Waterloo 1815: Battle Story E-Book

Gregory Fremont-Barnes

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 204

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

One of the most decisive battles in military history, Waterloo saw the culmination of a generation of war to bring a definitive end to French hegemony and imperial ambitions in Europe. Both sides fought bitterly and Wellington later remarked that 'it was the nearest-run thing you ever saw in your life'. In this bloody engagement, more than 20,000 men were lost on the battlefield that day by each side, but it was the Anglo-Allies who emerged victorious. Their forces entered France and restored Louis XVIII to the throne, while Napoleon was exiled to the island of Saint Helena, where he later died. Waterloo was a resounding victory for the British Army and Allied forces, and it changed the course of European history. In this concise yet detailed account, historian Gregory Fremont-Barnes tells you everything you need to know about this critical battle.

Leseprobe

About the Author

Gregory Fremont-Barnes holds a doctorate in Modern History from the University of Oxford and is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of War Studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. His other publications on the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars include The Peninsular War, 1807–14, The Fall of the French Empire, 1813–15, Waterloo 1815: The British Army’s Day of Destiny, Nile 1798, Trafalgar 1805 and The French Revolutionary Wars. He contributed two chapters to The Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars and edited Armies of the Napoleonic Wars and the three-volume Encyclopedia of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

This book is dedicated to the memory of my mother, who gave unswervingly of her time, energy and love to her children.

All images supplied from the author’s collection, except the cover image, which is The Battle of Waterloo by William Sadler, oil on canvas, June 1815 (Napoleon.org.pl/Wikimedia Commons).

First published 2012 by Spellmount

This paperback edition first published 2022

The History Press

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© The History Press, 2012, 2022

The right of Gregory Fremont-Barnes to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

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ISBN 978 0 75246 858 7

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Timeline

Historical Background

The Armies

A Brief Overview

Infantry Weapons and Tactics

Cavalry Weapons and Tactics

Artillery

The Days Before Battle

Napoleon Returns to Power

Opposing Strategies

Opening Moves

The Battlefield: What Actually Happened?

The Defence of Hougoumont and d’Erlon’s Attack

Charge of the Union and Household Brigades

Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte

Ney’s Cavalry Assault

The Fall of La Haye Sainte, the Struggle for Plancenoit and the Crisis in the Anglo-Allied Centre

Napoleon’s Final Gamble: The Attack of the Imperial Guard

After the Battle

The Butcher’s Bill: Casualties

Factors Contributing to Victory and Defeat

The Legacy

Political and Strategic Consequences

Orders of Battle

Further Reading

INTRODUCTION

Waterloo holds an enduring, international appeal, seen especially during the 2015 bicentenary events and media coverage. Accounting for this fascination amongst scholars, students, lay readers, historical re-enactors and wargamers poses little challenge, for few battles combine so many separate, but each compelling, struggles within a greater contest of arms: the stubborn defence of Hougoumont; the fight for the little farm of La Haye Sainte; the charge of the French heavy cavalry against Wellington’s centre; the bitter street-fighting in Plancenoit; the attack of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard; and a host of other remarkable episodes whose outcome in nearly every case remained in the balance until evening.

Waterloo offers a glimpse into the events of a single day whose salient features appear to bear little resemblance to the experience of combat familiar to us today. The ‘invisible battlefield’ – that eerie environment shaped by the lethality of fire which so often separates combatants to the extent that they become effectively unseen – has brought a cold, impersonal detachment to what the soldiers of 1815 understood as a very intimate business of killing. The pathos associated with men deployed shoulder to shoulder, following a strict evolution of drill in order to load and fire their muskets in volleys at their geometrically arranged opposites from harrowingly short distances; and the dramatic spectacle of horsemen, resplendent in impractical but superbly colourful uniforms, wielding sword or lance, holds a particularly romantic appeal to those who, with considerable justice, believe that war since 1914 has reduced mankind to new depths of inhumanity – even barbarism – sullied by the substitution of machines for men, by the horrors associated with the mass destruction of civilians from 20,000ft and by conflicts waged for less honourable motives than those of an apparently lost, halcyon age.

Napoleon in 1815. He could not hope to consolidate his newly restored power without defeating the two Allied armies in the Low Countries before the far larger Austrian and Russian armies reached France from the east. The best prospect for victory therefore rested with a strategy designed to defeat the Allies in detail, a course which obliged Napoleon to assume the offensive immediately, make a dash into Belgium and confront the Anglo-Allied and Prussian armies in separate, hopefully decisive, engagements thereby preventing the two armies from uniting and overwhelming the emperor through sheer weight of numbers.

The act of men standing opposite one another, blazing away like rival firing squads until the steadiness of one side or the other breaks under the pressure of fire or the impact of a bayonet assault somehow sparks the imagination, reminding us of the extraordinary courage required of soldiers who could, quite literally, see the whites of the enemy’s eyes. Waterloo marked the beginning of the end of chivalry, with 1914 signalling its final demise, as Andrew Roberts observed:

Ghastly as the carnage at Waterloo undoubtedly was, thenceforth wars were to be fought with the infinitely more ghastly methods of trenches (the Crimea), barbed wire, railways and machine-guns (the American Civil War), directed starvation (the Franco-Prussian War), concentration camps (the Boer War), and mustard gas and aerial bombardment (the First World War). By the time of the Great War, chivalry was effectively dead as an element of war-making.

Roberts, Waterloo, p.15

Eyewitness accounts of extraordinary devotion to duty abound – adding further to the appeal of this subject. Sir Edward Creasy, the Victorian author of The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, related a number of examples of this spirit:

Never, indeed, had the national bravery of the French people been more nobly shown. One soldier in the French ranks was seen, when his arm was shattered by a cannon-ball, to wrench it off with the other; and throwing it up in the air, he exclaimed to his comrades, ‘Vive l’Empereur jusqu’ à la mort!’… [A]t the beginning of the action, a French soldier who had both legs carried off by a cannon-ball, was borne past the front of Foy’s division, and called out to them, ‘Ce n’est rien, camarades; Vive l’Empereur! Glorie à la France.’ The same officer, at the end of the battle, when all hope was lost, tells us that he saw a French grenadier, blackened with powder, with his clothes torn and stained, leaning on his musket, and immovable as a statue. The colonel called to him to join his comrades and retreat; but the grenadier showed him his musket and his hands; and said ‘These hands have with this musket used to-day more than twenty packets of cartridges: it was more than my share: I supplied myself with ammunition from the dead. Leave me to die here on the field of battle. It is not courage that fails me, but strength’.

Creasy, London, 1877, p.614

Little wonder Waterloo continues to grip the imagination.

On a grand strategic level, it signified the end of an era – of over a century of conflict with France, with whom Britain would never again cross swords. Indeed, the two nations would co-operate in the Crimea forty years later and, of course, again in the two World Wars. It also marked the end of any further French attempts at territorial aggrandisement in Europe – which largely accounts for it also signifying the end of the long period of Anglo-French hostility, dating from the great conflict against Louis XIV which began in 1689 – though some may trace it back to the Hundred Years War if not to the Norman invasion. The comprehensive nature of Waterloo led to Napoleon’s final downfall and the re-drawing of the map of Europe, with central Europe rationalised into a few dozen, instead of a few hundred states – thereby setting the stage for German unification later in the century. As Andrew Roberts put it: ‘… it ended forever the greatest personal world-historical epic since that of Julius Caesar …’ Waterloo not only ended a generation of conflict, it put paid to such a blood-letting as Europe had not experienced since the religious wars of the seventeenth century and ushered in a hundred years of comparative peace. True, there were wars yet to be fought – the Crimean and those of Italian and German unification; but these paled into insignificance as compared with the sheer scale of the conflicts unleashed on Europe by the French revolutionaries in 1792, belatedly but definitively crushed in Belgium twenty-three years later. It was not for nothing that contemporary Britons referred to this period as ‘The Great War’ a century before the term was applied again in another, far more horrifying context.

Waterloo is not significant as representing a passing era of warfare and the beginning of a new phase, for the weaponry arrayed there bore a great deal in common with that deployed by the Duke of Marlborough’s army over a century earlier, and warfare on land would not undergo any genuinely significant change until the 1850s, with the application of rifling to small arms and, later, artillery, followed rapidly by the advent of breech-loading technology. But if the subtle differences between the weapons employed on either side at Waterloo did not palpably contribute to its outcome, the tactics employed there certainly did. In the absence of any great flanking movements on the battlefield, Waterloo amounted to a great slogging match, with the balance between victory and defeat depending heavily upon the degree of French determination to press home the attack and the stubbornness with which the Anglo-Allies were prepared to receive that attack. The fact that both sides fought with remarkable energy and spirit contributes all the more to the appeal of a subject which remains a great epic in the history of the British Army. Not for nothing Waterloo continues to be one of history’s most decisive battles.

TIMELINE

20 April 1792

France declares war on Austria, thereby initiating the Revolutionary Wars

1 February 1793

France declares war on Britain and Holland. In the course of the coming months the Allies form the First Coalition

5 April and22 July 1795

By the Treaties of Basle, Prussia and Spain leave the First Coalition

17 October 1797

France and Austria conclude the Treaty of Campo Formio, effectively ending all continental resistance to Revolutionary France and marking the end of the Second Coalition

25 March 1802

Britain concludes the Treaty of Amiens with France, ending the Revolutionary Wars

18 May 1803

After a brief hiatus, hostilities between Britain and France resume, so marking the beginning of the Napoleonic Wars

11 April 1805

Russia and Britain conclude an alliance, later joined by Austria (9 August) and Sweden (3 October), which results in the formation of the Third Coalition

2 December 1805

Napoleon decisively defeats a combined Austro-Russian army at Austerlitz, thereby destroying the Third Coalition

14 October 1806

The French decisively defeat the Prussians in the twin battles of Jena and Auerstädt

14 June 1807

The Battle of Friedland, fought in East Prussia, puts paid to the last vestiges of Prussian as well as, more importantly, Russian resistance to French control of most of the European mainland

7–9 July 1807

France, Prussia and Russia conclude the Treaties of Tilsit, effectively acknowledging Napoleon’s extensive dominion west of the river Niemen on the Polish-Russian frontier

2 May 1808

A popular uprising in Spain marks the beginning of open resistance throughout Iberia against French control

1 August 1808

Forces under Sir Arthur Wellesley (the future Duke of Wellington) land in Portugal, marking the beginning of British participation in the Peninsular War

5–6 July 1809

Battle of Wagram, the decisive battle of Napoleon’s campaign against a resurgent Austria, which concludes peace on 14 October at Schönbrunn

22 June 1812

Napoleon leads the Grande Armée of over half a million men into Russia

22 July 1812

Wellington defeats the French at Salamanca in central Spain, thereby opening the way for a major Anglo-Portuguese offensive to clear Iberia

19 October 1812

Having failed to bring the Russians to terms, Napoleon abandons Moscow and begins to retreat west, with disastrous consequences

21 June 1813

At Vitoria, Wellington inflicts a decisive defeat on the main French army in Spain

1813

16–19 October

A colossal Allied force consisting of Austrians, Prussians, Russians and Swedes decisively defeats Napoleon’s army at Leipzig, in Saxony, forcing it to abandon Germany and cross back into France

1814

6 April

After failing to hold back the Allies in a remarkable but ultimately unsuccessful campaign on home soil, Napoleon abdicates

30 April

(First) Treaty of Paris concluded between France and the Allies

1 November

The Congress of Vienna convenes to re-draw the map of Europe after a generation of war led to the abolition of some states, the creation of others and the shifting of the frontiers of practically all the rest

1815

26 February

Napoleon leaves exile on Elba for France

1 March

Napoleon lands on the south coast of France

19 March

Louis XVIII leaves Paris for the safety of Ghent in Belgium

20 March

Napoleon arrives in Paris and returns to power, marking the beginning of his ‘Hundred Days’

25 March

The Allies declare Napoleon an outlaw and form the Seventh Coalition

16 June

Battles of Ligny and Quatre Bras

18 June

Battles of Waterloo and Wavre

22 June

Napoleon abdicates

20 November

(Second) Treaty of Paris concluded between France and the Allies

HISTORICALBACKGROUND

In seeking to understand the Allies’ motives for wishing to defeat Napoleon, one must examine, if only in brief, the wars spawned by the French Revolution in 1792 which, apart from a short period of peace between March 1802 and May 1803, finally came to an end in the spring of 1814. The first phase of this fighting, known as the Revolutionary Wars, arose out of two principal requirements of the new republic: one ideological and the other strategic. In the case of the former, the French sought to spread the principles of the Revolution abroad, specifically by appealing to the populations of the Low Countries, Switzerland, the Rhineland and northern Italy to throw off, as the revolutionaries characterised it, the yoke of monarchical despotism which represented the tyranny, corruption and system of privilege which the French themselves had cast off in the first years of social and political turmoil following the fall of the Bastille in 1789. Having seized that great fortress and prison – the very symbol of monarchical oppression – the revolutionaries established a national assembly and eventually curbed the powers of the king, Louis XVI, later declaring a republic, adopting a series of constitutions and, finally, executing their monarch in January 1793 – as much to hail the triumphs of the Revolution as to offend the crowned heads of Europe, many of whom, by that time, had already seen the Revolution for what it was – a threat to their ideological well-being and the principle of legitimacy. Appreciating, too, that so much power as that gathered in the hands of men was clearly dangerous to European security – quite apart from the obvious threat to monarchical rule – Austria, Prussia, Holland, Spain and numerous smaller states went to war with France as early as April 1792.

The combined strength of this, the First Coalition, ought to have crushed the Revolution in short order; but through bungled strategy, competing war aims, indecisiveness and military incompetence in the face of the new, energetic and, above all, massive conscripted armies of the French republic, the Allied powers repeatedly failed to bring the revolutionaries to heel, forming in fact two impressive coalitions in the decade between 1792 and 1802 without accomplishing more than enabling France to expand her borders to an extent never even dreamed of by Louis XIV: the whole of the Low Countries, the west bank of the Rhine, the Alps (thus including parts of northwest Italy) and the Pyrenees – the so-called natural frontiers. In fact, there was nothing ‘natural’ about them at all, apart from the southern frontier with Spain, which had remained more or less unchanged for centuries. The French, not content merely to defend their own soil against, admittedly, those bent on the destruction of what amounted to wholesale improvements in the political, social and economic lives of millions of French citizens, took possession by force of arms these vast swathes of new territory, justifying these extraordinary conquests on the cynical basis that annexation, occupation or the imposition of some form of dependent status on the conquered inevitably benefitted them all. Who, the argument ran, could fail to appreciate the advantages bestowed by the Revolution? Accordingly, where neighbouring lands escaped outright annexation, they found themselves controlled either directly or indirectly from Paris – not quite akin to the Eastern European experience of Soviet control in the wake of the Second World War – but something of a precursor to that phenomenon. Those states with the temerity to oppose the ‘liberators’ paid a heavy price: military intervention, forced requisitioning, the imposition of indemnities and, in many cases, outright annexation.

The Battle of Jemappes, 6 November 1792, the second major French victory against the forces of the First Coalition, fought near Mons in the Austrian Netherlands (modern Belgium). After the decisive engagement at Fleurus in June 1794, France formally annexed the country the following year and thereafter conscripted extensively there for the next twenty years. This explains why, during the Waterloo campaign, many of Wellington’s Belgian troops had served Napoleonic France. The story was much the same for the Dutch, the French having conquered Holland in 1795 and absorbed it into the empire in 1810.

Disagreements within the Allied camp strongly contributed to the collapse of the First Coalition, a process begun as early as 1795, when Spain and Prussia, demoralised by failure to make progress against the growing strength of the republic, unilaterally abandoned their allies, which now included Britain since February 1793. After Austria suffered a series of humiliating defeats in her former Belgian possessions, along the Rhine and, above all, across northern Italy between 1796 and 1797, she concluded the Treaty of Campo Formio, which marked the death knell of the First Coalition. A resurgent Austria, still supported by Britain and joined by Russia, Turkey and others, formed the Second Coalition in 1798–99, with some initial success. The Allies recovered all of northern Italy from the French, Russian forces managed to penetrate as far west as Switzerland and even co-operated with the British in Holland in 1799, but they withdrew from the fighting, leaving Britain practically on her own in 1801, once Austria concluded a separate peace with France at Lunéville after suffering decisive twin defeats the previous year at Marengo and Hohenlinden. Thus, with an impasse created by French dominance on land and British supremacy at sea, the two hereditary enemies agreed to peace at Amiens in the spring of 1802. No one could deny that, in standing utterly triumphant on the Continent – with the consequent radical shift in the balance of power – France reaped the lion’s share of the benefits accruing to those nations now wearied by a decade of conflict.

The retreat from Moscow. The emperor leads the vanguard of the ever-dwindling Grande Armée out of Russia. Determined to rebuild his army for the coming campaign in the spring of 1813 and to forestall a coup in Paris, he absented himself at Smorgi and made his way by sledge to Poland and thence to France.

Napoleon at the Battle of Marengo, 14 June 1800, the last of his long string of victories over the Austrians during the French Revolutionary Wars. This decisive blow, in combination with General Moreau’s triumph at Hohenlinden six months later, obliged Austria to sue for peace despite her agreement with the other members of the Second Coalition not to withdraw from the alliance on a separate basis.

French claims that the republic required buffer states to protect her from her ideological rivals rang hollow during the interlude of peace inaugurated at Amiens. If Britain could grudgingly accept by 1802 that the principles of the Revolution – admirable though most of them were – had been thrust upon France’s neighbours at the point of the bayonet and remained an incontestable fact of life in western Europe, she could not long tolerate the strategic imbalance which French occupation represented or the control of the belt of satellite states created to enhance and extend French power beyond historically accepted bounds. The renewal of war thus remained inevitable even before the ink had dried at Amiens. Accordingly, hostilities resumed in May 1803, first in the form of a strictly Anglo-French conflict, but by the summer of 1805 it was to expand into a full-fledged coalition – the Third. By this time the Allies had ceased to insist upon the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy and concentrated simply on deposing Napoleon and restraining the over-arching power of an expansive, now imperial, France. That nation no longer represented an ideological threat – the fact that Napoleon had reined in constitutionalism and established himself as virtual dictator confirmed the fact. Yet, again, the Allies’ endeavour to re-establish a degree of strategic equilibrium on the Continent failed – and in shorter order than ever before – thanks to the capitulation of an entire Austrian army at Ulm in October 1805, followed six weeks later by Napoleon’s decisive victory at Austerlitz, about 95 miles north of Vienna, which led to the coalition’s collapse. Napoleon, flushed with victory, renewed his self-seeking bid for further territorial gain, a process rendered all the more permanent when he placed various members of his family on the thrones of some of his dependencies.

General Mack surrendering his entire army of 30,000 Austrians in October 1805 at Ulm, a precursor of even more disastrous events to befall the Allies at Austerlitz, the most decisive victory in Napoleon’s career, on 2 December. By the Treaty of Schönbrunn Austria abandoned the Third Coalition, leaving the Russians to retreat east into Poland to lick their wounds and await another opportunity to oppose the seemingly unbeatable forces of the Grande Armée.

By establishing the Confederation of the Rhine in July 1806, Napoleon could levy financial contributions as well as troops from a host of German states – some large like Bavaria and Saxony, some small like Hesse-Darmstadt and Mecklenburg. In his efforts to extend French influence well beyond central Europe, the emperor directly or indirectly controlled the whole of the Italian peninsula and the Dalmatian coast, such that, upon crushing the resurgent Russians at Friedland in June 1807 and concluding accords with Russia and Prussia at Tilsit, Napoleon possessed a free hand with which to create a Polish satellite state known as the Duchy of Warsaw, thus providing him control over the whole of the Continent from the Atlantic in the west to Denmark and the Prussian coast in the north, to the toe of Italy and the Adriatic coast in the south and to the Russian frontier in the east. In three short years Napoleonic armies had cowed the three great continental powers of Austria, Russia and Prussia – a military feat not repeated until Germany’s stunning successes in the early years of the Second World War. Britain, though supreme at sea, particularly after Trafalgar in October 1805, could accomplish little on land apart from seizing French colonies in the West Indies and dispatching largely ineffectual expeditionary forces to the Continent. To be fair, she could, and did, fund her allies generously with millions of pounds in subsidies; but in the wake of such catastrophes as Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland, financial aid proved woefully insufficient in reversing the hegemony imposed by France in the wake of the remarkable string of victories which marked out the Napoleonic heydays of 1805–07.