The War of Wars (121 page)

It was to the new government’s mistakes that that extraordinary whirlwind, the rising from the political grave of Napoleon Bonaparte, ‘the Hundred Days’, must be attributed. Chafing and resentful in Elba, he had watched like a vulture as the new French government stumbled and as discontent on the mainland increased. He soon believed he had enough support to move. He may also have been secretly encouraged in that belief by the falling out of his enemies at Vienna – Britain and Austria versus Russia and Prussia. He may have imagined this would rebound to his advantage, and that he had the tacit support of the Tsar or, absurdly, that Britain and Austria would need his help against the two northern powers.

He chose his moment carefully on 26 February 1815, embarking some 1,000 men aboard the brig
Inconstant
for the hazardous two-day sail to land near Antibes. Napoleon had earlier ordered the same brig to rescue his beloved Marie Louise from Aix, where she was holidaying; but by then she was already under the spell of a dashing general, Count von Neipperg, cunningly sent to chaperone her by her father, the Emperor Francis; so, she refused. Soon after it was clear that the two of them had become lovers. Napoleon had lost both his wives in the space of six months; and he was so offhand towards the adoring Marie Walewska, who visited him on Elba, that she too was put off. Napoleon wrote bitterly: ‘My wife no longer writes to me. My son is snatched away from me. No such barbarous act is recorded in modern times.’ Napoleon declared that he would reach Paris ‘without firing a shot’.

Landing on 1 March, he issued one of his famous rallying cries to his troops:

Soldiers! In my exile I have heard your voice. I have come to you through every obstacle, every danger. Your general, called to the throne by the voice of the people and raised on your bucklers, is back among you; come to him! Pluck off the colours that the nation has proscribed, and that, for twenty-five years, were the rallying point of all the enemies of France. Put on the Tricolor cockade; you wore it in our great days. Here are the eagles you had at Ulm, at Austerlitz, at Jena, at Eylau, at Friedland, at Tudela, at Eckmühl, at Essling, at Wagram, at Smolensk, at the Moskowa, at Lützen, at Wurschen, at Montmirail! Do you believe that the little handful of Frenchmen who are so arrogant today can support their sight? They will return whence they came; there let them reign as they pretend that they did reign these last nineteen years. Soldiers, rally around the standard of your chief! Victory will advance at the double! The Eagle, with the national colours, will fly from steeple to steeple to the towers of Notre Dame. Then will you be able to display your honourable scars. Then will you be able to claim the credit of your deeds, as the liberators of your country. In your old age, surrounded and honoured by your fellow citizens, all will respectfully listen while you narrate your great deeds; you will be able to say with pride: ‘And I also was one of that Grand Army that twice entered the walls of Vienna, of Rome, of Berlin, of Madrid, of Moscow, and that cleansed Paris from the stain left on it by treason and the presence of the enemy!’

He also pledged ‘equality among all classes’, in an opportunistic attempt to rally France’s remaining revolutionaries against the reactionary government of Louis XVIII. Receiving a hostile reception on landing, he chose not to march through Provence, a royalist hotbed, but across the lower Alps to Grenoble, a perilous single track across precipices and made slippery by ice and snow. It was an heroic progress by Napoleon’s thousand that lasted six days and covered 240 miles.

The column was blocked at Laffrey, twenty-five miles south of
Grenoble, by a body of troops. Napoleon, ever the actor, walked forward in front of his men, with ‘The Marseillaise’ being played behind him, and opened his greatcoat to show the white uniform beneath. ‘Here I am. Kill your Emperor if you wish.’ A resounding cheer was the response: ‘
Vive l’Empereur!
’

He reached Grenoble where the garrison refused to fire upon him and a crowd welcomed him into the city with flaming torches. A day later he reached Lyons and marched north to Auxerre after sending a note to his old comrade Ney. ‘I shall receive you as I did on the morrow of the Battle of the Moskva.’ This simple soldier came over to him at Auxerre, which precipitated dozens of other defections by officers and army units.

Louis had received news of Napoleon’s landing philosophically: ‘I beg you, Messieurs, to inform your Courts that, but for a little gout, I am in good health, and that I am not in the least bit worried by this event. I hope that it will trouble neither the peace of Europe nor my own.’ But already crowds were chanting ‘The Bourbons to the scaffold! Down with princes! Behead the royalists!’

On 16 March Louis addressed the two chambers, pledging to die in defence of the constitution. The leader of the ultras, the Crown Prince, the Comte d’Artois, for the first time pledged loyalty to the constitution. But with army units defecting in droves, the King was left with only his household troops and a few thousand volunteers.

Louis decided not to die after all, but to fly. At midnight on 19 March, as Napoleon’s growing army approached Paris, the corpulent King bade farewell to his tearful supporters. ‘Struck by his venerable appearance, we fell weeping to our knees,’ said one. Louis set off in his carriage with a military escort to Lille in pouring rain. At 9 p.m. the following evening Napoleon arrived and a delirious crowd carried him up the steps of the Tuileries. Not a drop of blood had been spilled.

Louis’s party, bogged down in mud, travelled slowly to Lille. It was met with sympathy by the people of the villages and towns it passed through. He crossed into Belgium, where people were ‘on their knees in the mud, raising their hands to heaven and begging the King not to abandon them’. Louis contemplated fleeing to England but instead
went on to a lovely castle. Here he downed a hundred oysters at a single sitting – an extraordinary feat even for this gourmand king. He justified his cowardice to Talleyrand: ‘So Bonaparte has force on his side; all hearts are for me. I have seen unequivocal proof of this all along my route. So the powers cannot doubt France’s desires this year. That is your text, I leave the commentary to you.’

Napoleon had made a serious mistake in his timing, for the Congress of Vienna was still sitting. There the main sovereigns of Europe and their foreign ministers continued to wrangle, enjoying magnificent hospitality at the Austrian Emperor’s expense, and gossiped maliciously about one another with Francis’s spies watching their every move. On 7 March a messenger reached Metternich’s palace with the news of Napoleon’s landing. But he was asleep and refused to read the paper for a while before opening the envelope and dashing off to inform Francis.

By one o’clock he had summoned Francis, the Prussian King and the Tsar. An hour later the Congress was resumed with urgency. Riders were despatched from Vienna to every country in Europe. Within six days each major power had agreed to provide 150,000 men – 600,000 in total to ‘crush the ogre once and for all’. The differences between the nations were hastily shelved: with Talleyrand leaving his post as Louis fled paris, the Russians and the Prussians secured a better deal than they might have expected: two-fifths of Saxony went to Prussia, and even more of the Grand Duchy of Poland was set up as a Russian satellite, the Kingdom of Poland. Napoleon was declared an outlaw, a capital offence. He had gone too far.

Desperately Napoleon sent an emissary to Alexander and Francis accepting the new boundaries of France; desperately he tried to act constitutionally: Carnot was appointed minister of the interior and even Lafayette became official opposition leader in an attempt to woo the old revolutionaries. However the sinister Fouché stayed on as chief of police. The constitution was to be reformed along moderate lines and Benjamin Constant, a widely respected moderate, appointed to perform the task. Constant agreed to set up a liberal constitution and hold a plebiscite on 6 May, although he previously had described Napoleon as ‘dyed with our blood . . . He is another Attila, another
Genghiz Khan, but more terrible and more hateful because he has at his disposal the resources of civilisation.’

In this plebiscite only 1.5 million approved the constitution, compared with Napoleon’s old turnout of 3.5 million. In Dijon he won less than a quarter of the vote, in Lyons 15 per cent, in Paris just 12 per cent, in Strasbourg 11 per cent, in Toulon 5 per cent, in Bordeaux 3 per cent, in Nantes 2 per cent and in Marseilles 1 per cent. Altogether only 21 per cent voted in favour. He could hardly claim popular legitimacy and certainly no general enthusiasm: his restoration had been the work of a minority, mostly disgruntled servicemen.

Napoleon also promised: ‘No more war, no conquests.’ ‘Can one be as fat as I am and have ambition?’ he asked disarmingly. But when the new Assembly defied him, he quickly flared up in his old imperious manner: ‘Let us not imitate the example of the later Roman Empire which, invaded on all sides by the barbarians, made itself the laughingstock of posterity by discussing abstract questions when the battering-rams were breaking down the city gates.’

He was soon bitterly disappointed to find that his peace overtures had been rejected by the allies, and called for mobilization: he raised nearly 300,000 men, but many were untrained and ill-equipped. He now had to decide on a suitable strategy – whether to stay and defend Paris or to strike at one of the great allied armies being hastily assembled to fight him. Already at the Rhine Schwarzenberg had assembled some 200,000 Austrians, while Barclay de Tolly was bringing up 150,000 Russians more slowly behind him. A force of 75,000 Austrians was assembling in Italy to enter France from the south-east. In the north a British-dominated army of 110,000, including Belgians and Saxons, was to be assembled to link up with 117,000 Prussians under Blücher.

Further bad news soon reached Napoleon: Murat had raised his flag against the Austrians, anticipating a victory by Napoleon – but had been badly defeated at the Battle of Tolentino on the eastern shores of the Apennines, south-west of Ancona, on 3 May. Within three weeks the dashing Neipperg, Marie Louise’s lover, led a body of Austrian troops to take Naples and the Bourbon Ferdinand IV was placed on the throne for the following decade.

Napoleon decided against a defensive strategy, which would have allowed him to build up his forces: he already had a much larger force to defend Paris in place than in the previous year. But he feared his unpopularity would grow in the capital if the campaign was drawn out. It was a characteristically bold gamble: to strike with his 140,000 strong northern army into Belgium only a few days’ march away and divide the British and Prussian armies strung out along a 145-kilometre front, the former with 100,000 men to the west, the latter with 150,000 men to the east and thus seek to counter their joint superiority as they sought separately to protect their communications.

Down in Vienna Wellington had been representing the British for a few weeks in place of Castlereagh, who had been recalled. (The British government had become desperately anxious to remove the Duke from Paris since an assassination attempt had been made on his life, and they knew that he would not budge unless the pretext were important enough.) Wellington sprang into action to face his great adversary as commander of the British army in Belgium. As in a Wild West film the two most formidable commanders in Europe were to meet for the final shoot-out in the last reel.

Wellington, whom Talleyrand described as the most complicated man he had ever met, had always been an indifferent diplomat, just as in later life he was to prove an even less impressive politician. His steely, martinet style was worlds apart from the finesses and evasions of diplomacy, or the compromises and backslapping of politicians. It must be asked what drove this extraordinary man on and on: having become Europe’s most famous soldier, he had striven for new successes in diplomacy and politics as though he could not rest.

He always attributed his drive to his sense of duty and noblesse oblige. But duty did not require him to climb the summit of three different careers. Beneath the carefully cultivated air of languor and detachment that were supposed to mark him out as the English gentleman he was not there lay a man of intense ambition, determined to succeed in everything that he did and never to rest on his laurels, perhaps the product of slights he had suffered in his youth, the ugly duckling brother of the glamorous Richard.

In this he again closely resembled George Washington, so apparently
obtuse, with the manner of a Virginian country gentleman which concealed a determination not just to win but to lead his own country. Wellington was no polymath: he was a great soldier, but not a very good diplomat or politician. This was the strange personality who now travelled to Belgium for his appointment with his adversary, the most powerful and famous ruler the world had ever yet seen, to ‘get his man’.

They were pretty evenly matched: the meticulous, calculating, defiant British general against the brilliant, bold French soldier, a clash of two military titans rarely experienced in history. It is unsurprising that the Waterloo campaign was to become the most written about in military history.

Yet the reality was somewhat different. Napoleon, like the proverbial outlaw he now was, was making his last throw of the dice. He calculated on inflicting a great defeat so that the government of Lord Liverpool in Britain would fall, to be replaced by the more conciliatory Whigs, while the Prussians and the Russians might peel off and make peace. In reality the chances that this would have happened were slender: in all probability the huge armies of Europe would probably still have continued to march if he had won Waterloo and he would have been crushed. Again like the proverbial outlaw, he preferred to go out and meet his enemies rather than be caught and surrounded and at last vanquished.

At midnight on 11 June Napoleon left Paris to join his 140,000-strong army. He had slept one last time with the loyal Marie Walewska. He spurned the capable but disloyal Murat’s offer of help, a mistake as he was so short of good generals, and left the highly capable Davout as military governor of Paris, no doubt to keep order while he was absent and to deter attack from the east and south. His faithful chief of staff, Berthier, had tragically thrown himself from a window of a palace in Bavaria for reasons which are still unknown. His chief lieutenants in the campaign were to be the fearless but strategically inept Ney, the competent but scarcely brilliant Soult, and Grouchy, a cavalry commander without imagination. Napoleon himself was clearly ailing: his face was puffy and he had grown much fatter recently. He appeared
tired and lethargic and required an unusual amount of sleep. On 14 June he issued his last great proclamation to an army.