Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (52 page)

T
HIS WOULD ACTUALLY
be the first time that the French would fight an army with so many British troops since the Egyptian campaign some sixteen years before, and it was the first and only time that Napoleon and Wellington would face each other on the battlefield. Both were forty-six years old, with outstanding reputations—Napoleon, the bold strategist, inclined to quick surprise strikes, and Wellington, the brilliant tactician who preferred a more cautious and balanced approach. Napoleon was as feared as Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan; Wellington had never lost a battle.

Napoleon, it must be said, had many advantages. Thanks to his zealous efforts rebuilding the army, he had more soldiers, seventy-two thousand to Wellington’s sixty-eight thousand, and more artillery, 246 cannons to Wellington’s 156. He also had more veterans, compared to Wellington’s many raw recruits and troops of uncertain loyalty (some two-thirds of his troops were non-British, mainly Dutch, Belgian, or German; many of them had either served the French in the past or were suspected of having French loyalties, or both). Napoleon, moreover, had a number of marshals who had fought Wellington in Spain and knew his tactics well.

Remarkably, as Wellington marched north on the seventeenth, neither Napoleon nor Ney seized the opportunity to attack. Orders had not been clear or timely, and Ney had hesitated more than usual. Some historians have wondered if Ney suffered from a form of “battle fatigue,” or perhaps feared that Wellington’s march was another one of his tricks. At any rate, Wellington had advanced his troops unharmed, and when the French realized that a good opportunity of striking the enemy was slipping away, they started marching. They were soon obstructed, however, by a violent storm, with heavy rain and then heavy mud bogging down their movement. By the evening, Napoleon decided to rest his army. “Have all the troops take up positions and we will see what happens tomorrow,” he said, moving on to his headquarters a mile away, at a white stone farmhouse called Le Caillou, on the road to Brussels.

Wellington had managed to move into position, and chose the field of battle. It was a classical Wellington selection—a deceptively flat plain with “dips and folds” where he could place his troops on the inverse slope, better to conceal their numbers and protect them from enemy fire. Behind him was the Soignies Forest. Wellington was confident that this would cover his back and, should it be necessary, aid his retreat while also hindering the French cavalry pursuit. Napoleon, on the other hand, thought that Wellington had made a mistake and that the Anglo-Allied troops would end up trapped in the forest. The French emperor wanted to make sure that he did not miss this excellent opportunity to eliminate the British-led army.

In the early hours of June 18, the day of the fateful Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington was uncharacteristically having trouble sleeping. He got out of bed at three in the morning and wrote a few letters, mainly last-minute orders, though one letter was more personal, to a friend, Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster. Wellington suggested that she prepare to leave Brussels, just in case the battle that day went poorly.

At some point that morning (the time is disputed), a courier arrived at Wellington’s headquarters with a message from Field Marshal Blücher. Wellington ripped open the dispatch and read. It was good news: The First and Second Corps of the Prussian army were on their way to join the Allies in battle. This was twice the number of soldiers that Wellington had hoped, but, problematically, the Prussians were not ready to leave for a couple of hours. “The exhaustion of the troops,” Blücher explained, “did not allow my commencing my movement earlier.”

Would the Prussians really be able to march as Blücher promised? Blücher was notoriously overoptimistic with his predictions, and the slow speed of the courier arriving with the message did not enhance Wellington’s confidence. “Blücher picked the fattest man in his army to ride with an express to me,” Wellington complained, “and he took thirty hours to go thirty miles.” If the Prussian army had any hope of arriving that day, they would have to move faster than that.

About six o’oclock that chilly and damp morning, the duke put on his blue coat, his blue cloak, and his boots, high up on the leg. With his hat in hand, which he typically wore front-back as opposed to Napoleon, who wore it side to side, Wellington walked over to his small charger, the chestnut Copenhagen, stepped into the iron stirrup, and vaulted into the stiff hussar saddle with the high pommel in front. He rode off to be everywhere at once.

Allied soldiers arrived exhausted onto the plateau around Mont-Saint-Jean. Many regiments had marched forty to fifty miles in the previous two days, each soldier carrying some fifty to sixty pounds of equipment. They slept in fields, soaked by the continuous hard rains, and not everyone had a tent. Water had poured down that night like “buckets emptying from the heavens,” and “ran in streams from the cuffs of jackets.” Many awoke with wet clothes still clinging to their body, and “petrified with cold.” The lucky ones had breakfast, even if it was only the “half mouthful of broth and a biscuit” given to the soldiers of the Fifty-second Light Infantry.

Meanwhile, about eight o’clock that morning, at a small whitewashed farmhouse two miles south on the Charleroi-Brussels road, Napoleon was eating breakfast with several senior commanders. After the meal, the imperial silver was removed and maps were spread out on the table.

“We have…ninety chances in our favor, and not ten against us,” Napoleon said, calculating the odds of success that day.

Marshal Ney, however, was troubled, fearing that Wellington would sneak away in a retreat and the French would miss the opportunity for a decisive victory. Napoleon rejected the possibility outright. Britain could no longer leave the scene, he said. “Wellington has rolled the dice, and they are in our favor.”

Marshal Soult, the recently appointed chief of staff, was also concerned, though for a different reason. Soult had fought Wellington in Spain several times, without success—the British infantry was the devil himself, as he had once put it. Perhaps Napoleon should recall Marshall Grouchy and the thirty-three thousand men whom he had dispatched the previous day to pursue the Prussians. Napoleon bluntly dismissed the suggestion: “Because you have been beaten by Wellington, you consider him a great general.”

“Wellington is a bad general,” Napoleon continued, “the English are bad troops, and this will be like eating breakfast.”

“I earnestly hope so,” Soult replied.

In truth, Napoleon probably did not believe his harsh indictment of Wellington’s ability as a commander; the emperor often spoke with such dash on the eve of battle, mainly as a tactic to bolster morale, and morale in war, Napoleon said, was everything. Still, the French emperor was probably not too impressed with Wellington so far in the campaign. In the last three days, the British general had been caught by surprise by Napoleon’s invasion route, been forced to retreat from Quatre Bas, and now found himself trapped like prey.

All morning, generals, staff officers, and couriers kept coming and going from French headquarters. General Honoré Reille, who would command the Second Corps on the far left or western flank, had just arrived, and on account of his experience fighting in Spain, fielded Napoleon’s follow-up question about the British infantry. Reille’s answer was not reassuring. The British infantry was fierce, he said, and if they were attacked from the front, “I consider the English infantry to be impregnable.” At the same time, Reille noted that the British could be defeated by striking at their flanks. Their infantry was “less agile, less supple, less expert in maneuvering than ours.”

Other generals at French headquarters emphasized the importance of attacking on either flank, rather than launching a direct frontal assault on the Allied center. General Maximilien Sébastien Foy, another veteran of the Spanish campaign, pointed out an additional reason why the British were so difficult to defeat: The crafty Duke of Wellington “never shows his troops.” Indeed, Wellington had defeated no fewer than eight of Napoleon’s marshals in Spain, and many other generals, including several who would take the field later that day.

Prince Jérôme, Napoleon’s youngest brother and once widely castigated as the spoiled brat of the Bonaparte family, informed the emperor of a rumor he had heard the previous night at the inn Roi d’Espagne in Genappe. According to a waiter, one of Wellington’s aides-de-camp had been boasting, indiscreetly, that the Prussians would return to the field later that day and join the British-led Allies.

“Nonsense,” Napoleon snapped, remembering how soundly he had defeated the Prussians two days before. They would require at least two days of hard marching, he added, naturally assuming that the Prussians had retreated north to their supply lines at Wavre. Besides, “the Prussians have Grouchy on their heels.”

It was at this morning strategy session that Napoleon’s former governor of Elba, Marshal Drouot, advised the emperor to delay the attack a few hours to allow the soggy ground to dry so that they could move and fire artillery more effectively. The emperor agreed. He also knew that his army, which had camped over a large area, needed more time to be in a position for the attack.

By the end of the morning, Napoleon had decided on a general strategy. The French would not concentrate on turning one of the weaker flanks, as several generals plainly hoped, but instead launch a direct frontal assault on the Allied center. The emperor would rely on power, not finesse—a quick strike at the enemy defenses without elaborate feints or maneuvers, which he probably figured would have been useless anyway given the wet ground. Besides that, the small size of the battlefield, barely three miles in width, was not conducive to such grand sweeping maneuvers (Austerlitz, by contrast, was seven miles; Wagram, twelve; and Leipzig, twenty-one). As the emperor’s valet Louis Marchand remembered the scene, Napoleon then suddenly rose from the table. “Gentlemen,” he concluded confidently, “if my orders are carried out well, tonight we shall sleep in Brussels.”

Chapter 32

L
A
B
ELLE
A
LLIANCE

The ball is at my foot, and I hope I shall have strength to give it a good kick.

—A
RTHUR
W
ELLESLEY, THE FUTURE
D
UKE OF
W
ELLINGTON, BEFORE THE
B
ATTLE OF
T
ALAVERA

N
obody knows for certain when the Battle of Waterloo began, but it was probably a little after 11:30 a.m., when Napoleon’s youngest brother, Prince Jérôme, leading a division of Comte Reille’s Second Corps, launched an attack on the Hougoumont manor on the extreme western flank of the battlefield. Hougoumont commanded the narrow roadway that passed through the rye fields and protected Wellington’s right flank against any wide enveloping movements. Napoleon had no intention of concentrating on this outpost, but only wanted to deceive Wellington into thinking that this would be the main thrust of his attack. Then, when Wellington began to shift troops away from the center, Napoleon would slam into his real target with his full strength.

Wellington had selected a Highlander, Lieutenant Colonel James Macdonnell, and five companies of Scots Guards and Coldstream Guards to hold the position at Hougoumont. In addition to the manor with its thick surrounding walls, there was a garden, an orchard, and a forest, as well as nearby hedges and fields. Granaries, storehouses, barns, sheds, stables, cattle pens, two small cottages, and other structures shielded the defenders. The inhabitants of the manor had fled long ago, except for a lone gardener, Willem van Kylsom, who hid in the cellar.

As Prince Jérôme’s division of about sixty-five hundred infantrymen attempted to storm the manor, three-quarter-inch iron balls whizzed by from rye fields, woods, and soon also from the manor itself with its windows, loopholes, and makeshift scaffolds. Britain’s musket, “Brown Bess,” which had only slightly been altered since its introduction in 1745, wreaked a heavy toll on the advancing division. The German light infantry in the forests—
Jäger,
or “hunters”—were deadly accurate, too. Prince Jérôme, however, refused to yield. He had his orders, and he would seize the manor. His reputation was at stake, as was the family name.