Englishman is rather neurotic, and a classic upper-class officer type. The heroic Ney is, in Gale’s version, exonerated of responsibility for key French blunders, which are ascribed to a Napoleon who is depicted as indecisive, self-deluding and pained by his piles.

Given that all of his readers will know the outcome of the battle, Gale does not have the luxury of suspense about the final result; instead he focuses on how close the French came to achieving victory, echoing Wellington’s sentiment after the event that the Allied victory was “a damned close-run thing”. With the aid of some useful maps, he keeps the story moving forward effectively – as you would expect, almost half of the book is devoted to the fourth day, the battle of Waterloo itself. It would be easy to be critical and say that none of the protagonists represent the rank and file of the armies, but then characters who spend their entire time standing or lying in large groups and being shot at, and who have no insight in to the strategy of the battle, are unlikely to make compelling characters in this context.

My main criticism would be of a particularly grating stylistic tick of the author’s: he writes a sentence describing the actions or thoughts of a character. Writes a full stop. Writes another clipped sentence without a pronoun. Does it again. Aaargh!

That really got on my nerves to begin with, and it took a while before I could tune it out. Having done that, I would say that this is an enjoyable read and fans of the Sharpe series will almost certainly want to track down a copy. It’s not designed to be historically accurate, and includes a fair dollop of speculation and embroidering, but you don’t read a book like this for historical accuracy. That does not mean it does not come across as well researched, which it undoubtedly is.

I do not doubt I shall be returning to Waterloo again in the not-too-distant future, probably in the company of Simon Scarrow, as I would expect the battle of Waterloo to be the climax of his Napoleon and Wellington Revolution series.

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