How the French Won Waterloo (or Think They Did) (13 page)

All in all, Napoleon’s new army was a hurriedly raised, scantly trained force, united almost entirely by their determination to defend France and their Emperor (and, in some cases, their apple trees). This might explain their willingness to run away at the end of Waterloo when they saw the elite
Garde
falter, but it also imbues them, in French eyes, with a kind of Dunkirk spirit, a refusal to let their country be invaded by the imperious foreigners. Morally, in Bonapartist eyes, they soar above the band of mercenaries paid for by the English enemy.

It took almost superhuman courage and stoicism to fight a battle in which the main tactic was to stand up in non-camouflaged uniforms and let the enemy fire at you, or charge, without bulletproof vests or even functional helmets, straight into the mouths of blasting cannons. One could therefore argue that all nationalities showed the same valour at Waterloo, but Bonapartist historians naturally prefer to cite their own side’s accounts of the horrors of battle.

In his book
Souvenirs d’un cadet
the young Larreguy de Civrieux remembers watching cannonballs flying towards him while under orders not to move: ‘The balls came at us after ricocheting off a rise in the ground, which meant that we could make out their curved trajectory before they decimated our ranks. Our courage was severely put to the test, and it was despairing to wait for death with total passivity, surrounded by the dying and horribly mutilated.’
^fn2

The French were of course fired up with patriotism – in contrast to Wellington’s army (or so some French commentators allege). On the morning of the battle, the veteran Hippolyte de Mauduit describes being a man on a mission: ‘Our warlike march on this magnificent morning, in the beauty of nature, had something romantic about it, and yet we were going to death with self-denial and a sort of joy, because gaiety was on all our faces.’

Even the hated French royalists grudgingly admired the spirit of Napoleon’s troops. Louis Rilliet de Constant, serving at the Battle of Ligny with the Prussian army, heard the cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ as the French attacked across open ground, bombarded by cannon fire: ‘What soldiers! They were a legion of heroes or demons … Back from the deserts of Russia and the prison ships of England, fired up by the memories of their past victories and the shame of their recent defeats, but most of all keen to achieve glory and expunge the immense misdeed of their defection to the royalist government [in 1814, while Napoleon was on Elba].’
^fn3

To the delight of French historians, the heroism of the ordinary French soldier is even confirmed by some Brits. Sir Charles Bell, a Scottish surgeon, treated and sketched the wounded during the Belgian campaign. He produced some horrifically fascinating paintings of arm stumps, entrails spilling out of a stomach wound, bullet holes in a swollen leg, and more. Bell wrote a letter to his brother George, who sent it on to Sir Walter Scott, describing a hundred or more French casualties he had seen in a hospital: ‘Though wounded, exhausted, beaten, you would still conclude with me that these were men capable of marching unopposed from the west of Europe to the east of Asia. Strong, thickset, hardy veterans, brave spirits and unsubdued, as they cast their wild glance upon you – their black eyes and brown cheeks finely contrasted with the fresh sheets – you would much admire their capacity of adaptation. These fellows are brought from the field after lying many days on the ground; many dying – many in agony – many miserably racked with pain and spasms; and the next mimicks his fellow, and gives it a tune –
Aha, vous chantez bien!
How they are wounded you will see in my notes. But I must not have you to lose the present impression on me of the formidable nature of these fellows as exemplars of the breed in France.’

As we saw in Chapter 3, most glorious of all were the
Garde Impériale
, who are described in French accounts as though they were Leonidas’ 300 Spartans holding off a million Persians. General Cambronne’s men who refused to surrender are depicted as history’s winners, even if they eventually got shredded into flesh fragments by point-blank cannon fire, gaining no strategic advantage in the process – unlike Leonidas, who kept the invading Persians at bay for two days while the bulk of the Greek army was able to retreat.

The
Garde Impériale
was divided into three units – the
Jeune
(Young), the
Moyenne
(Medium) and the
Vieille
(Old).
Moyenne
could also mean ‘average’, but mediocrity wasn’t what Napoleon had in mind. The titles simply referred to the order in which the different parts of the
Garde
had been created –
Vieille
in 1804,
Moyenne
in 1806,
Jeune
in 1808.

The
Vieille Garde
were known as the
élite de l’élite
, and were treated more like Napoleon’s brothers in arms than his cannon fodder. Some of the men at Waterloo had been with the Emperor throughout his career. One of the reasons he held them in reserve until the last moment was that he didn’t want to lose too many of his most experienced troops in the early, wasteful stages of a battle.

To join the Old Guard, a man had to have at least ten years of army service, know how to read and write, and possess a spotless record and at least one citation for bravery. They had their own traditions, such as wearing their hair in a powdered plait that they called their
queue
, or tail (the word also means ‘penis’). This was to help ward off treacherous sabre blows from behind. They also wore earrings – many of which were ripped out by corpse robbers after Waterloo. And the
Vieille
Garde
always carried purses so that they could buy food and drink honourably rather than steal it.

All in all, they set themselves above the common French soldier – literally. A
Vieille Garde
had to stand at least ‘cinq pieds six pouces’ tall – five feet six inches (yes at that time the French still used imperial measures) – though most were taller. It is said that the men of the two battalions of Premiers Grénadiers de la Garde at Waterloo were six feet four inches tall on average. With their foot-high fur busbies, they must have looked like giants.

The
Garde Impériale
’s greatest strength was their sense of unity in defence of their Emperor. When formed up in a square they were said to be impregnable. No one except Napoleon himself and his staff was allowed to break the line and enter their square for protection. General Petit, one of the Old Guard’s commanders, boasted that ‘We would fire on anyone who approached, be they friend or foe, for fear of letting one in with the other. It was a necessary evil.’

In his poem ‘Waterloo’, Victor Hugo depicts these heroes marching gloriously to their death in their last-ditch charge, like the heroes of one of the French tragedies that Napoleon loved to watch:

Knowing that they were going to die,

They saluted their god, erect in the storm,

Their mouths crying as one ‘Vive l’Empereur!’,

Then, slowly, to the beat of the drums,

Smiling calmly at the English grapeshot,

The Imperial Guard stepped into the furnace.

[…]

They walked, cradling their weapons, head held high, grave, stoical,

Not one of them retreated. Sleep, heroic dead!

To quote a more recent French historian, Jean Thiry, writing in the mid-twentieth century about the French soldiers at Waterloo: ‘The immortal page of glory that they wrote has made these defeated men the purest heroes in French history.’ And Thiry was a member of the Académie Française, so (to French minds at least) his opinion is incontestable.

Even more important than this general heroism is General Cambronne’s celebrated use of the word
merde
on the evening of 18 June. This, for Victor Hugo and others, was the supreme moment of the battle.

To neutral and Bonapartist commentators alike, Cambronne’s defiance as his square of
Vieille Garde
stood facing a line of British cannons just 60 metres away was even more impressive than US Army General McAuliffe’s famous ‘nuts’ in reply to a Nazi invitation to surrender at the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. McAuliffe’s GIs were dug in and awaiting reinforcements. Cambronne’s men were standing alone and surrounded by cannons in a cornfield.

Versions of the Cambronne legend vary. In Chapter 3, we saw Cambronne joking that he couldn’t have said that the
Garde
dies rather than surrenders because he had done neither – he had in fact been wounded in the final onslaught, and taken prisoner. The consensus since then has been that Cambronne’s call for heroic death was probably invented for him by a dramatist called Michel-Nicolas Balison de Rougemont.

It has also been alleged that Hugo invented the
merde
episode in his novel
Les Misérables
. But according to the nineteenth-century French historian Henry Houssaye, the use of the M-word was highly credible, because Cambronne was a battle-hardened soldier, well known for his love of swearing. Cambronne himself later admitted that he said ‘some less brilliant words, with a more soldier-like energy’ than his supposed ‘never surrender’ statement. And a sergeant at the battle told Captain Lemonnier-Delafosse that Cambronne shouted, ‘Merde! I won’t surrender!’

In any case, Hugo goes as far as to claim that Cambronne’s defiance was more than mere heroism – with his single expletive, Hugo says, Cambronne stole overall victory for France: ‘The man who won the Battle of Waterloo wasn’t Napoleon in retreat; it wasn’t Wellington who buckled at four o’clock, and was in despair by five, nor Blücher who didn’t even fight; the man who won the Battle of Waterloo was Cambronne. Unleashing deadly lightning with such a word counts as victory.’

Hugo devotes a whole chapter of
Les Misérables
to what he calls ‘this word of titanic disdain’, and makes fun of the British: ‘to encompass this victory in one supreme word that is impossible for them to pronounce is to lose the battlefield but win the battle. After the carnage, having laughter on your side is immense.’

In short, for Hugo, Cambronne’s single syllable was more lethal than every cannonball and musket shot fired on that day.

However, one novelist’s opinion doesn’t explain why the story of Cambronne’s legendary swearword has lived on, and even entered the French language. There were no doubt plenty of curses flying around the battlefield that day, in many different languages, but almost as soon as Cambronne’s
merde
was uttered, the French showed a deep psychological need to cling on to it, and to the men it was associated with, as something deeply meaningful. This
merde
seems to have been vital to France’s psyche as the nation came to terms with Waterloo and a new period of foreign occupation. And it grew in importance as the nineteenth century progressed, without – as Hugo pointed out – the vast, controlling presence of Napoleon. This was especially true after the swift, humiliating defeat in the 1870 Prussian war, when the French were desperately in need of heroes. Then, with the Prussians again marching victoriously through the Arc de Triomphe, France looked back on Napoleon and Waterloo as a period of national greatness and unity, apparently forgetting that it had all ended in bloodshed and exile.

But even before 1870, the French had begun glorifying Waterloo and saying
merde
to historical truth.
Les Misérables
was published in 1862. In 1864 and 1865, the writers Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian co-published a pair of patriotic novels,
The Conscript of 1813
and
Waterloo
, both of which were big hits.

In a similar vein, a picture painted in 1852 by Clément-Auguste Andrieux depicts a surging mass of French cavalrymen emerging from the smoke to crush a line of panicking British redcoats. It is a classic case of French cherry-picking, a picture of a successful charge that occurred at around three p.m. The scene certainly doesn’t warrant the all-embracing title
La Bataille de Waterloo 18 juin 1815.
But in 1852, with Napoleon’s nephew, Napoléon III, installed as emperor, France needed to be reminded that the Bonaparte family – and the country – had a glorious past.

Incidentally, Napoléon III disliked the painting because it didn’t show his uncle – in his view French glory had to be inextricably linked to the Bonapartes. Today, a lot of French historians would agree with him.

This nostalgia for past glory probably explains why the French celebrate the famous ‘Taxis de la Marne’, the fleet of 600 Parisian taxis that ferried soldiers to the front line in September 1914 to halt the German advance towards Paris. In fact, the 4,000 or so men who went out in the taxis were mainly reservists, and didn’t contribute much to the fighting, but this doesn’t matter – the important thing is that the French were saying
merde
to the enemy by all means possible.

In the same way, they are keen to remember the Occupation as a time when France was almost entirely populated by a mixture of Nazi invaders and French Resistance fighters. They need to believe that, as a nation, they didn’t just lay down their arms and surrender to Hitler. The Resistance hung in there, blowing up bridges, assassinating Nazi officers and generally saying
merde
to the occupiers.

This is the only way to counteract the effect of British and American jokes about French submissiveness during World War Two. There is the old one about why Napoleon planted plane trees along France’s main roads – so the Germans could invade in the shade. These jibes hurt the French, as does any reference to the surrender of 1940, which is why they cling on to Napoleon’s glory.

To the
merde
-sayers, it doesn’t matter if France did lose the Battle of Waterloo. Dominique de Villepin argues that Cambronne and Napoleon created a French taste for glorious defeat. It is what he calls a ‘new idea of Frenchness’ – a feeling that France is doomed to lose but will always remain defiant. In short,
merde
to everyone and everything.