by Tim Clayton
Fortunately, arrangements for intelligence gathering had been made before Wellington arrived and refined after the Prussians moved closer. The allied intelligence centre was at Mons, close to the border, astride the principal route from Paris to Brussels, whence reports were sent to Wellington’s secretary Fitzroy Somerset in Brussels, via the Dutch headquarters at Braine-le-Comte, about halfway between Mons and Brussels. Significant messages also passed east and west along a chain of forward headquarters linking Mons with Hans von Ziethen’s Prussian I Corps headquarters at Charleroi, twenty-three miles east of Mons and thirty miles south of Brussels. There was a French royalist officer at each military post whose job was to debrief deserters from the French army and interrogate any other Frenchmen crossing to the King.5
The man gathering information on enemy activity was Wilhelm von Dörnberg. Dörnberg was fluent in French, English and German and that in itself set him apart, for nobody on Wellington’s staff spoke German well enough to read Blücher’s letters; this obliged Blücher to write in French, a language in which he was not entirely comfortable.6 A nobleman from Hesse-Kassel, Dörnberg was a highly experienced soldier and spy, a famous champion of German patriotism, and a tried and trusted friend of Gneisenau, Blücher and Brunswick. An outstanding personality who helped to bond the allies and kept his post after Wellington arrived, he also commanded a brigade of light dragoons, and had orders to leave Mons and join it should Napoleon attack.7
Dörnberg established a network of travellers and smugglers who gleaned information for him as they passed through French towns, and he received frequent bulletins from French deserters and other French visitors to Mons. At first his informants told him that there was nothing to fear, but at the end of April trouble seemed to be brewing; there were alarming reports of large troop movements from both east and west producing a huge concentration of troops around the French border fortresses of Maubeuge and Valenciennes, facing Mons and little more than fifty miles south-west of Brussels. The French had closed the border, and Bonaparte’s arrival was rumoured to be imminent.8
Bonaparte’s movements were crucial because it was taken for granted that he would lead any attack in person. So long as he and his Imperial Guard remained at Paris, French deployments were probably defensive. Conversely, any movement of the Guard was to be noted because it was certain that it would take part in any offensive. By 9 May strong French forces appeared to have gathered close to the border either side of Mons.
Wellington was undismayed. ‘I am inclined to believe that Blücher and I are so well united, and so strong, that the enemy cannot do us much mischief,’ he wrote on 8 May to the ambassador to Vienna. Nevertheless, the following day he admitted to General Rowland Hill, commander of his army’s II Corps, that ‘matters look a little serious upon the frontier’, while the Prince of Orange, commanding I Corps, investigated possible defensive positions covering a French attack to the east of Mons, reporting that the high ground above the town of Nivelles, a few miles east of his headquarters, looked suitable. Wellington warned the Prussians of the danger, and in response Blücher moved his headquarters westward to Namur, while Karl von Müffling joined Wellington’s staff as liaison officer.9 Müffling did a good job of representing the Prussian point of view to Wellington and the British point of view to the Prussians, and Wellington came to value him highly: ‘There is no person who, in his situation, has done more to forward the objects of the operations,’ he wrote to Blücher in July.10
The crisis soon subsided as the British and Prussian staff concluded that the French troops to the east of Maubeuge were engaged in defensive measures. They were breaking down bridges, making roadblocks with trees, cutting trenches and generally obstructing the roads into France from Ziethen’s headquarters at Charleroi. According to Felton Hervey, a long-serving aide to Wellington who had lost an arm at the battle of the Douro in 1809, this ‘gave rise to the idea that they would never advance in that direction’. In fact the French concentration was probably a rehearsal, covered by a calculated and successful subterfuge, for this was exactly where Napoleon eventually attacked.11
Many of the reports Dörnberg received were equally inaccurate. Most derived from confused sources but some were planted by Bonaparte.12 The most insidious and effective disinformation arrived on 6 June via an agent sent to Paris by the French royalist representative at Mons. The agent had gazed with admiration at the spectacle of the Champ de Mai; he thought the Emperor would leave Paris on 6 June; he had seen a lot of troops and vehicles and had spoken to some people from the military movement section of the Quartier Général who had told him that the Emperor would go to Avesnes, a few miles south of Maubeuge, from where he would stage a false attack on the Allies while the real attack was launched from the Lille area, forty miles further west. This news chimed with reports reaching Dörnberg to the effect that ‘Buonaparte … will certainly attack as soon as possible; and he has said himself he would have destroyed the Allies before the Russian army could arrive. It is supposed he would make a false attack on the Prussians and a real one on the English.’13 These carefully laid false trails help to explain why when Napoleon did attack the Prussians, the British expected the thrust to be a mere decoy and waited for the real attack on them to follow.
Nevertheless, there was no concealing from the outposts a picture of a French army once again gathering on the border opposite Mons. On 5 June the commander of the cavalry outposts at Tournai, about twenty-five miles west of Mons, told his general, Lord Hill, that the French outpost line opposite them had been abandoned and the troops had marched eastward to Maubeuge. Ziethen, commanding the Prussian front-line forces to the east, sent news that the French IV Corps had marched into his area. A British artillery officer wrote to his wife on 8 June, telling her that the newspapers said that Bonaparte ‘intends to be with the army on the 15th’. Over the next few days Dörnberg made frantic attempts to establish whether Napoleon had arrived at the frontier. He had sent a spy south to Laon in France, halfway to Paris, to watch for Napoleon’s arrival, although he was afraid that three other spies he had put in place might have been arrested.14
The commander of the outposts just to the east of Mons, Jean-Baptiste van Merlen, was one of those Belgian officers with extensive experience in the French army that Wellington so distrusted – he had been colonel of the Red Lancers of the Imperial Guard and his younger brother was in the French army. Merlen believed that Napoleon was already present and expected an attack any day. Ziethen was equally convinced that he was not and that the French were still behaving defensively, since they were still digging up roads. Dörnberg later claimed that on about 8 June a soldier from the office of General Bertrand, the head of Napoleon’s Maison Civile, brought a warning that the French would launch an offensive in eight to ten days’ time and that Napoleon’s plan was to attack on a line between the British and Prussian armies, although if Dörnberg passed this information to Wellington his report is no longer in the Wellington papers.15
For the French, intelligence was easier to gather because the allied armies were essentially static. A branch of Soult’s Grand Quartier Général was devoted to intelligence and the Emperor’s Maison Militaire, his personal staff, also included a Bureau de Renseignements (intelligence department) which claimed to have good sources of information within the Belgian army.16 The English newspapers too provided fairly accurate news from the front, while Napoleon also had spies on the enemy side of the border to tell him where the allied armies were deployed: on 12 May one had been arrested in the cantonments of the British 69th Regiment.
And the Emperor was now considering where to strike. A move from Lille or Condé in the western sector against Louis XVIII in Ghent was appealing as it would cut the British supply lines to Ostend on the coast, while even though the enemy had strengthened the border fortresses, Napoleon could bypass them. The main drawback of this course was that even if he took Brussels he would thereby roll the Anglo-German-Dutch army eastward onto its Prussian allies.
An attack on the Prussians via the valley of the Meuse which led to Namur in the eastern sector was less attractive, since it would simply drive the Prussians into the arms of the British before Napoleon even reached Brussels. The place to strike was where the two armies joined on the line from Charleroi to Brussels. That way Napoleon could roll back the Prussians towards Germany and the British in the opposite direction, towards the sea, while heading straight for the Belgian capital, only thirty miles away.
The results of such an attack would become clear as it developed but it offered a variety of attractive possibilities. Both enemy armies were so spread out that with any luck a sudden attack might not only allow Bonaparte to eliminate first one army and then the other, but even to destroy them corps by corps. He decided to aim at the Prussians, knowing that their army was spaced out along its line of communication with Germany, and that Ziethen’s corps was exposed close to the border around Charleroi. He would march eastward from his position opposite the British and attack Charleroi, using the river Sambre to protect his left flank against any possible intervention by Wellington. He hoped to crush Ziethen and send the Prussians rolling back eastward to Liège before they even concentrated their forces. Failing that, if the Prussians succeeded in concentrating an army close enough to Ziethen to support him before he was destroyed, Napoleon hoped to fight a decisive battle against them and then to advance on Brussels.
Napoleon sent Soult north on 7 June with orders to find out all he could about the enemy’s deployment, to set up an espionage office at Lille, and to put together a company of men familiar with the roads in Belgium. At the same time he sent his own aide, Charles de la Bédoyère, into Belgium to make a final check that the British and Prussians were still calmly waiting in their cantonments to launch their invasion of France. La Bédoyère spent the days between 7 and 12 June touring the villages and towns where the Anglo-Dutch army was living. He was in Brussels when Wellington held another magnificent ball on 8 June, and reported to Napoleon at Avesnes that Wellington thought an invasion possible but improbable, especially not immediately. The British and Prussian cantonments remained widespread. They were too extended and it was perfectly possible to cut between the two armies.17 The Emperor’s plan seemed to be falling into place.
9
Waiting for the Invasion of France
Wellington’s army was happy enough in its cantonments, sheltered from the torrential rain that pelted down on Belgium that spring. British commissaries bought fresh food and forage locally, paying with Treasury bonds, which could be redeemed after a set delay, or converted immediately into a smaller sum of cash (thus enabling the commissaries to make fortunes). As a semi-literate trooper of the King’s Dragoon Guards explained, rations were tolerable but they did not always arrive: ‘hour alounse Per Day is One Pound of Beef a Pound and half of Bred half a Pint o Gin But the worst of all we dont get it Regeler and If we dont get it the Day it is due we Luse it wish It is ofton the Case i asure you.’ The soldiers spent their pay on tobacco and more gin – the latter, they were delighted to find, cost only 10d. a quart in the Netherlands – while officers bought champagne for only 4s. a bottle. Sergeant William Wheeler of the Yorkshire light infantry was one of many soldiers who handed over their rations to their hosts, who provided generous hospitality in return:
The people are remarkably kind to us. I with one man are quartered at a tobacconists, so we do not want for that article, we eat and drink with the landlord and family, coffee stands ready for use all day long, when we get our rations we give it to the Mistress of the house, except our gin, this we takes care of ourselves. We never see a bit of the bread after, if the meat should be good, it is cooked, if not, it is given with the bread to the beggars.1
Officers were also generously treated by their hosts. The tall, slim, blond Christian von Ompteda was placed with the Count and Countess van der Burcht at the Château d’Ecaussines, with his old comrades in arms Carl von Alten and Colin Halkett. Alten, aged fifty, a man with chiselled features and piercing eyes, had commanded the German Light Brigade in the Peninsula from 1808 until 1812, when Wellington promoted him to command the British Light Division, an enormous compliment since he was the only foreigner Wellington allowed to command British troops. His brigadiers, Ompteda and Halkett, had both commanded German Legion light regiments. Ompteda was another dedicated German freedom fighter, a personal friend of Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, and a sensitive soul who shared with Goethe’s Werther a passionate, requited, but hopeless love for a woman who unfortunately was married to somebody else. Ompteda’s aide was utterly charmed by the Countess van der Burcht and remembered his stay there as one of the most agreeable periods of his life.2
Inevitably, women were a preoccupation for the young soldiers, who naturally made friendships wherever they were billeted. Wheeler noted that:
There are some very pretty young women here, some of them are got very much attached to our men, and I doubt not when we move there will be an augmentation in the number of women. I must here observe that your humble servant does not intend to get entangled with any of them. It might be all very fine in its way and no doubt there are many sweets in having a pretty lovely young woman for a comrade, but then, I know from observation that there is an infinite number of bitters attending it, a soldier should always be able to say when his cap is on, his family is covered, then he is free as air.
In May Tom Morris was billeted on the miller of a little village and he and a mate spent many hours strolling with the miller’s young daughters through the meadows. ‘One of the girls was much attached to my comrade, and would not have needed much persuasion to become his wife.’3
Morris’s fellow sergeant Burton had brought his wife with him. About five or six wives were officially permitted to follow each company, although some regiments allowed more. This meant fifty or sixty to a battalion, so four thousand or so with the army, and more women followed the army unofficially. And they shared most of the hardships of their men; Sergeant David Robertson of the Gordon Highlanders was a Scot from the Duke of Atholl’s estates, five foot nine tall, blond and grey-eyed. He was brought up to be a shoemaker but in troubled times he volunteered, transferring to the Gordons in time to fight in Egypt in 1801. He went to Spain in 1808 and fought under Wellington thereafter. Robertson lost his wife in 1814 when, having given birth to a daughter in the snowy pass of Roncesvalles in the Pyrenees in midwinter, she was shot through the heart in a skirmish during their advance into southern France. His journal never explained whether his wife was Scottish or Iberian, nor did it mention the fate of his child, but it dwelt on the moment when, at the regiment’s departure for home, it was decided ‘that all the women who had followed the army from Portugal and Spain, should return with the troops belonging to the respective countries, whether married or not, as none of them would be allowed to embark for England’.4
For those who didn’t find a willing local girl, there were
most excellent pieces to be had at Brussels, Ghent and other large towns at regular licensed bawdy houses, indeed some of the French girls are beautiful and their action surpasses anything I have before met with at Drury Lane or Covent Garden. When you enter one of these houses you are ushered into a room adapted for the purpose and immediately 10 or 12 girls present themselves so that any one that may be a good judge of that species of biped may have an opportunity of selecting a capital goer. All the girls are examined three or four times a week by a surgeon and before I was allowed to perform, the girl just examined his worship.5
The end of May saw a series of reviews and dinners as formations reached completion. On 19 May Sir Augustus Frazer, commander of Wellington’s horse artillery – ultimately he had eight troops of British and two of German gunners – gave a dinner to all the British and German horse artillery officers under his command. Three days later a review took place of the Duke of Brunswick’s Black Legion of Vengeance and Death, ‘all cloathed in Black, with deaths heads and Horses tails on their Caps’, includi
ng ‘two squadrons of lancers in the Polish costume’. It rained hard all day and the corps was sadly bedraggled by the end of the parade.6 On 24 May Uxbridge reviewed the heavy cavalry and the next day the hussars. It continued to rain, with at least a shower almost every day in the second half of May. Officers rode around holding umbrellas.
On 27 May the Duke held a ball at his house in the highest and most fashionable area of town, on the corner of the park and the Rue Royale, in honour of the visiting Prince Blücher. The guests walked through illuminated gardens to be greeted by Wellington at the door. Dancing took place on the ground floor while the apartments on the first floor were laid out for a magnificent supper. General Hill’s aide remarked that:
The Duke himself danced, and always with the same person, a Lady Caroline [sic: Frances] Webster, to whom he paid so much attention that scandal, who is become goddess here, began to whisper all sorts of stories, but we are not bound to believe all she says; not but that the well-known bad private character of His Grace would warrant any suspicions whatever. There must have been something essentially bad in the education of the Wellesley family: on the score of gallantry not one of its members, male or female, is sans reproche. When the Duke of Wellington, after Lord Uxbridge’s appointment to the command of the British cavalry, was asked whether he would not feel it unpleasant to meet with the man who had run off with his sister? ‘Why?’ said he, ‘Damn him, he won’t run off with me too.’7
