by Tim Clayton
As it grew dark, Lefèbvre-Desnouëttes wrote a report for Ney who had remained at Gosselies.13 He said that he had driven Nassauers northward from Frasnes to the woods, had taken fifteen prisoners, caused about forty casualties and suffered about ten. Colbert’s lancers had approached within musket shot of Quatre Bras but, under fire from enemy artillery, and finding it occupied by infantry, they had withdrawn. A tired battalion of infantry had arrived at Frasnes as he returned there just before 9 p.m. The Nassauers belonged to Wellington’s army but they were stationed locally and had not come from Brussels, so there was no indication that Wellington’s army was yet on the move, nor had they taken part in the fighting at Gosselies.
The way in which the report is couched indicates that Lefèbvre-Desnouëttes’ objective had been the crossroads at Quatre Bras, but his disappointment at failing to take post there was not acute – it had not mattered that much. There was in any case absolutely no way that he could have seized Quatre Bras with five battalions of infantry defending it, since his guns were still behind two miles south with Bachelu, who had occupied the crossroads of the Roman road with the Brussels highway. Lefèbvre-Desnouëttes expressed the opinion that the forces occupying Quatre Bras would probably retire during the night.
For Ney’s part, even if he had pressed Bachelu’s infantry to the limit of their endurance it is unlikely that he could have driven out the Nassauers before nightfall. In any case, it mattered little: he was well placed to cut the Namur–Nivelles highway and he commanded the direct east–west route offered by the Roman road.
16
The French and Prussian Camps
Overnight, 15–16 June
Instead of driving his vanguard on to Quatre Bras, Marshal Ney had pursued the more urgent business of establishing a headquarters and making contact with the divisions that were now under his command. He chose for the former purpose the most imposing house in Gosselies, belonging to a nail merchant named Melchior Dumont, and while his wealthy host prepared an extravagant supper and opened numerous bottles of fine burgundy, Ney sent messengers to locate his various generals and discover the strength of their regiments and the names of their colonels.
In this he was only partly successful; he was in contact with the leading divisions that had been close to Gosselies during the afternoon, but he had not apparently located Reille. Colonel Toussaint Trefcon, chief of staff to General Bachelu who commanded the vanguard division, returned to Ney at Gosselies three or four times during the evening, bringing reports and details of the composition and location of his regiments.1 Before midnight Ney reported to Soult. He claimed 500–600 Prussian prisoners after the engagement at Gosselies, and told the major-general that the lancers and chasseurs of the Guard were at Frasnes, General Bachelu’s division was a couple of miles further back, where he controlled the junction with the Roman road – one of his objectives – and General Foy’s division was at Gosselies. Piré’s light cavalry was tracking Steinmetz’s Prussians. ‘I do not know where General Reille is,’ Ney concluded.
Reille was actually in the same town, but the two generals had not yet discovered each other’s whereabouts. In Reille’s own, realistic and matter-of-fact report to Soult he stated that one battalion of the 2nd light infantry had reached Frasnes around 9 p.m., while the rest of Bachelu’s division and the cavalry were just behind. Two divisions were around his headquarters but Jean-Baptiste Girard’s division had followed Napoleon’s order to take the road toward Fleurus. The light infantry had suffered about eighty casualties and the 1st Chasseurs around twenty to twenty-five, but they had taken 260 prisoners.
The comte d’Erlon, commander of I Corps, was at Jumet, a mile south of Gosselies. Although he had written several letters on the subject, his order to hold the Sambre crossings had not been rescinded, so his troops were still guarding points along his line of march and one brigade of his cavalry was acting as rearguard all the way back between Solre and Thuin. A brigade of cavalry and three divisions of infantry were camped along the road between Gosselies and Marchiennes, but the fourth, Joachim Quiot’s division, was guarding the crossings near Thuin, seventeen miles further behind. In the evening they were belatedly given orders to destroy the bridges across the Sambre from Thuin to Marchiennes and march forward at first light.2
This was another example of the sort of detail that Marshal Berthier, had he been present, would have dealt with on the Emperor’s behalf. Bad communication with Vandamme had led to one crucial delay; now failure to communicate properly with d’Erlon led to another. In guarding the bridges Napoleon had taken sensible precautions to prevent any flank attack by Wellington’s troops, but he had forgotten to issue orders to destroy them once it was clear that he no longer needed them intact. Soult, however, did not spot the problem emerging and did not remind Napoleon of it when he needed reminding. Consequently, next day when d’Erlon’s troops were suddenly needed at the front, they were still strung out miles back along the road. Though there had originally been a perfectly good military reason for keeping them in that position, the fact that they were not now further ahead was entirely the Emperor’s fault.
These troops stacked up idly behind the front line had been misbehaving and General François-Xavier Donzelot, who had spent the years from 1807 to 1814 in Corfu as a benign governor of the Ionian Islands, wrote a strongly worded warning to the regiments of his division – the hard-bitten André Ravard’s 13th Light included – about their conduct. He complained that ‘people have smashed open the doors of houses, broken up the interior furniture, pillaged, mistreated the inhabitants, forced priests to hand over their silverware and their consecrated vessels, acts of rape have been committed.’ He emphasised that the Belgians were to be treated like the Frenchmen they had been and would shortly become, and ordered that officers were to supervise the gathering of firewood and forage and that any future marauders would face a court martial.3
Nor was the marauding confined to Donzelot’s division. Lieutenant Jacques Martin’s 45th Line was in General Marcognet’s division and bivouacked near Marchiennes:
This night was better than the preceding one. It didn’t rain. The soldiers went to find wood and straw and, as was usually the case, while searching the attic for wood, they found some wine in the cellar. It is an inevitable evil: to look for forage, it is necessary to enter houses. Indeed, it is fortunate when nothing more serious happens. Among those given this job, one of our soldiers who had fought in Spain went straight to the village priest and, as he knew the ways of these gentlemen, he went down into the cellar and from it brought us back several bottles of an excellent, well-aged wine, which we drank to the health of the good cleric.4
Despite his failure to occupy Quatre Bras, Ney had done much better than the right wing. Having stopped several miles short of the crossroads that had been its ultimate goal, the French right wing camped about two miles short of Fleurus, the town that had probably been their main objective. Marshal Grouchy later claimed that they were obliged to halt because General Vandamme refused to obey his order to support the cavalry in attacking the town, and whether or not this was true they were evidently not getting on well together.5 In any case, Napoleon must have been fairly satisfied with what his army had achieved. Unless the French had induced a panic rout in the Prussian corps that was contesting their progress, they could never have got beyond Fleurus that day. You could only push troops so far without courting disaster.
Overnight, the Guard camped near Charleroi. By 9 p.m. Napoleon had returned to his headquarters at the Château Puissant, where Hippolyte de Mauduit’s battalion, the second of the 1st Grenadiers-à-pied, took their turn as headquarters guard, piling their guns and camping in the courtyard. Mauduit was a twenty-year-old Breton who had fought in the campaign of 1813 in Saxony. Awarded promotion for bravery, he had elected to become a sergeant in the Old Guard rather than an officer of the line.
They spent the evening cooking food, both for present consumption and for the next day. They had been on t
he march for nearly eighteen hours and had had no chance to cook and they expected that the next day might well follow the same pattern.6 The Emperor slept while he waited for reports to come in.
The vanguard camped at the edge of the woods just south of Fleurus. Grouchy wrote a report full of praise for his intrepid troops, claiming that the 15th Dragoons had broken a square and taken 300 prisoners. The ill-feeling and bickering between the three generals was evident in their reports. Pajol complained about Vandamme’s unsoldierlike failure to support his outposts with infantry, while Vandamme wrote a matter-of-fact statement of the location of his troops. Vandamme said that in his opinion the enemy was 12–15,000 strong and in retreat beyond Fleurus, while Grouchy estimated their strength at 30,000. On this occasion Grouchy may have been closer to the truth, but Vandamme was evidently a difficult colleague.
Count Lobau with his VI Corps camped for the night on the south side of the Sambre. Slowed by narrow defiles that forced the men to go through almost one by one, and tired because bad roads churned up by the passage of preceding troops were thick with cloying mud, they had only reached the river at 8 p.m. after marching twelve miles at a snail’s pace. The leading division of Gérard’s IV Corps had meanwhile crossed the Sambre in the evening and formed a bridgehead on the north side. Two more divisions were at Châtelet, just east of Charleroi, but the last infantry division and the cavalry were further back. The rear divisions had marched a very creditable distance under the circumstances and camped late and tired, along with the cuirassiers of Jacques Delort’s rearguard.
Once again the army’s travelling printing press went to work after these reports reached headquarters at Charleroi, producing the first Army Bulletin of the campaign. This claimed that Reille had taken 300 prisoners and Domon 400 during the advance to the Sambre. At Gilly they had caused 4–500 casualties and taken 1500 prisoners by breaking three squares. French losses were ten killed and eighty wounded.
For their part, the Prussians admitted to about 1200 losses in total, while the real losses were probably about 600 French and 2000 Prussians.7 General Ziethen had reason to be satisfied with the performance of his corps, having retired almost intact to the overnight position at Fleurus that Quartermaster-General Grolmann had ordered him to occupy. At 10 p.m. his cavalry camped behind the town, leaving strong outposts to the south. Otto von Pirch’s tired brigade bivouacked at Ligny, a couple of miles north of Fleurus, while Steinmetz’s trooped into the neighbouring village of Saint-Amand towards midnight after a harassing fighting retreat. Ziethen’s other two brigades guarded Fleurus and Ligny, so that his whole corps was united in the area that the staff had selected for a battle next day.
However, the concentration and movement of the other Prussian corps was not going so well. Blücher had set up his headquarters at the presbytery at Sombreffe during the afternoon, finding the staircase carved with French graffiti from 1794, and there he waited anxiously for news of the rest of his army. Delayed by rain and mud, small elements of Georg von Pirch’s II Corps had reached their points of concentration at the villages of Mazy and Onoz, about four miles east of Ligny as the crow flies, by 5 p.m. on 15 June, but most stumbled in between midnight and the early hours of the following morning, for some of his troops had been lodging more than thirty miles north and east of the point where Gneisenau had ordered them to unite. After marching all day to the sound of sporadic gunfire not far to the west, the intellectual patriot Ludwig Nagel’s 25th Regiment reached the huge camp at the village of Onoz just before midnight: ‘The fires were burning brightly in the wooded valley. Everything was as quiet and peaceful as the blue sky above us from which a friendly moon shone clearly.’8
Franz Lieber’s regiment was billeted near the town of Wavre, a good fifteen miles north of Mazy. The youth from Berlin whose father had told him to clean his rifle when the news of Napoleon’s escape from Elba had reached the Prussian capital, had volunteered as a rifleman with the 9th Colberg. Wilhelm Häring, later a novelist, was another Freiwilliger Jäger in this regiment. Their draft of 600 recruits had crossed the Rhine on 16 May and had been reviewed by Blücher on 25 May before joining their various units.
On 2 June the volunteer riflemen had paraded with the regiment and Lieber had his first sight of Friederike Krüger, their famous female sergeant, who wore three medals. Having cut her hair short and put on male clothing, she had joined the army in 1813 aged twenty-three. By the time her sex was discovered she had so impressed her comrades with her bravery and presence of mind that her brigadier allowed her to stay. Promoted to sergeant at the battle of Dennewitz, she had won the Iron Cross and the Russian order of St George for refusing to leave the field after being wounded. She was the only woman officially serving in the Prussian army, although Lieber knew of another in his brigade who had gone in her brother’s clothes so that he could help their parents avoid starvation, and there were many more following the troops. They got orders to assemble around midday and set off southward for Mazy in the evening, marching all night.9
The 22nd Regiment had been billeted in villages halfway between Namur and Liège and it took until 9 p.m. for the regiment to assemble before they marched through the night to reach Namur at four the following morning. There, a lieutenant noted in his diary: ‘Tired out by the night march, we rested for two hours under the beautiful lime and chestnut trees. The entire military road was covered with troops that were marching to the army’s assembly point at Sombreffe. The residents of Namur were standing in crowds on the main road, watching the troops march by.’10 III Corps also concentrated very slowly, but reached Namur before midnight; this was nothing compared to the disaster of miscommunication with regard to Friedrich von Bülow’s IV Corps, which remained at Liège.
At 10.30 p.m. Gneisenau ordered Georg von Pirch to get his corps to the battlefield before dawn and Johann von Thielmann to have his troops at Mazy by daybreak, but they were incapable of moving further without rest. Gneisenau had no idea where IV Corps had got to. The chief of staff reluctantly allowed Ziethen to pull back from Fleurus at first light, uneasy because the other corps were badly behind schedule and it was far from certain that there would be enough troops present to hold the position in the morning. Ziethen began to withdraw to the far side of the Ligny brook and onto the right flank. He had hoped to be able to rest his men, but Gneisenau told Reiche that Ziethen’s corps must be prepared to hold off the French until the other troops reached the battlefield.11
Blücher faced the agonising prospect that Napoleon might attack in the early morning while exhausted Prussian troops were strung out for miles along the highway. At dawn he sent a staff officer to find out what was happening on his right flank at Frasnes, where gunfire had been heard the previous evening, and then waited impatiently outside his headquarters at the presbytery of Sombreffe for II Corps to march in. It was looking as if at least a quarter of the Prussian army would fail to reach the battlefield that day, and he had a decision to make. With so many troops missing, dare he give battle?
17
The Duchess of Richmond’s Ball
15–16 June, 3 p.m.–2 a.m.
At Brussels, meanwhile, the first outlines of what was happening only twenty miles south were being sketched in the early afternoon.
The social event of the week was soon to commence. There had been at least one ball a week for a month or two, but today was the first to be held by the Duchess of Richmond and she wished it to be a splendid occasion. When, however, the Prince of Orange arrived at the Duke of Wellington’s smart rented mansion on the Rue Royale in time to dine at three o’clock prior to attending the ball, he announced with all drama that there had been fighting around the Prussian outposts that morning. Wellington was surprised: he had received no warning from Paris of an impending French attack, and thought that this was probably merely some minor disturbance on the border. He wanted more information before he would act, and the Prince, somewhat crestfallen, sent a message to Constant to stand down his divisions unless Cons
tant had new information that would cause him to do otherwise.1
Dinner was interrupted by news from Constant. Richmond’s son, who had ridden at top speed the twenty-two miles from Braine-le-Comte by changing horses, burst in about four o’clock and confirmed the loss of Thuin and Steinmetz’s retreat to Gosselies.2 Ziethen’s messenger arrived at Müffling’s house around the same time and, after paying a flying visit to the envoy from Württemberg, Müffling came to tell the Duke that Charleroi was being attacked.3 Müffling recalled that
The Duke of Wellington, who usually received daily accounts from Paris (from whence till now the diligences went unimpeded to Brussels), had heard nothing from Paris when I communicated to him the news from General von Ziethen; for the diligences had not been allowed to cross the frontier, and his spies had not yet found means of getting to him by cross roads. It seemed improbable to him that the entire French army should advance by Charleroi; he expected, in particular, that one column would show itself on the great chaussée to Brussels by Mons, where his advanced posts stood.4
Wellington’s trusted aide Felton Hervey confirmed in July that this was the view at headquarters: ‘thinking it probable that these attacks were only a feint, and that the real intention of the enemy was to penetrate by Mons … [Wellington] merely ordered the different divisions of the army to assemble at their several alarm posts, and wait for further orders.’5
When a messenger from the Duke arrived at Quartermaster-General Sir William Delancey’s house, Magdalene Delancey sent him on to where her husband of six weeks was dining with the Spanish envoy, Miguel Alava. She then saw from her window Sir William tearing past on horseback to the Duke’s. On Delancey’s arrival Wellington told him to order his troops to concentrate and be ready to march at a moment’s notice, and then briefed him on their movement orders. Sir William summoned his staff to his office, where he spent the next few hours writing. Orders to get ready to march were sent off straight away, but the movement orders were to be held back until Wellington learned whether there was any threat to Mons.
