The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (67 page)

The Lines of Torres Vedras–‘old towers’ in Portuguese–were actually a series of more than a hundred forts complete with redoubts, ditches and earthworks north of the city of Lisbon. Wellington’s army would be able to keep a steady holding pattern until hunger supplemented by ambushes drove the French out of Portugal. The fortifications were thrown up in such secrecy that the French had absolutely no idea of their existence. It was not until what was intended to be the French army of occupation under General Masséna got to within two days’ march of the Lines in the autumn of 1810 that they realized they could go no further. The whole British army had vanished into the hillside. Wellington had meanwhile given orders to the reluctant but nobly self-sacrificing Portuguese farmers to lay waste all the country around Torres Vedras and bring all their provisions and livestock within the Lines. He intended to hold out there indefinitely until starvation forced the French army to go away.

The British supply boats that he had waiting offshore permitted Wellington to sit out the winter of 1810–11 with his men. Outside Torres Vedras the French army under General Masséna prowled and ultimately starved, thanks to their policy of depending on the local produce. In the end, after waiting from October to March, in the course of which 30,000 French troops died, Masséna and his men were forced to abandon Portugal. In 1811 Wellington began his campaign to drive the French out of Spain. In that same year the Prince of Wales at last became regent, his father George III having been diagnosed as incurably mad. Although he had allied himself with the Whigs since his youth, the new prince regent was obliged to accept a Tory government, and the Peninsular War therefore continued unimpeded.

By April 1812 all four of the most important fortresses of Spain–Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida in the north, and Badajos and Elvas to the south–had fallen into British hands. But they had only done so after a series of sieges whose huge fatalities required gallant self-sacrifice on the part of the British soldiers. At Badajos Wellington wept at the appalling waste of life when the storming of an incomplete breech required his men to use the bodies of dead colleagues as bridges. Nevertheless his object had been attained: the road to Spain lay open, and, beginning with a magnificent victory at Salamanca, he began to achieve his aim of forcing the French out of the south of Spain and keeping them out.

Wellington’s influence in the corridors of power over the war’s strategy was now unexpectedly helped by the tragic death in May of the prime minister Spencer Perceval. After Perceval had been shot by a crazed businessman named Bellingham in the lobby of the House of Commons, the new prime minister Lord Liverpool made Wellington’s old ally Castlereagh foreign secretary. Meanwhile events in another part of Europe were aiding the allies. It was in 1812 that Napoleon finally overplayed his hand. He had parted company with the Russians over who should have Constantinople (modern Istanbul) and, believing that they were about to ally themselves with Britain as they were allowing British goods into their ports, in June he made the outstanding error of invading Russia.

His best soldiers were withdrawn from Spain to fight the new Russian foe, and were replaced by raw recruits. But not only was Napoleon badly overstretched. On its home territory the awakening colossus straddling the continents of Europe and Asia, which stretched from Poland in the west to China in the east, was too gigantic an enemy even for Napoleon. The 600,000 French soldiers he poured into Russia counted for nothing in its vast empty spaces. Like France herself, Russia was the nation in arms; and just as the French nation in arms in 1793 had proved too much for Europe, the Russian nation in arms was too much for Napoleon.

By 19 October Napoleon decided to abandon his attempt to conquer Russia, whose patriotic inhabitants were so determined to defeat him that they had burned their own capital, Moscow. It was far more important to return to his own empire, which he had been out of contact with for too long. The long and dreadful retreat from Moscow began. The ravenous once Grand Army broke up under the combined onslaught of hunger, the Cossacks and what Napoleon’s renowned general Marshal Ney called General Winter. Thousands of Frenchmen were abandoned to their fate. They died where they lay. Too weak to move they were buried alive in the snow or became the food of wolves. Those who did not die–and the dead numbered a staggering 170,000–made their way home often barefoot and without overcoats.

Unlike Wellington who provided for his men with meticulous care and invented the rubber boot which bears his name, Napoleon did not look after his soldiers. As Wellington said, ‘No man ever lost more armies than he did.’ Wherever he was, and in whatever circumstances, even if his men were starving, his aides were under orders to make sure that the ultimate luxury of white bread was available for the emperor.

Meanwhile, encouraged by the humiliation of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, the Prussians, Swedes and Austrians once more declared war on Napoleon, their soldiers paid for by British subsidies. Now that their ranks no longer consisted solely of patriotic Frenchmen, the emperor’s armies had lost some of the vigour and
esprit de corps
which had won the breathtaking campaigns of the past. Soldiers from Italy and the German Confederation of the Rhine made up much of their numbers. The Napoleonic Empire was beginning to pull apart under its own contradictions.

Against the inferior recruits in the French army in Spain, Wellington’s already triumphant campaign turned into a rout. By 1813 after a superb set of flanking movements he controlled the whole of the peninsula, and had pressed the French right back to the Pyrenees. Then in October of that year in central Europe the allies won a decisive victory. At the Battle of Leipzig the troops of Austria, Russia, Prussia and Sweden threw Napoleon and 190,000 French soldiers back across the Rhine. By January 1814 all the German states had risen against Napoleon, impelled by a proud new sense of German nationalism. Having defeated Soult, Wellington crossed the Pyrenees to join the invasion of France as allied soldiers advanced from all directions. By the end of March Tsar Alexander I was in Paris along with leaders of the other victorious nations, while Napoleon himself was forced to abdicate and retire to the Italian island of Elba.

The more far-sighted pointed out that Napoleon was far too near Italy for safety, and that the people of France should be consulted on the question of what sort of ruler they wished for. But the victors were too frightened of another French Revolution rocking their own thrones to do anything but immediately reimpose the Bourbon monarchy in the shape of Louis XVIII, younger brother of Louis XVI. Deliberations about the future shape of Europe were referred to a Congress at Vienna. But into the peacemaking–conducted in a self-conscious return to the style of the pre-war era by aristocratic diplomats in between glittering balls–broke hideous news. There was no point in continuing: Napoleon had escaped from Elba. The Hundred Days of his last campaign had begun.

He was on his way from the south back up to Paris with an army of his veterans which was snowballing by the hour. Marshal Ney, who had been sent to capture Napoleon and had vowed to bring him back in a cage, instead had joined his old comrade once more. The fat and unpopular Louis XVIII made no attempt to rally the French people. They scarcely knew him, as he had spent the war in England. All too mindful of his elder brother’s dreadful fate, he quickly got out of the country in an undignified scramble. Europe was back at war again.

It was decided that each great power should provide 150,000 men against Napoleon. The British forces under Wellington, who was by now not only a duke but commander-in-chief, were deputed with the Prussians under Field Marshal Blücher to defend the southern Netherlands north-east of the French border. It was there that Napoleon decided he should strike. He needed a conclusive engagement to defeat that section of the allied armies to enable him to link up with his followers at Antwerp before Russia and Austria had time to invade from the east. The Battle of Waterloo turned out to be conclusive in another way. It was the final end of the man Wellington called ‘the great disturber of Europe’. But the situation was not straightforward. The victory of Waterloo was far from predictable. As Wellington, the Iron Duke, would himself say later, it was ‘a damned nice thing–the closest-run thing you ever saw in your life’.

Wellington’s best, most highly disciplined peninsular veterans were far away in America. They had been sent there for a new Anglo-American war which had broken out in June 1812 over the carrying trade. What he was left with was a force he described as ‘an infamous army’–27,000 raw recruits most of whom had never held a gun in their lives. ‘I don’t know what effect these men will have on the enemy,’ he remarked, ‘but by God they frighten me.’ Moreover it was the emperor himself who was advancing out from France on 12 June 1815 with his most devoted partisans, veterans of twenty-two years’ campaigning.

Wellington himself had come to the conclusion that Napoleon would need to strike quickly before the Prussian and British armies could work out their strategy, but he had no idea just how soon that would be. Absolute success and the complete defeat of Napoleon would depend on the arrival of 30,000 Prussians under Blücher, to bring the combined Anglo-Dutch forces up to about 65,000, still 5,000 lighter than the French. But the two armies were a considerable distance from one another. Wellington and the Anglo-Dutch army were in the main path of the emperor’s advance, and in the event the Prussians very nearly never turned up to help them. For Napoleon’s intelligence was excellent as usual. He decided that the Prussians must be attacked first at Ligny and put out of action before he dealt with the Anglo-Dutch forces.

As a result of Napoleon’s secrecy and swiftness it was not until the afternoon of 15 June that Wellington discovered that his opponent had crossed the French border and was at Charleroi with 70,000 men. ‘Napoleon has humbugged me,’ said the furious duke. Not only were the Prussians being attacked at Ligny, but 1,500 French skirmishers had attacked an outlying Dutch division at Quatre Bras. This meant that the French were advancing up the highway to Brussels and were only twenty miles away.

Wellington now ordered his army forward to concentrate at the crossroads of Quatre Bras in order to divert Ney from Blücher and the Prussians at Ligny. Though there was an inconclusive draw between the two sides at Quatre Bras, by the end of the day Wellington had succeeded in his limited objective: the British had prevented the French getting any nearer Brussels. Meanwhile the Prussians had retreated eighteen miles from Ligny to Wavre, which was due east of Waterloo.

When the Prussian retreat became known, Wellington decided that Waterloo was where he should fall back to. He would make his stand there and hope that the Prussians would somehow come to his aid. The area crossed the highroad between Napoleon’s troops at Charleroi and allied headquarters at Brussels. It was bordered by the little village of Waterloo in the north, now on the outskirts of modern Brussels, and the Château de Hougoumont to the south with the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte in the middle. Wellington had had his engineers survey the ground for the past week for the maximum advantage. Every building, every peculiar feature of the landscape, had to be adapted for defensive purposes.

In the middle of the night Wellington got word from the seventy-two-year-old Blücher, who had been seriously wounded at Ligny, that even if the old general had to be tied to his horse he would personally lead out his troops against Napoleon’s right wing the next day. As 18 June dawned, there was a terrific downpour, so often the prelude to victory for Wellington. The soldiers awoke to find themselves in a sea of mud, but were soon up and about preparing for battle in their red coats. Everywhere rode the duke in his cocked hat and civilian clothes, which he found more comfortable than regimentals, raising everyone’s morale by his phlegmatic and indefatigable presence.

Napoleon, for his part, rose late. He shared none of his generals’ fears about the British infantry or the battle itself, for he believed that the Prussians had been too badly mauled by Ligny to be able to join up with the British. Nor did he rate his opposite number. Rather curiously, considering the havoc Wellington had inflicted on his armies, Napoleon dismissed him as a ‘bad general’. He took his time waiting for the ground to dry out for better use of his cavalry. That was another mistake, for every hour that passed gave the Prussians more time to come to the aid of the Anglo-Dutch, hours during which Wellington was seen surreptitiously looking at his watch and wondering where they were.

The Battle of Waterloo began with an attack by the French on the Château de Hougoumont. Though it was set on fire, the British held it all day, protecting Wellington’s right as well as preventing the French advance up the highway to Brussels. The French fruitlessly used up troops trying to capture it, but they never did. Meanwhile the battle raged as again and again the French columns assailed the British positions without success. The British were very carefully arranged in squares by Wellington. Drilled in preceding months by their sergeant majors, the novice infantrymen had quickly learned the ‘steadiness’ under fire that according to the duke made the British the best soldiers in the world. They could not have had more need of it. For against their squares came first the fearsome French infantry columns and then for two hours the French cavalry. ‘This is hard pounding, gentlemen,’ said Wellington at one point, ‘try who can pound the longest.’

But each British soldier, as taught, continued calmly to take aim and fire, and then kneel and let the man behind him, whose gun was cocked, take aim and fire in his turn, as the first lot cleaned their guns and loaded once more. The French cavalry with their glittering cuirasses and high plumed helmets, galloped round and round the squares trying to put an end to the steady firing by breaking them up and finding a way through the troops. But nothing could shake the steady British line, though they could scarcely see in the smoke and scarcely hear in the din. All the while the beautiful French horses and their superb riders crashed one by one into the mud–looking, as Wellington later remembered, like so many up-ended turtles. But the squares held. Later when he examined the battlefield with its awful debris the duke found a whole square of men who had died in formation rather than let the French pass. When Wellington had been asked if he could defeat Napoleon, he had pointed at a redcoated infantryman and said, ‘It all depends on him.’ His confidence had been well placed.