by Tim Clayton
Also by Tim Clayton
Sea Wolves: The Extraordinary Story of Britain’s WW2 Submarines
Tars: The Men Who Made Britannia Rule the Waves
Trafalgar: The Men, the Battle, the Storm (with Phil Craig)
Finest Hour (with Phil Craig)
Diana: Story of a Princess (with Phil Craig)
End of the Beginning (with Phil Craig)
Copyright
Published by Little, Brown
ISBN: 978-0-7481-3412-0
Copyright © Tim Clayton 2014
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
The right of Tim Clayton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Maps drawn by John Gilkes
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
Little, Brown
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
www.littlebrown.co.uk
www.hachette.co.uk
To James and John
in memory of happy
evenings at Worcester
CONTENTS
Also by Tim Clayton
Copyright
Dedication
List of Maps
Prologue: This Short Campaign of ‘Hours’
PART I: Preparations
1 The Violet Season
2 The Devil is Unchained
3 Glory, Liberty and Peace
4 Old Hooky Takes Charge
5 The Prussians
6 Honneur aux Braves
7 The Scum of the Earth
8 Intelligence
9 Waiting for the Invasion of France
10 The French in Motion
11 Sang-froid
PART II: The Invasion of the Netherlands
12 The French Cross the Border
13 The Prussian Outposts Attacked
14 The Fall of Charleroi
15 The Skirmishes at Gilly, Gosselies and Frasnes
16 The French and Prussian Camps
17 The Duchess of Richmond’s Ball
18 Marching Orders
19 The Emperor’s Orders
20 The Prince of Orange at Quatre Bras
21 The View from Brye
22 Napoleon Changes his Plan
23 Ney Attacks the Netherlanders
24 Probing Attacks on Saint-Amand and Ligny
25 Don’t Hesitate a Moment
26 Thin Red Line
27 Clubbed Muskets and Bayonets
28 Ney’s Second Assault
29 Saint-Amand
30 D’Erlon’s March
31 The Guard Enters the Battle
32 Kellermann’s Charge
33 Blücher’s Fall
34 Wellington’s Offensive
35 Council by Lamplight
36 No Time to Lose
37 Losing the Scent
38 Morning at Quatre Bras
39 The Road to Mont Saint-Jean
40 Panic Behind the Lines
41 The Heavens Open their Sluices
42 The Prussian March
43 Finding Breakfast
44 Tyrans, Tremblez!
45 The Position
PART III: The Battle of Waterloo
46 The French Plan
47 The First Assault on Hougoumont
48 The Prussians Detected
49 The Grand Battery
50 D’Erlon’s Assault
51 Crabbé’s Charge
52 The Charge of the Household Brigade
53 The Charge of the Union Brigade
54 The French Counter-attack
55 The Charge of Sir John Vandeleur’s Brigade
56 Where are the Prussians?
57 The Grand Battery Rebuilt
58 Sauve Qui Peut!
59 Napoleon Prepares a Second Assault
60 Milhaud’s Charge
61 Lobau and the Prussians
62 The Great Cavalry Charges
63 The Fall of La Haye Sainte
64 Guns and Horses
65 The Prussian Advance
66 Slowly but Surely
67 Ziethen Attacks
68 Plancenoit
69 The Last Reserves
70 La Garde Recule
71 Right Ahead, To Be Sure
72 The Pursuit
73 Victory! Victory!
74 Butcher’s Bill
75 Wives
76 What Misery War Causes
Epilogue: The Hardest Battle that Ever Was Fought
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes
Bibliography
Index
LIST OF MAPS
Allied cantonments from mid-May
The French invasion, 15 June
The concentration of allied armies and French marches, morning 16 June
Quatre Bras and Ligny, about 3 p.m.
Quatre Bras, about 5 p.m.
Ligny, about 6 p.m.
Troop movements, 17 June
Waterloo, 18 June: initial dispositions
Waterloo and Wavre; movements of Grouchy and the Prussians
Waterloo: the last French attacks
PROLOGUE
This Short Campaign of ‘Hours’
‘Nothing in ancient or modern history equals the effect of the victory of Waterloo,’ proclaimed The Times a week after the news broke, and it was not long before it became clear that the intense four days of fighting that culminated in the battle of Waterloo had put an end to twenty-two years of warfare.1 Few battles are so decisive. ‘The fate of Europe was at stake,’ wrote the Prussian General Gneisenau.2 Soon people began to be variously confident or fearful that the career of the phenomenal Napoleon Bonaparte was really over, and with it an age on which he had stamped his extraordinary personality; that revolutions were a thing of the past. Aristocracy ruled in Britain, the French king was restored to his palace and other hereditary monarchs could sleep soundly on their thrones once again. These had indeed been momentous days.
As the world realised that Waterloo had been an exceptionally hard-fought battle with exceptional consequences, in which the greatest army in the world had been utterly routed, the prestige of the little British army led by the Duke of Wellington rose to unprecedented heights. On behalf of a grateful nation that had already accumulated a debt of £850 million through its efforts to defeat the French Emperor, Parliament voted the Duke £200,000 for a mansion to add to the £500,000 that he had already been given to support a place in the hereditary aristocracy, and his status as destroyer of Napoleon gave him the last word on all matters military. All those lesser mortals who had survived the bloodbath near Brussels basked in the glory of having been a ‘Waterloo Man’. Waterloo, the Poet Laureate Robert Southey soon declared, was the greatest victory in British history, and the battle continues to enjoy that status to this day.
It was true that the army that sustained most of the pressure during the decisive battle of the campaign was led by a British general, and that it had been his British troops who had borne the greatest responsibility within the allied army. However, it had taken the combined efforts of all the allied forces to defeat Napoleon over four days of frantic marching and hard fighting. At the end of it, the only battle fought between Wellington and Napoleon had been, as the Duke himself famously put it, ‘a damned nice thing – the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life’.3 Wellington’s improvised army of British, German, Dutch and Belgian troops wo
uld have lost if the Prussians had not intervened when Napoleon thought their intervention impossible – but this was always part of their plan. For, as a British engineer admitted, ‘This short campaign of “Hours” was a joint operation. The honours must be shared.’4
Victory rewarded the dogged determination of Wellington and the Prussians to act in unison, despite Napoleon’s best efforts to drive them apart. At the heart of this successful Anglo-Prussian axis were three very different men: Wellington aged forty-six, an austere loner, efficient, socially ambitious; Blücher a hard-living, hard-drinking seventy-two-year-old cavalier, so loved by his troops that it was said they would follow him into the mouth of hell; and Gneisenau, Blücher’s brain, who organised, planned and restrained his chief, reputedly republican and ill at ease among the Prussian and British aristocrats. They were facing an old enemy, ‘the devil unchained’, Napoleon Bonaparte, who had returned from the exile imposed upon him after his defeat in 1814: genius, upstart, moderniser, liberator, tyrant, enigma, the man widely considered to be the best general since Alexander the Great.
This amazing story demanded publication and the Duke of Wellington received the first enquiry from a would-be historian within weeks of the event. ‘The object which you propose to yourself is very difficult of attainment, and, if really attained, is not a little invidious,’ he replied in August 1815. ‘The history of a battle is not unlike the history of a ball. Some individuals may recollect all the little events of which the great result is the battle won or lost; but no individual can recollect the order in which, or the exact moment at which, they occurred, which makes all the difference as to their value and importance.’5 This simile, curiously evocative of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, danced on the night before the first battles, was remarkably apt. More than most campaigns, Waterloo was a jumble of things done in a desperate hurry, without time for food, sleep or much in the way of official recording, and even so soon after the events it was difficult to recall exactly what had happened when.
Wellington’s second objection to a history was that it would inevitably expose those who did not perform well, since ‘the faults or the misbehaviour of some gave occasion for the distinction of others, and perhaps were the cause of material losses; and you cannot write a true history of a battle without including the faults and misbehaviour of a part at least of those engaged.’ Here, too, he had a point: at that time the honour of regiments and nations was sacred and individuals were forgiven most lapses in the wider interest. Individual participants are now long dead, but regiments and even nations have proved lastingly tender of their honour and insistent on having the story told their way, to the detriment of objective truth.
Despite Wellington’s misgivings, at least seven histories were published in 1815 and another nine the following year. The Duke did not think much of them. To a correspondent he replied testily:
The people of England may be entitled to a detailed and accurate account of the battle of Waterloo, and I have no objection to their having it; but I do object to their being misinformed and misled by these novels called ‘Relations,’ ‘Impartial Accounts,’ &c. &c., of that transaction, containing the stories which curious travellers have picked up from peasants, private soldiers, individual officers, &c. &c., and have published to the world as the truth.6
To another historian who wondered to what sources, if all ‘accounts’ were unreliable, he might safely resort, Wellington wrote, ‘You now desire that I should point out to you where you could receive information on this event, on the truth of which you could rely. In answer to this desire I can refer you only to my despatches published in the “London Gazette”.’7 Later, he amplified this view of the duty of the battle historian, who was
to seek with diligence for the most authentic details of the subject on which he writes, to peruse with care and attention all that has been published; to prefer that which has been officially recorded and published by public responsible authorities; next, to attend to that which proceeds from Official Authority, although not contemporaneously published, and to pay least attention to the statements of Private Individuals, whether communicated in writing or verbally, particularly the latter, if at a period distant from the date of the operation itself; and, above all, such statements as relate to the conduct of the Individual himself communicating or making the statement.8
Once again this was sound advice and, had his own accounts only been a bit more complete, honest and reliable, historians might have followed it. Unfortunately, Wellington’s own dispatch was written in a hurry when he was very tired: it was a fair enough account of the battle that Wellington had seen but there was much that he had not seen. The glory that he bestowed on the Foot Guards and the heavy cavalry put them at the centre of most subsequent British accounts to an extent that was not really justified. Moreover, he said little that was positive about his allied contingents, and although he paid warm tribute to the Prussians, his claim to have won the battle with his final charge before they made their breakthrough succeeded in belittling the significance of their contribution in the eyes of the average Briton.
Even at the time, many were dissatisfied with the completeness and impartiality of the Duke’s account and wary of his interest in news management. One participant in the campaign waited until he could use the French civilian post system at Paris before sending home his version of events:
for as half the letters from the army do not go, but are probably overhauled by clerks, as the Duke of Wellington is not a little disposed to repress all strictures on his conduct etc, it would not be altogether safe to say all one might think or know. It is impossible to contradict the Gazette statement of the battle for it is strictly true, yet there are many things omitted which would considerably tend to alter the account, but for good reasons they are suppressed. You would not however imagine that on the 17th the charge of the Life Guards was preceded by the complete rout of the 7th & part of the 23rd or that on the 18th the rear of the army was thrown into confusion in consequence of a panic first spread by some German and Belgic cavalry who fled towards Brussels, which if it had been more extensively propagated would most probably have lost the battle. We were all in a state of sleep when Bonaparte first attacked our lines …9
Assistant surgeon John James’s words serve to remind us that official sources can be just as forgetful or mendacious as private individuals, and that from a very early date people conspired to suppress certain episodes and shape the public record.10
Moreover, if Wellington was anxious to have the story of the Waterloo campaign told in a way that reflected well on him, he was not alone. The most dramatic intervention in the early historiography of the battle came in a book written by Napoleon’s aide Gaspard Gourgaud, recently returned from Saint Helena, who claimed to express the opinions of no less an authority than Napoleon himself. Gourgaud’s account shifted the blame for the calamitous outcome of the campaign away from Napoleon onto the treachery or incompetence of others, chiefly Marshals Ney and Grouchy. Ney could not defend himself – though in fact several others did – because he had been executed in December 1815, while Grouchy had fled to the United States.11 Napoleon made a second contribution with his Mémoires, published in the 1820s, and most subsequent French historiography divided over the extent to which Napoleon was the hero or the villain of the piece and whether others should be blamed.
After the battle, through their arrogantly exclusive assumption of the mantle of victory, the British (and in particular the Duke of Wellington, who had a political interest in magnifying Britain’s contribution to that victory) succeeded with remarkable speed in upsetting their allies, and much of the historiography on the allied side has revolved ever since around disputes over the respective contributions of the various allied forces. British officers were scathing about the Belgians, while the Prince of Orange, wilful and inexperienced though he may have been, could not possibly have committed all the military crimes of which, behind his back, he was accused by Anglo-German officer
s within days of the fighting. Grolmann, Gneisenau and the Duke of Wellington disliked each other and, though they suppressed their personal feelings quite effectively in 1815, they gave freer vent to their prejudices afterwards in arguments about who was most responsible for winning or for almost losing the campaign, arguments influenced by the political circumstances at the time they took place.
The battle became difficult to investigate and describe because it mattered so unusually much. First, people lied about what happened in order to excuse their deficiencies and to magnify their triumphs. This applies to everybody from the Emperor Napoleon to the least significant officer interviewed for Captain William Siborne’s detailed history of the campaign, published in 1844. Second, people rarely knew much about what was happening outside their own immediate surroundings. This was especially true of the battle of Waterloo itself, where even onlookers like the British supply officers who ‘retired a short distance to the rear watching the progress of the action’ soon found that ‘as it spread from right to left the whole position became enveloped in a dense smoke, and nothing could be perceived’.12
As days and then years went by, and tales recounted over port and cigars hardened into fact, or as people made their own memories fit what the historians said had happened, certain picturesque episodes – some based in fact, some entirely mythical – came to dominate the account, while more mundane detail slipped away. By 1842, when he was fifty-four and asked to provide his version of events for William Siborne, Wellington’s secretary Fitzroy Somerset found that ‘whenever he has to talk over that battle, he finds himself so much deceived in his recollections, that he cannot rely with any confidence upon himself, and cannot conceive the possibility of your being able to attain to accuracy, considering how conflicting are the statements one continually hears from persons, all whose testimonies one considers undeniable.’13
Given these difficulties, it is a challenge to discover what really happened during the Waterloo campaign. It does no harm to take the Duke of Wellington’s advice and set most value on official records, while recognising how these, even, might be bending the truth in order to please the recipient. There were reports to Wellington from senior officers but no regimental records survive centrally (and in any case the pace of the campaign was too fast for accurate recording). French reports from senior officers are useful until 17 June but, naturally enough, little survives for 18 June, except what was sent to the official newspaper, the Moniteur, and subsequent speeches and reports, such as those by Ney and Drouot. Prussian and Hanoverian reports are better and fuller and have recently been made more readily available.
