On June 16, Napoleon divided his army into three. Ney took the left wing with three corps to prevent the juncture of the two enemy forces by capturing the crossroads at Quatre Bras – where the north–south Brussels–Charleroi highway crosses the vital east–west Namur–Nivelles road that was the principal lateral link between Blücher and Wellington – while Grouchy was on the right wing with his corps, and Napoleon stayed in the centre with the Imperial Guard and another corps.61 Later that day, as Ney engaged first the Prince of Orange and then Wellington himself at Quatre Bras, Napoleon and Grouchy attacked Blücher at Ligny. ‘You must go towards that steeple,’ he told Gérard, ‘and drive the Prussians in as far as you can. I will support you. Grouchy has my orders.’62 While these mission-defined orders might sound somewhat casual, a general of Gérard’s enormous experience knew what was expected of him. Napoleon meanwhile ordered an army corps of 20,000 men under General d’Erlon, which an order from Soult had earlier detached from Ney’s command on its way to Quatre Bras, to fall on the exposed Prussian right flank at Ligny.
Had d’Erlon arrived as arranged, Napoleon’s respectable victory at Ligny would have turned into a devastating rout, but instead, just as he was about to engage, he received urgent, imperative orders from Ney that he was needed at Quatre Bras, so he turned around and marched to that battlefield.63 Before he got there and was able to make a contribution, Soult ordered him to turn round and return to Ligny, where his exhausted corps arrived too late to take part in that battle also. This confusion between Ney, Soult and d’Erlon robbed Napoleon of a decisive victory at Ligny, where Blücher lost around 17,000 casualties to Napoleon’s 11,000 and the Prussians were driven from the field by nightfall.64 Ney meanwhile lost over 4,000 men and failed to capture Quatre Bras.
‘It may happen to me to lose battles,’ Napoleon had told the Piedmontese envoys back in 1796, ‘but no one shall ever see me lose minutes either by over-confidence or by sloth.’65 With the Prussians seemingly retreating along their supply lines eastwards towards Liège, he could have fallen upon Wellington’s force at first light on Saturday, June 17. But instead he did not rise until 8 a.m. and then wasted the next five hours reading reports from Paris, visiting the Ligny battlefield, giving directions for the care of the wounded, addressing captured Prussian officers on their country’s foreign policy and talking to his own generals ‘with his accustomed ease’ on various political topics.66 Only at noon did he send Grouchy off with a huge corps of 33,000 men and 96 guns to follow the Prussian army, thereby splitting his force the day before he anticipated a major battle against Wellington, rather than concentrating it.67 ‘Now then, Grouchy, follow up those Prussians,’ Napoleon said, ‘give them a touch of cold steel in their kidneys, but be sure to keep in communication with me by your left flank.’68 But in sending Grouchy off, he was ignoring one of his own military maxims: ‘No force should be detached on the eve of battle, because affairs may change during the night, either by the retreat of the enemy, or the arrival of large reinforcements which might enable him to resume the offensive, and render your previous dispositions disastrous.’69
Although visiting Ligny gave him an idea of the Prussian order of battle and of which enemy corps had been most damaged, this intelligence could never compensate for letting the Prussian army escape – which it might not have done if he had sent Grouchy off on the 16th, or very early on the 17th. Soult had sent Pajol on a reconnaissance towards Namur, where he had captured some guns and prisoners, leading Napoleon further towards the theory that most of the Prussian army was retreating in disarray on its supply lines.70 Various comments he made that day and subsequently suggest that Napoleon thought he had so shattered the Prussians at Ligny that they could play no further significant part in the campaign. No reconnaissance was therefore sent northwards.
The Prussians had a fifteen-hour head-start on Grouchy, who didn’t know in which direction they had gone. Blücher had been concussed during the battle, and his chief-of-staff, General August von Gneisenau, had ordered a retreat to the north, to stay close to Wellington’s army, rather than east. This counter-intuitive move was to be described by Wellington as the most important decision of the nineteenth century. As he fought and refought the battle in his mind over the next half-decade, Napoleon blamed many factors for his defeat, but he acknowledged that either he should have given the job of staving off the Prussians to the more vigorous Vandamme or Suchet, or he should have left it to Pajol with a single division. ‘I ought to have taken all the other troops with me,’ he ruefully concluded.71
Only later on June 17 did Napoleon move off at a leisurely pace towards Quatre Bras, arriving at 1 p.m. to join Ney. By that time Wellington had learned what had happened at Ligny and was prudently retreating north himself in the pouring rain, with plenty of time to take up position on the ridge of Mont Saint-Jean. This was a few miles south of his headquarters at the village of Waterloo, in an area he had previously reconnoitred and whose myriad defensive advantages as a battlefield – only 3 miles wide with plenty of ‘hidden’ ground and two large stone farmhouses called Hougoumont and La Haie Sainte out in front of a ridge – he had already spotted. ‘It is an approved maxim in war never to do what the enemy wishes you to do’, was another of Napoleon’s sayings, ‘for this reason alone, because he wishes it. A field of battle, therefore, which he has previously studied and reconnoitred should be avoided.’72 Not committing the Guard at Borodino, staying too long in Moscow and Leipzig, splitting his forces in the Leipzig and Waterloo campaigns and, finally, coming to the decisive engagement on ground which his opponent had chosen: all were the result of Napoleon not following his own military maxims.
Napoleon spent some of June 17 visiting battalions that had distinguished themselves at Ligny, and admonishing those that had not. He recognized Colonel Odoards of the 22nd Line, who used to be in his Guard, and asked him how many men he had on parade (1,830), how many they had lost the day before (220), and what was being done with abandoned Prussian muskets.73 When Odoards told him they were being destroyed, Napoleon said they were needed by the National Guard and offered 3 francs for every one collected. Otherwise the morning of the 17th was characterized by an entirely unaccustomed torpor.
Claims were made decades after the campaign by Jérôme and Larrey that Napoleon’s lethargy was the result of his suffering from haemorrhoids which incapacitated him after Ligny.74 ‘My brother, I hear that you suffer from piles,’ Napoleon had written to Jérôme in May 1807. ‘The simplest way to get rid of them is to apply three or four leeches. Since I used this remedy ten years ago, I haven’t been tormented again.’75 But was he in fact tormented? This might be the reason why he spent hardly any time on horseback during the battle of Waterloo – visiting the Grand Battery once at 3 p.m. and riding along the battlefront at 6 p.m. – and why he twice retired to a farmhouse at Rossomme about 1,500 yards behind the lines for short periods.76 He swore at his page, Gudin, for swinging him on to his saddle too violently at Le Caillou in the morning, later apologizing, saying: ‘When you help a man to mount, it’s best done gently.’77 General Auguste Pétiet, who was on Soult’s staff at Waterloo, recalled that
His pot-belly was unusually pronounced for a man of forty-five. Furthermore, it was noticeable during this campaign that he remained on horseback much less than in the past. When he dismounted, either to study maps or else to send messages and receive reports, members of his staff would set before him a small deal table and a rough chair made of the same wood, and on this he would remain seated for long periods at a time.78
A bladder infection has also been diagnosed by historians, although Napoleon’s valet Marchand denied that his master suffered from one during this period, as has narcolepsy, of which there is no persuasive evidence either. ‘At no point in his life did the Emperor display more energy, more authority, or greater capacity as a leader of men,’ recalled one of his closest aides-de-camp, Flahaut.79 But by 1815 Napoleon was nearly forty-six, overweight, and didn’t have the raw ene
rgy of his mid-twenties. By June 18 he also had had only one proper night’s sleep in six days. Flahaut’s explanation for Napoleon’s inaction was simply that ‘After a pitched battle, and marches such as we had made on the previous day, our army could not be expected to start off again at dawn.’80 Yet such considerations had not prevented Napoleon from fighting four battles in five days the previous year.
There is in fact no convincing evidence that any of the decisions Napoleon took on June 18 were the result of his physical state rather than his own misjudgements and the faulty intelligence he received. ‘In war,’ he told one of his captors the following year, ‘the game is always with him who commits the fewest faults.’81 In the Waterloo campaign that was Wellington, who had made a study of Napoleon’s tactics and career, was rigorous in his deployments, and was everywhere on the battlefield. Napoleon, Soult and Ney, by contrast, fought one of the worst-commanded battles of the Napoleonic Wars. The best battlefield soldier Napoleon had fought before Waterloo had been Archduke Charles, and he was simply not prepared for a master-tactician of Wellington’s calibre – one, moreover, who had never lost a battle.
When Napoleon met d’Erlon at Quatre Bras on the 17th he said either ‘You have dealt a blow to the cause of France, general’, or, as d’Erlon himself preferred to recall it, ‘France has been lost; my dear general, put yourself at the head of the cavalry and push the English rearguard as hard as possible.’82 That evening Napoleon seems to have come close to the fighting between the British cavalry rearguard, slowing the pursuit in the heavy rain, and the French vanguard thrusting them northwards towards the ridge of Mont Saint-Jean, though he didn’t take part in a cavalry charge, as d’Erlon claimed in his memoirs.83 He did have time to stop for the wounded Captain Elphinstone of the 7th Hussars, however, to whom he gave a drink of wine from his own hipflask and for whom he got the attention of a doctor.84 Napoleon was perfectly capable of kindness to individual Britons while detesting their government.
At around 7 p.m., Napoleon called off the attack on the Anglo-Allied rearguard, as d’Erlon had been urging him to, and said: ‘Have the troops make soup and get their arms in good order. We will see what midday brings.’85 That night he visited the outposts, telling his men to rest well, for ‘If the English army remains here tomorrow, it is mine.’86 He chose Le Caillou farmhouse as his headquarters that night, sleeping on his camp bed on the ground floor while Soult slept on straw on the floor above. (He hadn’t wanted to go the extra 3 miles back to the town of Genappes as he knew he would be receiving reports.) Corbineau, La Bédoyère, Flahaut and his other aides-de-camp spent the night riding between the various corps in the rain, recording movements and positions.
‘Mamluk Ali’, Napoleon’s French bodyguard, recalled him lying on a bundle of straw till his room was made ready. ‘When he had taken possession … he had his boots taken off, and we had trouble in doing it, as they had been wet all day, and after undressing he went to bed. That night he slept little, being disturbed every minute by people coming and going; one came to report, another to receive orders, etc.’87 At least he was dry. ‘Our greatcoats and trousers were caked with several pounds of mud,’ Sergeant Hippolyte de Mauduit of the 1st Grenadiers à Pied recalled. ‘A great many of the soldiers had lost their shoes and reached their bivouac barefoot.’88 Never had Napoleon’s obsession with shoes been more vindicated.
Napoleon later told Las Cases that he reconnoitred with Bertrand at 1 a.m. to check that Wellington’s army was still there, which (despite there being no corroboration of it) he might have done. He was woken at 2 a.m. to receive a message from Grouchy, written four hours earlier, in which he reported being in contact with the Prussians near Wavre. Grouchy thought it might be the main Prussian force, whereas in fact it was only Blücher’s rearguard. Napoleon didn’t reply for another ten hours, despite knowing by then that Wellington was going to defend Mont Saint-Jean later that morning. It was an extraordinary error not to have brought Grouchy back to the battlefield immediately, to fall on Wellington’s left flank.
‘Ah! Mon Dieu!’ Napoleon told General Gourgaud the next year, ‘perhaps the rain on the seventeenth of June had more to do than is supposed with the loss of Waterloo. If I had not been so weary, I should have been on horseback all night. Events that seem very small often have very great results.’89 He felt strongly that his thorough reconnoitring of battlefields such as Eggmühl had led to victory, but the real significance of the rain was that his artillery commander, General Drouot, suggested waiting for the ground to dry before starting the battle the next day, so that he could get his guns into place more easily and the cannonballs would bounce further when fired. It was advice Drouot was to regret for the rest of his life, for neither he nor the Emperor knew that, having eluded Grouchy, Blücher had reiterated his promise to Wellington that same morning that at least three Prussian corps would arrive on the battlefield that afternoon. Indeed, Wellington decided to fight there only on the understanding that this would happen.
Had Napoleon started his attack at sunrise, 3.48 a.m. on Sunday, June 18, instead of after 11 a.m., he would have had more than seven extra hours to break Wellington’s line before Bülow’s corps erupted onto his right flank.90* Although Napoleon ordered Ney to have the men properly fed and their equipment checked ‘so that at nine o’clock precisely each of them is ready and there can be a battle’, it was to be another two hours before the fighting started.91 By then Napoleon had held a breakfast conference of senior officers in the dining room next to his bedroom at Le Caillou. When several of the generals who had fought Wellington in Spain, such as Soult, Reille and Foy, suggested that he should not rely on being able to break through the British infantry with ease, Napoleon replied, ‘Because you’ve been beaten by Wellington you consider him to be a good general. I say that he’s a bad general and that the English are bad troops. It will be a lunchtime affair!’ A clearly unconvinced Soult could only say, ‘I hope so!’92 These seemingly hubristic remarks completely contradicted his real and oft-stated views about Wellington and the British, and must be ascribed to his need to encourage his lieutenants just hours away from a major battle.
At the breakfast conference, Jérôme told Napoleon that the waiter at the King of Spain inn at Genappes where Wellington had dined on June 16 had overheard an aide-de-camp saying that the Prussians would join them in front of the Forest of Soignes, which was directly behind Mont Saint-Jean. In response to this (ultimately devastatingly accurate) information, Napoleon said, ‘The Prussians and the English cannot possibly link up for another two days after such a battle as Fleurus [that is, Ligny], and given the fact that they are being pursued by a considerable body of troops.’ He then added, ‘The battle that is coming will save France and will be celebrated in the annals of the world. I shall have my artillery fire and my cavalry charge, so as to force the enemy to disclose his positions, and when I am quite certain which positions the English troops have taken up, I shall march straight at them with my Old Guard.’93 Napoleon could be forgiven for not altering his entire strategy on the basis of a waiter’s report of the conversation of an over-loquacious aide-de-camp, but even his own explanation of the tactics he was about to adopt betrays their total lack of sophistication. Wellington expected Napoleon to adopt a wide flanking manoeuvre of the French left – and deployed 17,500 men at Hal to guard against it – but his plan turned out to be no more imaginative than those he had employed at Eylau, Borodino or Lâon.
At 9.30 a.m. Napoleon left Le Caillou, in his orderly Jardin Ainé’s recollection, ‘to take up his stand half a league in advance on a hill where he could discern the movements of the British army. There he dismounted, and with his field-glass endeavoured to discover all the movements in the enemy’s line.’94 He chose a small knoll near the La Belle Alliance inn, where he spread his maps on the table while his horses stood saddled nearby.95 ‘I saw him through my glass,’ recalled Foy, ‘walking up and down, wearing his grey overcoat, and frequently leaning over the little table on
which his map was placed.’96 The night’s rain had given way to a cloudy but dry day. Soult suggested an early attack, but Napoleon replied that they ‘must wait’, almost certainly to allow the Grand Battery to negotiate the mud more easily. Colonel Comte de Turenne and Monthion recalled Napoleon’s tiredness in the two hours before the battle started; the Emperor ‘remained a long time seated before a table … and … they frequently saw his head, overcome by sleep, sink down upon the map spread out before his heavy eyes’.97
Napoleon wrote to Grouchy at noon and again at 1 p.m. ordering him to rejoin him immediately. But by then it was too late.98 (One of his messages didn’t even reach Grouchy until 6 p.m.) Napoleon later claimed that he had commanded Grouchy to return earlier, but no such order has been found and Grouchy vociferously denied it.99 A bulging file in the war ministry archives at Vincennes bears witness to the controversy between Grouchy and Gérard as to whether, without Napoleon’s direct orders, Grouchy ought in any case to have marched towards the sound of the Grand Battery when it opened up in the late morning, rather than pressing on to engage the Prussian rearguard at Wavre.100
In the Peninsular War, Wellington had conducted several defensive battles, including Vimeiro in 1808, Talavera in 1809 and Bussaco in 1810, and was confident of holding his ground. A tough, no-nonsense Anglo-Irish aristocrat and stern, unbending Tory, he admired Napoleon as ‘the first man of the day on a field of battle’ but otherwise despised him as a political upstart. ‘His policy was mere bullying,’ Wellington said after Waterloo, ‘and, military matters apart, he was a Jonathan Wild.’ (Wild was a notorious criminal hanged at Tyburn in 1725.)101 Wellington’s choice of ground, with his right flank protected by Hougoumont, his left by a forest, and his centre on a lateral sunken road a few hundred yards behind the fortified La Haie Sainte, severely limited Napoleon’s tactical options.* But with the Forest of Soignes behind him, Wellington took a tremendous risk in choosing this ground. If Napoleon had forced him back from the road, an orderly retreat would have been impossible.
Napoleon the Great Page 92
