How the French Won Waterloo (or Think They Did) (11 page)

The words ‘sour grapeshot’ come to mind.

Meanwhile, with the British reeling, Ney spotted another opportunity to show what Lemonnier-Delafosse diplomatically called his ‘unthinking bravery’. Chomping at the bit to launch another assault, Ney sent his aide-de-camp, Colonel Heymès, to Napoleon for more troops, apparently having forgotten already that he himself had sent thousands of them to a wasteful, senseless death.

Predictably, Napoleon was incensed: ‘Troops? Where do you want me to get them? Do you want me to create them?’ He did still have one card up his sleeve (or rather in his waistcoat), but it was his most precious one, the ace that he never liked to play unless it was sure to win – his
Garde Impériale
.

In past battle reports, Napoleon had often written that ‘la Garde a donné’ – ‘the Guards performed’, a succinct phrase indicating that his elite troops had swiftly and efficiently finished the job of routing the enemy. Now, though, it would be more of a desperate move. The enemy line was shaken, but not yet on the verge of breaking. Sending in the
Garde
would not be the
coup de grâce
that it usually was. It would be his final trump, and he would have to hope that Wellington had no riposte.

But with Blücher’s Prussians beginning to arrive in increasing numbers, Napoleon had no choice. He had to wipe out the effects of Grouchy’s inactivity and Ney’s madness by sending in his coolest, best-trained troops.

Napoleon rode his horse over to the 5,000-strong
Vieille Garde
, who were, as usual, stationed close to his command post.

‘My friends,’ he told them, ‘you are at the
moment suprême
. Your job is not to shoot. You must engage the enemy in hand-to-hand combat, and, at the point of your bayonet, throw him back into the ravine from where he came, and from where he threatens France and the Empire.’

This was all in a day’s work for the Old Guard, who naturally replied with hearty shouts of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’

But yet again, Napoleon was let down. A traitor, named and shamed by French historians as Capitaine du Barrail, rode towards English lines, shouting ‘Vive le Roi!’ so that he wouldn’t be shot, and informed the enemy that the
Garde Impériale
were about to attack, led by Napoleon himself. The British knew that this would be the final, all-or-nothing French charge, and had time to brace themselves for one last onslaught. Accordingly, Wellington closed up his line and positioned cavalry at the point where the
Garde
were expected. Yet again, the Brits and their treacherous friends were cheating.

After a forty-five-minute cannon barrage, the first wave of the
Garde
saluted Napoleon and set off – 2,900 men in three tight lines, marching slowly, impassively, as if on parade, grouped around their eagle standards, their muskets on their shoulders, red plumes proudly fluttering from their tall busbies.

French accounts of the
Garde
’s march towards the English lines – effectively the last great French attack of the Napoleonic Wars – ooze with tragic hindsight. Dominique de Villepin calls it a ‘terrible moment where action became sublime thanks to the sacrifice of the immortals’. Victor Hugo declared that ‘history has nothing more moving than these last death throes’. Jean-Claude Damamme reminds us that these men had been ‘the victors of Europe’.

Unfortunately for these ‘immortal’ heroes, they were being led into battle by a mortal with a deathwish – Ney. When his horse was again shot from under him, he simply continued on foot. As he and his troops came closer to the top of the ridge, the drumbeat quickened and the
Garde
marched faster, while maintaining their impassive, machine-like advance.

Then came the British welcome. Cannons ripped into the
Garde
from front and side. Men fell in whole rows, sending muskets, busbies and limbs flying everywhere. About 500 were killed by the first salvo, but they simply closed ranks and marched on. Suddenly, Wellington unleashed his secret weapon: 2,000 Guardsmen lying down in four rows, hidden in a wheatfield. He gave his famous order: ‘Up, Guards! Make ready! Fire!’ And the British did just that, at a range of twenty paces. Even with primitive muskets, no one could miss.

This shock, coupled with a sudden English charge with fixed bayonets and the emergence of Hanoverian troops from Hougoumont who began firing at the
Garde
’s rear, was enough, and at this point some French historians face up to the painful task of admitting the inadmissible. Dominique de Villepin recognises that ‘the impossible happened: the
Garde
retreated’. (Note that they didn’t turn and run, they just retreated.)

Others refuse to countenance this national tragedy. General Antoine Drouot later claimed that ‘The large number of wounded men who left the battlefield made people believe that the
Garde
had been routed.’ Another veteran, Captain Duthilt, agreed, stressing that ‘Except for the Old Guard, everyone began to run.’

In an instant, with the
Garde
(apparently) doing the unthinkable, the French will to fight suddenly broke. General Drouot explained that ‘a panicking terror transmitted itself to the adjacent groups of men who hurriedly began to flee’.

By all accounts, once they decided they had had enough, the majority of French soldiers didn’t hang around to explain why. Shouting ‘Sauve qui peut!’ (‘Every man for himself!’), they began to disappear at speed into the deepening gloom, abandoning weapons, baggage, and the few officers who tried to rally them.

Sensing victory, Wellington appeared on the ridge and waved his hat, the order for the whole front line to advance and fulfil the role that Napoleon’s
Garde
had always performed.

As Jean-Claude Damamme describes the victorious troops charging down the ridge, he tries to minimise Wellington’s great moment by stressing that his soldiers weren’t all British. Everyone was ganging up on Napoleon, he says: ‘English, Scots, Irish, Belgians, Dutch, Brunswickians, Nassauers, Hanoverians, Westphalians, Prussians, all combining their weapons and their flags. It was a fight to the death of the multitude against just one nation. Just one man.’ Anything to dampen the flames of British triumphalism.

Napoleon saw what was happening, but all French sources maintain that he stood his ground, even though he was dangerously close to the fighting. He personally took command of the artillery, and continued to pound the British lines. When the rout became unstoppable, he tried to join the
Garde
to make a stand. His officers had to drag him away, one of them, Captain Coignet, asking, ‘What are you doing? Isn’t a victory enough for them?’

Meanwhile, Marshal Ney was still out there, trying to commit suicide. On foot, his sword broken, his uniform torn and bloodied, he came across a group of 800 infantrymen who had been held in reserve, and were still in good order, hoping to join up with the rest of the French army and regroup, or to dig in and protect the retreat. Their commander, General Durutte, went off to reconnoitre, at which point Ney ordered the men to charge the British lines. They naturally obeyed, only to run into a force of English cavalry who cut the isolated Frenchmen to pieces.

In
Les Misérables
, Hugo describes the scene, with Ney ‘sweating, fire in his eyes, froth on his lips, his jacket unbuttoned, one of his epaulettes half-severed by a Horse Guard’s sabre, his eagle badge dented by a bullet, bloody, muddy, magnificent, a broken sword in his fist, he was saying: “Come and see how a Marshal of France dies on the battlefield!” But in vain. He didn’t die.’

It really wasn’t Ney’s day.

At least some of the
Garde
had held fast and were withdrawing in tight formation. One battalion of 550 men has gone down in legend thanks to their last stand. Refusing to join the general flight, they formed into a square, and resisted the attacks of the British troops swarming around them. When a hundred of them were killed by a single cannon salvo, they simply closed ranks and continued to fight.

Their commander was General Pierre Cambronne, who had been the head of Napoleon’s personal guard during the exile on Elba. Called on to surrender, Cambronne famously answered, ‘The
Garde
dies but never surrenders.’ His brave retort was reported in the
Journal Général de France
on 24 June 1815, and widely re-quoted throughout the country.

When the British tried to persuade him that the battle was over, Cambronne defiantly shouted ‘Merde!’ – a moment in French history so famous that
merde
is euphemistically known as
le mot de Cambronne
, or ‘Cambronne’s word’.

Faced with such courage, the British sportingly withdrew the line of cannons pointed at the
Garde
, and left them to claim that they, at least, had won a corner of a foreign field that would forever be French. Well, no of course they didn’t do that at all – the British cannons opened fire at point-blank range and allowed the
Garde
to keep its word, and die.

Cambronne himself was only wounded, and survived to deny at least part of the story about him. According to Jean-Claude Carrière’s
Dictionnaire des Révélations Historiques et Contemporaines
, Cambronne later quipped, ‘I couldn’t have said “the
Garde
dies but never surrenders” because I’m not dead and I didn’t surrender.’

Despite the heroism of a few hundred
Gardes
, the defeat was total, and as darkness fell, this part of Belgium was overrun by French soldiers fleeing for their lives. Lemonnier-Delafosse, Marshal Foy’s aide-de-camp, called the scene a ‘hideous spectacle. A torrent pouring down a mountainside, uprooting everything before it, is a weak image to describe the mass of men, horses and carriages crushing each other.’

In his diaries, Captain Coignet remembered the chaotic scenes in Genappe, 7 kilometres south of the battlefield: ‘Soldiers of every regiment … were marching with no order at all, confused, knocking into each other, squeezing through the streets of this small town, fleeing the Prussian cavalry. Nothing could calm them … they would listen to no one. Cavalrymen were blowing their horse’s brains out, infantrymen were blowing out their own so as not to fall into enemy hands.’

The Prussians, frustrated at missing most of the battle, and virulently anti-French because of the invasions they had suffered, were taking no prisoners. Blücher had told his men that he would personally kill any soldier who brought him a French captive. French accounts of the aftermath of the battle are full of Prussian atrocities. Not only were wounded combatants robbed and finished off where they lay, unarmed French wagon drivers were massacred. At Le Caillou farm, Napoleon’s billet the previous night, which had been turned into a hospital caring for the wounded of all sides, the Prussians removed all non-French soldiers from the barn and set fire to the building. Reading French history books, it is easy to understand the birth of an anti-Prussian hatred that would not be appeased until after 1918, or even 1945.

Meanwhile, the Bonapartist historians tell us, the undeserving victor Wellington was able to meet up with his saviour, Blücher, in one of the biggest anti-climaxes in military history. Blücher couldn’t speak English, so he greeted Wellington with ‘mein lieber Kamerad’, and then, not knowing what else to say, added in French: ‘Quelle affaire!’ Not exactly Molière-like repartee. Napoleon would certainly have provided history with a decent quote.

According to Jean-Claude Damamme, Wellington was looking anything but jubilant. He quotes an unidentified British officer as saying that the Duke looked ‘abattu’, downcast – although
abattu
can also mean shot down or butchered, and comes from the French root word
battu
, meaning beaten. It’s all heavy, subliminal stuff.

Napoleon was already on his way back to France, and was seen at Quatre-Bras (the vital crossroads where Ney had dithered two days earlier), his arms folded, weeping at the sheer unfairness of it all. He had returned from Elba to save France from a corrupt and spineless king; he had offered Europe lasting peace and been rejected; and then, despite a severe attack of urinary disease, syphilis and/or piles, he had bumped across half of France and Belgium to execute a daring battle plan that would have paid off if God, the weather and a gaggle of incompetent or treacherous French commanders hadn’t each put a spoke in his cannon wheels.

Non
, he had not won his great gamble, but then, as various French commentators – including Napoleon himself – have explained, it really wasn’t his fault. And now it was time for a new battle to begin – the fight to rewrite history.

^fn1
The French, for once, are less romantic when naming something. Their word for grapeshot is
mitraille
, a descriptive term for a collection of metal projectiles, the ‘-
aille
’ suffix giving the word negative, random overtones (
ferraille
, for example, is odd bits of
fer
, or iron).
Mitraille
really does conjure up an ugly spray of metal.

^fn2
The image of horses leaping over the line of bayonet-wielding soldiers after crossing a kilometre or more of muddy field occurs more often in heroism-seeking French accounts than pragmatic British versions.

^fn3
It is of course ironic that the man responsible for so many horses’ deaths had a name that was pronounced ‘neigh’.

^fn4
This was not a pun on ‘not moving a muscle’, because the French for mussel is
moule
. Mussels, of course, stay clamped to their rocks.

^fn5
Possibly Major Andrew Hamilton, ADC to Major General Sir Edward Barnes.