The War of Wars (122 page)

Soldiers! This is the anniversary of Marengo and of Friedland, that twice decided the fate of Europe. Then, as after Wagram, as after Austerlitz, we were too generous; we believed in . . . the oaths of the princes whom we left on their thrones! And now, coalesced against us, they are aiming at the independence and the most sacred rights of France. They have begun an unjust aggression. Forward! Let us march against them; are not they and we the same men?

Soldiers! You were one against three at Jena against these same arrogant Prussians; at Montmirail, you were one against six. Madmen! A moment’s prosperity has blinded them. If they enter France they will find their graves. Soldiers, we have forced marches to make, battles to fight, dangers to encounter, but with constancy the victory will be ours; the rights, the honour, of our country will be reconquered. For every Frenchman who has courage the moment has come to conquer or to die!

He ordered his men forward with his customary speed and secrecy towards Charleroi, straight for the gap between the British and Prussian armies. It was a typically all-or-nothing strategy, and he caught the allies entirely by surprise.

Wellington had been in command in Brussels ever since early April, and had made a poor job of it. There he had to integrate Britain, Hanoverian and Dutch units. He complained of his ‘infamous army, very weak and ill-equipped, and a very inexperienced staff’. He divided the army into three corps, one under the youthful Prince of Orange, the second under the sturdy Rowland Hill, with himself in charge of the reserve. He had a total of just 92,000 men and 192 guns. Under entirely separate control was Blücher’s Prussian army of 120,000 men and more than 300 guns.

Wellington had met Blücher in Paris and, unusually for the acidulous Irishman, got on well with a brother general. But his first duty was to his own men. This in his opinion meant protecting his line of retreat to the ports of Antwerp and Ostend so that he could evacuate his army in the event of a defeat. He was concerned that Napoleon might come up around his west flank towards Tournai and threaten the coastal area, cutting him off. In spite of this worry, he privately believed that Napoleon, if he did come, would move towards Mons in the centre and keep his options open. He disposed his forces with an eye to protecting the coast, which meant they were kept a considerable distance from Blücher’s army.

But Wellington did not really believe Napoleon would attack at all. In fact he wanted to invade France to surprise Napoleon. The British commander basked in complacency in the almost carnival atmosphere of Brussels, to which British society had flocked in early summer. He wrote to Lord Stewart on 8 May: ‘I say nothing about our defensive
operations because I am inclined to believe we are so well united and so strong that the enemy cannot do us much mischief.’ On the very day that Napoleon’s army crossed into Belgium, Wellington wrote to the Tsar discussing the best routes for the allies to invade France.

Napoleon crossed the border with his army on 15 June and appointed Ney to command his left flank, the First and Second Corps, while Grouchy commanded the right, the Third and Fourth Corps. Ney was ordered to seize the hamlet of Quatre Bras just beyond the intersection of the main east-west Roman road with the north-south road to Brussels. Wellington was blissfully unaware of his approach, a major failure in allied intelligence. Lieutenant-Colonel Colquhoun Grant, one of his intelligence officers, had tried to warn him on 14 June; but another officer failed to pass the message on. Wellington did not receive news of the first French attacks that day until 6 p.m.

He had been enjoying himself with parties and amorous dalliances in Brussels, including one with Lady Frances Wedderburn-Webster in a leafy glade. Wellington’s caddish character in seducing married women, while himself being married, on an unusually large scale for an Englishman, even an officer, has not been given the attention it deserves. In this, if in so little else, he resembled Napoleon; but this behaviour was thoroughly at odds with the image of the dutiful English gentleman he liked to project.

As late as 13 June he had written: ‘There is nothing new here. We have reports of Buonaparte’s joining the army and attacking us; but I have accounts from Paris of the 10th, on which day he was still there; and I judge from his speech to the Legislature that his departure was not likely to be imminent. I think we are now too strong for him here.’

On 15 June at just before six he first heard the news that the French were attacking Prussian forward posts. He chose not to react, but to wait for further evidence of the size and whereabouts of the French force: the attack was much further to the east than he expected and could prove a feint.

Some German historians have alleged that he learnt much earlier of the attacks, but chose not to come to the help of the Prussians. There is no documentary evidence for this. Blücher sent a message calling for help; but Wellington had already left for a ball given by the Duchess of
Richmond improvised in a large workshop. There he ‘affected great gaiety and cheerfulness’ but an observer remarked: ‘I had never seen him with such an expression of care and anxiety on his countenance.’ He was not neglecting his duties: he simply did not yet know how to react to an attack whose direction and intensity he could not guess.

That same night Ney had disobeyed the admittedly ambiguous order from Napoleon to take Quatre Bras and bedded down for the night. There a small Dutch force commanded by Prince Bernhard of Saye-Weimar, and sent there by the Prince of Orange’s chief of staff in defiance of orders, had entrenched itself. At nearly nine o’clock in the evening, Wellington, who had escorted Lady Charlotte Greville to the ball, was told by the Prince of Orange of the French concentration outside Quatre Bras. He affected calm, but summoned the Duke of Richmond and said tersely: ‘Napoleon has humbugged me, by God, he has gained 24 hours’ march on me.’

It was too late to send reinforcements to Quatre Bras. He decided to make a stand farther back towards the village of Waterloo. After snatching three hours’ sleep, he breakfasted leisurely, then rode forward towards Quatre Bras, which he found to be peaceful. He ordered troops down to support the Dutch in their outpost. Then he sent a letter to Blücher at 10.30 declaring ‘I do not see much of the enemy in front of us, and I await news of your Highness and the arrival of troops in order to determine my operations for the day. Nothing has appeared on the side of Binche, or on our right.’

He rode to meet the Prussian commanders at the village of Brye. Blücher reported to him that he had concentrated three corps around the village of Ligny nearby to the south east. The accounts of the meeting are contradictory: General von Muffling, Prussia’s liaison officer, claimed that Wellington, on being asked to lend support to the Prussian stand at Ligny, said: ‘Well, I will come, provided that I myself am not attacked [at Quatre Bras].’ Another German officer claims that Wellington agreed simply to block the French at Quatre Bras and send the bulk of his forces to Prussia’s aid. This seems highly unlikely, as he was hurrying most of his troops forward to the exposed position at Quatre Bras and could not spare many for Ligny; he still could not be sure where the main thrust of Napoleon’s attack would
come – whether at Quatre Bras or Ligny – and his army was weaker than Blücher’s; he did not know that Napoleon intended to attack both at once.

Privately he considered Blücher had blundered in his choice of ground to meet the French, which was only a mile away from Brye. ‘If they fight here they will be damnably mauled.’ This was open ground in front of a hill. Meanwhile, in the west, Ney still hesitated to attack Quatre Bras because he was not sure of the enemy strength; owing to the incompetence of Napoleon’s chief of staff, Soult, clear orders did not reach him until the mid-afternoon to take the village and then wheel about and fall upon Blücher’s exposed eastern flank and rear while Napoleon attacked from the front. The Prussians would thus be annihilated between two fires.

On the morning of 16 June Napoleon ordered his men forward against the exposed Prussian front for the first of three battles over three days of fighting that collectively became known as the Battle of Waterloo. Napoleon declared: ‘the intention of His Majesty is that you attack whatever is before you and after vigorously throwing them back, join us to envelop this corps.’ However, he believed the Prussians to have only 40,000 men when in fact they had double that and General von Bülow’s corps of 32,000 stationed at Liège was on its way, although in the event it arrived too late for the battle.

He ordered a devastating artillery barrage to open up on the exposed Prussian positions, followed by a cavalry attack by Grouchy on the right, as well as by the infantry. Soon the French had captured the villages of St Amand and Sombrette. The gallant Blücher, who had put himself at the head of a cavalry charge, had his horse shot under him and narrowly escaped being trampled to death; but he was rescued, command temporarily devolving to Gneisenau, who anxiously awaited for reinforcements from Wellington that did not come. He later wrote; ‘on the 16th of June in the morning the Duke of Wellington promised to be at Quatre Bras at 10am with 20,000 men . . . on the strength of these promises and arrangements we decided to fight the battle . . . ’ As we have seen the Prussians had no reason to believe they would be reinforced unless Wellington felt himself secure at Quatre Bras.

At 2 p.m., out of sight three miles to the west, Ney’s army had at last launched a major attack and Wellington was desperately trying to bring up the men being hurried down the Brussels road to hold the village of
Quatre Bras. Ney had delayed attacking, believing the Dutch defending force to be greater than it actually was, and that Wellington’s army was largely concealed behind the brow of a low hill. When Ney finally did attack, reinforcements were hurriedly arriving, already exhausted by the march in the intense heat.

As the Dutch front line gave ground under the French assault, Picton and 8,000 troops arrived and pushed them back for a short while, before more French troops were committed and the Anglo-Dutch forces were pushed back again. A force of cavalry under the Duke of Brunswick arrived and charged, but he was mortally wounded. Wellington, mounted on Copenhagen, was nearly captured by a French counter-charge. He galloped into a British square yelling, ‘Lie down, 92nd,’ and the men let him pass over and jumped up again discharging volleys at the pursuing French horsemen, who veered away. Further French charges followed – in one case right into an incomplete square of the 42nd Highlanders, who closed it and trapped and killed the cavalrymen inside.

But Ney’s 40,000-strong army just kept on coming, counter-charging the reinforcements as quickly as they could be brought forward. Meanwhile Napoleon, realizing that Ney had not broken through Quatre Bras, instructed General d’Erlon, commanding Ney’s 22,000-strong reserve, to stage the flank attack he had planned against the Prussian right which he believed would deliver a decisive victory. Ney had been right to press his attack on Quatre Bras: for we now know that if he had veered off to the right to help Napoleon, the British would have felt free to reinforce Blücher.

But Napoleon’s last-minute change of orders proved very nearly disastrous, for it deprived Ney of the reserve support he needed to overwhelm the British position. D’Erlon, misunderstanding his orders, moved to reinforce the French right rather than attack behind Prussian lines: this panicked the French right, which mistook his men for enemy troops. This in turn delayed Napoleon’s own advance which had been going well; but he coolly ordered d’Erlon to march back upon the Prussian west flank and attack it.

Ney, preoccupied with his intense firefight at Quatre Bras, was incensed when he learnt that Napoleon had detached his own reserves,
and issued a counter-order to the confused d’Erlon to come back to his support at Quatre Bras: he threatened to have the unfortunate officer court-martialled. D’Erlon was about to attack from the west at Ligny and rout the Prussians when he received the new order: he felt he had no choice but to march back to Quatre Bras, arriving after fighting there had died down. The 22,000 troops which could have decided either battle were thus marching backwards and forwards all afternoon.

Back at Quatre Bras the French had charged again, almost breaking one infantry square, that of the 69th, then attacking the 33rd and forcing the 69th to take refuge in a wood. But another infantry division was brought up in the nick of time. As dusk had started to fall, it became apparent that Wellington had narrowly held the allied position, with casualties on each side about evens, at 4,000 each. It had been a standoff, to the relief of the British, who had been taken by surprise.

Not so at Ligny. Realizing that no help would be forthcoming from Ney or d’Erlon, Napoleon ordered a bayonet attack against the Prussian centre, which had backed up the incline known as the Heights of Bussy, calling in the Old Guard. The Prussians counter-attacked, but by then the French were in control and had beaten them off. With darkness falling, the Prussians were able to withdraw in good order, but they had suffered a major defeat: some 16,000 men and twenty-one guns had been lost, compared to the 12,000 French losses with no guns. A further 10,000 Prussians deserted in the demoralized aftermath. Only nightfall had prevented a complete Prussian route.

Gneisenau decided to withdraw the Prussians to safety in the east, which would have left Wellington’s army stranded and heavily outnumbered facing the French. But the battered old Blücher dragged himself from his sickbed just in time to prevent this and the decision was made to retire to Wavre, eighteen miles to the north, giving the defeated Prussians the option of either supporting Wellington, should the fight be renewed, or of retreating down their lines of communication eastward.

Napoleon had thus won the bloody battle of Ligny, although not to the point of destroying the Prussian army, while his forces had been fought to a standstill at Quatre Bras. But he was deeply frustrated: he
had caught the Prussians virtually unsupported by the British and should have inflicted a decisive defeat. Ney’s failure to take Quatre Bras, plus the mix-up over d’Erlon’s army, had cost him a spectacular victory. He blamed Ney; but he might have been cheated of the victory at Ligny if the British had been able to drive Ney back and reinforce the Prussians; so he owed a great deal to Ney for keeping the British engaged.