author
William Siborne
1797–1849
Remembered for turning the Battle of Waterloo into both a vivid scale model and a deeply researched history, this British army officer brought unusual care and detail to military writing. His work drew on eyewitness testimony and helped shape how later readers understood the 1815 campaign.
1 Audiobook
The Waterloo Campaign, 1815
by William Siborne
About the author
Born in 1797, he was a British Army officer who became best known as a military historian of the Waterloo campaign. He studied at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, served in the 9th Foot, and later worked at the Royal Military Asylum in Chelsea.
His reputation rests largely on his ambitious research into Waterloo. While building a large model of the battle, he gathered accounts from many officers who had been there, and he used that material in his major work, History of the War in France and Belgium, in 1815. That combination of visual reconstruction and firsthand evidence made his work especially influential.
His career was marked by dedication as well as difficulty, and his Waterloo project became both his signature achievement and a source of personal strain. He died in 1849, but his name remains closely tied to one of the best-known early histories of Napoleon's final campaign.