Fighting Napoleon with "An Infamous Army" Quiz

Answer:

"An Infamous Army" had been a dream project for years for Georgette Heyer; she had long wished to write of the Battle of Waterloo, and she particularly reverenced William Makepeace Thackeray's account of it in "Vanity Fair". She drew from many sources, including first-hand accounts, to complete an accurate picture of the battle.

The Battle of Waterloo, as it is now known, was perhaps the most famous battle of history. It was also particularly bloody: on that single day there was total of 33,000 French and 21,700 Coalition casualties, out of armies of approximately 72,000 and 118,000 men respectively. Charles Audley was not the only one to lose limbs during the battle; this was common during a time when amputation was often the only course to take to prevent infection from spreading. Because of the loss of so many, many of them his own friends, the Duke of Wellington reportedly cried after the battle, saying that it took the joy out of the victory.

It was, as the Duke of Wellington himself remarked, an extremely "close-run thing"; the battle ran in France's favor for some time. Eventually, however, at dusk that night, the Coalition forces, which included British, French royalist, and Dutch troops, had won. As related by Heyer in the book, Wellington himself named the battle, after his tradition of naming his battles after the places where he had slept the night before.

On a different note, "An Infamous Army" is actually a book that ties together two of Heyer's series--in fact, the only series that she ever wrote. It pairs the characters from "Regency Buck" (1935), her first Regency novel, with those in the books "These Old Shades" (1926) and "Devil's Cub" (1932).