An actor at a re-enactment of the Battle of Waterloo, held on the battlefield site in 2004. He is playing the part of a French officer in the bivouac forming Napoleon’s headquarters. Dickens stresses that Serjeant Munday had nothing but respect for the French soldiers, and bore French people no ill-will.
THE Belgian guides are great dealers in manufactured relics, and one man professes to have been the guide of Lord Byron — at which time the said precocious guide must have been just three years old!*
If you visit the field, Serjeant Munday is your man. He is about sixty; hale, fresh, frank; upwards of six feet in height, and a gentleman in manners. He has none of the showman about him. You go over the ground feeling as if you had fallen in with a well-informed yeoman of the neighbourhood, who is delighted to conduct you over that most impressive scene, and tell you all that he knows of it.
While he is zealous to state the real facts of the real history, no man will ever hear him utter a word injurious to the honour of the French; on the contrary, he is the first to bear cordial testimony to their bravery and spirit.
Dickens’s article appeared in 1851. George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron of Rochdale (1788-1824) died in Greece in 1824, nine years after the Battle of Waterloo, supporting the revolution against the Ottoman Empire: see Byron and Hercules. On the battle itself, see The Battle of Waterloo.
Précis
Charles Dickens wrote that the guides to the battlefield at Waterloo were not all to be trusted, but one in particular could be relied on for sound historical accuracy: Serjeant Munday. He described him as a man in his sixties, of gentlemanly demeanour, who had nothing but respect for the enemy on that day in 1815. (55 / 60 words)
