by Tim Clayton
Napoleon himself worked on state papers with the secretaries of his maison civile, then drove on to Beaumont, where, as they arrived, Napoleon’s coachman witnessed one of those incidents that so endeared him to the ordinary soldiers of his army, especially the privileged veterans of his Imperial Guard. As his coach passed, an officer of the guard struck a soldier, who presented his bayonet and ‘told his superior that if he dared to strike him again he would run him through. The Emperor seeing the whole from his carriage, called the officer toward him, and putting his hand out of the chariot window, tore off his epaulettes, and the cross of the legion of honour, telling him he was not worthy to command those brave men.’9
After thus demonstrating that his veterans had to be treated with respect by their officers, Napoleon dismounted at his new ‘palace’ and there, closeted with Bernard and Soult, he devised the movement orders for the next day’s invasion of Belgium.
The troops marched off with considerable gaiety, lively conversation and frequent songs, despite the pouring rain and the heavy going. It rained all day, but they found their allotted positions and trudged dripping into camp to make the best of a short night. Lieutenant Martin’s 45th Regiment reached their bivouac about seven in the evening:
We hardly slept because of the rain which had fallen abundantly and was still falling, but we got to talking about the next day’s operations. Everyone had a clear-cut opinion of the general’s plan, without understanding much about what was afoot, so each campfire became a council of war, while these resourceful people pushed wood on the fire and boiled the stewpot.10
In the evening the order of the day that Napoleon had composed at Avesnes was distributed to all units and read out to the troops, who clustered around to hear the Emperor’s inspiring words, recalling glorious battles of the past and the spirit of the Revolution: ‘Soldiers! Today is the anniversary of Marengo and of Friedland, which twice decided the destiny of Europe … The princes we allowed to remain on their thrones … have begun the most unjust aggression: let us march then to meet them; they and we, are we not still the same men?’
He reminded them how they had beaten the Prussians against numerical odds. He invited those who had been prisoners in English hulks (of whom there were a good number in the army) to tell of the suffering that they had endured; he told them that the Saxons, Belgians, Hanoverians and Rhinelanders, who had once been liberated, now fretted at being obliged to bear arms in the cause of princes who were hostile to justice and the rights of man and were even now gobbling up the smaller German states.11
They all had orders to be ready to march at first light. The cavalry commander, Emmanuel de Grouchy, had joined Claude Pajol’s cavalry corps during the day to ensure that they stopped short of enemy outposts that might raise the alarm. Marshal Grouchy and the cavalry generals Pajol, Exelmans and Subervie all had Belgian aides-de-camp who knew their way about.12 During the evening, a local inhabitant appeared at headquarters and told them that if they wanted to cross the frontier it was essential first to repair the roads which had been blocked by obstacles in the woods. Nobody had thought to tell Pajol about the recently constructed roadblocks, including the troop of customs officers stationed at the frontier town, who were supposed to serve as their guides, and they spent the night clearing roads.13
Napoleon had succeeded in bringing a massed force of 123,000 men to the border with Belgium, having thoroughly confused his enemies as to his intentions.14 He calculated that the enemy knew that I and II Corps were at Maubeuge, but hoped that his other forces had approached undetected. His plan was that, having allowed Wellington to perceive that his troops were stacked up opposite the British at Mons, they would march off in a completely unexpected direction, along the broken roads through the woods. They would then launch an attack on the Prussians at Charleroi with his Order of the Day’s final words of inspiration ringing in their ears:
Soldiers! We have forced marches to make, battles to fight, dangers to face; but with steadfastness, victory will be ours; we shall recover the rights, the honour and the happiness of our native land.
For every Frenchman with a heart, the moment has come to vanquish or to die.
11
Sang-froid
Although Napoleon thought his army’s concentration had been achieved in secret, in fact few of his movements had gone unperceived. A French landowner and the Earl of Uxbridge sent cautious warnings on 12 June that the French army believed it was about to attack. And the same day, a report sent by Dörnberg to Wellington contained what turned out to be very accurate information:
A French gentleman coming from Maubeuge to join the King, gives the following intelligence. The corps of General Reille is come yesterday to Maubeuge and its vicinity. The headquarters of the Army are transferred from Laon to Avesnes, where a division of the Guards is to arrive today. Buonaparte is expected every minute but nothing certain is known when he had left Paris, where it appears he was still on the 10th. Jérôme Buonaparte is at Solre-le-Château. Soult passed through Maubeuge this morning, coming from Laon, but the gentleman did not know where he was gone to. He estimates the forces between Philippeville, Givet, Mézières, Guise and Maubeuge at more than 100,000 troops of the line. A very considerable corps of cavalry was reviewed at Hirson two days ago by Grouchy. The general opinion in the army is, that they will attack, and that the arrival of Buonaparte at Avesnes, will be the signal for the beginning of hostilities.1
Indeed, reports of French activity were far from lacking. The following day Dörnberg reported French troops converging on Maubeuge, d’Erlon having reviewed his corps. One of Ziethen’s brigadiers reported that the French had closed the border, and an assistant to Quartermaster-General Grolmann who visited Brussels was assured that Wellington’s army could concentrate on its left wing within twenty-two hours of the first cannon shot.2 Sir Hussey Vivian, the dashing commander of the Hussar brigade, inspecting the 1st Hussars at Tournai, found the French cavalry pickets gone and replaced by customs officers who told him that the French army was concentrating and about to attack. ‘We treated this with contempt, supposing he would hardly dare such a thing,’ Vivian wrote to his wife. Nevertheless, he reported to Uxbridge and Hill what had been said.3
Had Wellington ordered the concentration of his forces on the receipt of this intelligence, the campaign might have been very short. The allied armies were so strong in combination that the only risk they ran was to be attacked and defeated separately, before one could come to the aid of the other. As one of his staff officers pointed out years later with the benefit of hindsight, Blücher should have brought his headquarters to Genappe, twenty-two miles south of Brussels, with his men camped north and south along the road to Charleroi, and Wellington should have placed his men along the road between Brussels and Mons. This course would have drawn the armies inseparably close together along near-parallel lines running roughly north to south. On the most fertile land in Europe, for a short period the difficulty of supplying both armies with food could have been overcome.
Instead, however, Wellington placed total confidence in his spy network, from which he had received no warning but instead assurances that he was safe until July. As Müffling recalled, ‘the Duke learned through me that the espionage of Prince Blücher was badly organized, while he believed himself to be very secure on this point, and expected to hear immediately from Paris everything indicating a march against the Netherlands.’4 The likelihood of receiving ciphered messages from Paris, moreover, explains the desirability of the cipher expert Sir George Scovell’s presence as a member of Wellington’s staff.
But in Paris something had gone wrong. In his memoirs, Joseph Fouché claimed that he had devised an elaborate deception. As soon as the Emperor left Paris, he had sent a certain ‘Mme D’ with a ciphered note for Wellington betraying Napoleon’s plan of campaign (which had been revealed to Fouché by Marshal Davout), but had then deliberately set up obstacles to delay her on the French side of the border so that Wellington did n
ot receive the promised information until it was too late to be of use.5 It is possible that while seeking to please Wellington in case Napoleon lost, Fouché was really working for the Emperor. There is a curious similarity between this story of Fouché’s and one told by William Napier, a friend of intelligence chief Colquhoun Grant, about an important message sent by Grant’s agents. So delayed at the border was this communication (for which Napier blamed Dörnberg) that the document, when seen by Napier, was annotated ‘received from Grant, June the 18th, 11 o’clock’. One might speculate that Grant’s agents were invented as a cover story for the real agent, who was Fouché, or else that they were the agents chosen to liaise with Fouché.6
The story, however, may not have been quite as Fouché told it. Napoleon knew that Fouché was not to be trusted: ‘The Duc of Otranto is betraying me,’ he told Lazare Carnot, Minister of the Interior, a few days before leaving Paris.7 It may be that Napoleon intercepted Fouché’s message, or forced him to act against Wellington. In July, soon after the battle of Waterloo, the Tory politician Lord Grantham visited the battlefield with intimates of Wellington. He subsequently reported that ‘The Duke own’d that he did not expect Buonaparte to have attack’d so soon, & that he had believ’d the Reports of Spies who had never deceiv’d him before. It is said that Buonaparte had discover’d those Spies & made them send false Accounts to the Duke to redeem their Lives.’8 Whatever the reason, it seems that Wellington’s espionage system in Paris was compromised and his faith in it was misplaced.
Thanks to that misplaced faith, however, he continued for the moment to place more reliance on what he was told by Paris than on the rumours reaching him from the frontier. He remained confident that there was no danger and the army continued to behave as if they were on holiday. On 13 June Uxbridge attended a huge race meeting at Grammont where the handsome Lord Hay, aide to General Peregrine Maitland of the Guards, won a sweepstake.9 The Duke passed the day at a cricket match at Enghien with the sixteen-year-old Lady Jane Lennox; her father was among those playing, along with a number of Guards officers, including Maitland, Sarah Lennox’s beau and one of the best cricketers in England. Jane’s tutor wrote:
Though I have given some pretty good reasons for supposing that hostilities will soon commence, yet no one would suppose it, judging by the Duke of Wellington. He appears to be thinking of everything else in the world, gives a ball every week, attends every party, partakes of every amusement that offers. He took Lady Jane Lennox to Enghien for the cricket match, and brought her back at night, apparently having gone for no other object but to amuse her.10
Moreover, when the tutor spoke of ‘reasons for supposing that hostilities will soon commence’ he was referring to the supposition that the allies were about to invade France. He was not expecting Napoleon to commence hostilities, for by this stage neither Wellington nor Blücher believed that they were about to be attacked. As early as 3 June Blücher had written to his wife, ‘we could perfectly well stay here for another year because Bonaparte won’t attack us’, and his view was shared by General Gneisenau who wrote on 12 June that ‘the danger of attack has almost disappeared’. From royalist spies Wellington had just received figures confirming that the French army was considerably weaker than the combined Allied armies, and on 13 June he wrote to an old military friend and colleague that, despite reports, Napoleon’s departure from Paris was ‘not likely to be immediate … I think we are now too strong for him here’.11 Instead, Wellington had a different agenda. His sang-froid was no longer connected with fear of a French attack on him. Rather he was intent on concealing from the local population and any other curious onlookers his own preparations for an imminent attack on Napoleon, now only a fortnight away. That was why everything had to appear normal and the British had to behave with studied insouciance.
Both the British and the Prussians therefore had perfectly adequate intelligence of Napoleon’s attack, but his timing and disinformation were so good that they simply didn’t believe it. However, Karl von Grolmann had become sufficiently alarmed to have sought reassurance from Wellington, and the Prussians gave more credence to the indications from the frontier than the Duke did.
On the night of 13–14 June both the Prussian and Dutch outposts reported the clouds glowing pink with the reflection of numerous campfires around Beaumont and Solre-sur-Sambre. The French had tried to camp in woods and valleys in order to conceal their fires, but they had been betrayed by the reflective cloud banks. Early next morning Jean-Baptiste van Merlen, the commander of the Dutch cavalry outposts that linked Dörnberg’s at Mons to those of the Prussians, reported to Ziethen the campfires near Beaumont and added that the French outposts near Mons were weaker, concluding that the French had moved towards the Prussians. On this warning, Ziethen took his own precautions, ordering I Corps’ heavy baggage to move back beyond Gembloux, fifteen miles to the north-east, in accordance with a defensive plan that had been devised on 2 May. This proved to be a crucial preparation, for by the time Ziethen had to retreat the roads were clear and his troops unencumbered.12 Dörnberg reported the same French movement towards Charleroi, and when Sir Harry Clinton, commander of the 2nd Division, rode from his headquarters for news, Dörnberg told him that the French army was concentrating and that Bonaparte was present. Clinton heard him out and said, ‘Yes, I believe it now, but the Duke, despite being very well informed, doesn’t believe it.’13
When French deserters warned Ziethen of an impending attack next day, Gneisenau decided at last to issue an alert. At noon on 14 June he warned Friedrich von Bülow’s distant IV Corps to prepare to concentrate and march westward as an offensive might be imminent; he then wrote to III Corps, requesting the same of Johann von Thielmann. When they received this warning, each corps would require about twelve hours to bring together its scattered brigades and then III Corps had twenty-six miles to march, IV Corps about fifty from Liège.14 At 9.30 in the evening Dörnberg wrote direct to Blücher’s headquarters at Namur, with a blunt warning that the French opinion was that an attack would begin early the following morning;15 half an hour later liaison officer Hardinge wrote to Wellington telling him that the French were in movement with provisions for eight days and that ‘the prevalent opinion here seems to be that Buonaparte intends to commence offensive operations.’16 At 11.30 p.m., Gneisenau ordered II and III Corps to gather their regiments together and be ready to march; frontline troops went to bed prepared for immediate action and the 6th Uhlans had been ordered not to undress.
Finally, at midnight, Gneisenau wrote again to Bülow at Liège, asking him very politely and respectfully – too politely as it turned out – to march westward the following day. With Blücher already asleep, preparing for a long day, the message went unsigned by the commander in chief:
I have the honour humbly to request your Excellency to be kind enough to concentrate the IV Corps under your command tomorrow, the 15th, at Hannut, in close cantonments. Information received makes it more and more probable that the French army has concentrated against us and that we must expect from it an immediate change to the offensive … Your Excellency had doubtless better make Hannut your headquarters.17
Still Wellington did nothing. Though he did not yet know about Gneisenau’s last-minute decision to initiate concentration of his forces, there was a degree of obstinacy in his continued sang-froid, and his rejection of intelligence from the frontier. Others sensed it and told the politician Lord Grantham when he visited Belgium. ‘Ld. Grantham had heard that the Prince of Orange had two days before sent Information of his own to the Duke of Buonaparte’s intended Advance, & perhaps the Duke too much recollected that His Royal Highness had been no more than his own Aid-de-Camp, & did not pay quite sufficient Regard to Information that came through him.’ Many, like the staff officer cited here, have suggested that both Wellington and Gneisenau should have concentrated their troops earlier, or that Wellington should at least have reacted when Gneisenau did on receipt of such ominous information from the border. But h
e simply did not believe that the French would attack. Still relying on his spies in Paris, he was unaware that he had been double-crossed.
PART II
The Invasion of the Netherlands
12
The French Cross the Border
15 June, 2.30–7 a.m.
For Napoleon speed and surprise were crucial. The allies knew that an army was massed behind Maubeuge, the French border fortress on the river Sambre, but assumed it was there to defend France, not to attack Belgium. Napoleon realised that the allies were ready for an assault since they had had months to prepare, but he hoped that they did not know that he and his Guard were present, he hoped that they didn’t expect him to attack them and especially he hoped that they didn’t expect him to attack Charleroi. In order to succeed, he had to catch the enemy forces off balance before they could combine. On 14 June he brought all his troops to the frontier and issued orders for an invasion the following morning.
The marching orders issued by the Emperor covered only the approach to Charleroi and the Sambre crossings about fifteen miles away. This was a sideways move away from the British and towards the Prussians and as the French marched east, the wide river would guard their left flank against possible interference from Wellington’s army. In this border country, the terrain was difficult: rivers and streams cut steep valleys into the wooded landscape and the roads were poor, none being cobbled and most mere paths. At Charleroi, where the river was thirty yards wide, there was a large stone bridge. A narrower, older bridge crossed the river about three miles west at Marchiennes and a third at Châtelet five miles to the east.
