How the French Won Waterloo - or Think They Did

by Stephen Clarke

  fn6 Incidentally, the governor of Moscow who emptied the city of food and burned it down was a man called Fiodor Rostoptchine. Rich Muscovites were so furious with him that he was forced into exile, eventually ending up in France in 1817 (which by then was under a new, anti-Bonapartist regime). There, Fiodor’s daughter Sofia married the nephew of a general who had been with Napoleon at Moscow, and she became one of France’s most famous children’s writers under the name La Comtesse de Ségur.

  fn7 The French also refer to the coalition of allies opposing Napoleon as les coalisés, which makes them sound rather like a bloodclot.

  fn8 Montereau, 80 kilometres south-east of Paris, is hoping to raise its profile by opening a Parc Napoléon in 2020. See the Epilogue, page 247, for more details.

  fn9 Perhaps the landowners on Elba hadn’t read the exact wording of Napoleon’s exile agreement, which stipulated that he received ‘for the rest of his life, the sovereignty and ownership’ of the whole island.

  fn10 Alexander used the French slang word nul, which means totally rubbish in all respects.

  fn11 This is a famous quotation that ensures Ney a decidedly chilly reception whenever Bonapartist historians are describing his actions at Waterloo, as we shall see in Chapter 3.

  fn12 A federal European system geared to the advancement of French civilisation – 200 years later, via the EU, France is still trying to make Napoleon’s wish come true.

  fn13 Incidentally, Villepin was so inspired by Napoleon in his own political career that when he was appointed Prime Minister, he gave himself ‘a hundred days to restore confidence’ in President Jacques Chirac’s right-wing regime. Sadly, Villepin’s first measure, a law that gave employers the right to fire workers under the age of twenty-five, provoked a national strike and rioting, and dashed his hopes of running for the presidency.

  2

  AT WATERLOO, NAPOLEON ALSO HAD TO FIGHT GOD AND HIS OWN GENERALS

  ‘Napoléon est le héros parfait … Il n’eut pas une pensée qui ne fît une action, et toutes ses actions furent grandes …’

  ‘Napoleon is the perfect hero … He never had a thought that he did not put into action, and all his actions were great …’

  – nineteenth-century French writer Anatole France

  I

  WATERLOO IS PROBABLY the most-analysed battle in history. Every musket shot and cannonball of 18 June 1815 has been debated, ballistically tested, computer-generated and re-enacted – especially by Bonapartists trying to extract positive conclusions from the debacle.

  Countless veterans of the actual battle emerged from the mud and gore to tell their stories, which are often self-aggrandising and almost always partly inaccurate, because each one is of necessity just a personal snapshot of the events of the day. Over the past two centuries, these have been slotted together like the odd-shaped pieces of a thousand different jigsaw puzzles.

  The accounts of what went on at Waterloo include those of Wellington and Napoleon, both of whom wrote their official reports while the wounded were still trying to crawl off the battlefield. Predictably, both men’s reports are biased – Wellington’s by old-fashioned English understatement and Napoleon’s by the need to stress that he did not have to give up his emperor’s cloak just yet, because his army could regroup and carry on the fight.

  In most British versions of the battle, there is an understandable undercurrent of triumphalism. Meanwhile many French accounts, including those by veterans, tend towards a more puzzling conclusion. Someone lost the battle, they seem to admit, but one thing’s for sure: it wasn’t Napoleon.

  His defenders explain away the disaster by blaming it on everyone and everything except l’Empereur himself. They point an accusing pen at God, the weather, destiny, history, traitors, deserters, the generals, the contours of the battlefield, the type of mud, the dense smoke, the food, piles, a urinary problem, syphilis, and – of course – British cheating.

  So who or what exactly was to blame for it all going so wrong for Napoleon?

  II

  Among Napoleon’s many sayings on the subject of fighting was: ‘In war, as in love, to get the job done, you have to get up close.’ But tender-hearted he was not. For him, war was all about merciless, focused attack.

  He had reinvented warfare using what Dominique de Villepin calls his three weapons – cannon, bayonets and horses. He would launch a diversionary assault on his opponent’s left or right flank while his artillery would batter what he considered the weakest point of the opposing lines, and skirmishers would snipe at key officers and gunners. Then, depending on the terrain, the cavalry or infantry would charge, the opposing lines would break into a rout, and finally the cavalry would mop up with their sabres and lances, playing dandelion cutters with the fleeing soldiers to ensure that no one would be around to fight the following day.

  This was the theory, and it often worked in practice, which was why the Russians had been so careful to avoid face-to-face confrontation in 1812.

  Napoleon’s charges were as terrifying as his artillery onslaughts. The heavy cavalry would trot forward slowly, an impenetrable mass of snorting horses and growling Frenchmen. The infantry would begin its advance with linked arms and march straight into musket or cannon fire, each fallen man instantly replaced by another. Then, nearing the lines, they would point their bayonets straight at the enemy’s hearts and close in for the kill. The idea was to give the opposing army plenty of time to panic in the face of the wave of doom bearing down on them, and run.

  Napoleon’s footsoldiers called these charges a déjeuner à la fourchette – a ‘fork lunch’ – and one of his army’s many slogans was ‘the Old Guard only fights with the bayonet’. French historians describe Napoleon’s battles with all the glee of Dad’s Army’s Corporal Jones’ catchphrase ‘They don’t like it up ’em’. It’s no coincidence that the most common words in French Napoleonic histories are Empereur, gloire (glory), patrie (homeland) and baïonette. Bonapartist historians delight in the butchery inflicted on France’s enemies by Napoleon’s fearless troops.

  Before Waterloo, Napoleon was looking forward to an attack along these lines. He told his general Maximilien Foy, ‘The battle that is about to come will save France and be famous in the annals of history. I will bring my artillery into play, I will send my cavalry into the charge to force the enemy to show themselves, and when I know exactly where the British troops are, I will march straight at them with my Old Guard.’

  In the end, the only bit he got wrong was the prediction that he would save France. (Although some French people would of course dispute even that.)

  Napoleon knew that several armies, in total about a million men, were converging on him at once: the Spanish and Portuguese from the south-west, the Austrians and Italians from the south-east, and the Anglo-Dutch/Prussian/Russian coalition from the north. His only hope was to go out and face them. Marching into attack kept the morale of his soldiers high, and he knew that the French people would not back a leader who allowed raping, pillaging troops to return to French soil. No matter that his Army of the North was only 128,000-strong, half of them new recruits, and that in the first part of his defence campaign he would be going up against more than 200,000 allied troops. He ordered his army to march into Belgium, and at four a.m. on 12 June, he got into his carriage (ironically called a berline in French, after the capital of Prussia) and went to join them.

  Napoleon dictated a proclamation to be read to his men on 15 June, reminding them that it was the anniversary of his victories over the Austrians at Marengo (1800) and the Russians at Friedland (1807), which, he said, ‘twice decided the fate of Europe’. However, he went on, ‘we were too generous. We believed the promises and vows of the princes that we left on their thrones. Today, allied against us, they are threatening France’s most sacred rights and independence … One moment of prosperityfn1 has blinded them … If they enter into France it will be to find a grave there!’

  III

  Napoleon’s strategy was t
o use speed, thrusting his troops between Wellington and Blücher’s armies, hoping to push them apart and destroy first one then the other. According to French historian Jean-Claude Damamme, Napoleon was banking on even more than the effect of surprise. He thought that the alliance was one-sided and that Wellington was, Damamme alleges, ‘cautious and selfish, like any Englishman, and [would] show no haste in coming to his ally’s aid’. A big enough rift would end the war in the north in Napoleon’s favour.

  At first, his plan seemed to be working. On 16 June, his army fought two simultaneous battles, at Ligny and Quatre-Bras, two villages a few kilometres south of Waterloo.

  Napoleon began by sending Marshal Ney – who had been welcomed back into the fold despite his remarks about the need to lock Napoleon in a metal cage – to take a vital crossroads at Quatre-Bras, which was held by some of Wellington’s Dutch troops. Surprisingly, although it was only lightly occupied, Ney dithered, and didn’t attack until after lunch, when Wellington had had time to send reinforcements. Fighting went on until dark, by which time nothing had been achieved on either side except around 4,000 casualties each.

  Meanwhile in and around the village of Ligny a few kilometres to the east, Napoleon began hammering Blücher, and used a sweeping attack by his Old Guard to break the Prussian lines. The battle was a bloodbath, with the French losing about 7,000 dead or wounded and the Prussians 20,000 – all in one afternoon of crashing cannon fire and vicious street fighting to gain control of the village (which was still occupied by innocent Belgian civilians). Blücher himself almost died in the battle when his horse was shot from under him and he was ridden over by the French cavalry. Amazingly for a seventy-two-year-old, he not only survived, but vowed to fight the next battle.

  The problem for Napoleon was that despite a clear victory at Ligny and an honourable draw at Quatre-Bras, he had not managed to smash either Wellington’s or Blücher’s armies. He could have inflicted far more damage on the Prussians if he had pursued them, and might have beaten Wellington soundly if Ney had been quicker off the mark. But the worst thing was that, contrary to his expectations, the Prussians did not retreat east along their supply lines. They went north, sticking close to Wellington. The Iron Duke, meanwhile, withdrew and regrouped at a place he knew well – Waterloo.

  This is where Bonapartists, desperate to defend Napoleon’s record as one of history’s winners, allege that the perfidious Brits showed their true character: despite all their nonsense about fair play and giving everyone a sporting chance, the English cheated. The implication is that if a victory is won unfairly, surely it doesn’t really count as a victory. The Bonapartist argument here is that not only had the British government been financing Napoleon’s enemies for years, skewing the odds against him; now Wellington had a whole day to position his men on ground that he had reconnoitred a full year earlier.

  During the campaign to oust Napoleon in 1814, Wellington had shrewdly scouted out likely sites for a face-off with the aggressive Empereur, and recognised the strategic importance of this crossroads just south of Brussels. He knew that the ridge running across the main road to the Belgian capital – a plateau known as the Mont Saint-Jean – would provide cover for his men when Napoleon began firing his cannons. It would also enable him to conceal the true strength of his army from prying French telescopes. Furthermore, even though the surrounding fields were not as sloping or (yet) as muddy as those at Agincourt and Crécy, the British army would, almost exactly 400 years after Agincourt, be standing on a ridge waiting for Frenchmen to trudge towards them. It was a good omen.

  Some people might see this foresight on Wellington’s part as great military tactics, but most French historians agree that grabbing the high ground gave him an unfair advantage. Wellington had not so much moved the goalposts as decided where they would be set up in the first place. It was not fair play at all (even though the concept of fair play is so alien to the French that they don’t have a word for it – they call it le fair-play).

  As a result of this British ‘cheating’, the French would be advancing uphill across what Victor Hugo, one of Napoleon’s most outspoken defenders, famously called a ‘morne plaine’ – a bleak, sad, dismal plain, almost the equivalent of Macbeth’s ‘blasted heath’. And the fields south of Waterloo were about to get blasted in no small measure.

  IV

  Nature, then, favoured the English at Waterloo, just as the early November frost had enabled the Russians to evict the French from Moscow. But this was hardly surprising, because in many French eyes, God was against Napoleon.fn2 He had been helping the Brits before the battle even started. In a book called Histoire des derniers jours de la Grande Armée, a Waterloo veteran called Hippolyte de Mauduit wrote that General Vandamme was late arriving at Ligny, but would have been there five hours earlier ‘had fate not wanted the officer bringing the order to break his leg en route’. Without ‘this fateful accident’, Mauduit concludes, Napoleon’s ‘skilful plans’ would have resulted in outright victory against Wellington and Blücher. But ‘God decided otherwise’. And Mauduit was at Waterloo with the Old Guard, so he should know.

  Dominique de Villepin entitles the section in his book on the events of 18 June ‘Waterloo ou la crucifixion’, again giving a religious tinge to what was purely a battle for political supremacy in Europe. Perhaps he feels that God sacrificed Napoleon to atone for our sins, or even that God was annoyed with Napoleon for attacking on a Sunday? After all, one of the charges laid against Joan of Arc by the religious court that eventually sentenced her to death for wearing men’s clothes was that she had fought battles on the Sabbath. Why should Napoleon be excused?

  But it is Victor Hugo who argues most strongly that Napoleon’s fate was decided somewhere beyond the clouds. In the vivid description of Waterloo in his novel Les Misérables, Hugo declares bluntly that ‘his [Napoleon’s] fall was decided. He bothered God.’

  The problem seems to boil down to a rivalry between two alpha males – God and Napoleon. ‘Was it possible for Napoleon to win this battle?’ Hugo asks, using French writers’ favourite stylistic tic, the rhetorical question. ‘We answer: no,’ he goes on, modestly referring to himself in the plural. ‘Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blücher? No. Because of God.’

  The trouble with Napoleon was that he was just too great, Hugo explains. ‘It was time for this vast man to fall … the excessive importance of this man in human destiny was unbalancing things … Waterloo wasn’t a battle. It was a change in direction of the universe.’ What Hugo seems to be suggesting is that God was getting a bit jealous of Napoleon, and decided to dampen his squib. As we know, Napoleon’s favourite weapon was the cannon. So all God had to do was put them out of action …

  It rains a lot in south-western Belgium. It rains every month in an average year, with peaks in July and August. June is the fourth rainiest month of the year. Even so, there are French commentators who see the downpour that began at about 2.30 p.m. on 17 June 1815 and lasted all through the night as some kind of freakish divine intervention. Hugo says that ‘if it hadn’t rained on the night of 17-18 June, the future of Europe would have been different. A few raindrops more or less felled Napoleon.’

  Dominique de Villepin backs this up, saying that ‘when men didn’t compromise his [Napoleon’s] battle plans, the elements did’. Villepin, like other Bonapartist historians, quotes Grande Armée veterans complaining about the atrocious weather. One of these is the chief of staff to General Maximilien Foy, an officer called Marie Jean Baptiste Lemonnier-Delafosse (though for obvious reasons the ‘Marie’ is usually omitted when discussing his military career). Captain Lemonnier-Delafosse, like so many Waterloo veterans, wrote his memoirs, in which he was scathing about the conditions of Belgium’s roads in the wet.

  After beating the Prussians at Ligny, Lemonnier-Delafosse notes, Napoleon wanted to regroup his armies and send all his men against Wellington, who was retreating towards Waterloo. But ‘the road was a veritable river … already full of potholes
thanks to the English army that we were following. Infantry, cavalry, artillery, etc., all on the same road, leaving those at the back in the most terrible mud.’ As other armies have found out since, Flanders can play havoc with military footwear.

  Lemonnier-Delafosse goes on to complain about the drenching he got in the hours that followed: ‘The night of the 17th to the 18th June seemed to foreshadow the misfortunes of the day. An uninterrupted violent downpour meant that the army could not enjoy a single minute of rest. To make things even worse, the bad roads hindered the delivery of supplies, and most of the men – both common soldiers and officers – were deprived of food.’

  As we all know, the Almighty can inflict no worse hardship on humankind than to deprive a Frenchman of his dinner, but Lemonnier-Delafosse seems to have had faith in a higher power – Napoleon: ‘As dawn broke, catching sight of the Emperor, [the men] called out to him, announcing that they were ready to rise to another victory.’ The trouble was, though, that the heaven-sent deluge had clearly put victory out of even Napoleon’s reach. The mud made all manoeuvres impossible, and Lemonnier-Delafosse concludes that ‘If the Emperor had been able to start the battle at five in the morning, by mid-day Lord Wellington would have been beaten.’fn3

  Sergeant Hippolyte de Mauduit told a similar story: ‘While marching backwards and forwards during that terrible night, everything was confusion … We searched in vain for our generals and our officers in the darkness and pounding rain. We had to climb through hedges and across ravines … Our overcoats and trousers were dragging two or three pounds of mud; many men had lost their boots and arrived at the bivouac with bare feet.’