The Battle

by Alessandro Barbero

  On this subject, the French general Foy, basing his remarks on his experiences in Spain, wrote that “the English soldier is stupid and intemperate,” but that this was an advantage: “An iron discipline exploits some of these faults and blunts the others.” All in all, Foy wrote, the British army’s “main strength lies in the fact that its masses of ignorant men allow themselves to be led blindly by men who are more enlightened than they are.” The Duke of Wellington would certainly have agreed with Foy’s judgment. The full version of the duke’s scathing comment about his troops reveals that he was actually pronouncing a kind of ambiguous tribute to the British soldier: “Our friends—I may say it in this room—are the very scum of the earth. People talk of their enlisting from their fine military feelings—all stuff—no such thing. Some of our men enlist from having got bastard children—some for minor offences—many more for drink; but you can hardly conceive such a set brought together, and it really is wonderful that we should have made them the fine fellows they are.”

  SIX

  THE FRENCH ARMY: “ALL MUST MARCH”

  The French army, recruited on the basis of compulsory military service, presented a different aspect. Even though entering the draft lottery was theoretically required of all male citizens, multifarious exemptions, favors, and bribes—together with every man’s perfectly legal right to buy a replacement if he could afford one—guaranteed that the burden of conscription fell principally upon the rural working class. Nevertheless, the army considered itself, and wished to be considered, as representative of the entire society, in a way that would have been inconceivable to the English. Wellington himself remarked on this significant difference between the composition of a French army and that of a British one: “The conscription calls out a share of every class—no matter whether your son or my son—all must march.”

  In 1815 the army’s command structure was composed of officers in the regiments the Bourbon monarchy had maintained on active duty (though with reduced personnel) during the brief period of the First Restoration; these were joined by a certain number of officers, noncommissioned officers, and ordinary soldiers who had been discharged in 1814 but responded to Napoleon’s appeal by returning to arms under his banners. The egalitarian ideas of the French Revolution had remained alive in the army; perfectly compatible with the cult of the emperor, they were particularly reflected in the officers, most of whom were former enlisted men or noncommissioned officers who had been promoted on merit: some three-quarters of the officers who served under Napoleon had come up through the ranks. In comparison, the equivalent percentage in the British army fluctuated between 5 and 10 percent.

  At the highest levels, Napoleon’s army also included a large number of career officers, who had served under the ancien régime and whose families belonged to the old aristocracy. But the emperor made no distinctions between them and those of equal military rank who had started at the bottom and who, in former times, would probably have been the lackeys or attendants of the wellborn officers. Count d’Erlon, the commander of the I Corps, had been an ordinary soldier under the monarchy; at the outbreak of the revolution, he was promoted to the rank of corporal. Among his four division commanders, Marcognet, the son of a true count, came from the rural nobility of the Vendée and was already an officer when the revolution began, and Durutte, likewise an officer before the revolution, had even been condemned to death as a monarchist during the Reign of Terror. But the third commander, Donzelot, had begun his career as an ordinary soldier of the king and received a promotion to officer during Robespierre’s time, and the fourth, Quiot, had enlisted as a sixteen-year-old volunteer in 1791, at the height of the revolution.

  Napoleon’s officer corps at Waterloo encompassed all social classes and was formed in great part by men of humble origin, but it was no longer as young as it used to be. Especially in the highest ranks, the average age was little different from that in much more conservative armies, among them the British. The twenty-six corps and division commanders who fought at Waterloo had an average age of forty-four and a half, exactly the same as their British counterparts, and as in the Anglo-Allied army, the youngest French commander was a prince of the blood, Jérome Bonaparte, the emperor’s brother, who had been given command of a division even though he was only thirty-one years old. Considered this way, the imperial army seems to bear more of a resemblance to the armies of the old monarchies than to the revolutionary army that engendered it. One veteran, Captain Blaze, addressed this subject: “After every battle, a swarm of officers sent from Paris descended on our regiments to secure the best vacant posts for themselves. The new nobility was just as greedy as the old; all nobilities are the same. Had the Empire lasted ten more years, the fact that a plebeian had reached the rank of colonel would have been cited as something remarkable.”

  Students of the battle have advanced contradictory opinions concerning the overall quality of the troops Napoleon led at Waterloo. According to some, this army, all of whose soldiers were French, was the best outfit the emperor had commanded in many years. Moreover, since the conscripts of 1815 had not been able to join their units in time, every one of Napoleon’s men must have been a veteran of at least one campaign; yet several eyewitnesses stated that many regiments included a high percentage of young soldiers who had never been under fire. In what is probably the most convincing judgment in this matter, the nineteenth-century French historian Henry Houssaye, after analyzing an enormous mass of documents and eyewitness accounts, drew the following conclusion: “Volatile, always ready to argue, undisciplined, suspicious of its leaders, undermined by the fear of betrayal and therefore perhaps susceptible to panic, but also battle-tested, war-loving, thirsty for revenge, capable of heroic efforts and furious élan, and more spirited, more passionate, more fanatical than any other French army, whether Republican or Imperial: such was the army of 1815. Napoleon had never held in his hand an instrument of war so fearful, nor one so fragile.”

  Contemporary opinions are mostly negative, but the fact that they were written under the shock of the catastrophe undermines their accuracy. One commentator, Captain Duthilt, observed that too many regiments had been formed by throwing together men who had fought many battles, but on different fronts, so that they didn’t know one another and couldn’t have complete faith in their officers. Furthermore, he thought, the soldiers who had suffered the defeats of the emperor’s recent years and then served under the Bourbon monarchy—and to a greater extent the returned prisoners of war from England or Russia—had lost a great deal of their enthusiasm. Desales, the I Corps artillery commander, wrote of his men: “I had a rather considerable force; with the exception of the officers, none was very educated or very combat-hardened. There was a prodigious gap between them and our old soldiers from the Camp de Boulogne.” But all these writers found that French soldiers were more than sufficiently combat-hardened when they engaged the enemy. As an English officer replied when asked whether he had faced the Old Guard at Waterloo, “We regret, exceedingly, that we are not informed as to the name or quality of our opponents. They might have been the Old Guard—Young Guard—or no Guard at all; but certain it is, that there they were, looking fierce enough, and ugly enough to be anything.”

  SEVEN

  THE PRUSSIAN ARMY

  The army of the Kingdom of Prussia, considered the first in Europe under Frederick the Great (1712–86), had been destroyed by Napoleon in 1806. Subsequently, during the course of the Napoleonic Wars, it had undergone a drastic reorganization. In the 1813–14 wars of liberation, when Prussia shook off the yoke of French domination and reversed the alliance Napoleon had forced upon it, the new army, although smaller than its predecessor, had performed at a fairly high level of effectiveness. Prussia not only adopted but also modernized the French system of compulsory military service, introducing the practice by which conscripts who had finished their military service remained on the rolls; in case of war, these veterans were called up again and formed into reserve regiments. Alt
hough less efficient than line units, such regiments, led by professional officers and noncommissioned officers, were on the whole equally reliable. The German and Polish peasants who made up the bulk of the Prussian army’s recruits, although suddenly transformed from subjects to citizens in the flurry of reforms that attended the wars of liberation, continued to be excellent soldiers, just as they had been in former days.

  The officers who commanded them were still drawn exclusively from the landowning aristocracy and preserved a strong link with Frederick the Great’s old army. At Waterloo, almost all the Prussian officers from the rank of captain up had begun their military service before 1806, yet the average age of the corps and division commanders in Blücher’s army—forty-five—was the same as in Napoleon’s and Wellington’s—one more confirmation of the parity that characterized the armies of the period. Here, too, the only general officer who was truly young was a royal scion, Prince Wilhelm of Prussia, the king’s eighteen-year-old son, who commanded the cavalry of the IV Corps; he would live long enough to become emperor of the new German empire in 1871.

  On the eve of Waterloo, the Prussian army was afflicted by what we may call a crisis of growth. The Congress of Vienna in 1814 had elevated the Kingdom of Prussia to the rank of a great European power, thus considerably expanding its borders and the recruitment pool at the service of its military. The human resources in the new territories, however, were thought to be less reliable than those in the old provinces of the kingdom. At the same time, the Prussian government had decided to incorporate into the regular army the reserve regiments, the various volunteer contingents (Freikorps) established during the wars of liberation, and several German units that had passed from Napoleon’s service to Prussia’s. This multitude of formations, with their differing levels of efficiency and their widely divergent uniforms, were transformed on paper into Prussian line regiments, but their reorganization had barely begun when Napoleon’s return compelled Prussia to concentrate its army in Belgium.

  Of the thirty-one infantry regiments that then constituted the army of Prussia, fully twenty-five were under Blücher’s orders in June 1815. But of those twenty-five, only seven were traditional regiments that had already existed prior to 1815, with stable troop strength and regular uniforms. Another ten were reserve regiments, recently renumbered as regiments of line infantry but still heterogeneously dressed: Some wore old uniforms donated by England, while others had French uniforms seized in earlier wars. Two regiments, formerly comprising the infantry of the Grand Duchy of Berg, had been incorporated just as they were, with their white uniforms cut in the French style. Another two regiments came from the Russo-German Legion, which the Russians had assembled in 1812 from prisoners of war representing a wide variety of nationalities; they still wore their old dark-green Russian uniforms. Finally, there were three regiments that had been formed by combining Freikorps veterans, the remaining troops from the Napoleonic Kingdom of Westphalia, and replacements recruited in Prussia’s newly acquired Rhineland provinces.

  While most of these troops behaved properly on the battlefield, they were not comparable to the old Prussian regiments in terms of cohesiveness, level of training, and patriotism. The number of soldiers already trained and discharged proved insufficient to reach the new, ambitious troop levels, so that even the line regiments had to incorporate a certain number of inadequately prepared troops into their ranks. As Peter Hofschröer, the most recent historian of Prussian and German participation in the Battle of Waterloo, wrote, “The armed forces fielded by the Kingdom of Prussia in 1815 were, in terms of quality of manpower, equipment and coherence of organisation, probably the worst Prussia employed in the entire Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.”

  As for the Prussian militia, the Landwehr, which in 1815 furnished a grand total of eighteen infantry regiments and seventeen cavalry regiments to the army in Belgium, it fielded many veterans of the wars of liberation and was better on the battlefield than the militias of other countries. Comparing militia cavalries is harder, since other countries judiciously avoided organizing them as cavalry troops needed much more intensive training before they could be profitably used in battle. But for the Prussian generals, and perhaps especially for the Prussian politicians, quantity counted much more than quality in the late spring of 1815.

  EIGHT

  THE MINOR ARMIES

  The minor armies on the Allied side—those of the Dutch-Belgian kingdom of the Netherlands, the electorate of Hanover, and the two duchies of Brunswick and Nassau—provided nearly two thirds of the troops under Wellington’s command and shared one characteristic: They had all been constituted—or reconstituted—very recently. Belgium and Holland, annexed to France by Napoleon, had regained their independence only in 1814; later that year, the Congress of Vienna amalgamated them into a single kingdom. Its new army could count on a fairly extensive recruitment pool, because the Low Countries had furnished Napoleon with the obligatory annual conscript levies, and a great many Dutch and Belgian officers had made their careers in the armies of the revolution and the empire. By absorbing these veterans, the army of the Netherlands secured for itself a cadre of excellent officers; however, they had fought under Napoleon’s orders for too long not to arouse some suspicions about their current loyalties. Indeed, fears of this sort are understandable when one considers such biographies as that of Jean-Baptiste van Merlen, who commanded an Allied cavalry brigade at Waterloo: At the age of fifteen, he volunteered to join the Belgian revolutionaries in their struggle against Austrian domination; after fleeing to France, he enlisted in the French army, becoming a second lieutenant at nineteen; he was a veteran of the Peninsular War in Spain, where he gained distinction—fighting against the British, no less—as a cavalry commander; and in 1812 he was promoted to general and named a baron of the empire. Like many other Belgian and Dutch officers at Waterloo, Major General van Merlen found himself going into battle for the first time against the army in which he had served all his life.

  The armies of Hanover and Brunswick had been reconstituted in 1813, after the two principalities regained their independence from France. Each consisted of recruits commanded by professional soldiers who had fought under the British in Spain and by officers and noncommissioned officers from the former Napoleonic Kingdom of Westphalia, which had been dissolved in 1813. At the time of Napoleon’s return from Elba, Hanover was still in the process of organizing a Landwehr militia alongside its regular troops; three months later, the task had been rushed to completion. The troops fielded by both the Hanoverians and the Brunswickers in 1815 were rather young and short on experience. The Brunswickers in particular, despite their menacing black uniforms and the death’s heads that adorned their shakos, struck the English officers as excessively young. (“They were all perfect children,” Captain Cavalié Mercer observed.) The average age of the company commanders in the army of Brunswick was twenty-eight, and their battalion commanders averaged thirty, both very youthful by the standards of the age. Moreover, because of grave losses suffered at Quatre Bras, several Brunswick battalions were commanded by captains, and one of the brigades by a major, on the day of the battle.

  The mercenary King’s German Legion (KGL) was quite different, however. In 1803, after the French invaded Hanover, many soldiers and officers of the Hanoverian army fled to England, where King George caused them to be formed into a unit and maintained in his personal service. In the course of the following years, the KGL had fought under Wellington in Spain and attained such a high degree of professionalism that it was considered equal in every way to the best British units. Yet the effort to assimilate the KGL into His Majesty’s army had not been completely successful: Its troops wore English uniforms and were trained, at least in part, according to the British manual of arms, but orders continued to be given in German. Assimilation was more advanced at the officers’ level: In 1815 many junior officers were English, while some German officers originally attached to the KGL held command positions in the British army. Karl v
on Alten (“Sir Charles Alten” to the English), for example, commanded a division at Waterloo.

  The experience of the Nassau troops was similar to that of the KGL, but it had been gained on the other side. For years, Napoleon had maintained two infantry regiments recruited from this Rhineland duchy. Incorporated into the French army of Spain, the Nassauers acquitted themselves well. In December 1813, after Wellington invaded southern France, one of these regiments—the Second Nassau, commanded by Colonel von Kruse—deserted to the British; a year and a half later, it was still part of the Allied army in Belgium. The French disarmed and interned the other regiment, the First Nassau, in Spain, but in the course of 1814, the men of this regiment returned home. Kruse had reconstituted the regiment around a nucleus of these veterans, recruiting army volunteers as well as a militia battalion. A third regiment, called the Orange-Nassau, had been recruited by the Prince of Orange, whose principality bordered the duchy of Nassau. Like the Second Nassau, this unit was also built around officers who had served Napoleon in Spain.

  All told, these regiments accounted for more than seven thousand men—more than a tenth of Wellington’s army—but they by no means constituted a discrete, coherent entity. For example, after the Congress of Vienna gave the Prince of Orange-Nassau the new Kingdom of the Netherlands, the Orange-Nassau Regiment was incorporated into the Netherlands army and wore its uniform. The Second Nassau, though continuing to wear the green uniform of the duchy, also entered into the service of the Netherlands. Therefore these two regiments were united into a single brigade (officially part of the army of the Netherlands, even though the brigade’s troops were actually German) and placed under the command of Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar. By contrast, the First Nassau, which was mostly composed of barely trained recruits, had joined the army only a few days before the beginning of the campaign and constituted an independent force under the command of Kruse, who in the meantime had been promoted to general. Thus the organizational complexity of Wellington’s army precisely reflected the heterogeneity of the political coalition from which it had sprung.