The Battle E-Book

Alessandro Barbero

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 737

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

A vivid and original reconstruction of the Battle of Waterloo. On the afternoon of 1 March, 1815, a fleet of ships dropped anchor off the southeast coast of France. After ten months in exile on the island of Elba, the Emperor Napoleon had returned to reclaim his throne. European chancelleries responded by immediately preparing for war. Only one year earlier, four great powers - England, Austria, Russia and Prussia - had combined to defeat Napoleon and now, these four countries made a pledge to invade France from all sides. Napoleon's only recourse was to rearm, and he quickly marshalled his forces: mobilized the National Guard, began mass production of muskets and bought or confiscated all available horses. On the Allied side, by the end of spring, only the Duke of Wellington's troops and the Prussian army, under the command of Field Marshal Blucher, were prepared. The Emperor knew that by attacking the two armies separately, his Armee du Nord stood a good chance of winning. He planned a surprise strike, to destroy the first army he encountered before the other could intervene. Maintaining complete secrecy over his tactics, he manoeuvred the Armee du Nord close to the Belgian border and at dawn on 15 June, sent the first cavalry patrols over into enemy territory, followed immediately by columns of infantry. Thus begins The Battle, a thrilling new account of the great Battle of Waterloo, which survivors from all sides deemed, in the words of an English officer 'a terrible fight for a terrible stake: freedom or slavery to Europe.'

Leseprobe

THE BATTLE

Alessandro Barbero is professor of Medieval History at the University of Piemonte Orientale in Vercelli, Italy. He is the author of Charlemagne: Father of a Continent and of several historical novels, one of which, also set in the Napoleonic age, won the Strega Prize, Italy’s most distinguished literary award.

‘A thoroughly readable, exciting account of a great clash of arms . . . Brilliant.’ Mark Adkin, author of The Waterloo Companion

‘Perhaps the most readable and original account for many years.’ John Childs, Professor of History, University of Leeds

‘Alessandro Barbero’s new book deserves to be read by anyone with an interest in warfare.’ Dr Gary Sheffield, King’s College London

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2005 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Grove Atlantic Ltd.

Published simultaneously in the United States of America in 2005 by Walker Publishing Company, Inc.

Originally published in Italy in 2003 by Gius. Laterza & Figli as La battaglia, Storia di Waterloo.

This ebook edition published by Atlantic Books in 2013.

Copyright © Alessandro Barbero 2003

Translation copyright © John Cullen 2005

The moral right of Alessandro Barbero to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

The moral right of John Cullen to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in aretrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

9781782391388

Atlantic Books Ormond House 26–27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

The history of a battle is not unlike the history of a ball! Some individuals may recollect all the little events of which the great result is the battle won or lost; but no individual can recollect the order in which, or the exact moment at which, they occurred, which makes all the difference as to their value or importance. Wellington

I object to all the propositions to write what is called a history of the battle of Waterloo. . . . But if a true history is written, what will become of the reputation of half of those who have acquired reputation, and who deserve it for their gallantry, but who, if their mistakes and casual misconduct were made public, would NOT be so well thought of? Wellington

Leave the battle of Waterloo as it is. Wellington

CONTENTS

Illustrations

Campaign Maps

Prologue

PART ONE – “We’ll See Tomorrow”

1. The Night Before

2. “Who Will Attack the First Tomorrow?”

3. “The Decisive Moment of the Century”

4. The Nature of the Armies

5. The British Army: “The Scum of the Earth”

6. The French Army: “All Must March”

7. The Prussian Army

8. The Minor Armies

9. “As Bad a Night as I Ever Witnessed”

10. On the Brussels Road

11. Letters in the Night

PART TWO – “It Will Be as Easy as Having Breakfast”

12. “Very Few of Us Will Live to See the Close of This Day”

13. The Emperor’s Breakfast

14. The Numbers in the Field

15. Wellington’s Deployment

16. Napoleon’s Deployment

17. “Vive l’Empereur!”

18. What Is a Battle?

19. Napoleon’s Orders

20. Napoleonic Infantry Tactics

21. The Skirmish Line

22. Hougoumont

23. The Defence of the Château

24. The Bombardment in the Hougoumont Sector

25. The Attack on the North Gate

26. The Grande Batterie

27. News of the Prussians

28. Bülow’s March

29. New Orders for Grouchy

30. La Haye Sainte

31. The First Attack on La Haye Sainte

32. Crabbé’s Charge

33. D’Erlon’s Advance

34. The Attack on the Sunken Lane

35. The Firefight Along the Chemin d’Ohain

36. The Intervention of the British Cavalry

37. The Charge of the Household Brigade

38. The Charge of the Union Brigade

39. Dragoons Against Guns

40. Jacquinot’s Lancers

41. “Tu N’es Pas Mort, Coquin?”

PART THREE – “A Stand-up Fight between Two Pugilists”

42. “It Does Indeed Look Very Bad”

43. Papelotte

44. The Second Attack on La Haye Sainte

45. The Great French Cavalry Attacks against the Allied Squares

46. “Where Are the Cavalry?”

47. “Vous Verrez Bientôt Sa Force, Messieurs”

48. Blücher Attacks

49. Plancenoit

50. “I’ll Be Damned If We Shan’t Lose This Ground”

51. The Nivelles Road

52. “Infantry! And Where Do You Expect Me to Find Infantry?”

53. The Last Effort to Take Hougoumont

54. The Capture of La Haye Sainte

55. The Advance of the French Artillery

56. The Renewed Attack on Plancenoit

57. Ziethen at Smohain

58. Napoleon’s Last Attack

59. “Voilà Grouchy!”

60. The Imperial Guard’s Advance

61. The Attack of the Imperial Guard Grenadiers

62. “La Garde Recule!”

PART FOUR – “Victory! Victory!”

63. The Allied Advance

64. The Squares of the Old Guard

65. The Meeting at La Belle Alliance

66. The Prussian Pursuit

67. Night on the Battlefield

68. “A Mass of Dead Bodies”

69. Letters Home

70. “I Never Wish to See Another Battle”

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS

Detail of a Ferraris & Capitaine map of 1797

Europe in 1815

Overview of the Battle Area

Allied Advances in June/July 1815

Deployment of French Troops

Battle of Waterloo, 10.00hrs, 18 June 1815

Battle of Waterloo, 16.00hrs

PLATES

Napoleon Bonaparte. Painting by Robert Lefèvre. (Wellington Museum, London)

Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, 1814. Painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence. (The Art Archive/Wellington Museum London/Eileen Tweedy)

The elderly Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher. (The Art Archive/Wellington Museum London/Eileen Tweedy)

Napoleon giving orders to an aide-de-camp for Marshal Grouchy on the morning of the battle. (The Art Archive)

General Reille, commander of Napoleon’s II Corps. Engraving by A. Tardieu. (Collection Viollet)

Jérome Bonaparte, division commander and Napoleon’s youngest brother. Painting, 1808. (The Art Archive/Musée du Château de Versailles/Dagli Otti)

The Duke of Wellington outside his headquarters at Mont-Saint-Jean. Painting by J. C. Aylward. (The Art Archive/Eileen Tweedy)

The ceremonial Eagle, mounted on a pole with the French tricolour. (Collection Viollet)

A 12-pounder gun, one of les belles filles de l’Empereur. (Mark Adkin)

Crops of rye in June. (Mark Adkin)

British soldiers form a square to defend against cavalry attacks. (Mary Evans)

The Guards brigade attack the French to alleviate the pressure on the defenders of the château, just visible in the far right background. Painting by Denis Dighton. (Bridgeman)

The French bombard Hougoumont, prompting the British artillery to open fire, against Wellington’s orders. (Mary Evans)

General von Bülow. German engraving. (Bridgeman)

Marshal Grouchy. Engraving. (The Art Archive/Musée Carnavelet Paris/Dagli Orti)

The battle around the farmhouse and stables at La Haye Sainte. Painting by R. Knotel. (Mary Evans)

Count d’Erlon holding his marshal’s baton. Engraving by Collier after Larivière. (Collection Viollet)

“That old rogue,” Sir Thomas Picton. (Mary Evans)

The charge of the Scots Greys. Painting by Lady Butler. (Mary Evans)

Marshal Ney. (Mary Evans)

French cuirassiers charging a Highlanders’ square. Painting by Félix Philippoteaux, 1874. (The Art Archive/Victoria & Albert Museum/Eileen Tweedy)

Colonel von Ompteda. (National Army Museum)

Nassauers defending their position at La Belle Alliance. Painting by R. Knotel. (Mary Evans)

Blücher orders his men to attack Plancenoit. Painting by Adolf Northern. (Bridgeman)

An officer of the mounted chasseurs of the Imperial Guard. Painting by Gericault. (Mary Evans)

Napoleon, viewing the attack on his Imperial Guards through a spyglass. Painting by James Atkinson. (The Art Archive)

Colonel Hew Halkett captures the French general Cambronne. Painting by R. Knotel. (Mary Evans)

Wellington signalling the general British advance on Waterloo. Painting by James Atkinson. (The Art Archive/The British Museum)

The Earl of Uxbridge, commander of the Allied cavalry. Painting by Peter Edward Stroehling, c. 1816. (National Army Museum)

The surgeon’s saw used to amputate Lord Uxbridge’s leg. (National Army Museum)

The famous meeting between Wellington and Blücher, depicted here in front of the inn at La Belle Alliance. (Mary Evans)

General von Gneisenau. (Victoria & Albert Museum)

Napoleon among his men as he faces defeat. His carriage awaits his flight. Painting by Ernest Crofts. (Mary Evans)

Napoleon Bonaparte burning the eagles and standards of his Imperial Guard after the battle. (The Art Archive)

A burial party at work near La Belle Alliance, seven days after the battle. Engraving by E. Walsh, drawn on the spot. (Mary Evans)

British soldiers removing French cannons, July 1815. (Collections Viollet/Bibliothèque Nationale)

Detail of a Ferraris & Capitaine map of 1797, as used by Napoleon and on which Wellington’s own map was based.

Europe in 1815

Overview of the Battle Area

Allied Advances in June/July 1815

Deployment of French troops

Battle of Waterloo, 10.00hrs, 18 June 1815

Battle of Waterloo, 16.00hrs, 18 June 1815

THE BATTLE

PROLOGUE

In the afternoon of 1 March, 1815, a fleet consisting of one warship and six smaller vessels dropped anchor off Golfe-Juan on the southeastern coast of France, in view of what are today the most luxurious vacation spots on the Côte d’Azur but what were then miserable fishing villages clinging to the edge of an inhospitable landscape. As soon as they were anchored, the ships lowered their small boats. Shortly thereafter squads of soldiers began to disembark on the shore, despite the protests of the flabbergasted customs official who had rushed to the scene to contest this highly irregular landing. The first troops to reach solid ground went to knock on the gates of the nearby French fort at Antibes and were immediately placed under arrest; but the small boats kept bringing ashore other soldiers, and soon more than a thousand grenadiers had been disembarked, along with two cannon and an entire squadron of lancers who spoke Polish among themselves. Finally, towards evening, the leader of this host came ashore in person, walking over an improvised gangway, which his men, standing in water to their waists, held up for him; and an officer was sent to notify the commandant of the fort that the emperor Napoleon, after ten months of exile on the island of Elba, had returned to France to reclaim his throne.

Even in an age without the benefit of mass media, the news of Napoleon’s return was so astonishing that it travelled throughout the continent in a few days, arousing consternation or enthusiasm everywhere. Europe had really believed that the Napoleonic Wars were over, and with them the French Revolution, which together had inflamed the world for twenty-five years. Kings had regained possession of their thrones, armies had been demobilized, and a cosmopolitan, self-satisfied political class was preparing for the tranquil task of managing a long period of peace. The fact that Napoleon was still alive, exiled to an island somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea, was certainly irritating, but people tried hard not to think about it. When the Duke of Wellington announced to the Congress of Vienna – where, since Napoleon’s abdication, representatives of the European powers were leisurely redrawing the political map of Europe – that the exile had escaped from Elba and landed in France, the delegates burst into laughter, believing that the announcement was some sort of joke. A few days sufficed to change their minds: on 13 March, the Congress published a resolution, couched in the diplomatic French of the period, in which Napoleon was proclaimed an outlaw, subject to “vindicte publique”, whereupon the English Parliament and half the chancelleries of Europe began discussions to decide whether this formula meant that anyone could kill him with impunity, or whether it would first be necessary to arrest him and put him on trial.

Meanwhile, on 20 March, the emperor made a triumphant entry into Paris, while King Louis XVIII and the whole Bourbon family fled hurriedly to Belgium. From there he sent personal letters to all the sovereigns of Europe, assuring them in the most modest tones that he desired only peace and that he renounced all claims whatsoever to any of the territories that previously, at the apogee of his empire, had belonged to France. But the European chancelleries did not deign to respond to these missives; in London, the prime minister would not even permit the prince regent to open the letter and had it returned with its seal intact. One year earlier, four great powers – England, Austria, Russia, and Prussia – had combined to defeat Napoleon; now, on 25 March, 1815, the same four countries signed a treaty in which each of them pledged to put an army of 150,000 men into the field as soon as possible, with the set purpose of invading France from all sides. England, then the dominant economic power in the world, agreed to finance the mobilization of the Allies, and the Rothschild bank began gathering quantities of cash, eventually furnishing His Majesty’s government with the immense sum of 6 million pounds sterling, which corresponded to the estimated total cost of the undertaking.

In these circumstances, Napoleon’s only recourse was to rearm, and he did so with all his extraordinary talent for organization, a talent that the passage of time had not diminished. The army he inherited from the Bourbons was brought back up to full strength, the previous year’s conscripts were recalled, the National Guard was mobilized, the mass production of muskets began, and all available horses were either bought or confiscated; as a result, French treasury reserves were consumed within a few weeks, and financing had to be extorted from reluctant banks. Even with their help, however, the emperor could not hope to be successful in opposing the four armies that were about to invade France; he had tried to accomplish such a feat a year before, when his resources were decidedly more extensive, and things had not turned out well for him. His only hope was to beat his opponents to the punch.

Even though the training period for new conscripts could be reduced, in times of emergency, to a few weeks, the armies of the day still required several months to equip their forces properly and put themselves on a war footing. As spring drew to an end, only two of the four invading armies had assembled on the borders of France. The one commanded by the Duke of Wellington included, along with its British contingent, troops from the Low Countries and from various German principalities; the other army was Prussian, commanded by the elderly field marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher. Considered alone, each of these two armies was weaker than the Armée du Nord, which Napoleon had assigned to defend his northern border. If the emperor could manage to attack them separately, therefore, he had a good chance of defeating them.

A quartered army awaiting the start of military operations occupied a vast amount of territory. Soldiers were lodged with civilians, who were legally obligated to provide the troops with room and board, and it was essential to spread out such a great number of men and horses if they were to obtain proper food and shelter. In early June, Wellington’s and Blücher’s armies were quartered over nearly all of Belgium, one in the northwest and one in the southeast. Calculating that each of these generals would need at least two or three days to concentrate his forces and give battle under optimum conditions, the emperor planned to make a surprise advance between the two armies and destroy the first one he came upon before the other could intervene. Obviously, secrecy was indispensable to the success of Napoleon’s plan: in the first days of June, he closed the borders and ordered that not one man, not one carriage, not one letter should exit France. Then, very swiftly, he concentrated the Armée du Nord close to the Belgian border, and at dawn on 15 June the first cavalry patrols crossed over into enemy territory, followed at once by long columns of infantry. Thus began the Waterloo campaign, which survivors from both sides – all equally convinced of having striven in a just cause – would later consider, in the words of an English officer, “a terrible fight fought for a terrible stake: freedom or slavery to Europe”.

PART ONE

“We’ll see tomorrow”

ONE

THE NIGHT BEFORE

The rain had started falling in the early afternoon of 17 June, 1815, soaking the Brabant hills and turning them into a sea of mud. Only the cobblestone road, the big main highway that led from the French-Belgian border to Brussels, was still practicable – though with difficulty – and this road was crowded with Napoleon’s soldiers, horses, and guns, all in pursuit of Wellington’s retreating army. Under normal conditions, the mid-June daylight should have lasted until well past nine o’clock, but on this day, after a series of cloudbursts had displaced the warm morning sunshine, the horizon had grown steadily darker, as though night were falling early. All the soldiers in both armies, right down to the lowliest Dutch or German farm boy recruited into the militia a few weeks earlier and completely ignorant of war, understood that there was no more chance of fighting a battle that day.

Riding on horseback in the torrential rain, Napoleon arrived at an inn and farmhouse called La Belle Alliance, which stood, and stands today, on a panoramic spot near the main road, in the commune of Plancenoit. From there one could see the road descending in dips and rises across a broad area of cultivated fields, which the rain had reduced to bogs, and then climbing towards a long ridge, parallel to the line of the horizon and marked, in those days, by a large, solitary elm tree. There the Brussels road intersected another, smaller road, a lane, sunken in some places and known locally as the chemin d’Ohain, which ran the entire length of the ridge. Past this crossroads, the main road, no longer visible from the farmhouse, descended to another farm and a small cluster of houses, barely a village; both farm and village were called Mont-Saint-Jean. A man on foot needs a good quarter of an hour to cover the distance between La Belle Alliance and the crossroads, which still exists today, though to be sure the surfaces are all paved, and a little group of hotels and restaurants has replaced the elm.

Extending the telescope that one of his aides had hastened to offer him, Napoleon studied the horizon. A dark column of enemy infantry was crossing the shallow valley at a brisk pace and preparing to march up the opposite slope, under the protection of the British cavalry standing in line along the ridge and ready to charge, as it had already done several times during the course of that arduous day, to cover the retreat of these last foot soldiers. The vanguard troops of the French cavalry had ridden into the valley as well, and they were maintaining only a little distance between themselves and the enemy’s rear guard, wishing to make the retreating soldiers feel the hot breath of their pursuit. The rain came down in torrents, and it was impossible to see anything else in the gloomy grey light. The bulk of Wellington’s hastily assembled army – whose English, German, Belgian, and Dutch troops spoke in four different languages – had already disappeared behind the ridge of Mont-Saint-Jean.

The emperor dismounted from his horse and entered the inn. While he was removing his rain-drenched hat and overcoat, he ordered his map to be spread out on a table. This map, which Napoleon always carried in a special compartment of his travelling carriage, together with all the books and documents that might prove useful to him during the course of a campaign, had been drawn by Ferraris for the Austrian government in 1777 and printed in Paris by Capitaine in 1795. On it the emperor could see that the road to Brussels, after it crested the ridge and passed the village of Mont-Saint-Jean, ran past a few more isolated farms and some windmills before coming to another, larger village: Waterloo. Beyond Waterloo stood a vast woodland, the forest of Soignes; the road passed through the village and advanced resolutely into the trees. Continuing to follow the road with his finger on the map, the emperor could easily calculate that an infantry column, marching on the pavé – the cobblestones – could traverse the forest in a few hours; and when the troops broke into the open, they would be within sight of the bell towers of Brussels.

For Napoleon, the situation was clear. If Wellington intended to defend Brussels, he would have to turn and give battle before reaching Waterloo, and so his army must have halted behind the long, low ridge that hid the duke’s forces from the emperor’s telescope. In a time when a general and his officers could rely only on the sight of their persons and the sound of their voices to manoeuvre an army and maintain its cohesion, one did not give battle in a forest. As for the possibility that the duke and his entire army might take refuge in the city and passively await the course of events, perhaps generals of another generation would have done so; but, after the lessons that Napoleon had taught the world, no commander would be so mad as to place his forces in such a trap voluntarily, particularly when his opponent was the emperor himself. Therefore, if Wellington wished to defend Brussels and spare his ally, the king of the Netherlands (which at that time included Belgium), the shame of losing one of his two capital cities in the very first days of the war, he would spend the night at Mont-Saint-Jean, and tomorrow he would give battle.

If, on the other hand, the enemy columns were continuing their gloomy retreat through the pouring rain, that would mean the vanguard had already entered the forest of Soignes and the duke had abandoned the defence of Brussels. But this hypothesis, despite its favourable appearance, could have brought no joy to the emperor’s heart. Among the same gently rolling hills, somewhere to the east but not too far away, another army was on the march in the rain. The Prussian army, which Napoleon had defeated at Ligny the previous day, was retreating, although Napoleon could not yet know on what roads and in what directions. If Wellington accepted the loss of Brussels and continued to withdraw, he would still be able to join forces with the Prussians; in that case, the capture of the city would cease to have any significance. The purpose of Napoleon’s invasion of Belgium and his surprise advance against the two enemy armies massing along the border with France had been to face and defeat them separately; to allow the English to escape and link up with the Prussians would be equivalent to watching the objective of his campaign go up in smoke.

For this reason, the emperor preferred that Wellington should not march his exhausted men any farther into the nocturnal darkness, but rather that he should halt and prepare to accept battle on the Mont-Saint-Jean ridge. Napoleon felt confident of winning that battle, and then the forest of Soignes would be transformed into a fatal trap for the defeated army. It was imperative, therefore, to discover Wellington’s purpose because, if his troops were continuing their retreat on the other side of the hill, the emperor’s forces would have to push forward at once and pursue the enemy without giving him a chance to breathe. But if the enemy army was preparing to bivouac just beyond the ridge, then the similarly exhausted French units, as they reached La Belle Alliance, could also be ordered into bivouac, there to prepare for battle the next day by cooking their soup and trying to get a few hours’ sleep in the rain.

Together with the vanguard of the French cavalry, two batteries of horse artillery – a total of twelve 6-pounder cannon – had arrived at La Belle Alliance. The emperor ordered the gunners to unlimber the guns, get them into position, and open fire on the opposing ridge, where the waiting enemy cavalry could still be glimpsed through a veil of rain. At that distance, and in the steady downpour, the guns could do little damage, but if the English riders were simply carrying out a covering operation, they would abandon their positions and join the retreat, the infantry being safe. Before much time had passed, however, the enemy artillery opened fire in response, and not with just a few pieces, but with a large number of batteries dispersed along the whole length of the ridge. The columns of French infantry that were approaching La Belle Alliance on the main road found themselves under fire and suffered some casualties before their officers could succeed in withdrawing them to a more secure position, and some cannonballs struck the inn of La Belle Alliance. After a little while, Napoleon judged that he had learned enough and ordered the artillery to stop firing. Wellington had decided to accept battle with his back to the forest, and in Napoleon’s view his army was doomed.

As long as a little light remained in the gathering dusk, the emperor continued to peer through his telescope, examining the terrain that would become a battlefield. The ridge of Mont-Saint-Jean was the principal defensive position, and doubtless the enemy army would await his attack under cover of that rising ground, which would shelter the Allied troops from artillery bombardment. According to the emperor’s generals, whom Wellington had defeated one after another during the long, ferocious war in Spain, this had always been the duke’s favourite tactic. Furthermore, there were a few positions ahead of the ridge that could impede the French offensive, and Napoleon had no doubt that his enemy would fortify them. In the centre of the battlefield, right beside the Brussels road, stood the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte, a stone building surrounded by stout walls and half hidden in a fold of the earth. Before the French could break through the centre of the enemy position, they would have to take La Haye Sainte. Away on the left, the emperor’s telescope revealed a thickly planted wood. His eye could have seen only trees, but the map indicated that they concealed a complex of buildings: the château of Hougoumont. Should he decide to turn the enemy’s right flank, Napoleon knew he would have to take possession of that wood, which extended towards him from the château. Hougoumont and its grounds lay at the bottom of the shallow valley, halfway between the two ridges of La Belle Alliance and Mont-Saint-Jean. Finally, at the opposite end of the terrain, far on the emperor’s right, barely visible in the midst of sparse clumps of trees, were some small communities, indicated on the map with the names of Papelotte, La Haye, and Smouhen (or Smohain, as it is written today), which if defended would protect Wellington’s left flank.

While Napoleon was surveying the position, his corps commanders reported to him and received instructions for the bivouac of their troops: on the ridge of La Belle Alliance, or farther to the rear, or – in the case of those units that were still too far from the front – along the road. Aside from the bivouac orders, the emperor gave his generals no further commands. Before mounting his horse to ride to the farm of Le Caillou, a couple of miles to the rear, where his numerous imperial staff were already preparing his dinner and his camp bed, Napoleon spoke to d’Erlon, the commander of the I Corps: “We’ll see tomorrow,” he said. And in truth, the emperor knew too little about the enemy positions on the other side of the ridge to be able to determine in advance what would happen. Besides, he himself had repeatedly declared that battles could not be blocked out and directed as though they were plays in a theatre; one had to know how to improvise: “On s’engage, et puis on voit.” Provided that the enemy remained where he was, there would be plenty of time to force him to reveal his positions, and only then would the emperor see where to deliver the decisive attack.

Napoleon dined alone, in a room in the farmhouse of Le Caillou. In an adjoining room, another table had been set for his aides-de-camp and several high-ranking officers, among them Colonel Combes-Brassard, the VI Corps chief of staff. In the course of the officers’ dinner, one of them spoke in a loud voice about the battle awaiting them on the morrow, and the emperor heard him. Napoleon burst into the room and took a few paces with his hands behind his back; then, without turning around, addressing no one in particular, he exclaimed: “A battle! Gentlemen! Are you sure you know what a battle is? Between a battle won and a battle lost, there are empires, kingdoms, the world – or nothing.” Saying no more, he returned to his chamber. A few days after the battle, Colonel Combes-Brassard wrote that in that moment he had seemed to hear the sentence of Fate.

TWO

“WHO WILL ATTACK THE FIRST TOMORROW?”

The Duke of Wellington never had any intention of abandoning Brussels without a fight. Two days previously, when he received the appalling news that Napoleon had invaded Belgium – catching the duke, whose spies had given him no warning, by surprise – Wellington had sought to concentrate his army between Brussels and the Belgian-French border so that he might intercept the enemy advance as soon as possible. Meanwhile, farther to the east, the duke’s Prussian colleague, Field Marshal Blücher, began gathering his forces. On 16 June, all this activity had resulted in two simultaneous battles, one at Quatre Bras and the other at Ligny. At Quatre Bras, Wellington had barely managed to halt the advancing French columns led by Napoleon’s second-in-command, Marshal Ney, while not far away at Ligny, the emperor, commanding the bulk of his army, had defeated the Prussians. The following morning, perceiving that the Prussian rout had made his position at Quatre Bras indefensible, Wellington had ordered his troops to retreat. “Old Blücher has had a damned good licking and gone back to Wavre, eighteen miles. As he has gone back, we must go too.” Nevertheless, the duke was determined to try his luck again and fight Napoleon on that side of Brussels. If he abandoned the capital of Belgium without a fight, he realized, the bloody encounter at Quatre Bras would look like a defeat, and the English press would eat him alive. Wellington was a prudent general, but he was also an ambitious politician with an image to maintain, and his only choice was to face another battle.

Given the situation, there was but one place where he could do so: in front of the village of Waterloo, the last inhabited spot before the great forest. An episode that supposedly took place in the Duke of Richmond’s house in Brussels on the evening of 15 June has passed into legend. Having first expressed his irritation at the way things were going (“Napoleon has humbugged me, by God!”), Wellington is said to have pointed at two spots on the map spread out before him: Quatre Bras (“but we shall not stop him there”) and Waterloo (“and if so, I must fight him here”). In reality, no superhuman clairvoyance was required for this perception; along all the nearly twenty-two miles of road that stretched between Quatre Bras and Brussels, the series of parallel ridges and shallow valleys south of Waterloo presented the most suitable terrain for a defensive battle. On an inspection tour the previous year, Wellington had observed the position, surveying it with the eye of a professional accustomed to evaluating the lie of the land wherever he found himself and filing away a mental note that might prove useful in the future.

Recently, moreover, after it had become clear that Napoleon was preparing to strike, the duke had returned to Waterloo and asserted to more than one officer that, should he ever find himself compelled to defend Brussels, this was the place where he intended to make his stand. At dawn on 15 June, very shortly after the Allied troops had been put on alert, word was already circulating among the British officers that the army was going to have to march to a place called Waterloo, a name that meant nothing to most of them. That morning, the commander of the Allied horse artillery, Sir Augustus Frazer, after a conversation with his superior officer, Sir George Wood, sat down and wrote a letter to his wife: “I have just learned that the Duke moves in half an hour. Wood thinks to Waterloo, which we cannot find on the map: this is the old story over again.” The following day, as the retreat from Quatre Bras was getting under way, Wellington sent his quartermaster general, Colonel Sir William De Lancey, back to Waterloo, with orders to reconnoitre the ground and identify precisely the position that the Allied army would defend. De Lancey first considered the ridge of La Belle Alliance, but he decided that there the defensive line would be too long, and in the end he opted for the next ridge, on Mont-Saint-Jean.

In that late afternoon of 17 June, therefore, the Duke of Wellington did not order his troops on to Brussels; they marched up the slope of Mont-Saint-Jean and down the other side, disappearing from the enemy’s sight, and as the units reached him, the duke sent them into bivouac, one after another, along the entire length of the ridge, where they would be in position to receive the French attack the next day. A small road ran along the ridge, crossing as it did so the main road to Brussels. This secondary road, the chemin d’Ohain, was actually a deeply sunken lane, bordered for most of its length by willow trees and thorny bushes. The Allied troops took up their positions beyond the lane; the artillerymen ranged their guns in batteries and prepared to bivouac under the ammunition wagons, while the exhausted infantry soldiers, who were without even so poor a shelter as this, lay down in the fields to sleep as they could. Only the innumerable carts loaded with severely wounded troops from the Quatre Bras battle, and their escort – the throng of those less seriously hurt and still able to plod along on their own two feet – continued the dismal march on the cobblestones, bound for the hospitals of Brussels.

When the French appeared in force on the high ground of La Belle Alliance and their artillery began firing, the Allied gunners up and down Wellington’s line, acting either on orders from the nearest generals or on the initiative of the battery commanders themselves, returned to their weapons and set up an answering fire. “We opened our fire upon the French Infantry who had followed us up rather too close, and [were] disposed to continue,” one of the officers remembered. “The range we had was La Belle Alliance, or just where the road widens into a quarry or open space.” The Duke of Wellington, who had given no such order, was distinctly irritated by the indiscriminate bombardment, which revealed his positions to the enemy, and he took steps to silence the guns. Some time passed, however, before the cease-fire order could reach the farthest batteries.

Captain Cavalié Mercer, commander of a troop of horse artillery, was enthusiastically participating in the cannonade when a civilian appeared in the midst of his guns and started chatting with him. The stranger wore a threadbare greatcoat and a round hat that had seen better days. Convinced that the man was an English tourist who had come from Brussels to see the battle, Mercer spoke to him rather brusquely, and only after his visitor finally went away was the captain told that he was Sir Thomas Picton, one of the most famous generals in the British army, respected for his courage and feared for his irascible temperament. (To the men who had known him in Spain, he was simply “that old rogue Picton”.) Meanwhile, the darkness gathered, and the guns started falling silent all along the line. One of Mercer’s officers waved his hand in the direction of the French and shouted, “Bonsoir, à demain!”

In the village of Waterloo, the officers in charge requisitioned the peasants’ houses, scribbling in chalk on the doors the names of the generals who would spend the night there. Before retiring, the Earl of Uxbridge, commander of the Allied cavalry, decided to inquire into the duke’s plans for the following day. Lord Uxbridge, one of the many officers at Waterloo who had never fought under Wellington’s command, had been forced on him by the minister of war, a state of affairs that elicited from the duke a variety of nasty comments. The presence of Uxbridge was all the more disagreeable to Wellington in that six years previously the earl, who was one of the prince regent’s favourites and a companion of his revels, had run off with Lady Charlotte Wellesley, the duke’s brother’s wife and the mother of four children. Although he himself had a wife and eight children, Uxbridge had eventually married Lady Charlotte, after a year and a half of hesitation and gossip, a double divorce, a duel, and the birth of an illegitimate daughter. The Victorian Age was still to come, and the Duke of Wellington was certainly not a man to be scandalized by so small a matter; nevertheless, it seems he was less than overjoyed to find Uxbridge again in his path, this time in Belgium. The earl’s appointment was equally unpopular with his officers. Shakespear, of the Tenth Hussars, spent the eve of the battle reflecting on the errors His Lordship had committed up to that point and on those he would very probably commit the next day; according to Tomkinson, of the Sixteenth Light Dragoons, Uxbridge was “too young a soldier to be much relied on with a separate command”. Apparently, the earl’s brash style – he continued to wear the uniform of his old regiment, the Seventh Hussars – did a pretty effective job of hiding his forty-seven years.

Lord Uxbridge made his way to the Waterloo inn, where the door bore the chalked legend “His Grace the Duke of Wellington”, went inside, and asked the duke to tell him his plans for the next day. His Grace responded with a question of his own: “Who will attack the first tomorrow – I or Buonaparte?”

“Buonaparte,” the general replied.

“Well,” said the duke, “Buonaparte has not given me any idea of his projects; and as my plans will depend upon his, how can you expect me to tell you what mine are?”

At this point, however, Wellington realized he was going too far and tried to smooth things over. “There is one thing certain, Uxbridge, that is, that whatever happens, you and I will do our duty.”

THREE

“THE DECISIVE MOMENT OF THE CENTURY”

Like Napoleon and Wellington, Prince Blücher, the commander of the Prussian army, had ridden on horseback through down pours the entire day, with the difference that he was not forty-six years old, as were both his colleagues in arms, but seventy-two. The night before, at the end of the battle of Ligny, the old man had nearly been killed while commanding a cavalry charge and had escaped capture only by a miracle: an aide had covered him with his coat while French cuirassiers galloped past them a short distance away. But on 17 June, after having his contusions massaged with a mixture of garlic and schnapps and fortifying his stomach with a magnum of champagne, Blücher was back in the saddle. When he met the English liaison officer, Sir Henry Hardinge, the prince felt obliged to excuse himself. “Ich stinke etwas,” he said – “I stink a bit” – though it seems likely Sir Henry’s thoughts were elsewhere, given that his arm, shattered by a cannonball, had just been amputated. The old man remained in the saddle until nightfall, riding through the rain in the midst of his soldiers as they retreated northward towards the road junction at Wavre.

In the chaos following the battle of Ligny, the small town of Wavre had been chosen as a rendezvous point for all the retreating Prussian troops, chiefly because it was readily identifiable on maps. Early on 17 June, when Baron von Müffling, the Prussian liaison officer at Wellington’s headquarters, found Wavre on the map, he was shocked to see how far to the rear it was. “Ma foi, c’est fort loin!” he said.1 Only then did Wellington, who until that moment had been convinced that Blücher would hold out at Ligny, perceive the necessity of abandoning his lines at Quatre Bras and withdrawing equally far to the north, in order to avoid being flanked.

But the map also showed that Blücher’s troops, once arrived in Wavre, could easily interrupt their northward retreat, turn west, and march towards Waterloo. By deciding to retire on Wavre, instead of heading farther east to Namur or Liège, the Prussian generals had kept open the possibility of remaining in contact with their ally; rarely has a strategic decision, made in a few minutes by candlelight, in driving rain, and in the midst of the chaos that attends a disintegrating army, proved more unerring. It was, Wellington later remarked, “the decisive moment of the century”.2

After having decided to retreat from Quatre Bras early on 16 June, the duke sent a letter to Blücher, informing him that he would give battle at Mont-Saint-Jean the next day, provided that the field marshal would send at least one army corps to his aid. That evening, in the midst of their troops’ immense bivouac in the fields around Wavre, the Prussian generals discussed at length what course of action they should take. The decisive voice in this council was that of the chief of staff, General von Gneisenau; for although Blücher was the commander in chief, a national hero, and a military leader capable of exercising an extraordinary moral ascendancy over his soldiers, Gneisenau, for all practical purposes, planned the army’s movements. As Müffling maliciously observed, “In Europe it was no secret that old Prince Blücher, having passed his seventieth birthday, understood absolutely nothing about conducting a war; indeed, when his staff submitted a plan to him, he was incapable of forming a clear idea of it or of judging whether it was good or bad. This state of affairs made it necessary to place at his side someone in whom he would have absolute faith, someone who possessed inclinations and abilities that would be employed in the general interest.” However, this system of dual command – which imperial Germany would reinstate a century later with another famous pair, Hindenburg and Ludendorff – wasn’t simply a matter of coupling a politician and a military technician; in this particular case, the “technician”, Gneisenau, had his own ideas, which didn’t always coincide with those of his superior officer.

For example, Gneisenau had little faith in Wellington, with whom he had quarrelled during the preparations for the campaign. When Gneisenau sent Müffling to the English, he recommended that the baron “remain very much on guard” in his dealings with the duke, “because his relations with India, and his experience in negotiating with the shrewd nabobs, have so accustomed this distinguished general to deceit that he has become a master of the art, surpassing in duplicity the nabobs themselves.” During the catastrophic night that followed the Prussian defeat at Ligny, Gneisenau had bitterly recalled the promises made by Wellington in the course of the previous days and repeated on the very morning of the battle, when the duke had again guaranteed that his army would come to the Prussians’ aid. Today we know that Wellington was himself under severe pressure from the French at Quatre Bras and unable to fulfil his promise, but in those anxious hours, Gneisenau could not know these facts, nor did he wish to know them; and so he remained convinced that his ally could not be trusted.

Understandably, therefore, the idea of exposing his army to great risk by rushing to assist Wellington displeased Gneisenau greatly, and all the more so because on the night of 17 June the Prussian command was still without news of a large part of its munitions train, with which contact had been lost during the retreat. But Blücher was determined to adhere to the terms of the Allies’ treaty, and in the end he succeeded in winning over his reluctant chief of staff. At eleven o’clock that night, Blücher gave the good news to Sir Henry Hardinge (“Gneisenau has given in. We are to march to join Wellington”) and immediately dictated a letter to Wellington, in which he guaranteed that General von Bülow’s IV Corps – the only one of the four corps in the Prussian army that had not yet been in combat, and therefore the freshest – would begin marching towards Waterloo at dawn, while the II Corps, commanded by General von Pirch, would be ready to follow it. On paper, these two corps were nearly equivalent to Wellington’s entire army; their arrival would dramatically shift the balance of power against Napoleon.

FOUR

THE NATURE OF THE ARMIES

In general, the quality of the troops that were about to confront one another between La Belle Alliance and Mont-Saint-Jean was relatively homogeneous. By 1815, Europe had been at war for more than twenty years, and this practical experience had raised the professional competence of all European armies to the highest level, so that basically they all resembled one another. The tactical differences between the most advanced armies, as the French army was in 1815, and the most conservative, the British, were much smaller than they had been at the beginning of the French Revolutionary Wars. French troops were still capable of marching more rapidly and performing manoeuvres more smoothly than any other, but the discrepancies were no longer great enough to decide the outcome of a battle.

Nevertheless, there were still some identifiable differences in quality between the armies in the field that had little to do with national character. Such an assertion would have surprised the combatants’ contemporaries, who put great faith in clichés about the racial qualities of various peoples; indeed, many generalizations of this kind were considered to have indisputable scientific value. In fact, however, the comportment of troops on the battlefield at Waterloo was substantially the same whatever their nationality. Even in Wellington’s composite, heterogeneous army, the gap between British troops and “foreign” troops – a gap that British officers and soldiers, with their ingrained chauvinism, considered unbridgeable – did not prove significant under fire. Only 35 per cent of the duke’s soldiers were in British units; the Dutch-Belgian army contributed 26 per cent, Hanover 16 per cent, and Brunswick 9 per cent, while another 9 per cent belonged to the so-called King’s German Legion, and a contingent from the duchy of Nassau made up 5 per cent. So heterogeneous an army certainly had its disadvantages from an organizational point of view, but on a tactical level, contrary to what some historians have maintained, the fighting quality of battalions and squadrons in Wellington’s army was substantially the same irrespective of their nationality.

On the other hand, there were important differences in the methods used to recruit the troops, and the decisions made in this area were essentially political. The armies of 1815 found themselves in the middle of the transition from professional or “mercenary” recruitment to the compulsory military service that was to characterize the national armies of the future. Revolutionary France had been the first to adopt the principle of universal conscription, according to which all young men of draft age were subject to being called up; in fact, however, a system of drawing names was in place, and as a result, only a minority of those eligible were enrolled every year. Generally speaking, under the empire 100,000 conscripts were called up annually, which meant that about one name in seven was drawn. The last conscripts to join their units en masse were those of 1814, whose call-up had been advanced to the preceding year. The majority of the army that Napoleon rebuilt after returning from Elba, therefore, was composed of soldiers who had at least one campaign behind them, although in the eyes of veterans of Egypt or Austerlitz, the recruits of 1814 (nicknamed the “Marie Louises”, from the name of Napoleon’s empress) still seemed like little boys.

Apart from France, the only nation that practised conscription was Prussia, where the national reawakening that sparked the 1813–14 wars of liberation had allowed the government to institute the revolutionary policy of universal, compulsory military service. Since the available human resources were less abundant than in France, every year one Prussian conscript out of five was called to serve. But precisely because conscription had been adopted so recently, Prussian subjects who were more than twenty years old had never performed any compulsory service, and the king could not allow himself to disregard such a resource. Therefore, alongside the regular army, Prussia had organized a territorial militia, the Landwehr, composed of civilians chosen by lot from each province. These troops were required to undergo periodic training under the command of officers on loan from the regular army or recalled from retirement to serve in this capacity.

By contrast, the different national contingents that made up Wellington’s heterogeneous army reflected governments which, for political reasons, could not permit themselves to adopt universal conscription. In the armies of England, the Netherlands, Hanover, Brunswick, and Nassau, the infantry units were manned by paid soldiers who signed up to serve for several years or, more frequently, for life. They were enrolled by recruiting officers who scoured the country for volunteers, luring them with offers of cash premiums. The British army’s recruitment pool encompassed the British Isles, so the vast majority of volunteers were subjects of the king, and the army retained a distinctly national connotation. By contrast, the kings of the Netherlands and Hanover and the minor German princes, who had barely regained possession of their territories after the long hiatus of French occupation, had all formed their armies by enlisting professional soldiers, many of them recently discharged from the French army or from that of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Westphalia, without much concern for the nationality of those who signed up.

Thus all these sovereigns spared their subjects the burden of compulsory military service. Even in these countries, however, the thirst for manpower provoked by the Napoleonic Wars was so great that the regular army had to be backed up with a territorial militia, formed from the civilians that every province was obligated to provide in proportion to the number of its inhabitants. In general, the drawing of lots for the militias was carried out according to criteria designed to reduce its social impact and to avoid any confusion with the hated policy of conscription. In the Kingdom of the Netherlands, for example, the militia was recruited on the basis of one man for every hundred inhabitants, with broad exemptions for only sons and orphans with sisters to support, in order to render the measure more politically tolerable. By this means, it was possible to make use of the human potential available in the country without arousing the kind of opposition that would have greeted universal conscription. In Wellington’s army, therefore, the Dutch-Belgian, Hanoverian, and Nassauer contingents consisted in part of regular army regiments and in part of militia regiments; only the British contingent was entirely composed of regular soldiers, because in Great Britain constitutional guarantees blocked the use of the militia outside the kingdom.

The difference between troops of the line and militia presented, in terms of effectiveness, the greatest discrepancy on the battlefield at Waterloo. Cobbled together and improperly trained, militia units, even though commanded by both professional and noncommissioned officers, inevitably possessed a level of preparation and moral cohesion inferior to that of regular troops. This discrepancy was perhaps less marked among the Prussians, owing to the strong national spirit that animated a large part of their Landwehr, but it was particularly evident in the other continental armies; and it was one of the reasons why the Duke of Wellington, assessing the army that had been placed under his orders, had judged it “an infamous army, very weak and ill equipped”. The quality of his troops explains why Wellington had been obliged to establish and defend his line, while Napoleon, with the more professional army, had pursued him defiantly the day before and would attack him relentlessly on the eighteenth.

FIVE

THE BRITISH ARMY: “THE SCUM OF THE EARTH”

The fact that the British army was composed entirely of professional military men carries none of the elite implications that the expression may suggest to the modern reader. The soldierly profession, badly paid and subject to the harshest discipline, was not greatly appreciated in the United Kingdom; it was, in fact, a decidedly proletarian vocation. It was no accident that a high percentage of those who enlisted were Irish, since Ireland, overpopulated as it was with a deeply impoverished peasantry, had always been the major provider of cannon fodder to His Majesty’s armies; except for a few Scots regiments whose recruiting had been notably regional, Irish soldiers generally made up between 20 per cent and 40 per cent of the infantry battalions that Wellington marshalled at Waterloo.

Furthermore, in the course of the Napoleonic Wars, the British army, desperately short of men, had been obliged to avail itself of the reservoir of recruits constituted by the militia: men chosen by lot in local drawings to join the territorial regiments were strongly pressured to sign up for the regular army after completing their training; hence, in many regiments at Waterloo, more than half of the men had enlisted after some experience in the militia. These recruits probably produced a statistical rise in the average level of education and social class among the troops, which by then included some decently educated, lower-middle-class young men whose ineluctable fate it was to become noncommissioned officers; to such men we owe the relatively few letters or diaries written by enlisted men, as opposed to officers, in Wellington’s army.

The vast majority of soldiers nonetheless came from the ranks of the otherwise unemployed, men who had not found another way to earn a living. The few available statistics show that around half of the troops had been farm labourers and the rest textile workers or apprentice tradesmen. In such a class-conscious society as England’s, the proletarian origins of the troops opened a chasm between them and their officers; one day the Duke of Wellington, a man devoid of democratic feelings and little given to mincing his words, said that the English army was recruited from among “the scum of the earth”.

His enemies shared this uncharitable judgment. Years later, when French veterans recalled the Angluches, they were still surprised by the rigid class lines that divided the men from their officers. According to the French, English soldiers obeyed blindly; if they committed a fault, they were punished with the whip; and when off duty, they got fabulously, unconscionably drunk. The noncommissioned officers were excellent; “they never rise higher in rank; the concept of class is so ingrained in them that they take this to be the natural order of things.” As for the officers, “they are, for the most part, quite courageous, but fairly ignorant of their trade, for the English education is not directed towards the profession of arms; moreover, all their manners are those of aristocrats: haughty and disagreeable.” The impression that the British and their army made on the French was a reflection of undeniable social realities. As one of Napoleon’s veterans remembered, “The officers were all upper-class, all nobles or gentlemen, and the soldiers, who were all from the working class, obeyed them without question.”

A more modern attitude, the notion that troops should be treated more humanely, was just beginning to manifest itself in English society; but Great Britain was still the country where a person could be sentenced to death for any one of more than sixty different crimes, and where women or half-grown children were hanged every day for the theft of a piece of fruit. Unsurprisingly in such a society, army officers, particularly those of the old school, maintained a rigid, pitiless discipline. Even for minor infractions, a soldier could be condemned to hundreds of lashes, which grew to one or two thousand in the most serious cases. Lashes were administered with a cat-o’-nine-tails until the victim fainted. In the weeks that preceded Waterloo, several sentences of this type were carried out in public, to the disgust of the Belgian citizenry and the dismay of the local authorities, who appeared before the British high command and requested them to put a stop to these barbaric displays.

Not all officers, however, were members of the aristocracy. Among the lower-ranking officers in the British regiments, many were the sons of clerks or shopkeepers, members of the hardworking urban middle class that was creating England’s wealth. Still, such officers were unlikely to receive much advancement; lacking the money to buy a higher rank, they grew old as lieutenants or captains. Indeed, the customary way to obtain promotion in the army was to purchase a “commission”, which was both a rank and an appointment to a command. There was a comparable practice in all the old monarchies, where all public offices were for sale to the highest bidder. In every respect, the acquisition of a rank was an investment; if an officer grew tired of military life, he could always sell his commission. The War Ministry limited itself to ratifying the transaction and to making sure that no one skipped one or more levels, for an officer on his way up in the army was required to occupy all the ranks, one after the other. The rich were still able to advance quickly, buying a commission to the next-higher rank as soon as one was offered in any regiment whatsoever. Before he became the Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley had been an ensign at the age of eighteen and a lieutenant colonel at twenty-four; in six years, he had received five promotions, all of them in return for payment, and he had passed through seven different regiments, without having served a single day in battle.