Citizen Emperor (117 page)

Unity of allied command in the north of France was given to Wellington, who rushed back from Vienna to Brussels, arriving on 4 April, as soon as he heard of Napoleon’s return. He had his job cut out for him as the few troops to hand were mainly militia who had never seen active service. He set about trying to knock them into shape, but there were few officers he could rely on. He pestered the new prime minister, Lord Liverpool, to send him more over the coming weeks.
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By the start of the campaign he had managed to cobble together British, Dutch and German contingents of about 112,000 men and 230 cannon. Then there were the Prussians to deal with. An army of about 130,000 men and 304 cannon based in eastern Belgium was centred on Liège. Their conduct throughout the campaign for France in 1814 had been deplorable, but that was perhaps understandable considering how much they had suffered over the years at the hands of the French occupier. In 1815, their behaviour was just as disgraceful. Marching through Holland on their way to Belgium, they behaved as if in enemy territory, looting everything they could along the way and, whenever anyone complained, telling them the British would foot the bill. The Prussian troops’ attitude towards the Saxon contingents in Belgium was so bad that in May 1815 the Saxons mutinied and attacked Prussian headquarters. Blücher and Gneisenau were forced to flee.
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The mutiny was put down – seven officers were shot and 14,000 Saxon troops were sent home – but it was a telling sign of the divisions that rent the allied armies. Given the recent history of relations between Prussia and Saxony, and the fact that the Prussians had occupied part of Saxony even before the Congress of Vienna had come to an end, it is understandable that they hated each other.

The allies under Wellington had briefly considered attacking France but decided to wait until they had overwhelming numerical superiority. As a consequence, Napoleon struck first. His strategy was typical when faced with crushing odds – to drive a wedge between the two armies and to defeat them one after the other. This he would have done if he had managed to defeat Blücher and the Prussians soundly. On 16 June 1815, he met them some forty-five kilometres south of Brussels, at Ligny, ‘a village built of stone and thatched with straw, on a small stream which flows through flat meadows’.
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The French were slightly outnumbered – 76,000 to the Prussians’ 83,000 – while the Prussians had managed to dig themselves into the farmhouses, enclosed within walls and gates. Four times the French attacked and were driven back until finally the Prussians withdrew in good order. Napoleon had managed to maul them badly. At Ligny, the French lost 10,000–12,000 men, to the Prussians’ 12,000 men killed and and 20,000 wounded.
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Another 8,000–10,000 Prussians deserted. It was to be Napoleon’s last victory. Because he was unable to press home his advantage, the Prussians escaped and would return to the fray at Waterloo on 18 June, turning the tide of battle against him. Grouchy was ordered to pursue Blücher with 33,000 men. That same day, ten kilometres to the north-west, Ney attacked Wellington’s forces at Quatre Bras, with casualties of around 4,000 to 5,000 men on each side.

At Waterloo – the battlefield lay in a valley about sixteen kilometres south of Brussels – Napoleon’s army slightly outnumbered and significantly outgunned the allies: 72,000 French troops and 246 cannon faced some 68,000 British, German and Dutch troops and 157 cannon.
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The advantage was virtually negated, however, by the terrain and Wellington’s positioning of his troops. They were placed on the reverse side of hills so that cannon fire proved ineffective. Rain before the battle turned much of the field into mud. Commenting on this, Victor Hugo wrote many years later, ‘A little rain, and an unseasonable cloud crossing the sky, sufficed for the overthrow of the world.’
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The battle was one of the most concentrated of the era, nearly 200,000 men fighting over an area of four square kilometres. It perhaps explains the incredibly high casualty rates, even for a Napoleonic battle. Forty-five per cent of the men involved in Waterloo would be either killed or wounded.
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The battle of Waterloo is one of the most written about in history, to the point where it has become synonymous with defeat.
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In the English-language literature, Waterloo is often recounted from a British triumphalist perspective that until recently left little room for the role of the Prussian, Dutch or German contingents.
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The British contingent made up less than one-quarter of the army facing Napoleon’s forces that day. Certainly, Wellington was familiar with the terrain; he had examined the lie of the land on two occasions, in 1814 and again in 1815 when it became apparent that Napoleon was going to attack and that he would have to defend Brussels.
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Wellington dug in his heels and performed well on the day, but Waterloo was not so much a British as an allied victory. Wellington would not have been able to carry the day had it not been for the Dutch and the Prussians.
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No one really knows what time the battle began – some say 10 a.m., others 11.30 – but it soon centred on the large farmhouse called Hougoumont, on the French left flank, defended by British Guards, and attacked relentlessly by the French for most of the afternoon.
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Hougoumont and another farmhouse, La Haye Sainte, in the centre of the battlefield were key; they lay only a few hundred metres from Wellington’s line, meaning that if not taken they would interrupt any advance by the French. There is no need to go into the details of the pounding taken by both sides. Late in the afternoon, the Prussians appeared on Napoleon’s right flank. They were held off for some time while Napoleon launched the Guard at Wellington’s line, roughly halfway between Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte, at about 7.30 in the evening. The Guard faltered, and retreated. It was the moment Wellington decided to launch a general advance across the line with the consequences that we now know.

Ney and Grouchy bear some of the burden of defeat: Ney for not pressing home his advantage after the battle of Ligny, for squandering his cavalry on useless attacks against British squares, and for pointless and costly attacks against Hougoumont which could easily have been reduced by an astute use of artillery; and Grouchy for letting Blücher slip away, also after Ligny, and for not riding to the sound of the cannon once the battle was engaged.
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Grouchy actually heard the sound of the Grand Battery opening fire at the beginning of the battle, even though he was about twenty kilometres away to the east, and got into an argument with his commanding generals about whether they should ride to the sound of the guns.
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Grouchy insisted on pressing after Blücher but never caught up with him, allowing Blücher to join Wellington later in the day.

In subsequent years, Napoleon sought to blame others for the defeat, exaggerating the number of men he faced, pointing to the deficiencies of his generals, and arguing that fate had abandoned him.
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Ultimately, however, he must assume the responsibility. His efforts remained disappointing. The fact that Berthier, his brilliant former chief of staff, was not around meant that the army was not as numerous, not as well equipped and not as well organized as it could have been, with the consequence that it appears to have performed sluggishly throughout the campaign. So did Napoleon. He may have been looking for what he called a ‘coup d’éclat’,
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but his behaviour during the days and weeks leading up to the fateful battle was listless. It is possible that he grossly underestimated the quality of the enemy before him. Wellington’s account of the battle in a letter to Lord Beresford is telling: ‘Never did I see such a pounding match. Both were what the boxers call gluttons. Napoleon did not manoeuvre at all. He just moved forward in the old style, in columns, and was driven off in the old style. The only difference was, that he mixed cavalry with his infantry, and supported both with an enormous quantity of artillery . . . I had the infantry for some time in squares, and we had the French cavalry walking about us as if they had been our own.’
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Chaos

One of the turning points in the battle was the flight towards the end of the day of the Imperial Guard, which set in motion a general panic in the French ranks. This was not the Imperial Guard of old, decimated in Russia. Of the 50,000 members of the Guard who had entered Russia in 1812, a little over 1,500 returned, 200 of whom were permanently incapacitated. The Young Guard was wiped out entirely.
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The Guard formed in 1813–14 was made up of experienced soldiers, meeting the minimum requirement of ten years’ service and three campaigns, but possibly not as experienced as the Old Guard had once been.

There is an anecdote often told of the Guard’s last stand. When asked to surrender Cambronne is famously reputed to have said one of two things: a brief but ballsy ‘Merde’, or the more prosaic ‘Je meurs et je ne me rends pas’ (‘Shit’, or ‘I will die but I will not surrender’).
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It lends a romanticism to the end of the battle that conflicts with the harsh reality of a rout. The Guard that had lost the battle was transformed by this heroic, suicidal gesture. The phrase came to represent throughout the nineteenth century the suffering of Bonapartists faced with the fall of their idol.
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After the battle, Napoleon tried to plunge into the heart of Cambronne’s corps and expose himself to enemy fire, but was prevented from doing so by Soult. He was seen riding towards Charleroi with a little group of generals. They reached Quatre-Bras (near Genappe) by one that morning. There they stopped for a while and made a fire; Napoleon was spotted by an officer crying. Colonel Trefcon, who had experienced the retreats in Syria, in Russia and at Leipzig, wrote that he had never seen such a ‘horrible disorder’.
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The officers were unable to overcome the chaos; many of the troops were utterly demoralized, some preferred suicide rather than suffer at the hands of the enemy. Fear gripped the retreating army; small groups of men broke off from the main army and pillaged their way through the towns and villages in their path. Cries of ‘Prussians! Prussians!’, even when they were nowhere to be seen, were enough to throw men into a panic, tossing their muskets and sacks away, abandoning their colours and making a run for it.
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The astonishing thing about Waterloo is not so much that Napoleon lost the battle as his reaction to it. In all, 55,000–60,000 men were killed and wounded during that day in the space of a few square kilometres, along with 10,000 horses. But Napoleon still retained control over about 117,000 men in the north, yet he did not attempt to rally his troops, nor continue the fight and bring the battle to the enemy at another point. Blücher and Wellington did not co-ordinate their advance on France so it is more than possible that, had Napoleon rallied his troops, he could have inflicted defeats on both armies separately in order to be in a stronger position to negotiate. Many of the British troops believed Waterloo was only the first in what would be a series of battles,
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and in some respects this was true. Other battles ensued in the days and weeks that followed.
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Between 27 June and 3 July, three of the four Prussian army corps marching into France fought battles in the regions of Picardy and the Île de France.
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At Rocquencourt, a Prussian brigade was almost completely annihilated. Battles were also fought at Sèvres and Meudon. But none of them involved Napoleon. To be fair, Napoleon was caught between a rock and a hard place. If, as had happened the previous year, he stayed with the army, he was likely to be betrayed in Paris. This time, he reasoned, he would sort out Paris first and return to the army in a few days.

The battle may have been the ‘nearest run thing’, as many contemporaries will attest,
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but the fact remains that even if Napoleon had carried the day, it would not have made the slightest difference to his fate. He might have won another battle or two, but he could not possibly have won the campaign. One need only keep in mind the campaigns of 1813 and 1814 when he triumphed in a number of battles but was unable to win the war. This time, not only did he face the combined forces of the coalition but, as we have seen, his position at home was less than assured with little or no support from the elites. A prolonged and sustained campaign would soon have met with opposition if not revolt at home. A striking sign of Napleon’s lack of support is that the price of shares in the Paris stock exchange went up on news of Waterloo.
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