Waterloo: June 18, 1815: The Battle for Modern Europe
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Waterloo: June 18, 1815: The Battle for Modern Europe
Andrew Roberts
June 18, 1815, was one of the most momentous days in world history, marking the end of twenty-two years of French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. On the bloody battlefield of Waterloo, the Emperor Napoleon and his hastily formed legions clashed with the Anglo-Allied armies led by the Duke of Wellington — the only time the two greatest military strategists of their age faced each other in combat.
With precision and elegance, Andrew Roberts sets the political, strategic, and historical scene, providing a breathtaking account of each successive stage of the battle while also examining new evidence that reveals exactly how Napoleon was defeated. Illuminating, authoritative, and engrossing, Waterloo is a masterful work of history.
WATERLOO
June 18, 1815:
The Battle for Modern Europe
ANDREW ROBERTS
MAKING HISTORY
Series Editors: Amanda Foreman and Lisa Jardine
NEW YORK • LONDON • TORONTO • SYDNEY
FOREWORD
The Duke of Wellington described the English victory at the battle of Waterloo as ‘a damned nice thing — the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life’. As Andrew Roberts makes vividly clear in this gripping new account of the action leading up to and during the fateful battle of 18 June 1815, throughout that day the military advantage swung vertiginously towards and then away from Wellington’s forces as the battle raged. The loss of life on both sides was devastating — this was a battle in which in some senses both sides could be termed the losers. In the end, though, the victory and the lasting glory deservedly fell to Wellington.
The outcome of the battle marked a crucial and lasting juncture in European history. Napoleon Bonaparte’s defeat at Waterloo was his final downfall and the end of his imperial dream. Wellington’s victory marked the beginning of a new English imperial adventure.
The battle of Waterloo, then, was one of those milestones in history — a marker, a turning point, an epoch-making incident, a directional laser-beam of light from the past to the future — on which our understanding of the past depends. Andrew Roberts’s sharply-focused and economical account highlights the extraordinary way in which events on the ground at key moments in history shape forever what follows.
Waterloo launches an exciting series of small books edited by Amanda Foreman and Lisa Jardine — ‘Making History’— each of which covers a ‘turning point’in history. Each book in the series will take a moment at which an event or events made a lasting impact on the unfolding course of history. Such moments are of dramatically different character: from the unexpected outcome of a battle to a landmark invention; from an accidental decision taken in the heat of the moment to a considered programme intended to change the world. Each volume of ‘Making History’ will be guaranteed to make the reader sit up and think about Europe’s and America’s relationship to their past, and about the key figures and incidents which moulded and formed its process.
Amanda Foreman
Lisa Jardine
INTRODUCTION
‘AFTER THE PUBLICATION of so many accounts of the battle of 18 June, it may be fairly asked on what grounds I expect to awaken fresh interest in a subject so long before the public.’ Those words were written by Sergeant-Major Edward Cotton of the 7th Hussars as long ago as 1849, in his preface to a guidebook to the battlefield entitled A Voice from Waterloo. True enough then, how much more true are they when applied to yet another book on the battle published a century and a half and over one hundred books later. The answer that Cotton gave then is the one I would also give today: that while there are still doubts, mysteries, debates and confusions about the battle — let alone tremendous national bias evident in its retelling — there is always scope for another account.
‘Never was a battle so confusedly described as that of Waterloo,’ wrote the Swiss historian (and Marshal Ney’s chief of staff) General Henri Jomini, and that is partly because it was such a momentous engagement. The Duke of Wellington himself likened the description of a battle to that of a ball — perhaps he had in mind the Duchess of Richmond’s famous one three days before Waterloo — where there is so much simultaneous movement of so many people across so large an area with so many different outcomes that to record it all from a single standpoint becomes nigh-impossible.
Yet what we can say for certain about the battle of Waterloo — that it ended forever the greatest personal world-historical epic since that of Julius $$ — is easily enough to drive us on to want to discover more. The political career of Napoleon Bonaparte, that master of continental Europe whose life was nonetheless punctuated by the three islands on which he was born, was exiled and died, came to a shuddering and total halt on the evening of Sunday, 18 June 1815. The Grande Armée which he had led across the sands of Egypt, the meadows of Prussia, the plains of Iberia, the hamlets of Austria and the snows of Russia, was finally and completely routed on the slopes of Mont St Jean twelve miles south of Brussels.
Of course Waterloo did not spell the end of the entire Bonapartist epic — that did not take place until Napoleon’s great-nephew the Prince Imperial was speared to death by Zulu assegais in 1879 — but it did condemn the Emperor Napoleon I to ignominious exile and a subsequent early death on the Atlantic rock of St Helena. It also finally brought to an end no fewer than twenty-three almost unbroken years of French Revolutionary and subsequently Napoleonic Wars, and ushered in a period of peace in Europe that was to last — with a few short if sharp exceptions — for a century, until those self-same Low Countries fields were churned up once more with the mud and blood consequent upon similar hegemonic European ambitions.
What Lord Byron disapprovingly called ‘the crowning carnage, Waterloo’, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, with more reverence in his panegyric poem to Wellington, ‘that world-earthquake, Waterloo!’, brought the eighteenth century to a full stop, or rather to a final exclamation mark. Despite taking place one-seventh of the way into the calendar nineteenth century, Waterloo was nonetheless essentially an eighteenth-century phenomenon. Historians sometimes write of ‘the long’ eighteenth century, a period starting with the English revolution of 1688 and ending in 1815, and it is right to see Waterloo as the end of both a geopolitical and a military era.
Ghastly as the carnage at Waterloo undoubtedly was, thenceforth wars were to be fought with the infinitely more ghastly methods of trenches (the Crimea), barbed wire, railways and machine-guns (the American Civil War), directed starvation (the Franco-Prussian War), concentration camps (the Boer War), and mustard gas and aerial bombardment (the First World War).1 By the time of the Great War, chivalry was effectively dead as an element of war-making.
By contrast with today, when an enemy head of state constitutes a legitimate military target, Wellington refused an artillery officer under his command permission to fire his battery at Napoleon. The gorgeously-coloured uniforms worn in the Napoleonic Wars were replaced, by the time of the Boer War, with khaki and subsequently camouflaged uniforms, as troops sought to blend in with the surrounding country rather than bedazzle their enemies. For all that Waterloo was, like all battles, essentially about bringing death and maiming to the enemy, there was also a tangible spirit of élan, esprit, éclat and — at least initially — aesthetic beauty to the scene.
There was also plenty of chivalry shown on both sides at Waterloo; witness the reaction of the British infantry during the great French cavalry attack when, according to Ensign Howell Rees Gronow of the 1st Foot Guards:
Among the fallen we perceived the gallant colonel of the hussars lyin
g under his horse, which had been killed. All of a sudden two riflemen of the Brunswickers left their battalion, and after taking from their helpless victim his purse, watch, and other articles of value, they deliberately put the colonel’s pistols to the poor fellow’s head, and blew out his brains. ‘Shame!’’ Shame!’ was heard from our ranks, and a feeling of indignation ran through the whole line.2
Captain (later Lieutenant-Colonel) William Tomkinson of the 16th Light Dragoons similarly recorded the occasion when ‘An officer of cuirassiers rode close to one of our squares with a detachment of men. He saw he had no chance of success, and by himself alone rode full gallop against the square, was shot and killed. Our men and officers regretted his fate.’3
The generation after Waterloo saw, in the title of the great work of the distinguished historian Paul Johnson, The Birth of the Modern, and in one sense the battle was the midwife to this great act of world-historical obstetrics. With Napoleonic ambitions no longer subjecting Europe to campaign after campaign, Mankind could finally look ahead to a period of peace and progress.
Yet Napoleon himself had also been, at least in the early days of his rule, a great force for social and political modernisation. His absolute power had of course corrupted his regime absolutely, but before that happened he had swept away much of the obscurantism and backwardness of many of Europe’s anciens régimes. Tyrant that he undeniably became, responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands though he undoubtedly was, a standing obstacle to peace as he certainly turned into, nonetheless Napoleon was not all bad, and certainly nothing like the ideological totalitarian monsters who followed him.
The battle that brought the Napoleonic juggernaut to its final halt and shattering collapse is worthy of all the exhaustive study and minute analysis that has been devoted to it. As one of its earliest and most perceptive chroniclers, General Sir James Shaw Kennedy (who had fought in the campaign), wrote in the peroration of his classic Notes on the Battle of Waterloo:
There can be no doubt that, so long as history is read, the battle of Waterloo will be much and eagerly discussed; and that, so long as the art of war is studied, its great features, and most important details, will form subjects of anxious inquiry and consideration by military men.4
And not just by military men. The enduring fascination of Waterloo is not just its sheer size, or its historical results, or the fact that Napoleon and Wellington had never faced each other across a battlefield before and never would again, or the strategy and tactics employed, or the tales of valour, or the famous and colourful individuals and regiments involved, or even the fact that it was ‘a close run thing’; it is the unique combination of all those factors, and of so many more besides.
THE CAMPAIGN
THE WATERLOO CAMPAIGN began in earnest at 3.30 a.m. on Monday, 12 June 1815 when the Emperor Napoleon, exhibiting none of the torpor and lack of decisiveness that his supporters later claimed afflicted him, left Paris after a farewell dinner with his family and was quickly driven north in his carriage, crossing the Belgian border with an army of 124,000 men a mere three days later. He had only been in France for three months, having landed at Fréjus near Antibes from his island exile on Elba on 1 March.
Napoleon had initially hoped to regain his throne from the legitimate Bourbon monarch of France, King Louis XVIII, without a war, but on 13 March the rest of the European powers, then in congress at Vienna, had denounced him as an outlaw and a ‘disturber of world repose’. Once Louis had fled Paris on 18 March and Napoleon had entered the Tuileries Palace the following day, it was perfectly clear to all that the Emperor would have to defeat at least four nations’ armies to survive in power. Nor was time on his side.
Napoleon’s strategy was really dictated to him by the fact that although vast enemy armies were being despatched towards France, they could only arrive at its borders piecemeal and so could, he hoped, be defeated one by one, through his employing the superior generalship that had allowed him to win all but ten of the seventy-two battles he had fought in his career.
Although it is very difficult to be accurate as to exact troop strengths throughout this period, Napoleon had roughly 20,000 troops under Marshal Davout in Paris, 85,000 guarding France’s frontiers, 10,000 putting down the royalist revolt in La Vendée in western France, and 123,000 in the Armée du Nord. To add to these 238,000 effectives, around 115,000 French troops were either on leave or absent without leave, 46,000 conscripts were in training at depots, and there were National Guard units garrisoning border fortresses who could have been called upon were Napoleon to be granted more of his most precious commodity of all: time.
To march north quickly, defeat either the Anglo-Allied armies under the Duke of Wellington or the Prussian army under Marshal Gebhard von Blücher, Prince of Wahlstadt, would have the immediate effect of re-establishing la Gloire. As one historian has summarised Napoleon’s plans: ‘His object was to defeat one or the other before they had time to concentrate and then, forcing both back on their divergent communications, to enter Brussels as a conqueror. Thereafter … the Belgian common people would rise against the Dutch, the war-weary French take heart and unite behind him, the Tory government in London fall, and his Austrian father-in-law [Emperor Francis II], deprived of British subsidies, sue for peace.”1
There were other factors that imparted a sense of urgency to Napoleon’s actions, principally the knowledge that British regiments were on their way back from America, no fewer than 200,000 Russians were marching towards France along with 210,000 Austrians, and a Spanish/ Portuguese force of around 80,000 might also take the field in the south. Napoleon therefore formulated a bold plan, as one might have expected from a commander who, though he had tasted catastrophic defeat in Russia in 1812, terrible reverses in 1813, and the humiliation of abdication in 1814, nonetheless remained one of the most formidable strategists of world history.
Even though over 700,000 Allied soldiers were being mobilised to defeat him, only a fraction of these were guarding Brussels — roughly 116,000 under Blücher and 112,000 under Wellington — and the Emperor had crushed six enemy coalitions in the past. Furthermore Wellington needed to leave some of his troops garrisoning Brussels.
The logistical, supply and communications problems involved in coordinating the coalition’s efforts would, Napoleon hoped, be exacerbated by certain political differences that had emerged between them in Vienna. Whatever the odds against him, he was certainly not about to give up the chance of ruling France again, and of one day handing on his throne to his beloved son Napoleon, the King of Rome.
France had been exhausted by almost continual warfare since 1792, and although she despised the Bourbons and failed to support them on Napoleon’s return, only a quick victory would encourage the majority — and especially the middle classes impoverished by twenty-three years of war — to return to his standard. Accordingly he set the nation to work to prepare for the coming invasion. Parisian workshops had been busy throughout April, May and the first half of June turning out over 1,200 uniforms per day and manufacturing twelve million cartridges. Muskets were produced at the impressive rate of 12,000 a month, with another thousand a month being repaired and reconditioned.
By the time his Armée du Nord crossed the River Meuse and captured Charleroi on Thursday, 15 June, it was as fine and as well-equipped a force as Napoleon had commanded in years, indeed since the loss of the flower of French manhood in the endless pine forests and frozen winter wastes of European Russia three years earlier. Yet because several of his former marshals had refused to serve under him, many of the rank-and-file of his army were highly suspicious of their officers; talk of treason abounded. ‘Never,’ wrote one historian, ‘did Napoleon have so formidable or so fragile a weapon in his hand.’
It was a very different story for the Anglo-Allied force that had been under the command of Arthur Wellesley, ist Duke of Wellington, only since April 1815. Although Wellington had been in overall command of the Anglo-Spanish-Portuguese forces that had f
ought in the Iberian Peninsula between 1808 and 1814, the army he now led had relatively few veterans of those fierce and brilliantly-fought campaigns. For the most part the heroes of Talavera, Badajoz, Salamanca and Vittoria were stationed in the far-off United States, where they had been fighting under Wellington’s brother-in-law, General Sir Edward Pakenham, against the American commander and future president Andrew Jackson. Although peace had come in January 1815, few had had time to make the long Atlantic crossing home.
‘I have got an infamous army,’ Wellington had privately complained only the month before Napoleon crossed the Meuse, ‘very weak and ill-equipped, and a very inexperienced staff. In my opinion they are doing nothing in England … ‘It was true that reinforcements had been slow to arrive in the Low Countries, so that by the opening of the campaign only a little over one-third of Wellington’s 112,0oo-strong force was made up of British soldiers, of whom some had never before seen a shot fired in anger.
Yet that does not tell the whole story; in all there were thirtynine infantry battalions from the British army and the King’s German Legion (KGL), a crack unit loyal to George III that was equal in professionalism to any British one. Furthermore there were twenty-nine cavalry regiments, including several of the best in the army. As the distinguished Waterloo chronicler Ian Fletcher has observed: ‘It was a pale shadow of the old Peninsular army, but there were, nevertheless, some fine regiments present, and the British contingent was certainly not the inexperienced and raw army … that some historians would have us believe.’2 To underline this one has only to name some of those famous regiments present, such as the 1st Foot Guards, Coldstream Guards and 3rd Foot Guards, as well as the 30th, 42nd, 73rd and 95th line regiments, the 1st and 2nd Light KGL, the 1st and 2nd Life Guards, Royal Horse Guards, 1st (Royal) Dragoons, 6th (Inniskilling) Dragoons, 16th and 23rd Light Dragoons, 7th, 10th, 15th and 18th Hussars, and both light dragoons and hussars from the KGL.3