NAPOLEON & WELLINGTON - The Battle of Waterloo and the Great Commanders who Fought It by Roberts, Andrew

New York 2001, Simon & Schuster, First US edition, hard bound in dust jacket, 6x9, VG/VG condition, xxxii, 350 pages, illus, maps, notes, bibliog, index.  A breakfast on the morning of the battle of' Waterloo, the Emperor Napoleon declared that the Duke of Wellington was a bad general, the British were bad soldiers and that France could not fail to win an easy victory. Forever afterwards, historians have accused, him of gross overconfidence and massively underestimating the caliber of the British commander opposite him. Now Andrew Roberts presents an original, highly revisionist view of the relationship between the two greatest captains of their age and of the great battle that determined European history in the nineteenth century.Napoleon, who was born in the same year as Wellington-1769-fought Wellington by proxy years earlier in the peninsular War, praising his ruthlessness in private while publicly deriding him as a mere "general of sepoys." In contrast, Wellington publicly lauded Napoleon, saying that his presence on a battlefield was worth forty thousand men, but privately he wrote long memoranda lambasting Napoleon's campaigning techniques.Although Wellington saved Napoleon from execution after Waterloo, the emperor Icft money in his will to the man who had tried to assassinate the duke. Wellington in turn amassed a series of Napoleonic trophies of his great victory, even sleeping with two of the emperor's mistresses.