The Battle

by Alessandro Barbero

  A little to the rear of Mercer’s position were the fusiliers of the Second Battalion of the Ninety-fifth Regiment. Having received permission to plunder the surrounding farms, they broke up whatever wood they found and built a fire that would serve to dry their clothes and cook the few farm animals the peasants had left behind. Upon entering a farmyard, a group of fusiliers found the body of one of their comrades and immediately concluded that he had been poisoned, although it is much more probable that he had simply drunk himself to death. Beside themselves with rage, the fusiliers began systematically to destroy everything on the farm. They went down into the cellar, broke open the casks, and filled their canteens with wine. Then, since the dead man belonged to a company just arrived from England and fitted out with new uniforms, while their company had been in Flanders for more than a year and their uniforms were reduced to tatters, the soldiers agreed to strip the corpse and divide the deceased’s clothing.

  In the fields near La Belle Alliance, the soldiers of the Twenty-eighth Ligne, having disassembled, dried, and oiled their muskets and changed their flintlocks, were preparing a meal. The previous evening, as they scoured the area, they had seized a sheep, which they prudently decided to keep in reserve for the following day. A corporal who had been an apprentice butcher before enlisting slaughtered the animal, skinned it, and chopped it into pieces. Then the meat was put on the boil, together with a certain amount of flour, which another corporal, Canler, had found who knows where. Barely eighteen years old, Canler had known no other life except the army: The son of a soldier, he had lived with his father in the field, and at fourteen he had signed up as a drummer boy. Although a survivor of many bad soups, Canler noted that this one was particularly disgusting, because there was no salt and the cook had had the bright idea of adding a handful of gunpowder for flavor. Nevertheless, the men were so hungry that they all ate their soup, including the company captain and lieutenant, who came up and claimed their rightful portions.

  A commissariat wagon loaded with gin stopped behind the Seventy-third Regiment’s position, and two men from each company went to draw the gin ration for their unit. Private Tom Morris was one of them, and while he was waiting his turn someone pointed out to him a gigantic cavalry soldier, from the Second Life Guard, who was commanding a lot of space and guzzling vast quantities of strong drink. Morris observed him admiringly, for this was the famous Shaw, one of the best prizefighters in England. When Morris returned to his company, he discovered that the gin ration had been calculated to supply all the men whose names were on the rolls, without subtracting those whom the carnage at Quatre Bras had killed or put in the hospital. As a result, after the gin rations were distributed, the private was left with a goodly amount of liquor. Morris, who was not yet twenty years old, and Sergeant Burton, who was over fifty, took advantage of their opportunity and prepared themselves a double ration of grog. Then Burton ordered his comrade to put a little gin aside for after the battle; Morris, however, considered this idea not worth the trouble. “Very few of us will live to see the close of this day,” he objected. But the old sergeant had a presentiment of good fortune: “Tom, I’ll tell you what it is: there is no shot made yet for either you or me.”

  Not far from La Haye Sainte, the Earl of Uxbridge observed the remains of a cottage that the men of the First Battalion of the Ninety-fifth Rifles had started to tear down the previous evening, using the lumber and the straw from the roof to feed their fire; but the battalion commander, Sir Andrew Barnard, had stopped them from demolishing the structure completely, for the very good reason that he intended to spend the night in it.6 A wisp of smoke rose from the cottage roof, of which there now remained only the beams of the frame, and Lord Uxbridge, deducing the presence of something warm in the ruined hovel, stepped inside. There he found Sir Andrew and his officers making tea, and Uxbridge took a cup with them. Such condescension on the part of such a great personage profoundly impressed the younger officers. That tea remained impressed in the minds of many, including Captain Kincaid, the adjutant of the battalion. Upon arising that morning, Kincaid had discovered that his mare had gone missing, and he had been obliged to spend an hour slogging through mud before finding her among the artillery horses. He recalled with gratitude the camp kettle full of tea, to which abundant quantities of milk and sugar had been added, bubbling over the fire when he returned, and he remembered that “all the big-wigs of the army” passed near there in those first hours of the day. Kincaid believed that “almost every one of them, from the Duke downwards, claimed a cupful.”

  By seven o’clock in the morning Major von Bornstedt, commander of a battalion of the First Kurmark7 Landwehr, arrived with his exhausted men at the bivouacs prepared for them on the banks of the River Dyle, near the town of Wavre. The men, who belonged to General von Thielemann’s III Army Corps, had marched not only all the previous day but also all the previous night, engaging in various skirmishes with the more advanced enemy patrols, for Bornstedt’s battalion constituted the rear guard of the entire Prussian army. While they marched, the rain drenched them as it did everyone else, and they had never had time to stop and eat. The troops were ready to collapse on the wet ground and finally snatch a few hours of sleep, but the major ordered them first to clean and dry their weapons, because they might be attacked at any moment. The soldiers grumbled, but they knew he was right.

  Major von Witowsky had been sent out before dawn with a patrol from the Sixth Hussars to reconnoiter the roads that Bülow’s corps would have to take that morning in order to reach Waterloo. They were not roads so much as tracks, full of mud from the previous days’ rains, and the intervening watercourses, the Rivers Dyle and Lasne, were swollen and turbid. Fording them would be treacherous, so they would have to be crossed by means of the few available bridges. But this bad news was largely counterbalanced by the astonishing absence of the enemy. If the French cavalry was looking for the Prussians, it wasn’t looking for them there. When the Silesians and Poles who made up Witowsky’s patrol came into contact with an enemy patrol for the first time, they were already in view of the bell tower of Maransart, practically at the back of the unwitting French right wing. At about the same time, other Prussian officers sent out on similar missions were arriving at identical conclusions; soon their reports would start to reach the vanguard of Bülow’s columns with the vital information that their way lay open.

  THIRTEEN

  THE EMPEROR’S BREAKFAST

  Several hours after daylight, an officer from one of the outposts arrived at Le Caillou and reported to Napoleon that the enemy, according to all appearances, was falling back. Electrified, the emperor stopped dealing with his Parisian correspondence and dictated a hasty note to the commander of the I Corps, ordering him to begin the pursuit of the enemy immediately. Then Napoleon called for the horses to be saddled and rode off to observe in person what was happening along the bivouac line. But when he reached d’Erlon, he learned that the troops of the I Corps had not moved; according to the general, the enemy in his front wasn’t withdrawing at all, and the only visible movements were those of units on the march to their battle positions. Napoleon, unconvinced, wanted to see with his own eyes. He and d’Erlon rode forward to the outposts, dismounted so as not to offer too conspicuous a target to some enemy sentry, and peered through a telescope at what was happening on the ridge of Mont-Saint-Jean. The emperor quickly persuaded himself that his general was right, and that Wellington’s army was taking up defensive positions in anticipation of an attack. “Order the troops to cook their soup and put their weapons in order,” Napoleon ordained. “And around noon, we’ll see.”

  Noon may seem quite late, but the emperor had his reasons for taking time. A good half of his army had been compelled to bivouac well to the rear of the French positions at La Belle Alliance, and those men would need several hours to get themselves in line of battle: II Corps’s vanguard wouldn’t reach Le Caillou until after nine. Furthermore, the muddy terrain would not allow cavalry to maneuver
and was even more inhospitable to artillery, which always moved laboriously through fields. Napoleon knew the sun would dry the ground in a few hours. He invited d’Erlon to breakfast with him and returned to Le Caillou.

  Breakfast à la fourchette was served on the massive imperial silver, a small meal of cold meat and wine. While the troops who were already in line were cleaning their weapons and cooking their soup and those who had bivouacked in the rear were plodding through the muddy fields to their assigned positions, Napoleon was lingering at the table with his generals. It was a numerous company: Along with the army chief of staff, Marshal Soult, there were Drouot, the commander of the Imperial Guard, and d’Erlon, accompanied by his four division commanders. After the meal was consumed, Napoleon had his map spread out on a table. He studied it for a while, and then he announced to his generals, “The enemy’s army outnumbers ours, but we have ninety chances on our side and not even ten against us.” As he later declared in exile on St. Helena, none of his battles had ever seemed to him a surer thing than this one.

  At that moment, Marshal Ney entered the inn. The bravest, if not the most intelligent, of Napoleon’s generals, he had joined the army barely five days previously, but that had been long enough for him to make a poor impression, for he had led the attack at Quatre Bras without much success. Ney, too, had heard that Wellington’s army was withdrawing, and he was coming in great haste to warn the emperor. Napoleon complacently informed him that he was mistaken; the enemy army, even if it wanted to retreat, could no longer do so without risking catastrophe. He concluded, “Wellington has rolled the dice, and they are in our favor.” Soult, who had fought without success against Wellington in Spain, suggested that Grouchy could be ordered to join them with part of his force, but Napoleon interrupted him: “Because you’ve all been defeated by Wellington, you consider him a great general. But I tell you that he’s a bad general, and it will be as easy as having breakfast.”

  The emperor himself may not have completely believed what he was saying, but he always made it a practice to speak ill of the enemy in public, by way of reinforcing troop morale: “And in war, morale is everything.” In any case, his only direct experience of Wellington had come in the past few days, and it had certainly done nothing to justify the high opinion that his generals seemed to have of the enemy commander. For starters, hadn’t Wellington let himself be caught by the invasion unprepared, and now wasn’t he pinned with his back against the forest, without any possibility of retreat, in front of an army stronger than his own? In all probability, Napoleon was genuinely convinced that the duke had been overestimated.8

  Other generals joined the emperor’s table: Reille, commander of the II Corps, which was finally reaching its positions in front of Hougoumont, and two of his division commanders, one of whom was Jérome Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother. Reille, too, had fought in Spain, and when he was asked for his opinion, he observed that the English infantry was excellent, and that when it was in a good defensive position, its steadiness of character and its superior firepower made dislodging it almost impossible. But the British army was also the last of the old-style armies, impervious to revolutionary changes, accustomed to marching prudently and never straying too far from its supply base: “It’s less agile, less flexible, less skillful in maneuver than ours. If we can’t beat them with a frontal attack, we can beat them by maneuvering.”

  But Reille’s opinion came too late. As early as the previous evening, the emperor had decided that the enemy army, in halting behind the ridge of Mont-Saint-Jean to await his attack, had put itself in a trap, and he interrupted the general with an exclamation of incredulity. (According to another version, Reille did not present his views to Napoleon, but only in private to d’Erlon; and when the latter suggested discussing these objections with the emperor, Reille replied, “What’s the use? He wouldn’t listen to us!”) Not even a strange bit of news brought by his brother Jérome could disturb Napoleon’s serenity. The previous evening, the prince had dined at the King of Spain Inn in Genappe; a few hours before, the Duke of Wellington, accompanied by his officers, had eaten lunch in the very same inn. A waiter told Jérome that during the meal the English had talked about the Prussians’ planned march from Wavre to join the Allied army. But the incredulous Napoleon shrugged; after the trouncing they’d taken at Ligny, he declared, the Prussians would need at least two days to recover, and moreover Grouchy would take care of them.

  The emperor’s plan was as yet largely undefined; it would take a great deal of time and a great deal of work to unmask the strengths and weaknesses of Wellington’s deployment. Napoleon said to his generals, “I’ll bring my numerous artillery into play, I’ll have my cavalry charge in order to force our enemies to show themselves, and when I’m quite sure of the position occupied by the English nationals, I’ll march straight at them with my Old Guard.” But over and above this way of proceeding, which may be considered routine, there were two things the emperor was sure of: This battle would save France, and it would go down in history. At ten o’clock, while the generals were remounting their horses to return to their troops, Soult wrote to Grouchy: “The Emperor directs me to inform you that at this moment His Majesty is about to attack the English army, which has taken up a position at Waterloo.”

  FOURTEEN

  THE NUMBERS IN THE FIELD

  Many books about Waterloo give a precise tally of the armies in the field and their orders of battle, down to the last detail. The meticulousness exhibited in such books is seductive, until you notice that the careful figures of one scholar never agree with those of another. Moreover, the first of these books were published when the officers who had taken part in the battle were still alive, and they greeted with derision the scholarly writers’ naive faith in the official numbers entered in the regimental rolls. When Major De Lacy Evans, the aide-de-camp in Sir William Ponsonby’s cavalry brigade, read in a book that his brigade had gone into battle with 1,123 sabers, he objected: “I dare say it is all very right as a Return, but the 1,123 sabres were not on the field according to my humble recollection and belief.” Recent scholars, basing their conclusions on the rolls, arrive at even greater numbers for the brigade, namely 82 officers and 1,233 men; and yet another officer, Captain Clark, declared, “With regard to the strength of the Brigade in the field on the 18th of June, I have never calculated it at more than 950, or at the utmost 1,000 swords.” Similarly, Captain Rowan of the Fifty-second, reading in a colleague’s memoirs that the regiment had gone into action with 1,148 men of all ranks, specified that this was a purely theoretical figure, corresponding to “about 1000 bayonets when in squares.” The fact is that one must subtract from the rolls the officers’ servants, who stayed behind with their commanders’ horses and baggage; the soldiers charged with looking after the wounded and assisting the surgeons; all those assigned to guard depots, hospitals, or prisons, or to escort convoys; and last but not least, the absent without leave. The forces actually in the field were always quite inferior in number to the forces as they appeared on paper.

  Bearing in mind that there are such limitations on the documents’ reliability, we may hazard a guess as to the number of combatants each commander actually had at his disposition. The army with which Napoleon intended to assault the Mont-Saint-Jean ridge must have counted around 69,000 men, or—to be more precise—48,000 infantry, 14,000 cavalry, and 7,000 artillery with about 250 guns. This was not a particularly imposing army; at Wagram in 1809, the emperor had commanded 170,000 troops and 500 guns, and at Leipzig in 1813 he’d had a grand total of 195,000 men and 700 guns. At Waterloo, Napoleon’s host more resembled the old-time armies, the ones from the days before the empire provoked half of Europe, both enemies and allies, into mobilizing their human and material resources and building up their military strength. Except for the cannon—the emperor always maintained an unshakable faith in the big guns, and he never stopped increasing their number—the forces under his command were roughly equivalent to those at Austerlitz ten y
ears earlier, when the French army had fielded 73,000 men and 139 pieces of artillery.

  Napoleon was wrong in thinking that Wellington’s army outnumbered his. The number of men effectively available to the duke was nearly identical, around 67,000, of which 50,000 were infantry, 11,000 cavalry, and fewer than 6,000 artillery. Among these, the British accounted for no more than 24,000 men. Around 18,000 belonged to the army of the Netherlands, and 26,000 were divided among the four German contingents: the King’s German Legion, with 6,000 men; the Hanoverian regulars, with 11,000; the army of the duchy of Brunswick, with 6,000; and the army of the duchy of Nassau, with nearly 3,000.9Although numerically equivalent to Napoleon’s army, Wellington’s was much inferior in artillery. The Allies had slightly more than 150 guns in the field, a hundred fewer than the French.

  The weakness of the Allied army was increased by the presence of a large contingent of militia soldiers. While Napoleon could count on a line infantry of 48,000 men, Wellington had, in effect, barely 38,000; another 13,000 were inexperienced militiamen. This factor, together with the enormous disparity in guns, was the fundamental reason why Wellington had spent the previous day in continuous retreat and was preparing a defensive position that morning, while Napoleon was getting ready to attack, convinced that his adversary had committed a fatal error by accepting battle in order to protect Brussels.