Wellington (26 page)

The fact that all this laminating was necessary testifies to the nature of Wellington’s army. Some British historians have joined their contemporary countrymen in expressing a uniformly low opinion of the Netherlands troops. However, it is beyond question that many fought bravely at Waterloo, and, but for the common sense of a Netherlands general, there might have been no battle there at all. It is more honest to observe that across the board, Wellington’s army was of patchy quality, with Peninsula veterans alongside battalions filled out with new recruits. He later affirmed that if he had had his old Peninsula army, he would have attacked Napoleon at Waterloo and beaten him in about three hours. This may be hyperbole, but it reflects his conviction that, in April 1815, he had what he called ‘an infamous army, very weak and ill-equipped, and a very inexperienced staff.’

Many old hands were unavailable. His former quartermaster-general, George Murray, was in Canada; Ned Pakenham was dead; Larpent was in Vienna, and Sir James McGrigor (as he now was) could not be spared from his medical responsibilities in London. In France in 1814, Sir Thomas Picton had come to him to admit that: ‘I am grown so nervous, that when there is any service to be done, it works upon my mind so that it is impossible for me to sleep at nights. I cannot possibly stand it, and I shall be forced to retire.’ But he let neither resentment at not having been made a peer, nor a premonition of death, hold him back when offered command of the 5
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Division. Sir Stapleton Cotton, who had done so well at Salamanca, had now become Lord Combermere and would have been a good choice for command of the cavalry, but Lord Uxbridge (once Lord Paget) had been promised the job.

Major General Sir Hudson Lowe, of whom Horse Guards had a very high opinion, was sent out as quartermaster-general. Wellington thought him ‘a damned fool’. He persisted in telling the duke the Prussians were better than the British so much that ‘I was obliged to tell him that I had commanded a much larger force in the field than any Prussian general.’
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Even this did not work, and Wellington was obliged to ask the government to replace him. His successor was Colonel Sir William De Lancey, who had served under George Murray in the Peninsula and mastered the Wellingtonian style of correspondence. On one occasion he regretted that the commander-in-chief could not reply to an officer’s letter because it was illegible, and so the man’s colonel was told that ‘his Lordship requests that you will recommend to Captain Campbell to pay a little more attention to his writing as it is impossible in many cases to allot the necessary time to trace the Characters in his letters without neglecting other public business’.
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Sir Edward Barnes, another Peninsula veteran, was adjutant-general.

Unusually, the duke divided his army up into three corps, the first under the Prince of Orange and the second under Rowland (now Lord) Hill, each containing two British and two Netherlands divisions. Wellington himself commanded the reserve, with two British divisions, a divisional-sized ‘corps’ of Brunswickers under the Duke of Brunswick, and a small Nassau contingent. He had a grand total of just over 92,000 men and 192 guns by the time Waterloo was fought.

Whatever its strengths and weaknesses, Wellington did at least command the allied army forming up in the Netherlands in the late spring 1815. He did not command the nearest coalition contingent, on whose effective co-operation the conduct of the campaign would depend. The Prussian army in the Netherlands numbered nearly 121,000 men and 312 guns by the time the campaign opened. Its commander, Marshal Gebhard von Blücher, Prince of Wahlstadt, was a sprightly 73-year-old who had first been commissioned into the Swedish army a lifetime ago and entered Prussian service after being taken prisoner. A doughty adversary of Napoleon, he had had horses shot beneath him at Jena in 1806 and Lutzen in 1813, and had helped crush Napoleon’s last brilliant flicker in 1814. His headquarters were at Namur, and his four corps were stationed around it, with two posted forward close to the French border at Charleroi and Ciney. His chief of staff, the brave and experienced August Wilhelm von Gneisenau, was something of an anglophobe, possibly because he had served alongside the British army in North America during the Revolutionary War, when it was not at its best.

The campaign was to turn on the relationship between Wellington and Blücher. They had met in Paris the previous year, and quickly established a sound working relationship. Most anglophone historians had long regarded the collaboration between Wellington and Blücher as an honest and fruitful one. However, the publication, in 1998 and 1999, of Peter Hofschröer’s two carefully-researched books on Waterloo raised issues that had long troubled German historians and cannot be lightly brushed aside by any modern biographer.
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Making extensive use of German sources, Hofschröer accuses Wellington of duplicity during the Waterloo campaign, and terms the battle ‘the German victory’. The debate has generated more heat than light, and has not been helped by the fact that while Hofschröer’s attack on Wellington appears in popular books, John Hussey’s reasoned rebuttal of some specific accusations are in the less widely circulated pages of the academic journal,
War in History.
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And the clash is not simply national, for it is not hard to discern in the dispute something of the ‘tall poppy syndrome’ which makes Britain uncomfortable with her heroes, living and dead. One British reviewer looked forward to ‘the Oxford-accented screams’ that Hofschröer would cause.

Three general points deserve mention. First, military history tends to fall prey to monolinguality. For example, British histories of the 1916 Battle of the Somme often pay as little attention to the Germans, who the British fought against, as they do to the French, who fought alongside them, and in the process suffered about one-third of the allied casualties.

Secondly, the campaign to defeat Napoleon during the Hundred Days was always an allied struggle – not a British, Prussian or a German one. The great majority of allied troops in the theatre spoke German as their first language, and their enormous contribution to victory cannot be denied. But nor should it be taken out of context, and if the Prussians were able to set the seal on victory at Waterloo, it was only because Wellington’s army, with its British, Netherlands, Hanoverian and Brunswick contingents, had set the conditions for that victory before they arrived.

Thirdly, any commander of a national contingent within a wider coalition force in any century must answer to two masters. On the one hand, he has a responsibility to, and loyalties within, the alliance. On the other, he derives his authority from his own government, and will be aware that there will be times when his national duty will override his responsibilities to the alliance. Wellington believed that his prime duty was to defeat the French in collaboration with his allies, and his first general memorandum on the campaign and his subsequent letters before the opening of hostilities make this clear. The allied object was to ‘defeat the army, and destroy the power of one individual’, and this could be accomplished by a concentric advance in the direction of Paris with ‘the largest body of men that can be assembled’.
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On 8 May, he told Charles Stewart that ‘Blücher and I are so well united, and so strong’ that he thought it unlikely they would be attacked.
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As Paris was their objective, he believed that he and Blücher would meet ‘the greatest force and the greatest military difficulties’, and their thrust should accordingly not be launched until offensives elsewhere could keep the French in play.

However, there was another agenda. Wellington was fighting expeditionary warfare; his continental allies were not. Just as his army in the Peninsula had relied on its base at Lisbon, defended by the lines of Torres Vedras, so his army in the Netherlands relied on the ports of Antwerp and Ostend. These were indispensable for the continued arrival of troops and supplies, and, if the campaign turned badly against him, they offered him the chance of preserving at least part of his army by evacuation. Antwerp lay due north of Brussels and Ostend north-west, offering alternative lines of retreat. His concern about the reliability of Netherlands troops meant that these ports had substantial British garrisons, and he had ordered work to be carried out on their fortifications. All this was entirely in keeping with his well-established notion of a plan of campaign which, as he himself put it, resembled a rope head-collar rather than a finely-made set of harness: if it broke, he simply tied a knot.

He would take measured risks, but not gamble, for what would he have gambled with? While this was not his old Peninsula army, as he constantly pointed out, it contained the core of the British regular army. If lost, these troops could not readily be replaced in a country that relied on voluntary enlistment. Although the Liverpool government, to which the duke was very close, might conceivably have survived his defeat, it could not have done so had this been accompanied by the destruction of his army. Moreover, the army was more than an instrument of foreign policy; in the absence of a police force, it provided the government’s most reliable defence against internal disorder. There had been serious riots against the Corn Laws, which kept the price of bread at an artificially high level, and the situation in Ireland was causing concern. Wellington had good reasons, political and military, for ensuring that he had a plan available if coalition war went as sour in 1815 as it had in 1793 or 1809.

It was not in Wellington’s interest, however, to declare his concern for preserving his army in the event of a catastrophe. Throughout his time in Brussels he took pains to radiate confidence, taking Lady Jane Lennox off to watch a cricket-match at Enghien, giving and attending parties – there were the usual complaints that he asked all the ‘Ladies of Loose Character’ to his own – and talking up his prospects of victory. When Thomas Creevey asked him, as they walked in a Brussels park, whether he was confident, he replied: ‘By God, I think Blücher and myself can do the thing.’ He then pointed at a British private, gawping at the statues, and added. ‘No, I think Blücher and I can do the business. There,’ pointing at the soldier, ‘it all depends on that article there whether we do the business or not. Give me enough of it and I am sure.’
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Privately he felt less confident. On 8 June he warned the Duchess of Richmond, comfortably established in Brussels, not to organise a picnic down by the frontier: ‘You’d better not go. Say nothing about it, but let the project drop.’
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After the campaign had opened he urged Charles Stewart, now also in Brussels: ‘Pray keep the English quiet if you can. Let them all prepare to move, but neither be in a hurry nor a fright, as all will turn out well.’
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The same letter enclosed one to the Duc de Berri, who commanded the French Royalist troops, suggesting that he move King Louis from Ghent to Antwerp. He also dashed off a note to Lady Frances Wedderburn-Webster (with whom he had enjoyed a tender assignation in a wooded glade, where campaign planning may not have featured in the conversation), that ‘you ought to make your preparations, as should [her father] Lord Mountnorris, to remove from Bruxelles to Antwerp in case such a measure should be necessary … I will give you the earliest intimation of any danger that may come to my knowledge: at present I know of none.’
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He ordered the governor of Antwerp to consider the place in a state of siege, opening the sluices to flood the protective ditches, but to admit any refugees from Brussels. Colonel De Lancey, as close to the duke as anybody, was concerned enough to send his young wife off to Antwerp. She left as Wellington’s troops were marching up, and her description catches the dreadful poignancy of the moment:

It was a clear refreshing morning; the scene was very solemn, and melancholy, the fifes playing alone, and the regiments one after another marched past, and I saw them melt away through the great gate at the end of the square.
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If one of the duke’s objectives was to maintain confidence in Brussels, another was to ensure harmonious relations with the Prussians. While his own lines of communication lay north and north-west, those of the Prussians lay to the east, almost at right-angles to a French thrust. The closer to Wellington Blücher came, the greater the risk to his own communications, and Napoleon was too experienced a general not to exploit this. It was in Wellington’s interests to ensure that Blücher trusted him, co-operating effectively even if his communications were threatened – and disclosing contingency plans for the defence of Antwerp and Ostend would scarcely be calculated to boost Blücher’s confidence. There is no evidence that a withdrawal on his lines of communication was ever Wellington’s preferred option, and even his hurried letters, dashed off in the small hours of 18 June, when the campaign was not going well, still spoke of withdrawal as something he hoped to avoid. Contingencies existed, and Wellington would have been gambling had they not. If he did not discuss them with Blücher, it is because he feared that by doing so, he might have induced that old warrior to suspect that they weighed more heavily on his mind than they did.

Lastly, Peter Hofschröer complains that Wellington’s duplicity is emphasised by his efforts to suppress Clausewitz’s history of the campaign, which would have given the German view. Wellington was frank enough on the score:

If it is to be history, it must be the truth, and the whole truth, or it will do more harm than good … But if a true history is written, what will become of the reputation of half those who have acquired reputation, and who deserve it for their gallantry, but who if their mistakes and causal misconduct were made public, would not be so well thought of?
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