The battle of Waterloo started around 11 a.m. with the guns of Reille’s corps preparing the way for the diversionary attack on Hougoumont by Jérôme’s division, followed by Foy’s. The attack on the farmhouse failed, and was to draw in more and more French troops as the day progressed. For some unknown reason they did not try to smash in the farmhouse’s front gates with horse artillery. Wellington reinforced it during the day and Hougoumont, like La Haie Sainte, became an invaluable breakwater that disrupted and funnelled the French advances. Jérôme fought bravely, and when his division was reduced to a mere two battalions Napoleon summoned him and said: ‘My brother, I regret to have known you so late.’102 This, Jérôme later recalled, was balm to the ‘many repressed pains in his heart’.
At 1 p.m. an initial bombardment by Napoleon’s eighty-three-gun Grand Battery against Wellington’s line did less damage than it might have due to Wellington’s orders that his men lie down behind the brow of the ridge. Napoleon unleashed his major infantry attack at 1.30 p.m. when d’Erlon’s corps assaulted Wellington’s centre-left through muddy fields of breast-high rye, marching past La Haie Sainte on their left in the hope of smashing through and then rolling up each side of Wellington’s line, rather as they had the Austro-Russians at Austerlitz. It was the correct place to attack, the weakest part of Wellington’s position, but the execution was faulty.
D’Erlon launched his entire corps with all the battalions deployed in several lines 250 men wide at the start of his assault, presumably to increase the firepower on contact with the enemy, but violating all the established French models of manoeuvring in column before deploying into line. This left the whole formation unwieldy, difficult to control and extremely vulnerable. Captain Pierre Duthilt of General de Marcognet’s division recalled that it was ‘a strange formation and one which was to cost us dear, since we were unable to form square as a defence against cavalry attacks, while the enemy’s artillery could plough our formations to a depth of twenty ranks’.103 No one knew whose idea this formation was, but ultimately d’Erlon must be responsible for so important a tactical decision as the formation in which his corps launched the vital front-fixing assault.* Another of Napoleon’s maxims was that ‘Infantry, cavalry and artillery are nothing without each other’, but on this occasion d’Erlon’s infantry attack was inadequately protected by the other arms, and was repulsed having failed to fix Wellington’s front in place.104 Instead the Union and Household brigades of British cavalry charged the corps and sent it fleeing back to the French lines with the loss of two eagles out of twelve. At 3 p.m., once the British cavalry had been driven away from the Grand Battery in the wake of d’Erlon’s retreat, Napoleon joined General Jean-Jacques Desvaux de Saint-Maurice, commander of the Guard artillery, for a closer look at the battlefield. With the Emperor riding beside him, Desvaux was cut in half by a cannonball.105
At about 1.30 p.m. the first of three Prussian corps started to appear on Napoleon’s right flank. He had been warned that this might happen by a Prussian hussar who had been captured by a squadron of French chasseurs between Wavre and Plancenoit, and had been moving men off to the right flank for the better part of half an hour. He now ordered that the army be told the dark-coated bodies of men on the horizon were Grouchy’s corps arriving to win the battle. As time wore on this falsehood was gradually revealed, with a corresponding drop in morale. During the afternoon Napoleon was forced to divert steadily increasing numbers to his right flank to confront the Prussians, and by 4 p.m. Bülow’s 30,000 Prussians were attacking Lobau’s 7,000 French infantry and cavalry between Frischermont and Plancenoit.106 The advantage that Napoleon had enjoyed in the morning of 72,000 men and 236 guns over Wellington’s 68,000 men and 136 guns was turned into a significant disadvantage once the Allies could together deploy over 100,000 men and more than 200 guns.
A series of massive cavalry charges totalling 10,000 men, the largest since Murat’s charge at Eylau, was launched under Ney against Wellington’s centre-right at around 4 p.m., although it is still unclear quite who – if anyone – had ordered it, since both Napoleon and Ney denied it afterwards.107 ‘There is Ney hazarding the battle which was almost won,’ Napoleon told Flahaut when he saw what was happening, ‘but he must be supported now, for that is our only chance.’108 Despite thinking the charge ‘premature and ill-timed’, Napoleon told Flahaut to ‘order all the cavalry [he] could find to assist the troops which Ney had thrown at the enemy across the ravine’.109 (Today one can see at the Gordon Monument how deep the road was, but it is no ravine.) ‘In war there are sometimes mistakes which can only be repaired by persevering in the same line of action,’ Flahaut later said philosophically.110 Unfortunately for Napoleon, this was not one of them.
Wellington’s infantry now formed thirteen hollow squares (in fact they were rectangular in shape) to receive the cavalry. A horse’s natural unwillingness to charge into a wall of bristling bayonets made them near-impregnable to cavalry, though Ney had broken the squares of the 42nd and 69th Foot at Quatre Bras and French cavalry had broken squares of Russians at Hof in 1807 and of Austrians at Dresden in 1813. Squares were particularly vulnerable to artillery and infantry formed in line, but this cavalry attack was unsupported by either, confirming the suspicion that it had started as an accident rather than from a deliberate order by Napoleon or Ney. Not one of the thirteen squares broke. ‘It was the good discipline of the English that gained the day,’ Napoleon conceded on St Helena, after which he blamed General Guyot, who commanded the Heavy Cavalry, for charging without orders. This was unfounded as Guyot only rode in the second wave.111
The mystery of the battle of Waterloo is why a collection of fine and experienced French combat generals of all three arms repeatedly failed to co-ordinate their efforts, as they had done successfully on so many previous battlefields.* This was particularly true of Napoleon’s favourite arm, the artillery, which consistently missed giving close support to the infantry at various important stages throughout the battle. With much of the French cavalry exhausted, its horses blown, and the Prussians arriving in force after 4.15 p.m., Napoleon would have been wise to withdraw as best he could.112 Instead, sometime after 6 p.m., Ney succeeded in capturing La Haie Sainte and the nearby excavation area known as the Sandpit in the centre of the battlefield, and brought up a battery of horse artillery at 300 yards’ range, allowing him to pound Wellington’s centre with musketry and cannon, to the extent that the 27th Inniskilling Regiment of Foot, formed in square, took 90 per cent casualties. This was the crisis point of the battle, the best chance the French had of breaking through before the sheer weight of Prussian numbers crushed them. Yet when Ney sent his aide-de-camp Octave Levasseur to beg Napoleon for more troops to exploit the situation, the Emperor, his cavalry exhausted and his own headquarters now within range of Prussian artillery, refused. ‘Troops?’ he said sarcastically to Levasseur. ‘Where would you like me to find them? Would you like me to make them?’113 In fact at that point he had fourteen unused Guards battalions. By the time he had changed his mind half an hour later, Wellington had plugged the dangerous gaps in his centre with Brunswickers, Hanoverians and a Dutch–Belgian division.
It wasn’t until around 7 p.m., once he had ridden right along the battlefront, that Napoleon sent the Middle Guard up the main road towards Brussels in a column of squares. The Imperial Guard’s attack in the latter stages of Waterloo was undertaken by only about one-third of its total battlefield strength, the rest being used either to recover Plancenoit from the Prussians or to cover the retreat. Napoleon ordered Ney to support it, but when the Guard was brought up, one infantry division had not been drawn out of the wood of Hougoumont, nor had a cavalry brigade been called over from the Nivelles road.114 So the Guard ascended the slope towards Wellington’s line, now well-defended once more, without a regiment of cavalry protecting its flanks and with only a few troops from Reille’s corps in support. Only twelve guns took part in the attack, out of the total of ninety-six available to the Guard arti
llery.
The forlorn nature of this attack might be judged from the fact that the Guard took no eagles with it, although 150 bandsmen marched at its head, playing triumphant parade-ground marches.115 Napoleon placed himself in the dead ground south-west of La Haie Sainte, at the foot of the long slope heading up towards the ridge, as the Guard marched past him cheering ‘Vive l’Empereur!’116 They started off with eight battalions, probably fewer than 4,000 men in all, escorted by some horse artillery, but dropped off three battalions along the way as a reserve. The harder ground was better for Wellington’s artillery and soon, as Levasseur recalled, ‘Bullets and grapeshot left the road strewn with dead and wounded.’ The sheer concentration of firepower – both musketry and grapeshot – that Wellington was able to bring to bear broke the will of the Imperial Guard, and it fell back, demoralized. The cry ‘La Garde recule!’ had not been heard on any battlefield since its formation as the Consular Guard in 1799. It was the signal for a general disintegration of the French army across the entire front. Although Ney was to deny having heard it when he made a speech about Waterloo in the Chamber of Peers a few days later, the cry ‘Sauve qui peut!’ went up at about 8 p.m., as men threw down their muskets and tried to escape before darkness fell. When it was clear what was happening, Napoleon took an unnamed general by the arm and said: ‘Come, general, the affair is over – we have lost the day – let us be off.’117
Two squares of the Old Guard on either side of the Charleroi–Brussels road covered the army’s pell-mell retreat. General Petit commanded the square of the 1st Battalion of the 1st Grenadiers à Pied some 300 yards south of La Belle Alliance, among which Napoleon took refuge.* ‘The whole army was in the most appalling disorder,’ Petit recalled. ‘Infantry, cavalry, artillery – everybody was fleeing in all directions.’ As the square retreated steadily, the Emperor ordered Petit to sound the stirring drumroll known as the grenadière to rally guardsmen ‘caught up in the torrent of fugitives. The enemy was close at our heels, and, fearing that he might penetrate the squares, we were obliged to fire at the men who were being pursued … It was now almost dark.’118
Somewhere beyond Rossomme, Napoleon, Flahaut, Corbineau, Napoleon’s orderly Jardin Ainé, some officers and the duty squadron of Chasseurs à Cheval left the square to ride down the main road. Napoleon transferred into his carriage at Le Caillou but he found the road at Genappes completely blocked by fleeing soldiers. Abandoning the carriage he mounted his horse for the flight through Quatre Bras and Charleroi.* Flahaut recalled that, as they rode off towards Charleroi, they were unable to go at much more than walking pace because of the sheer crush. ‘Of personal fear there was not the slightest trace, although the state of affairs was such as to cause him the greatest uneasiness,’ he wrote of Napoleon. ‘He was, however, so overcome by fatigue and the exertion of the preceding days that several times he was unable to resist the sleepiness which overcame him, and if I had not been there to uphold him, he would have fallen from his horse.’119 Getting beyond Charleroi after 5 a.m., Ainé recorded that the Emperor ‘found in a little meadow on the right a small fire made by some soldiers. He stopped by it to warm himself and said to General Corbineau: “Eh bien monsieur, we have done a fine thing.” ’ Even then, Napoleon was able to make a joke, however grim. Ainé remembered that Napoleon ‘was at this time extremely pale and haggard and much changed. He took a small glass of wine and a morsel of bread which one of his equerries had in his pocket, and some moments later mounted, asking if the horse galloped well.’120
Waterloo was the second costliest single-day battle of the Napoleonic Wars after Borodino. Between 25,000 and 31,000 Frenchmen were killed or wounded, and huge numbers captured.121 Wellington lost 17,200 men and Blücher a further 7,000. Of Napoleon’s sixty-four most senior generals who served in 1815, twenty-six were killed or wounded that year. ‘Incomprehensible day,’ Napoleon later said of Waterloo. He admitted that ‘he did not thoroughly understand the battle’, the loss of which he blamed on ‘a combination of extraordinary Fates’.122 Yet the genuinely incomprehensible thing was quite how many unforced errors he and his senior commanders had made. With his torpor the day before the battle, his strategic error over Grouchy, his failure to co-ordinate attacks and his refusal to grasp his last, best opportunity after La Haie Sainte fell, Napoleon’s performance after Ligny recalled those of his more ponderous Austrian enemies in the Italian campaigns nearly twenty years earlier. Not only did Wellington and Blücher deserve to win the battle of Waterloo: Napoleon very much deserved to lose it.
31
St Helena
‘The soul wears out the body.’
Napoleon to Marie Louise
‘He lived in the middle of the plains of Persia, ever missing his country.’
Napoleon on Themistocles
‘All is not lost,’ Napoleon wrote to Joseph the day after the battle.
I calculate that, when I reassemble my forces, I shall have 150,000 men. The fédérés and National Guards (such of them as are fit to fight) will provide 100,000 men, and the regimental depots a further 50,000. Thus I shall have 300,000 men ready to bring against the enemy. I shall use carriage-horses to pull the guns; raise 100,000 men by conscription; arm them with muskets taken from royalists and from National Guards unfit for service; organize a levée en masse … and overwhelm the enemy. But people must help me, not deafen me with advice … The Austrians are slow marchers; the Prussians fear the peasantry and dare not advance too far. There is still time to retrieve the situation.1
Napoleon believed that if he managed to get all the forces under Grouchy (who had escaped the area with his corps intact), Rapp, Brune, Suchet and Lecourbe together, if the great border fortresses could hold out until relieved, and if he could attack the Allies’ extended supply lines, he might obtain respite.2 If nothing else, it was a tribute to his extraordinary determination and continuing energy that he so much as contemplated all this after such a rout as Waterloo. Soult drew up a general order for commanders to gather together stragglers and concentrate on Lâon, Lafère, Marle, Saint-Quentin, Bethel, Vervier, Soissons and Reims, where various unbroken units were garrisoned.3 Jérôme and Morand meanwhile rallied parts of the army at Philippeville and Avesnes.
Napoleon knew that in order to fight on he needed the support of the chambers meeting in the Palais Bourbon, so he hastened back to Paris on horseback, and even by mail-coach, to try to beat the news of the defeat. On the journey, an innkeeper at Rocroi insisted upon being paid 300 francs in cash for the supper provided for the Emperor and his entourage, refusing a requisition chit – as sure a sign as any of Napoleon’s waning authority.4 He arrived at the Élysée at 7 a.m. on Wednesday, June 21, summoned his family and ministers, and took his first bath in several days. But although he had gone straight to Paris after Egypt and Moscow, this time his return smacked of desperation. Even John Cam Hobhouse detected ‘a precipitancy that nothing can excuse’ in his hero. Napoleon’s swift return only emboldened his opponents, despite their having sworn solemn oaths of fidelity to him at the Champ de Mai less than three weeks before.5
One hundred and one cannon had been fired in Paris on June 18 to announce the victory at Ligny, which was reported to have been won over Wellington and Blücher, but the lack of any bulletins since had started to worry Parisians. Napoleon considered going to the Palais Bourbon immediately on his return, ‘covered in the dust of the battlefield’, as one of his supporters put it, and appealing to the legislature’s sense of patriotism.6 The hastily summoned Cambacérès, Carnot and Maret supported the idea, and his coach was made ready in the courtyard, but the majority of his ministers thought it too dangerous considering the febrile mood of the parliamentarians.* Instead, the Emperor sent a message to the chambers saying he had come back to Paris ‘to consult with my ministers about measures of national salvation’.7 He later regretted not going there in person, saying: ‘I would have moved them and led them; my eloquence would have enthused them; I would have cut the heads off Lanjui
nais and Lafayette and ten others … I have to say it: I didn’t have the courage.’8
Nor did he have the support. The power vacuum was quickly filled by Lafayette, who appointed five members of each chamber to take on ministerial functions – effectively a parliamentary coup d’état.9 Regnault de Saint-Jean d’Angély and Lucien tried to dissuade the chambers from this course but Lafayette was eloquent and persuasive in his denunciation of Napoleon. Accused of treachery by Lucien, he said: ‘We have followed your brother to the sands of Africa, to the deserts of Russia: the bones of Frenchmen, scattered in every region, bear witness to our fidelity.’10 During the day, disarmed and dejected troops started arriving in the capital, who ‘reported everywhere, as they passed, that all was lost’.11
The bulletin Napoleon wrote on June 21 argued that Waterloo had been on the verge of being won when ‘malicious malefactors’ (malveillants) started crying out ‘Sauve qui peut’, and so ‘In an instant the whole army was nothing but a mass of confusion.’ He ended: ‘Such was the issue of the battle of Mont Saint-Jean, glorious for the French armies, and yet so fatal.’12 It convinced few, but the use of the word fatal (funeste) three times left Parisians in no doubt about the catastrophe, which was now also fatal for Napoleon’s chance of remaining on the throne. It is possible that Napoleon tried to poison himself again that night. Cadet de Gassicourt, the Emperor’s apothecary, told General Thiébault in 1818 that he had been summoned to the Élysée on June 21 after Napoleon had swallowed poison, as he had the previous year, and then changed his mind – after which the terrified Gassicourt had managed to provoke nausea and then administer fluids.13 Though there is no corroborating testimony, Gassicourt may well have been telling the truth.
Napoleon the Great Page 93
