Waterloo: June 18, 1815: The Battle for Modern Europe

by Andrew Roberts

  Despite his private misgivings, Wellington was still confident that if he and the Prussians under Marshal Blücher could coalesce successfully, victory would be theirs. One day he came across the diarist Thomas Creevey in the park at Brussels, who quizzed him about his plans. ‘By God,’ Wellington said, ‘I think Blücher and myself can do the thing.’’Do you calculate upon any desertion in Buonaparte’s army?’ asked Creevey. ‘Not upon a man,’ the Duke replied, ‘from the colonel to the private in a regiment — both inclusive. We may pick up a Marshal or two, perhaps, but not worth a damn.’ Wellington then spotted a British private wandering in the park, looking up at the statues. ‘There,’he said, pointing out the man to Creevey, ‘it all depends on that article, whether we do the business or not. Give me enough of it, and I am sure.’4

  The French army might have feared treachery in high places, but the Anglo-Allied high command was equally concerned about whether the Dutch and Belgian contingents, which made up a quarter of Wellington’s force, would remain loyal in the field, not least those units which only the previous year had been in the service of the Emperor. Wellington’s German troops — which made up another third of his force — ranged from the superb King’s German Legion of 6,000 veterans to the less reliable contingents from Brunswick, Hanover and Nassau.

  If Napoleon had cause not to fear the Anglo-Allied force overmuch, he could also feel relatively unperturbed about the 116,000 Prussians to his east. Although the numbers seemed large, over half the Prussian army was made up of Landwehr (militia) troops rather than regular soldiers, and many of them came from outside Prussia itself. Earlier in June a force of 14,000 well-equipped Saxons had mutinied and had to be removed from the theatre of operations. Yet the average Prussian regular soldier was a tough specimen, and no one in the army was tougher than the commander-in-chief, Prince Gebhard von Blücher, whose seventy-three years belied an offensive spirit second to none. His splendid nickname — Marshal Vorwärts (‘Marshal Forwards’) — was well-deserved.

  Not everything about Blücher inspired confidence, however, since he suffered from occasional mental disturbances, including the delusions that he had been impregnated by an elephant and that the French had bribed his servants to heat the floors of his rooms so that he would burn his feet. The Prussian high command nonetheless exhibited a commendably broad-minded attitude towards these disorders; their army chief of staff General Gerhard von Scharnhorst wrote that Blücher ‘must lead though he has a hundred elephants inside him’.

  The only two coalition armies ready to fight Napoleon in June 1815 were Wellington’s and Blücher’s. The two commanders had met only twice in May, when they agreed on the broad outlines of a defensive strategy should they be attacked before the coalition had had time to deploy its huge forces. Wellington was deeply cognisant of the disastrous campaigns that the coalition had fought against Napoleon in front of Paris in 1814, when they had lost battle after battle through lack of coordination. ‘I would not march a corporal’s guard on such a system,’ was his characteristically dismissive response to the failed strategy.

  Napoleon’s Orders for the Day were famous for their uplifting sentiments, and that of Thursday, 15 June was no different. He reminded his troops as they crossed into the Austrian Netherlands (roughly modern-day Belgium) that it was the anniversary of his great victories of Marengo in 1800 and Friedland in 1807. ‘The moment has come,’he stated in his peroration, ‘to conquer or to perish.’

  Although British historians in the nineteenth century strove to conceal the fact, and Wellington himself denied it into old age, Napoleon’s swift operation to take Charleroi on 15 June and to advance quickly towards Brussels took Wellington and to a lesser extent Blücher by surprise. There is still considerable (and surprisingly bitter) debate over exactly when Wellington heard the first truly reliable information about where Napoleon was and what he had done, and what the first Allied troop manoeuvres were in response, but Wellington’s well-authenticated phrase ‘Napoleon has humbugged me, by God! He has gained twenty-four hours’ march on me!’ has come down to us through history, and seems vividly to sum up his understandable reaction.5

  Napoleon himself was worse than humbugged on 15 June when General Comte Louis Bourmont, one of his divisional commanders but nonetheless royalist in his politics, rode directly over to the Prussian 1st Corps commander General Hans von Zieten and surrendered to him with five of his staff. The information he was able to pass on about Napoleon’s invasion plans was immediately vouchsafed to Marshal Blücher, who nonetheless seems to have failed to take proper advantage of it. There is even some doubt whether he passed on all the information to Wellington about Napoleon’s proposed route to Brussels.6 (This might well have been because Blücher suspected deliberate misinformation; he certainly felt that Bourmont’s actions offended his sense of soldier’s honour.)

  At this point Napoleon split his forces, always a dangerous thing to do at the start of a major campaign. He ordered Marshal Michel Ney to march west to take the strategically important crossroads of Quatre Bras before Wellington could reinforce it. Quatre Bras stood at the junction of the Charleroi-Brussels and the Nivelles—Namur roads, and would thus give Napoleon extra leeway when it came to deciding how to make his approach on Brussels. Possession of the crossroads would have kept French strategic options open, and Ney was under no illusions about how much Napoleon wanted to capture it.

  Meanwhile the Emperor marched off towards Ligny in the east in order to engage the Prussians, who he rightly estimated had come far too far south when Blücher had decided to invest Sombreffe. (Few of these place-names were towns in the modern sense, and some villages mentioned later, such as Plancenoit, were in 1815 little more than a collection of cottages and outhouses, but any stone walls at all could be invaluable in a musketry firefight.)

  Napoleon did not write down his strategic plans, nor did he vouchsafe them to subordinates, and since virtually everything he would ever write about the Waterloo campaign was factually suspect and politically motivated, it is impossible to do more than surmise what he intended on 15 and 16 June. Yet one thing is near-certain: by risking splitting his forces he was hoping to be able to drive a wedge between the Anglo-Allied and the Prussian forces, and thereby deal with first one and then the other separately, in a microcosm of his overall plans for the division and destruction of all his enemies in the coalition.7

  In this scheme Napoleon was enormously aided by the problems of communication during campaigns. Although semaphore and a very basic telegraph system were in existence in 1815, they were not comprehensive and did not extend across Belgium; neither were balloons in use on either side. Messages could thus only be sent at the speed of a galloping horse, and since there was much rain, and therefore mud, during the Waterloo campaign, this was consequently slower. The aides de camp who carried messages between commanders could be fired upon, captured, take wrong turnings, find that their quarries had moved on, or be subject to any number of problems that meant that messages — sometimes taken over significant distances — either never arrived or were delivered so late as to be utterly superseded by events. It was an occupational hazard of early-nineteenth-century warfare, and it seems to have struck particularly badly in the Waterloo campaign, on both sides.

  Wellington might have complained about his inexperienced staff, but Napoleon too had to deal with a brand-new chief of staff, Marshal Soult, in the place of his long-standing and highly efficient Marshal Berthier, who had at first refused to take part in the campaign, and then had soon afterwards died in very mysterious circumstances, falling out of a high window on 1 June in Bamberg, Bavaria. Soult, a solidly professional soldier who had nonetheless been regularly defeated by Wellington during the Peninsular Wars, did not shine in his place.

  On the night of 15 June, as Napoleon slept in Charleroi, Wellington and his senior officers were entertained at a great ball only thirty miles away in Brussels, at the invitation of the 4th Duke of Richmond and Lennox and his wife. It was
perhaps the most famous social occasion of the nineteenth century, and any criticisms that Wellington should have been paying attention to French troop movements rather than enjoying a party were waved away with the argument that it was important to show the citizens of Brussels that there was no need to panic. ‘Duchess,’ Wellington told his hostess, ‘you may give your ball with the greatest safety, without fear of interruption.’By the time the ball in the rue de Blanchisserie had begun, however, Wellington had received definite news from the Prussians that Napoleon had indeed crossed the border.

  A letter in the author’s possession is worthy of quotation in extenso (see APPENRDIX I), since it illustrates the lack of foreknowledge of many of those who attended the Duchess of Richmond’s ball. Rumours were plentiful, not least when Wellington withdrew from the ballroom to confer with his most senior commanders in the Richmonds’ study, but facts were thin. ‘The lamps shone o’er fair women and brave men,’ wrote Byron of that brilliant night, and as the ball began few could have suspected that only seventy-two hours later fully four in ten of the officers present would be either dead or wounded. (Although Byron mythologised the ‘high hall’of the ballroom, in fact the occasion took place, according to the Richmonds’ daughter Lady de Ros, ‘in an old building that had once been a coachmaker’s depot in which she and her sisters played in bad weather … A long, barn-like room; with small old-fashioned pillars.’8)

  For all that it was held in a coachmaker’s barn, the evening was a glittering social occasion, the guests including the Prince of Orange (later King William II of Holland), the Duke of Brunswick (who fell the next day at Quatre Bras), the Prince of Nassau, the Earls of Conyngham, Uxbridge (commander of the British cavalry), Portarlington and March, as well as twenty-two colonels, sixteen comtes and comtesses, a large number of British peers and peeresses and a total of twenty-two people bearing the title of ‘honourable’, denoting the child of a peer. Whether it was a particularly romantic evening, however, must be doubted, since of the 224 people invited by the Richmonds there were only fifty-five women, of whom fewer than a dozen were unmarried.9

  Wellington, who had assumed that Napoleon would advance on Brussels via Mons rather than taking the more direct Charleroi route, and who stuck to his assumption despite growing evidence to the contrary, was finally disabused during the ball by important and reliable information from the Prussians, who were expecting to fight at Sombreffe the next day, and from the commandant of the Mons garrison that there were no Frenchmen in sight. He had been ‘humbugged’ indeed, but he made up for it by trying to concentrate his army as quickly as possible upon Quatre Bras. ‘This news was circulated directly,’ recalled one of the guests, Lady Georgina Lennox, ‘and while some of the officers hurried away, others remained at the ball, and actually had not time to change, but fought in evening costume."10

  The Duke of Richmond later told the tale that in his study Wellington had admitted that he would not be able to stop Napoleon at Quatre Bras, adding, ‘And if so we must fight him here,’ passing his thumbnail over the map and allowing Richmond to mark in pencil a village called Waterloo. To this author at least, the story sounds like a case of esprit d’ escalier, a serviceable French phrase whose English translations smack too harshly of deliberate falsehood. Unfortunately the map that might have authenticated the tale was lost in Canada when Richmond was Governor-General there three years later.’11

  At 8 a.m. on Friday, 16 June Napoleon was informed that the whole of the Prussian army seemed to have assembled at Sombreffe, so he left for the extreme right flank of his forces to check for himself, arriving at Fleurus at 11 a.m. Sure enough, the Prussians were there, so he ordered Marshal Ney, who he assumed would take the Quatre Bras crossroads with relative ease, to despatch a large body of his force to him to help rout the Prussians.

  By the time Ney received Napoleon’s rather florid instructions — ‘The fate of France is in your hands. Thus do not hesitate even for a moment to carry out the manoeuvre’— he was no longer capable of carrying them out. For if Wellington had been relatively slow in concentrating his forces upon Quatre Bras, fearing that it might be a feint of Napoleon’s, Ney had been still more dilatory, and by the time he started to try to take the crossroads the British reserve had already begun arriving there after a thirty-mile march. Although the credit for saving Quatre Bras must go to the initiative of General Constant Rebecque, the Dutch chief of staff, who was early on the scene and recognised its strategic importance, the actual outcome of the battle of Quatre Bras itself was due to Wellington himself.

  Wellington had set out from Brussels at 3 a.m., and by 11 a.m. he was conferring with Blücher at the Brye windmill overlooking the battlefield of Ligny. It is said that he trained his telescope on Napoleon, the first time he had ever set eyes on the man with whose name his fame was to be forever inextricably linked. They had both been born on islands, they had both attended French military academies and spoke French as their second language; they were the same age, born within three months of one another in 1769; they both excelled at topography and chose Hannibal as their ultimate hero, yet they had never hitherto faced one another across a field of battle. Nor were they destined to on 16 June, since Wellington only had time to give Blücher his considered opinion as to the Prussian displacements before being called off to command the defence of Quatre Bras.

  The Duke politely criticised Blücher’s decision to present the whole Prussian army to Napoleon’s view — and artillery — in the old Continental manner, explaining his own preference of trying to conceal soldiers behind the reverse slopes of hills. ‘My men prefer to see the enemy,’ replied the proud, brave, but in this case also foolhardy Prussian. Wellington’s private estimation as he rode off was: ‘If they fight here, they will be damnably mauled.’ Sure enough, when Napoleon attacked, they were.

  Marshal Ney, the veteran of seventy battles, might have won the splendid soubriquet ‘the bravest of the brave’in numerous engagements, but he was not an impressive commander when left in overall charge, and there were also fears that he had been suffering from a form of ‘combat fatigue’or ‘battle stress’ ever since the gruelling Russian campaign of 1812, when he had been left to command the French rearguard after Napoleon had fled back to Paris. He had certainly become highly unpredictable by 1815, and was quite possibly simply burnt out as a soldier. Napoleon once complained that Ney understood less than the youngest drummer boy in the French army, and certainly piled complaint on complaint upon his actions — and inactions — during the Waterloo campaign when he was exiled on St Helena.

  Ney, who had fallen for Wellington’s tactic of concealing his troops in the Peninsular War, only attacked at Quatre Bras late and half-heartedly, even though Wellington was not on the battlefield in the early stages and had not hidden any troops. Nor had Ney yet received Napoleon’s urgent request that he send the bulk of his force to Ligny. Instead two battles — at Ligny and Quatre Bras — developed simultaneously only about seven miles from each other. Ney had too often in the Peninsula seen the ill-effect of attacking British infantry head on, and quite possibly feared that the crossroads of Quatre Bras hid another Wellingtonian deception, in the way that in 1810 the use of topography had won him the battle of Busaco against Marshal Masséna.

  Believing that Ney could manage to take Quatre Bras with the troops already under his command, Napoleon sent a message to General Drouet d’Erlon, who was on his way to reinforce Ney from Gosselies with the 1st Corps, to march to the battlefield of Ligny instead, where fierce house-to-house combat had developed. By 5 p.m. Blücher’s force was hard-pressed, and he had to commit his reserves to the struggle, a dangerous moment for any commander when facing Napoleon. Had the French emperor been able to fling d’Erlon’s fresh troops into the battle, a rout would have been assured. But no such force was there, not least because d’Erlon had been counter-ordered by Ney to march to Quatre Bras instead. As it was, d’Erlon arrived on neither battlefield in time to affect the outcome of either engageme
nt. The greatest living authority on the campaigns of Napoleon, Dr David Chandler, has stated that the importance of the non-appearance of d’Erlon’s corps at Ligny and Quatre Bras was crucial, since ‘in either … its intervention could have been decisive’.12

  By the time nightfall had descended on the battlefield of Quatre Bras it was clear that there was a stalemate, with both sides in much the same position they had occupied before Ney had originally attacked. Over 9,000 lives had been lost — roughly equally on each side — to no significant strategic advantage to either.

  Yet over at Ligny a few miles to the east it was a very different picture. Even despite d’Erlon’s non-appearance, Napoleon had conclusively given Blücher the damnable mauling that Wellington had predicted. The Emperor had delayed launching an attack by his Imperial Guard — the crack regiments nicknamed ‘Les Invincibles — until 7.30 p.m., but when he had — preceded by a huge artillery bombardment — it had proved decisive. Crying ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ the Guard had charged the Prussian centre with bayonets, supported by brigades of cavalry. Although Blücher personally counterattacked with only two brigades of cavalry, the French could not be turned back.

  Darkness turned the defeat into a rout. Sixteen thousand Prussians were killed or wounded at Ligny, and around 8,000 Rhinelanders deserted the colours that night and simply returned home. Nonetheless the decision was taken by Blücher’s chief of staff General August von Gneisenau — in Blücher’s absence, because the marshal could not be found — that the army should act in a completely counter-intuitive way. Instead of retreating eastwards towards Liège and Prussia, the Prussians would instead go north to Wavre, where they could stay in touch with the Anglo-Allied army. Gneisenau was an Anglophobe, but he had nevertheless made the crucial decision of the campaign, one that Wellington himself hardly exaggerated when he described it as ‘the decisive moment of the century’.