Waterloo: The True Story of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles

by Bernard Cornwell

  Yet the old hands, the veterans, were full of confidence. Frederick Mainwaring was a Lieutenant in the 51st, a Yorkshire battalion that had fought at Corunna, Fuentes d’Onoro, Salamanca, Vitoria and in the battles of the Pyrenees and southern France. It was stationed at Portsmouth when the news of Napoleon’s return reached Britain. Mainwaring recalled:

  I was seated with two or three others at breakfast in the mess-room, the Bugle-Major came in with the letters and as usual laid the newspaper on the mess-table. Someone opened it and glanced his eyes carelessly over its contents when suddenly his countenance brightened up, and flinging the newspaper into the air like a madman, he shouted out ‘Glorious news! Nap’s landed again in France, Hurrah!’ In an instant we were all wild … ‘Nap’s in France again’ spread like wildfire through the barracks … the men turned out and cheered … our joy was unbounded!

  Captain Cavalié Mercer commanded a troop of Royal Horse Artillery at Colchester when the news arrived and tells the same story as Lieutenant Mainwaring. The order to march was ‘received with unfeigned joy by officers and men, all eager to plunge into danger and bloodshed, all hoping to obtain glory and distinction’.

  The French and Prussians were no different. Eager volunteers had flocked to the Prussian colours, and in France most soldiers were overjoyed at the Emperor’s return. Many had been prisoners-of-war in the dreadful British prisons, either on Dartmoor or in the pestilential hulks that were great dismasted ships that lay at permanent anchor, and those men wanted revenge. They wanted glory. Captain Pierre Cardron, an infantry officer, recorded a scene that happened again and again across France. His regiment had sworn loyalty to the King, but after Napoleon’s return the Colonel summoned all the officers. They stood in two ranks ‘asking one another what was going on? What was there? In the end we were filled with worry,’ Cardron remembered, but then their Colonel appeared:

  holding in his hands, what? You would not guess in a hundred years … Our eagle, under which we had marched so many times to victory and which the brave Colonel had hidden inside the mattress of his bed … At the sight of the cherished standard cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ could be heard; soldiers and officers, all overwhelmed, wanted not only to see, but to embrace and touch it; this incident made every eye flow with tears of emotion … we have promised to die beneath our eagle for the country and Napoleon.

  No wonder that one French general wrote home that his men were in a ‘frenzy’ for the Emperor. And in that frenetic atmosphere Napoleon decided on a pre-emptive blow against the British and the Prussians. He would attack them before the Austrian and Russian armies could reach the French frontier, and for his attack he had 125,000 men and 350 cannon. Facing him was Blücher with 120,000 men and 312 cannon and Wellington’s army of 92,000 men and 120 guns. The Emperor was outnumbered, but that was nothing new and he was a master of manoeuvre. His task now was to divide the allies then destroy them one by one. War, he had declared, was simple. ‘It’s like a boxing match, the more you punch the better it is.’

  And in June of 1815 he set out to punch Blücher and Wellington into oblivion.

  Franz Lieber was just seventeen years old when he heard the Prussian army’s call to arms, and he and his brother volunteered in Berlin. He reported to his regiment at the beginning of May, had one month’s training and then was marched into the Low Country to join Marshal Blücher’s forces. He would go on to have a distinguished career in America, emigrating in 1827, where he became Professor of Political Economics at South Carolina College. He moved to the north before the Civil War and taught at Columbia University, where he compiled the Lieber Code, credited as the first attempt to codify the rules of war. He lived till 1870.

  ‘The Duke of Wellington’, by Francisco Goya. When in 1814 the Duke was asked whether he regretted that he had never fought the Emperor in battle, he replied: ‘No, and I am very glad.’ He despised Napoleon the man, but admired Napoleon the soldier.

  Portrait of the Empress Josephine, by Pierre-Paul Prud’hon.

  ‘Napoleon, Fontainebleau, 31 March 1814’, by Paul Delaroche – the handsome, slim young man was gone, replaced by a pot-bellied, short-haired figure with sallow skin.

  Czar Alexander I of Russia, 1814, by Baron François Gérard: ‘It is up to you,’ he told the Duke of Wellington, ‘to save the world again.’

  ‘Clemens Lothar Wenzel, Prince Metternich, 1815’, by Sir Thomas Lawrence: ‘War’, Metternich recalled, ‘was decided in less than an hour.’

  ‘The Arrival of Napoleon at the Tuileries’: It was evening before Napoleon arrived at the palace. The waiting crowd could hear the cheering getting closer, then came the clatter of hoofs on the forecourt and finally the Emperor was there.

  A souvenir made to mark Napoleon’s return to Paris in March 1815. The violet was Napoleon. His beloved Josephine had carried violets at their wedding, and he sent her a bouquet of the flowers on every anniversary.

  Portrait of Louis XVIII of France with the coronation robe, by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Napoleon has humbugged me, by God!

  NAPOLEON WAS SURELY RIGHT when he claimed that the most difficult thing in war was ‘to guess the enemy’s plan’. And that was precisely the difficulty that Marshal Blücher and the Duke of Wellington faced. What was the Emperor planning?

  The first question was whether the Emperor would attack at all, and if the answer was yes, then they needed to know where and when that attack would occur. Yet only three days before the storm burst the Duke of Wellington was persuaded that no onslaught was coming. He planned to give a ball in Brussels on 21 June, the anniversary of his great victory at Vitoria, and when the Duchess of Richmond asked whether it would be sensible for her to give a ball on 15 June he reassured her, ‘You may give your ball with the greatest safety without fear of interruption.’ On Tuesday, 13 June, he wrote to a friend in England:

  There is nothing new here. We have reports of Buonaparte’s joining the army and attacking us, but I have accounts from Paris of the 10th, on which day he was still there; and I judge from his speech to the Legislature that his departure was not likely to be imminent. I think we are now too strong for him here.

  That letter was written on Tuesday, and on the day before, Monday, 12 June, Napoleon had left Paris to join l’Armée du Nord in Flanders. On 14 June that army closed up to the frontier and the allies still suspected nothing. Blücher shared Wellington’s opinion. He had written to his wife, ‘Bonaparte will not attack us,’ but Bonaparte was poised to do just that. He had closed France’s borders – ‘Not a stage or carriage must pass,’ he ordered – while north of the frontier, in the province of Belgium, the British and Prussian armies were spread across a swathe of country over a hundred miles wide.

  That dispersal was necessary for two reasons. The allies are in a defensive posture. They will not be ready to attack until they have overwhelming force, when the Austrians and Russians have reached the French frontier, so for the moment Wellington and Blücher are waiting and, of course, they know that the Emperor may attack them before they move against him. Wellington may have thought such an attack unlikely, but he still must guard against the possibility, and that means watching every route that the French might take. With hindsight it seems obvious that Napoleon would strike at the junction of the Prussian and British armies, to separate them, but that was not so obvious to either Blücher or to Wellington. Wellington’s fear was that Napoleon would choose a route further west, through Mons and so on to Brussels or even towards Ghent, where Louis XVIII had taken refuge. Such an attack would cut Wellington off from the coast, and so sever his supply lines. Whatever happened Wellington wanted to be certain that his army had a way to retreat to safety if it was outfought, and that safe retreat led west to Ostend, where ships could evacuate the army to Britain. Blücher had the same concern, only his retreat would be eastwards, towards Prussia.

  So the two armies are spread wide because they need to guard against every possible
French attack. The most westerly Prussian forces, General von Bülow’s Corps, are a hundred miles to the east of Wellington’s western flank. That dispersal was also necessary to feed the armies. The troops depended on buying local supplies and too many men and too many horses in a single place soon exhausted the available food.

  So the allies were spread across a hundred miles of country, while Napoleon was concentrating his army south of the River Sambre on the main road which led through Charleroi to Brussels. So why did the allies not detect this? In Spain the Duke of Wellington had a superb intelligence service; indeed his problem had been that he received too much intelligence, but in Flanders, in 1815, he was virtually blinded. Before the frontier was closed he had received plenty of reports from travellers coming north out of France, but most of those reports were fanciful and all were contradictory. He was also denied his favourite intelligence instrument, his Exploring Officers.

  The Exploring Officers were reliable men who scouted enemy country and depended on their superb horses to escape French pursuit. They rode in full uniform, so they could not be accused of spying, and they were extremely effective. Chief among them was a Scotsman, Colquhoun Grant, and Wellington demanded Grant’s presence in Belgium as the head of his Intelligence Department. Grant arrived in Brussels on 12 May and immediately set about establishing a network of agents on the French frontier, in which activity he was severely disappointed because the local population, all French-speaking, was either sympathetic to Napoleon or sullenly apathetic. Nor could Grant send Exploring Officers south of the border because, officially, the allies were not at war with France, only with Bonaparte.

  But Grant did have superb contacts in Paris. This was by accident, because in 1812 Grant had the misfortune to be captured by the French in Spain. The French, knowing his value to Wellington, refused to exchange or parole him, but sent him to France under close guard, though not close enough, because, once over the frontier in Bayonne, the Scotsman escaped and learned that General Joseph Souham, a French officer who had risen from the ranks, was staying in the town and planning to travel to Paris. In an act of superb bravado Grant introduced himself to Souham as an American officer and asked to travel in the General’s carriage. He was still wearing the red coat of the British 11th Regiment of Foot and no one thought to question it. What did Frenchmen know of American uniforms? Once in Paris the intrepid Grant found a source in the Ministry of War and contrived to send reports to the Duke in Spain. Grant eventually made his way back to England, but his source still existed in Paris and, once established as head of Wellington’s Intelligence Service, Grant managed to make contact again. The source gave him much valuable information about l’Armée du Nord, but not what he really wanted to know: was Napoleon going to attack? And if so, where? The French were not making it easy to guess; the earliest contacts between the armies were on the road to Mons where French cavalry patrols exchanged shots with allied picquets, suggesting that Napoleon was reconnoitring the direct route to Brussels.

  The map here shows the allied positions. The Prussians occupy a spread of land to the east of the main road leading north from Charleroi, the British are widely spread to the west of that road. The British headquarters is in Brussels, while Marshal Blücher’s is almost 50 miles away in Namur, guarding the best routes the Prussians might need if they are forced to retreat. This is important. If Napoleon punches really hard and defeats both his enemies, then he shatters any chance they have of cooperating, because the Prussians will retreat eastwards and the British will withdraw westwards, both seeking the safety of their homelands. This, in essence, is Napoleon’s plan, to divide the allies and, once divided, to deal with them separately. And to achieve this, on 14 June, he concentrates his army just south of Charleroi. Now he is ready to launch his men like a spear into the heart of the widespread allied dispositions.

  Napoleon attacked on Thursday, 15 June. He crosses the frontier and his troops march on Charleroi. The Prussian cavalry screen skirmishes with French horsemen and messengers gallop north with the news of the French advance, but when those messages reach Wellington he mistrusts them. The Duke fears that any French advance on that road is really a feint intended to distract him while the real attack is launched on his right wing. Hindsight condemns the Duke for his caution, claiming that Napoleon would never have attacked in the west because such an assault would have driven Wellington back onto Blücher’s army, but the Duke knows he must expect the unexpected from Napoleon. So the Duke remains cautious. In Brussels there is a rumour that the army will march on 25 June, but it is only one rumour among many. Edward Healey, an undergroom in the service of a British staff officer, noted the rumour in his diary, and added that officers were taking their swords to ironmongers’ shops to be ground and purchasing cloth from linen-drapers to make bandages, ‘but in a general way,’ he adds, ‘things were going on as if nothing was the matter.’

  The Emperor marched close to the frontier on 14 June. Next night, the Duchess of Richmond gives a ball in Brussels. The Duke attends.

  While everything to the south is going wrong for the allies.

  * * *

  Charlotte, Duchess of Richmond, was married to the fourth Duke, a not too successful soldier whose real passion was cricket. He was given command of a small reserve force that was posted in Brussels and his Scottish wife, herself the daughter of another duke, is one of society’s hostesses. She was forty-seven in 1815, the mother of seven sons and seven daughters. Wellington had assured the Duchess that her ball would not be interrupted by unwelcome news, though he had also advised her against throwing a lavish picnic in the countryside south of Brussels. There had been too many reports of French cavalry patrols, so it was better for the Duchess to entertain in Brussels itself.

  The Duke and Duchess had rented a large mansion with a capacious coach-house which was transformed into a dazzling ballroom. The humble coach-house was decorated with great swathes of scarlet, gold and black fabric, while chandeliers hung between the pillars that were wreathed with foliage, flowers and still more fabric. The guest list glittered too, headed by the Prince of Orange, also known as Slender Billy or the Young Frog. He was twenty-three, Crown Prince of the newly created Kingdom of the Netherlands, and something of a thorn in the Duke’s side, though the Duke liked him personally. The problem was the Young Frog’s father, King William I, who insisted that his eldest son hold high command in the Anglo-Dutch army. Wellington was forced to cede this demand or else manage without the Dutch troops, which meant that a large part of the Duke’s army was under the command of a young man whose only qualification for such responsibility was the fortune of royal birth. He commanded the 1st Corps and, because of Wellington’s insistence that unreliable or inexperienced battalions were brigaded with loyal and veteran units, the Prince commanded some of the Duke’s best British and Hanoverian troops.

  The Prince had been an aide-de-camp to the Duke for almost three years in Spain, an experience that had given him a highly exaggerated opinion of his own military talents. He was called Slender Billy because of his strangely long and thin neck, and the Young Frog because he had a high, receding hairline, a wide mouth and prominent eyes. He was supposedly engaged to Princess Charlotte, only daughter of Britain’s Prince Regent, but after she saw Slender Billy get drunk at the Ascot races she broke off the engagement. Slender Billy airily dismissed her rejection, believing, falsely, that she would change her mind. He had similarly dismissed his father’s French-speaking subjects, the Belgians, as ‘idiots’, and because he had been educated at Eton was much more at home among the British than among his compatriots. In the next few days he would be in command of almost a third of Wellington’s army, but fortunately the Young Frog was well served by capable staff officers who, the Duke must have prayed, would rein in his inexperience, self-regard and enthusiasm.

  The guests at the ball were the cream of Brussels society, a beribboned throng of diplomats, soldiers and aristocrats, one of whom was General Don Miguel Ricardo de Á
lava y Esquivel, a soldier who had been appointed Spain’s ambassador to the Netherlands. He had begun his military career in the Spanish navy and had been present at the battle of Trafalgar as a combatant fighting against Nelson’s ships, but the exigencies of war had meant Spain becoming an ally of the British, and Álava, who had joined the Spanish army after Trafalgar, had been appointed as liaison officer to Wellington. Relations between the British and Spanish had been fraught with jealousies, difficulties and mutual misunderstandings, and would have been much worse had it not been for Álava’s cool-headed and sensible advice. A lifelong friendship sprang up between him and the Duke, and the Spaniard would be at the Duke’s side throughout the next few days. He had no business being at Waterloo, but friendship alone made him share the dangers, and Wellington was grateful. Álava has the rare distinction of being one of the very few men who were present at both Trafalgar and Waterloo, though a good number of French also had that distinction, because at least one battalion who fought at Waterloo had served as marines aboard Villeneuve’s doomed fleet.

  Sir Thomas Picton was at the ball. He was newly arrived in Brussels, come to command the Duke’s Second Corps, and welcome he was, because Picton was a fighting general who had seen long and successful service in Portugal and Spain. ‘Come on, ye rascals,’ he had shouted as he led an attack at Vitoria, ‘come on, ye fighting villains!’ He was an irascible Welshman, burly and unkempt, but indubitably brave. ‘A rough, foul-mouthed devil,’ the Duke of Wellington described him, but by 1814 the rough, foul-mouthed devil was suffering from what we would know as combat stress reaction. He had written to the Duke begging to be sent home, ‘I must give up. I am grown so nervous, that when there is any service to be done it works upon my mind so that it is impossible for me to sleep at nights. I cannot possibly stand it.’