Ecologies of War and Fields of Conflict: Re-Imagining the Environment of the Battle of Waterloo

This article investigates how sources in Romantic period literature and the visual arts can help to reconstruct the impact on the nonhuman environment of the Battle of Waterloo. The focus is the field where the battle was fought, although some wider contexts are considered because of the trade and transport in relics and other matter. Primary sources used are published and manuscript accounts from the years following the battle, paintings, and more recent archeological reports. Authors discussed include Charlotte Waldie (later Eaton), who visited the site within a month; Walter Scott, the first major writer to visit the Field; writer and artist Robert Hills; diarist and journalist Henry Crabb Robinson; and poet Robert Southey. Artists include Joseph Mallord William Turner, William Sadler, and late-Victorian specialist in military painting Elizabeth Thompson Butler. The theoretical and methodological approaches are archival, literary historical, art historical, and ecocritical. The article aims to contribute to interdisciplinary studies and, to that end, engages where possible with soil science, battlefield archaeology, military history, and discourses concerning pollution.