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

by Bernard Cornwell

  ‘The Meeting of Wellington and Blücher after Waterloo’, detail of wall painting by Daniel Maclise. Wellington, exhausted, later wept and remarked: ‘Well, thank God, I don’t know what it is to lose a battle, but certainly nothing can be more painful than to gain one with the loss of so many of one’s friends.’

  ‘After the Battle of Waterloo’, (detail) by William Heath.

  AFTERMATH

  A thousand shall fall beside thee, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee

  WELLINGTON RODE THROUGH THE darkness to Waterloo. He dismounted from Copenhagen and gave the horse a friendly pat, whereupon Copenhagen lashed out with a hoof. The Duke was tired. ‘Both mind and feelings are exhausted,’ he was to tell Lady Shelley. There must have been a huge sense of relief too, ‘thank God I have met him!’ he was to exclaim later, and not only met him, but to have survived such a meeting. ‘It has been a damned nice thing,’ he told Creevey in Brussels the next day, ‘the nearest thing you ever saw in your life!’ He used the word ‘nice’ in its old sense of a narrow escape, a sliver. He also told Creevey, surely rightly, ‘By God! I don’t think it would have been done if I had not been there!’ He was to write to his brother, William:

  You’ll see the account of our Desperate Battle and victory over Boney!! It was the most desperate business I was ever in. I never took so much trouble about any battle, and was never so near being beat. Our loss is immense, particularly in that best of all Instruments, British Infantry. I never saw the Infantry behave so well.

  He ate a lonely supper in Waterloo. He could not use his own bed because an aide was dying in it so he slept on a pallet. He was woken early by Doctor John Hume, who had a list of casualties. Hume recounted:

  He was much affected. I felt the tears dropping fast upon my hand. And looking towards him, saw them chasing one another in furrows over his dusty cheeks. He brushed them away suddenly with his left hand, and said to me in a voice tremulous with emotion, ‘Well, thank God, I don’t know what it is to lose a battle, but certainly nothing can be more painful than to gain one with the loss of so many of one’s friends.’

  He had been so exhausted that he had gone to sleep without washing, and the Duke was a most fastidious man. Now, in the dawn of Monday 19 June, he began composing the despatch which was his official report to the British government, then he returned to his quarters in Brussels where he finished the despatch and wrote letters. One of the first was to Lady Frances Webster:

  My dear Lady Frances … I yesterday, after a most severe and bloody contest, gained a complete victory, and pursued the French till after dark. They are in complete confusion; and I have, I believe, 150 pieces of cannon; and Blücher, who continued the pursuit all night, my soldiers being tired to death, sent me word this morning that he had got 60 more. My loss is immense. Lord Uxbridge, Lord FitzRoy Somerset, General Cooke, General Barnes, and Colonel Berkeley are wounded. Colonel de Lancey, Canning, Gordon, General Picton killed. The finger of Providence was upon me, and I escaped unhurt.

  The Duke was wrong about Colonel de Lancey, who still lived, though he was badly wounded. Towards the end of the battle a cannonball had struck a glancing blow on his back, leaving his skin unbroken, but separating his ribs. He was Wellington’s Deputy Quartermaster-General and undoubtedly one of the friends whose loss Wellington felt so keenly. William de Lancey had been born in New York to a Loyalist family who lost their property at American independence. The family moved to England and William had a distinguished military career, fighting in the Peninsula and earning Wellington’s trust. In April 1815, de Lancey, by now Sir William, married Magdalene Hall, a Scottish girl, and she accompanied her husband to Flanders when the Duke insisted that de Lancey serve as his Deputy Quartermaster-General. Lady de Lancey had gone to Antwerp before the battle, but returned immediately after to discover her husband in a cottage bedroom at Mont St Jean. She nursed him, and it seemed he would make a miraculous recovery, but on Monday 26 June, eight days after his injury, Sir William died. Magdalene was distraught. They had been married less than three months. She later wrote an account of her tragically doomed romance that was published as A Week at Waterloo in 1815.

  The Prussians had undertaken the night-time pursuit of the French army. That made sense. There had already been more than enough accidental clashes between the British–Dutch troops and Blücher’s men, and in the moonlit night such mistakes would have been even more likely. Gneisenau organized the pursuit, cleverly mounting drummers on cavalry horses so that the French would think Prussian infantry was close on their heels. The Prussians pursued till past midnight, feeding the panic, scattering Napoleon’s survivors and slaughtering fugitives. Blücher spent the night at Genappe, the small town on the road to Quatre-Bras, from where next morning he wrote to his wife:

  The enemy’s superiority in numbers obliged me to retreat on the 17th, but on the 18th, together with my friend Wellington, I put an end once and for all to Buonaparte’s dancing. His army is completely routed, and the whole of his artillery, baggage, caissons and equipment are in my hands; the insignia of all the various orders he had worn are just brought to me, having been discovered in a casket in his carriage. I had two horses killed under me yesterday.

  ‘My friend Wellington’ shows a generosity of spirit that was utterly lacking in Gneisenau and, indeed, in Wellington himself. Gneisenau did acknowledge that the British fought with ‘superb bravery’, but he never reconciled his opinion of Wellington.

  The narrow bridge at Genappe proved a huge obstacle to the retreating French. Baggage wagons made a traffic jam which completely blocked the street so that fleeing soldiers had to crawl beneath the wagons to reach the bridge. Napoleon had managed to find his coach, but the coachman could not get through the village, so the Emperor had to abandon the carriage just moments before Prussian cavalry captured it. He abandoned a fortune in jewels too. The army’s treasury, stored on wagons, had managed to reach Charleroi and there became stalled by another traffic jam, whereupon it was looted by fugitives who slit open the sacks of gold coins with sword and bayonet.

  Napoleon was given a horse and, escorted by a handful of Imperial Guardsmen, went on southwards. At Quatre-Bras, in the moonlight, the Emperor saw thousands of naked bodies on the battlefield, all of them stripped and plundered by the local peasantry. He avoided the crush at Charleroi and by 9 a.m. on Monday was across the French border, where he stopped. He dictated a letter to his brother Joseph, who was his deputy in Paris. ‘All is not lost,’ the Emperor wrote:

  I estimate that collecting all my forces I shall have 150,000 men left. The National Guard and a few brave battalions will give me 100,000 men; the depot battalions 50,000. I therefore have 300,000 men to face the enemy immediately. I can drag my artillery with carriage horses; I can raise 100,000 conscripts … I am starting for Laon, I shall doubtless find troops there. I have not heard from Grouchy, unless he is captured, which I fear he is, I shall have 50,000 troops in three days.

  He was building castles in the air. Grouchy had been horrified by the news of Waterloo, then conducted a skilful retreat from his fruitless victory at Wavre and brought 25,000 men safely across the border, but whatever Napoleon thought, all was lost. The Emperor reached Paris on 21 June, a Wednesday, and found the city already unsettled by rumours of a disastrous defeat. Émile Labretonnière, who had been so excited at Sunday’s false news of victory which had been heralded by the cannon at Les Invalides, heard the rumours and went to the Élysée Palace, which was Napoleon’s summer residence:

  The palace courtyard was full of horses covered in dust and sweat; aides-de-camp kept arriving and looked to be utterly exhausted. Several cavalrymen of the Imperial Guard were sitting gloomily on a bench while their tethered horses waited in the yard. One of the horsemen had his face bandaged with a black scarf. The whole scene spoke of shame and grief.

  France had given Napoleon a last chance, and that chance had died in the valley at Mont St Jean. The Chamber of Deputies
would not support the Emperor any more. Blücher and Wellington were leading their armies south towards Paris, the Austrians had crossed the eastern frontier and the Russians were not far behind. Napoleon raged against his fate, then accepted it. Paris surrendered to the allies on 4 July, though their forces did not enter the city till the 7th. By then Napoleon had abdicated. He was at Malmaison, Josephine’s house, and he flirted with the idea of emigrating to the United States. He ordered books on America, then travelled to Rochefort, where he hoped to find ships that would carry him to the New World, but instead found a British naval blockade. He gave himself up to Captain Maitland of HMS Bellerophon, the Billy Ruffian of Trafalgar fame, and so began his journey to Saint Helena.

  At Genappe, far to the north, thousands of copies of a proclamation were still lying in the mud. The proclamation had been printed in Paris, though at its top the sheet of paper announced it had been issued from ‘The Imperial Palace of Laeken in Bruxelles’. It was addressed to the people of Belgium:

  The brief success of my enemies detached you for a short time from my Empire, but in my exile on a sea-bound rock I heard your grief. The God of battles has decided the destiny of your beautiful provinces: Napoleon is among you! You are worthy to be Frenchmen! Rise en masse, join my invincible forces to exterminate the rest of the barbarians who are your enemies and mine; they will flee with rage and despair in their hearts.

  But it was the Emperor who had fled with rage and despair, and now the Prussians were determined to execute him. Gneisenau wrote to von Müffling, still the liaison officer with Wellington, and demanded that the Duke must agree to the Emperor’s execution. ‘That is what eternal justice demands, and what the declaration of March 13th requires, and so the blood of our soldiers … will be avenged.’

  Müffling delivered the demand, which was reinforced by a Prussian ultimatum to the interim government in Paris that Blücher would only accept a cessation of hostilities if Napoleon was handed over ‘alive or dead’. The Duke of Wellington, Müffling recorded:

  stared at me in astonishment, and in the first place disputed the correctness of this interpretation of the [March 13th] Viennese Declaration of Outlawry, which was never meant to incite to the assassination of Napoleon … Such an act would hand down our names to history stained by a crime, and posterity would say of us that we did not deserve to be the conquerors of Napoleon.

  ‘If the Sovereigns wished to put him to death,’ Wellington wrote tartly, ‘they should appoint an executioner, which should not be me.’ Gneisenau, ever ready to accuse Wellington of ulterior and sly motives, called this ‘theatrical magnanimity’, but the Prussians ceded the point, however reluctantly. This was not the only disagreement between the allies. On a minor point Blücher wished to call the events of 18 June the battle of La Belle Alliance, under which name it is still known in Germany, but Wellington preferred Waterloo. The French usually term it the battle of Mont St Jean. And when the allies occupied Paris the Prussians decided to blow up the Pont d’Iéna, the bridge across the Seine which celebrated Napoleon’s great victory over the Prussians at Jena in 1806. To Wellington this was a nonsense. A bridge was useful! What point was there in destroying it? Lady Shelley tells us that the Duke saved the bridge:

  by the simple device of posting an English sentry upon it … the Prussians tried hard to get rid of the sentry, for they were determined to blow up the bridge. But the sentry would not leave his post. ‘You may blow up the bridge if you like,’ said he, ‘but I don’t stir from here.’ He kept his word and the bridge was saved!

  Napoleon reached Paris on 21 June, and on the same day Major the Honourable Henry Percy of the 14th Light Dragoons reached London. He arrived late in the evening, a hot evening, and went to No. 10 Downing Street to deliver Wellington’s despatch to Earl Bathurst, the Secretary of War, and was redirected to Grosvenor Square where the Earl was at dinner. From there Percy was despatched to St James’s Square to give the news to the Prince Regent, who was attending a ball. Percy had been at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball just six days before and had been given no opportunity to change out of his silk stockings and dancing shoes, which were now covered in mud. The ball was being given by Mrs Boehm, a merchant’s wife and rich enough to attract aristocratic society to her dances and dinner parties. Many years later she described the events of the evening to the Reverend Julian Young, who recorded her words. It was about 10 p.m. when Mrs Boehm:

  walked up to the Prince, and asked if it was his Royal Highness’s pleasure that the ball should open. The first quadrille was in the act of forming, and the Prince was walking up to the dais on which his seat was placed, when I saw everyone without the slightest sense of decorum rushing to the windows, which had been left wide open because of the excessive sultriness of the weather. The music ceased and the dance was stopped; for we heard nothing but the vociferous shouts of an enormous mob, who had just entered the Square, and were running by the side of a post-chaise and four, out of whose windows were hanging three nasty French eagles. In a second the door of the carriage was flung open, and, without waiting for the steps to be let down, out sprang Henry Percy – such a dusty figure! with a flag in each hand, pushing aside every one who happened to be in his way, darting up stairs, into the ball-room, stepping hastily up to the Regent, dropping on one knee, laying the flags at his feet, and pronouncing the words ‘Victory, Sir! Victory!’

  Three Eagles? The account says so, and Wellington’s official despatch also mentions three Eagles, though Mrs Boehm says that Major Percy had a flag in each hand, which suggests just two. The third flag might have been a cavalry pennant. Mrs Boehm should have been delighted at the news, instead she saw only the ruin of her social aspirations as the Reverend Young reports with, one suspects, more than a little acid in his inkwell:

  The splendid supper which had been provided for our guests stood in the dining-room untouched … all our trouble, anxiety and expense were utterly thrown away in consequence of, what shall I say? Well, I must say it! The unseasonable declaration of the Waterloo victory! Of course, one was very glad to think one had beaten those horrid French, and all that sort of thing; but still, I always shall think it would have been far better if Henry Percy had waited quietly till the morning, instead of bursting in upon us, as he did, in such indecent haste.

  Or perhaps, she suggested, Henry Percy might have had the decency to whisper the news to the Prince Regent who, she was sure, ‘would have shown consideration enough for my feelings not to have published the news till next morning’. In that hope she would almost certainly have been disappointed, because a guest at the ball recorded the Prince’s reaction on hearing of the victory; she wrote to her husband that the Prince ‘fell into a sort of womanish hysteric. Water was flung in his face. No, that would never do. Wine was tried with better success, and he drowned his feelings in an ocean of claret.’

  The news reached Edinburgh the following day, preceded by rumours of a great defeat which claimed that the Prussians had been annihilated and that Wellington had been trounced at Quatre-Bras. Not everyone believed the rumours and bets were taken on their veracity. Then the official news came from London. James Taylor, a lawyer, heard it in court:

  The bearer of the glad tidings was soon in the Court where the judges were sitting; the cheers of the Outer Hall were suspended only to be renewed in the Inner. Further law proceedings were out of the question; adjournment was ruled; and judges, advocates, agents and officers were speedily in the street, already crowded by their excited and exultant townsmen. Nobody could stay at home. The schools were let loose. Business was suspended, and a holiday voted by acclamation.

  Edinburgh Castle’s 24-pounder cannons fired a nineteen-gun salute. The mail-coach that brought the London newspapers arrived garlanded with laurels and bright with flags. The losers paid the winners their wagers which, Taylor said, were speedily handed over to the fund that had been started for the wounded and for the widows and orphans made by Waterloo.

  And they were far too many
.

  * * *

  The news reached London on the Wednesday, and that night, a full three days after the battle had ended, there were still wounded men lying untended on the battlefield. The last would not be rescued till the Thursday. Many who might have been saved had died in the meantime. The dead lay in heaps. Major Harry Smith, the Rifleman-hero of the Peninsular War, rode over the battlefield the day after the fight:

  I had been over many a field of battle, but with the exception of one spot at New Orleans and the breach of Badajos, I had never seen anything to compare with what I saw. At Waterloo the whole field from right to left was a mass of dead bodies. In one spot, to the right of La Haie Sainte, the French Cuirassiers were literally piled on each other; many soldiers not wounded lying under their horses; others, fearfully wounded, occasionally with their horses struggling on their wounded bodies. The sight was sickening … All over the field you saw officers, and as many soldiers as were permitted to leave the ranks, leaning and weeping over some dead or dying brother or comrade. The battle was fought on a Sunday, the 18th June, and I repeated to myself a verse from the Psalms of that day – 91st Psalm, 7th verse; ‘A thousand shall fall beside thee, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee.’

  At night the scavengers moved onto the field to plunder the dead and wounded, and if the wounded resisted they were killed. Men and women used pliers to pull teeth from the dead and, for years after, false teeth were known as Waterloo Teeth.