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

by Bernard Cornwell

  That seems plain enough: the Prussian intervention was ‘most decisive’. The Gneisenau school complains that the Duke still ascribes victory to his own attack, but surely that was justified? The immediate cause of the French army’s collapse was the defeat of the Imperial Guard, and the Guard was defeated by Wellington’s forces. The Duke does not attempt to deny that the assault by the Guard would have been far worse if the Prussians had not drained Napoleon’s reserves into the defence of Plancenoit. This was an allied victory.

  Yet as the years passed, the Duke undoubtedly wanted the lion’s share of the honour. The battle was his crowning achievement, a victory over Napoleon himself, and from that victory stemmed the Duke’s unassailable position as the greatest British hero. He refused to discuss the battle and rejected all requests for information from authors (whom he detested). It was impossible, he said, to tell the story of a battle, but in the 1830s William Siborne, a British army officer, conceived the idea of constructing a massive model of the battle on a scale of nine feet to the mile. The model was built and can be seen today in the National Army Museum in Chelsea. It is a huge and impressive achievement with over 70,000 toy soldiers depicting the three armies at the moment of ‘the crisis’, which Siborne took to be the defeat of the Imperial Guard. Siborne spent months living at Waterloo to familiarize himself with the battlefield’s topography and, with the assistance of the army, wrote to almost every surviving officer with requests for their recollections, and the subsequent replies form a unique archive of eyewitness accounts.

  The Duke refused to contribute his own memories, even though it seems he was unhappy with Siborne’s work. In March 1837, Lord Fitzroy Somerset wrote to Siborne. Fitzroy Somerset had been the Duke’s Military Secretary during the campaign (he later became Lord Raglan of Crimean fame) and was close to Wellington. He wrote amicably enough to Siborne, but noted:

  I still think that the position you have given to the Prussian troops is not the correct one as regards the moment you wish to represent, and that those who seek the work will deduce from it that the result of the battle was not so much owing to British valour and the great generalship of the chief of the English army, as to the flank movement of the Prussians.

  Siborne offered to make changes, but the government had just purchased the work and it was too late for any more alterations and so the model as we see it today is the one to which Fitzroy Somerset objected. It is probably accurate. And it is probably true that as the Duke grew older he underplayed the Prussian contribution. That was vanity, and he was a vain man with much to be vain about. On hearing of Napoleon’s death in 1821 the Duke remarked to Harriet Arbuthnot, probably the closest of his many women friends, ‘Now I think I may say I am the most successful General alive!’ He was undoubtedly proud of that and jealous of anything that might diminish his reputation.

  The battle of Waterloo was an allied victory. That was how it was planned and that was how it turned out. Wellington would never have made his stand if he thought for one moment that the Prussians would let him down. Blücher would never have marched if he thought Wellington would cut and run. It is true that the Prussians arrived later than Wellington hoped, but that probably contributed to the battle’s success. If Blücher’s forces had arrived two or three hours earlier then Napoleon might have disengaged his army and retreated, but by the time that the Prussians intervened the French army was almost wholly committed to the fight and disengagement was impossible. The Emperor was not just defeated, he was routed.

  Frances, Lady Shelley, once asked Wellington if it was true that he had been surprised before Quatre-Bras. She had in mind the evening of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball where the Duke declared he had been humbugged. He wrote back to her in March 1820: ‘as for the charge of being surprised … supposing I was surprised: I won the battle; and what could you have had more, even if I had not been surprised?’

  That surely remains the Duke’s answer to all his critics. ‘I won the battle; and what could you have had more?’

  * * *

  An easier question to answer than ‘who won the battle?’ is ‘who lost the battle?’, and the answer must be Napoleon. The Duke and Blücher both offered leadership; their men saw them and were encouraged by their presence, but Napoleon left the conduct of the battle to Marshal Ney, who, though braver than most men, did little more than hurl troops against the most skilful defensive general of the age. The French had the time and the men to break Wellington’s line, but they failed, partly because the Duke defended so cleverly, and partly because the French never coordinated an all-arms assault on the allied line. They delayed the start of the battle on a day when Wellington was praying for time. They wasted men in the assault on Hougoumont. Ney threw away the French cavalry in a time-consuming attack that lasted much of the afternoon. And why Napoleon entrusted the battle’s conduct to Ney is a mystery; Ney was certainly brave, but the Emperor damned him as ‘too stupid to be able to succeed’, so why rely on him? And, when the French did achieve their one great success, the capture of La Haie Sainte, which enabled them to occupy the forward slope of Wellington’s ridge, the Emperor refused to reinforce the centre and so gave the Duke time to bring up his own reinforcements. Finally, when the Imperial Guard did attack it was too few and too late, and by that time the Prussians were on the French flank and threatening their rear.

  The Duke, as so often, was right: it is impossible to tell the story of a battle, because there are too many stories woven together and no one can unpick the strands. For some men it was all a blur, a day of terror in which they saw little but smoke. Some battalions only knew where the enemy was by the flash of musket flames in that smoke, and so they fired at those. Afterwards they tried to make sense of the chaos they had endured and so their individual stories were shaped. There was the tale of John Shaw, Corporal of Horse in the 2nd Life Guards, a tall and frighteningly strong man who had been a bare-knuckle boxer. Some said he was blind drunk when he charged with his regiment, but he still killed seven cuirassiers, and when he was last seen his sword was broken and he was using his helmet as a club. He died. Then there was John Dawson, 2nd Earl of Portarlington, who disappeared the night before the battle, probably to keep an assignation with a woman in Brussels. As a result he missed the beginning of the battle, and because he was the commanding officer of the 23rd Dragoons he was in total disgrace. He attached himself to the 18th Hussars instead and charged with them at the battle’s end, but his disgrace was such that he was forced to resign his commission. ‘He took to dissipation,’ the Waterloo Roll Call records, ‘and died in an obscure London slum.’ Then there was the farmer’s wife in Mont St Jean who, knowing the predatory habits of soldiers, took all her poultry into her farmhouse attic and spent the battle guarding her chickens and ducks. A young Prussian wrote home to his parents after the battle and said, ‘tell my sister I didn’t poop in my pants!’ And after the battle Lieutenant Charles Smith of the 95th Rifles had the grim task of burying the dead Greenjackets and, as his work-party sorted through the heaped corpses, they found the body of a French cavalry officer ‘of a delicate mould and appearance’. It was a young woman in uniform. We will never know who she was, only that Charles Smith thought her beautiful. Perhaps she could not bear to be parted from her lover?

  So many stories, and so few with a happy ending. On the day before Waterloo the Major who was in command of the 40th wrote to his wife. He was a 34-year-old Irishman commanding a Somersetshire battalion, and the letter he wrote is one that many soldiers have written, a last letter in case the writer died. Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Prussians, Hanoverians, Scotsmen, Irishmen, Welshmen and Englishmen all wrote such letters on the eve of Waterloo. ‘My dear Mary,’ Major Arthur Heyland wrote:

  My Mary, let the recollection console you that the happiest days of my life have been from your love and affection, and that I die loving only you, and with a fervent hope that our souls may be reunited hereafter and part no more. What dear children, my Mary, I leave you. My Marianna, gentl
est girl, may God bless you. My Anne, my John, may heaven protect you … My darling Mary, I must tell you again how tranquilly I shall die, should it be my fate to fall; we cannot, my own love, die together; one or other must witness the loss of what we love most. Let my children console you, my love, my Mary.

  Major Arthur Heyland was among the thousands who were killed at the battle of Waterloo.

  ‘The Eagle Standards Taken at Waterloo Returned to Wellington’, by Mathieu Ignace van Bree.

  ‘The Duke of Wellington describing the Field of Waterloo to King George IV’, by Benjamin Robert Haydon.

  ‘March of the Allied forces into Paris’, F. Malek.

  Napoleon on board the ‘Northumberland’ on its way to St Helena – drawn by a British officer on the ship.

  AFTERWORD

  PARIS SURRENDERED TO THE allies on 4 July 1815. Napoleon reached Saint Helena in the southern Atlantic on 15 October 1815. He was to live another six years, most of them spent writing a tendentious memoir which fed the Napoleonic cult which still prevails in France. Basil Jackson, the British staff officer who brought General Picton the orders to retreat from Quatre-Bras, was one of Saint Helena’s garrison and recorded how the defeated Emperor made a deliberate policy of constant complaining about ‘unnecessary restrictions, insults from the governor, scarcity of provisions, miserable accommodation, insalubrity of climate, and a host of other grievances’. Few of these whines were justified, but Napoleon succeeded in blackening the reputation of Sir Hudson Lowe, the island’s long-suffering governor, and in encouraging pity for himself. At his death in 1821 Napoleon was buried in a beautiful high valley overlooking the Atlantic, but in 1840 his body was moved to France, where he now lies in a lavish tomb in Les Invalides. Longwood House, built on Saint Helena for Napoleon’s use, was given to the French nation in 1858 and is now a museum.

  Most of the French generals fled into exile after the battle. Almost all had sworn loyalty to Louis XVIII and feared Royalist vengeance, but one by one they returned and were restored to favour and high honours. Marshal Soult, for instance, became Prime Minister. He attended Queen Victoria’s coronation in London’s Westminster Abbey, where he had an amicable encounter with the Duke of Wellington. Grouchy was widely blamed for the Emperor’s defeat and he took refuge in the United States, but was forgiven in 1821, the year of Napoleon’s death.

  Marshal d’Erlon encountered Marshal Ney during the panicked retreat from Waterloo and advised him to flee into exile. Ney should have taken that advice. Instead he returned to France where, on the restoration of the monarchy, he was arrested and tried for treason. On 7 December 1815, early on a wintry morning, Marshal Ney was executed by a French firing squad. He refused a blindfold, refused to kneel and died in his Marshal’s uniform. He deserved better. He was passionate, brave, impetuous and heroic. He was undoubtedly guilty of high treason against Louis XVIII, but so were scores of others, chief among them Marshal Soult who, before the Waterloo campaign, had been Louis’s Minister of War, but Soult had powerful political allies in Paris and so escaped punishment. There is a persistent legend that Ney escaped to South Carolina and another man took his place in front of the firing squad, but the basis for the tale seems to be romantic wishfulness.

  Louis Canler, the young soldier whose breakfast was flavoured with gunpowder, had a distinguished career as a detective in the Sûreté, the French national police, rising through its ranks to become the organization’s chief. Another young man who had a distinguished career was Franz Lieber, the young Prussian who joined the army with such enthusiasm in Berlin. He emigrated to America in 1827, was Professor of Political Economics at South Carolina College, but 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.

  General von Müffling was promoted to Field Marshal. For a time he was commander of the allied garrison that occupied Paris, then he was appointed Chief of the General Staff of the Prussian military. He died in 1851. Carl von Clausewitz is most famous as the author of Vom Kriege, known in English as On War, the seminal text of war’s political implications. Von Clausewitz served as Gneisenau’s Chief of Staff, but both men died in the 1831 outbreak of cholera. Field Marshal von Gneisenau is rightly celebrated in Germany as a great patriot and as a man who, with von Scharnhorst, was responsible for reorganizing the Prussian army and readying it for the climactic struggle with Napoleon. His partnership with Blücher was one of the most successful in military history.

  Field Marshal von Blücher retired to his estates in Silesia after the wars and died in 1819. Soon after Waterloo he made a visit to London to be celebrated and thanked by the British government for his vital part in the defeat of Napoleon. He had landed at Dover and his route to London took him over Blackheath, where his carriage stopped so he could be shown the great panorama of the British capital stretching westwards. He marvelled at the sight, then said, ‘What a city to sack!’ He was a splendid man.

  Slender Billy proved a better king than a general. His father abdicated in 1840 and the Prince became King William II of the Netherlands, which by then had lost the province of Belgium. He was generally liberal, encouraging electoral reform and accepting constitutional restraints on the monarchy. He ruled till his death in 1849.

  Most of the British soldiers who survived the battle remained in the army. Both Ned Costello and John Kincaid became Yeomen Warders of the Tower of London, while others vanished into obscurity and poverty. Others, like Sir John Colville, had stellar careers in government service. Colville became Lord Seaton and Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada, while Frederick Ponsonby, having been hacked by swordsmen, pierced by a lance and looted by passing infantrymen, survived to become the Governor of Malta. Cavalié Mercer rose to high rank in the Royal Artillery. For all these men, the famous and the obscure, Waterloo was the defining experience of their lives. Nothing that came before had such significance, everything that came after was seen through the prism of that terrible day, and that was most true of the Duke himself. Ever after, despite the high offices he held, he was the victor of Waterloo. He became Prime Minister and it was not a success; his nickname ‘the Iron Duke’ came not from battle, but from the iron shutters he placed on Apsley House so that the mob stoning the façade would not break his windows. He died, aged eighty-three, in 1852. Despite his political failures he had achieved an eminence and fame that was unrivalled. He was celebrated before Waterloo as the most successful British general since Marlborough, but Waterloo made his reputation unassailable.

  The battle marked a turning point. The latter half of the eighteenth century had been a long struggle for supremacy between France and Britain. The Seven Years War drove the French from North America, but France had its revenge in the American Revolution when its army, allied with George Washington’s forces, decisively defeated the British and so secured independence for the United States. Ten years later the Revolutionary Wars began, and except for one brief respite in 1802, those wars would last till 1815. Waterloo ended the struggle and ensured that Britain would dominate the nineteenth century, a domination that was sealed by the Duke of Wellington’s defence of the ridge at Mont St Jean.

  ‘The Duke of Wellington and officers and soldiers of the Allied army at the end of the Battle of Waterloo’, by Jan Willem Pieneman in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Prince William of Orange lies wounded on a stretcher in the left foreground.

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