Description

50 signed and numbered prints

The crash of the Imperial drums, beating with the harsh unity that stamped them as the voices of veterans in war, woke me from my reverie and made my heart throb with their stony rattle. Never did I hear such drums and never shall again: there were years of battle and blood in every sound.”—British artist and Napoleonic author Benjamin R. Haydon “Will I survive this momentous day?”—Memoirs of Larreguy of the Civrieux, a soldier in the 93^rd The romantic image of “brave little drummer boys” was a fiction invented by Victorian era writers. The reality was that a child could not carry a heavy drum along with the extra soldier’s kit needed on campaign.

The 93rd Line fought at both Quatre Bras and Waterloo in the 1815 campaign. Some men in this regiment came from the 3rd Battalion, 8th Tirailleurs Regiment of the Imperial Guard that was disbanded in 1814. The scarlet pompom and tuft shown on these drummers’ shakos, normally only worn by grenadiers, may be related to that previous association.

In summer 1814 the 93rd Line Regiment’s drummers were wearing green Imperial Livery. In 1815 they were issued new habits, but based on the regiment’s records of cloth on-hand these were blue with Imperial Livery. Such a habit exists in the Borodino Battlefield Museum in Moscow and was the basis for the uniform of this painting’s central figure. After Napoleon’s first abdication in 1814 the War Administration ordered that Imperial lace and drummers’ habits be burned, but it is likely at least some survived and would have been used in the Hundred Days campaign. Hence, the other drummer here wears the regulation green habit of 1814.

During the fighting on the French left at Waterloo the 93rd had 205 men wounded and evacuated to the Genappe field hospital, 46 men killed, and 248 noted as prisoners or missing—a total of 499

men lost or almost 34% of the regiment’s starting strength. British prisons held 68 men of the 93rd, of which ten died before they could be repatriated to France.

At Waterloo: 2nd Corps, Count Reille/9th Infantry Division,