The Battle (12 page)
Authors: Alessandro Barbero
W
hile the troops were still marching into position, Napoleon mounted his horse to inspect the outposts one more time. The artillery officers had reported that the ground was drying out and that soon it would be possible to maneuver their heavy weapons. The valet Marchand stayed behind at Le Caillou, together with the coaches carrying the emperor's baggage and his cooks, who had received orders to have dinner ("a well-cooked shoulder of mutton") ready at six o'clock in the evening. Riding with the emperor and his adjutants was a local resident, a peasant named De Coster who owned a tavern on the road not far from Le Caillou. At five in the morning, the French had hauled him out of his bed and forced him to go with them; the emperor needed a guide. To keep De Coster from escaping, they tied his hands behind his back and hoisted him onto a horse that was attached by a strap to a light cavalryman's saddle.
As the emperor passed, the troops greeted him with mounting enthusiasm. The shouts of the men, thousands upon thousands of them, even drowned out the music of the regimental bands, whose members were playing their hearts out, sounding the glorious marches of the revolution and the empire. Everyone made an effort to get close enough to see Napoleon; for many, it was their first sight of him since his return from Elba. "He looked to me to be in the best of health, extraordinarily active and intense. Several times, he doffed his hat to us," a young officer later recalled; but then he added, with a touch of uneasiness: "He seems to be deep in thought and seldom speaks, except when he gives some sudden, terse order. As for his complexion, it's without color, almost waxen, not yellow, but rather white, like a Pascal candle." However, the great majority of the troops had no chance to observe Napoleon so narrowly, nor any occasion to conceive grounds for disquiet in his appearance. The infantry raised their shakos aloft on the points of their bayonets, the cavalry brandished their sabers, and from every section of the line there arose a mighty roar: "Vive
l'Empereur!"
An officer in d'Erlon's corps later wrote, "Never had those words been shouted with more enthusiasm; we were practically delirious."
In reality, this enthusiasm was not shared by everyone, and especially not by those soldiers whose stomachs were empty. An infantryman of that same I Corps recalled that a double ration of brandy had been issued that morning: "We would have been just fine with a chunk of bread, but there was no bread. You may imagine what kind of humor we were in. Many people say that we were filled with enthusiasm, that we were all singing, but that's a lie. Marching all night without rations, sleeping in water, forbidden to light fires, and then preparing to face grape and canister took away any desire to sing. We were just glad to pull our shoes out of the holes they sank into with every step. After passing through the wet grain, we were chilled and soaked from the waist down, and even the bravest of us looked discontented. It's true that the regimental bands were playing marches, and that the cavalry's trumpets and the infantry's drums mingled their sounds to grandiose effect, but as for me, I never heard anyone sing at Waterloo."
Whether sham or sincere, the enthusiasm with which the soldiers acclaimed their emperor that morning was the result of a well-orchestrated propaganda campaign. Napoleon had exerted every effort to ensure that the surge of excitement that had passed through France like an electric shock at the news of his escape from Elba did not subside, especially among the troops. Triumphant ceremonies, such as the presentation of the Eagles to the regiments of the reconstituted imperial army, were devised to galvanize the troops. These Eagles were fashioned of bronze and mounted, along with the French tricolor, on poles similar to those carried by the legions of ancient Rome; there was one Eagle per regiment, and the emperor had presented them to their respective units in a solemn ceremony on the Champs-de-Mars barely eighteen days before. Those regiments that had been absent from Paris at the time received their Eagles even later, on the eve of the campaign. On June 11, Colonel Fantin des Odoards, commander of the Twenty-second Ligne, presented the Eagle to his regiment, which was formed up in square. According to the colonel's emotional account of the scene, "This new standard, fresh from the gilder's studio, was solemnly blessed in the church of Couvins; then every soldier touched it with his hand and swore to defend it to the death." Although the men irreverently referred to the Eagle as "the Cuckoo," at Waterloo they would demonstrate that they took their oath seriously.
In the weeks preceding the battle, while he was still in Paris, Napoleon had increased the troops' enthusiasm by a massive distribution of decorations. In one incident, the emperor asked the colonel of the Ninety-third Ligne for the names of twenty soldiers, to whom he would award the Legion of Honor when the Ninety-third passed in review in the Place du Carrousel. At the ceremony, noticing that the colonel had submitted twenty-five names, Napoleon refused to confer the decoration on the last men in line and irritably threw away the list. One of the soldiers who watched their ribbons evaporate this way later wrote about the experience: "I could see the piece of paper on the ground, carried away by the wind, like my young man's dreams. I never in my life felt a sharper pain." Perhaps such public relations errors as this explain why not everyone in his secret heart shared the widespread enthusiasm for the emperor; nevertheless, it cannot be denied that Napoleon, during the course of the Hundred Days, managed not only to raise an army but also to galvanize it sufficiently to face the tests that awaited it.
Along the ridge occupied by the Allies, all eyes were fastened on the extraordinary spectacle presented by the enemy troops as they took up positions in full view little more than a kilometer away, with banners flying in the wind and bayonets gleaming in the sun; successive roars of enthusiasm burst from the men as the emperor, on horseback, reviewed one regiment after another. To the eyes of Lieutenant Wheatley, one of the many British junior officers who had joined the King's German Legion in the past few years, the vision of those dark masses of troops, outlined against the horizon and coming down toward him, "disjointing then contracting, like fields of animated clods, had a fairy look and border'd on the supernatural in appearance." Corporal Farmer of the Eleventh Light Dragoons, one of the regiments in Vandeleur's cavalry brigade, deployed on the extreme left of the Allied line, compared the descent of the seemingly endless columns to images seen in dreams. Ensign Macready of the Thirtieth Regiment, an extremely young officer who had been in the service for only a few months, realized that the sight of the French advance was giving him the shivers, and he thought that all the thousands of men crowded around him with their eyes fixed on the enemy must be feeling the same emotion.
In fact, some of them were feeling even stronger—and less honorable— emotions. In the Fortieth Regiment, a recruit who had never been in battle before approached Sergeant Lawrence, declaring that he had been taken ill and would have to fall out. "I could easily see the cause of his illness," Lawrence later recalled. "So I pushed him into rank again, saying, 'Why, Bartram, it's the smell of this little powder that has caused your illness; there's nothing else the matter with you'; but that physic would not content him at all, and he fell down and would not proceed another inch." The sergeant chose to overlook this behavior, for otherwise he would have been obliged to shoot the young man; sometime later, however, when the soldier again reported to the regiment, Lawrence handed him over to a court-martial, which sentenced him to 300 lashes. One of the troopers in the Sixteenth Light Dragoons jumped off his horse and took to his heels. According to Captain Tomkinson, the man was "deranged. He was an old soldier, yet not the wisest, and had been shoemaker to the troop for many years. The men after the day was over did not resent his leaving them, knowing the kind of man and his weakness." Another of Tomkinson's dragoons failed to get off so easily: Having absented himself without leave before the battle—he was off thieving— he was reported to the captain and, the morning after the battle, "booted" by his comrades-in-arms.
Many strove to identify Napoleon, aware that they were about to measure themselves, for the first time in their lives, against the great man himself. Their emotions were divided between the hatred and contempt officially directed at "Buonaparte" by British public opinion and the admiration they felt for him in their hearts, almost in spite of themselves. Even the simplest soldiers were conscious of these contradictory sentiments; sometime previously, Sergeant Wheeler had written to his family at home, couching his letter in his peculiar orthography: "The Emperor will most assuredly command the French Army, and it will require a General of uncommon skill to withstand so powerful a genus." There was all the more reason for officers to feel this way; Captain Mercer admitted that deep down he "had often longed to see Napoleon, that mighty man of war—that astonishing genius who had filled the world with his renown." Naturally, at that distance it was difficult to know with any certainty whether one had really seen the emperor or not. An officer of the Royal Scots "saw a cloud of staff moving about, following some person of rank, who stopped occasionally, as if to address the French troops. I could almost fancy I could distinguish the redingote and 'petit chapeau tricorne' of our imperial Enemy." Sir Hussey Vivian was positive he'd picked him out with his telescope before the attack began: "With a large suite of Officers, he rode amongst the Columns forming in the front of the British left, and was hailed with shouts of Vive l'
Empereur.
I fancied looking through my glass I could distinguish the little Hero, and, indeed, have little doubt of it."
When the last troops had reached their positions, shouting themselves hoarse all the while, Napoleon ordered Marshal Ney to remain on the field and coordinate the action; as for himself, the emperor intended to oversee the whole battlefield, and therefore he had decided to establish his headquarters on high ground almost two kilometers to the rear, near the Rossomme Farm. From there it was possible with a telescope to survey the entire horizon, from Hougoumont on the left all the way to the forest known as the Bois de Paris (or Fichermont) and the heights of Chapelle-St. Lambert, which obstructed the horizon on the right. In accordance with a well-established procedure, the emperor's aides set up a camp chair and a little table, on which they spread out his maps. Weary from so much riding, Napoleon sat down heavily and waited for the battle to begin.
One of the young officers in his retinue noted, a little uneasily, that the emperor, in stark contrast with his enthusiastic troops, seemed all too listless.
W
hat exactly was a "battle" in 1815? The most acute description is given by Carl von Clausewitz in the fourth book of his treatise
On War,
published posthumously in 1832-5. In the following passage, the Prussian theoretician was not describing Waterloo in particular, but rather the general idea of a Napoleonic battle, which he knew well both from direct personal experience and from many hours spent in reflection. Clausewitz wrote:
What generally takes place in a major battle these days? Great masses of troops calmly position themselves in rank-and-file order. A relatively small proportion of the whole is sent forward, and these men are left to expend themselves in a firefight of several hours' duration. Now and again, combat is interrupted and displaced a little this way or that by small, isolated blows: infantry attacks, bayonet assaults, cavalry charges. If the engaged troops gradually wear themselves down in this way and lose some part of their fighting spirit, then they are withdrawn, and other troops take their place.
Thus the battle burns on slowly, with moderated intensity, like wet gunpowder, and when night spreads its dark veil and all grows calm, because no one can see anymore and no one wants to entrust himself to blind chance, then the estimates and evaluations begin: how many usable forces (that is, how many masses of troops not yet collapsed like blasted volcanoes) remain to one side and the other, how much territory has been won or lost, how secure is the rear. The impressions of courage and cowardice, cleverness and stupidity that individual officers believe they have gathered, both from their own men and from the enemy, are assembled into a general impression and combined with the results of the foregoing evaluations to arrive at a decision: either to abandon the field, or to renew the fighting the following morning.
Although in the case of Waterloo a sense of defeat overcame the French army before reaching its commanders and the decision to abandon the battlefield was taken by the troops themselves, more spontaneously and chaotically than Napoleon would have wished, Clausewitz's sketch corresponds better than one might think to the events of June 18, 1815. In fact, an earlier version of the definition of battle given above can be found in the book Clausewitz wrote before
On War,
titled
The Campaign of 1815 in France,
which dealt specifically with the Waterloo campaign:
In every contemporary battle, the opposing forces are worn down during a long period of mutual destruction along the front line, where these forces are in contact. This phase of the conflict lasts for several hours, and the firefight results in minor oscillations, until one of the two sides finally receives a visible preponderance from its reserves—that is, from fresh troops—and thus is able to deal the decisive blow to the already wavering enemy.
A little farther on in the same book, Clausewitz wrote:
Our battles last between half a day and an entire day. For what is by far the major part of the entire struggle, there is a slow attrition, a slow destruction of the two armies, which are in contact at points all along the battle line and which, like two incompatible elements, destroy each other at those points of contact. Thus the battle keeps burning slowly, moderately, like wet powder; and it's only when the major part of the forces on one side or the other has been consumed and rendered useless that a decision can be reached with the remaining troops.
Then chief of staff to Thielemann's corps, Clausewitz had seen hard action at Ligny and found himself in Wavre that June 18 morning, where he would remain all day long. His analysis is indispensable to our understanding of the way in which Napoleon conducted the Battle of Waterloo.
