THE ORIGINS OF THIS BOOK This book originated in a discovery made by Chris Bassford when he was working on his Ph.D. dissertation at Purdue University. [Bassford, Christopher. "The Reception of Clausewitzian Theory in Anglo-American Military Thought." West Lafayette, IN: Ph.D. Dissertation, Purdue University, 1991.] While working to track down early references to Clausewitz in Great Britain, he came across a number of rather mysterious, anonymously-published letters, articles, and book reviews from the 1830s and 1840s. There was also an anonymous translation of Clausewitz’s “Campaign of 1812 in Russia,” published in 1843. Going through publishers’ business records, he traced these publications to writers who turned out to be members of the Duke of Wellington’s inner circle. That discovery led Bassford to examine Wellington’s own papers, where he discovered Lord Liverpool’s translation of Clausewitz’s study of the campaign of 1815. This, in turn, led to a treasure-trove of correspondence about Clausewitz within Wellington’s circle. The existence of Wellington’s 1842 memorandum in response to Clausewitz’s study of the Waterloo campaign was not really a secret, of course, since it had been published in one of the twelve volumes of Wellington’s dispatches and correspondence. Further research revealed that it had in fact been well known in 19th-century Britain, frequently referred to in British discussions of Waterloo until shortly before the First World War. After that, however, British historians’ references to Clausewitz’s (and other Germans’) discussions of Waterloo dwindled to insignificance, and the Clausewitz-Wellington connection was quite unknown in the field of Clausewitz Studies. Since Bassford’s interests are in strategic theory, not Napoleonic or British military history, he simply wrote up the story as part of his dissertation, later published as Clausewitz in English: The Reception of Clausewitz in Britain and America, 1815-1945 (Oxford University Press, 1994), and turned his attentions elsewhere. It was only at the urgings of Peter Kracht, military history editor at Westview Press in the early 1990s, that Bassford began considering the possibilities of a book focused on this connection between Wellington’s circle and Clausewitz. Since his main interest was still in Clausewitz’s ideas themselves rather than simply the Wellington story, it soon became clear that merely revising and expanding Liverpool’s very incomplete translation was hopeless—it was too rough and too literal. A new and complete translation of Clausewitz’s campaign study was needed, as well as additional materials from Clausewitz, Wellington and his circle, and modern analysts. Westview Press proposed a contract to pursue this idea with the initial title of “On Waterloo: The Exchange Between Clausewitz and Wellington.” Later in the 1990s, Westview prematurely announced its pending publication, despite Bassford’s insistence that this was going to be a lengthy project. Greg Pedlow met Chris Bassford in 1995 when Bassford was on the faculty of the US Army War College. Pedlow was attending the College as a US Army Reserve lieutenant colonel. Pedlow was fascinated by the “On Waterloo” project and offered to help. Because Pedlow is fully fluent in German (his Ph.D. is in German history) and had studied the Battle of Waterloo ever since coming to Belgium as Chief of the Historical Office at NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe in 1989, Bassford gladly accepted. Greg set out to prepare a completely new translation of Clausewitz’s entire campaign study. For the next decade he worked on this challenging project in his spare time. Bassford and Pedlow were already very far along when they learned of relevant work by Professor Daniel Moran of the Naval Postgraduate School, who with Peter Paret had translated and edited Clausewitz’s Historical and Political Writings (Princeton University Press, 1992). Moran had independently prepared his own translation of Clausewitz’s 1815 campaign study. Moran figured, however, that there was no commercial market for this work, so in 2005 he simply posted it as a PDF file on the internet for the convenience of fellow scholars. Shortly thereafter, Bassford and Pedlow contacted Moran, described the much wider scope of their project, and—on the theory that three heads are better than one, at least when translating Clausewitz—invited him to join the team. He immediately agreed. He then withdrew his translation from the internet. Pedlow and Moran set about merging the two translations, taking the best aspects of both, with Bassford working to ensure that the product read well in English and to integrate it with the other pieces of the larger project. For the larger work, Moran contributed an essay concerning Clausewitz’s attitude regarding Napoleon, while Pedlow contributed an essay on how Wellington’s and Clausewitz’s exchange fits into the long historical debate over the battle. Since the three editors are all well-published writers, under no pressures to “publish or perish” and with no interests at stake other than an intellectual fascination with the issues that Clausewitz and Wellington raised, they decided to make the results of their collaboration freely available via the internet. The first full draft of the project was posted to the web at the beginning of April 2010 and has been kept updated since. It can be found on-line at http://www.clausewitz.com/readings/1815/ . This on-line version contains not only the full text of On Waterloo: Clausewitz, Wellington, and the Campaign of 1815 but also numerous related or supporting documents, including:
Print on paper also has its uses, however. Bassford—who has long been the webmaster of The Clausewitz Homepage [http://www.clausewitz.com/] and likes to play with technology—therefore proposed to his colleagues that they had an opportunity to experiment with recent advances in print-on-demand technology. Given that the text was already in electronic form, he found the process of producing a fully professional printed book to be a remarkably simple and straightforward process. Clausewitz.com soon published a paperback edition using the print-on-demand publication system of Amazon.com’s affilate CreateSpace.com. The only hard part was learning to use a professional type-setting program—Adobe’s InDesign. Having done one such book, however, he now has several more such projects in mind. The printed book is available directly from CreateSpace as well as from Amazon.com and has been picked up, via CreateSpace’s distribution channels, by other distributors. Readers might also be interested in another version of Clausewitz’s study of the 1815 campaign, also published in 2010: Carl von Clausewitz, On Wellington: A Critique of Waterloo, ed./trans. Peter Hofschroer (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010, series Campaigns and Commanders), ISBN:0806141085. Independent writer and researcher Peter Hofschröer is a graduate of Kings College London and author of numerous books for Napoleonic history buffs. Hofschröer has long been aware of Bassford, Pedlow, and Moran’s undertaking and recently decided to publish a competing project. Despite its title, this is simply another translation of Clausewitz's Der Feldzug von 1815 in Frankreich (Berlin: Dümmlers Verlag, 1835). Other than Hofschröer’s own introduction, it is uncluttered by any content beyond Clausewitz’s campaign study itself. Neither Wellington’s comments nor any additional documents or essays are included. Hofschröer’s chosen title is a bit unfortunate, giving the impression that Clausewitz’s focus was on Wellington when, in reality, Clausewitz’s study was aimed at understanding the overall political/military strategic issues of the campaign (his subtitle was “Strategic Overview of the Campaign of 1815”). He critically examined the decisions and actions of all of the key commanders, with no particular focus on Wellington. Nonetheless, Hofschröer’s treatment may be useful to some readers, expecially those intrigued by Hofschröer’s longstanding hostility to Wellington. Return to the on-line text of On Waterloo: Clausewitz,
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