The War of Wars (123 page)

Napoleon consoled himself with the thought that complete victory could be achieved the following day, now that the Prussians were badly mauled and licking their wounds. Wellington, caught by surprise by the rapid French advance, now faced the terrifying prospect that the French would move forward on the territory abandoned by the Prussians and outflank him. This seemed to leave him no alternative but to call a full-scale retreat to the Channel ports. But he had one cause for consolation: he had held the position at Quatre Bras and Napoleon had lost the element of surprise.

He considered withdrawing to the defensive position forward from Waterloo he so favoured, and which he had long carefully mapped out. This seemed his last chance, but he was a deeply worried man. Leaving Quatre Bras at 10 p.m., he had supped at an inn in Gemappe and adjourned for three hours’ sleep, returning to Quatre Bras at 3 a.m. There he paced about ‘at the rate of three and a half to four miles an hour’. With the Prussian retreat to Wavre he considered the game about up: ‘As he [Blücher] has gone back, we must go too. I suppose in England they will say we have been licked.’ It was 7 a.m.: it seemed that the battle had been won by Napoleon by default.

Two hours later the dispirited Wellington received a Prussian emissary from Blücher, to whom he said he would make a stand at Mont St Jean, his reserve position, if the Prussians promised to send ‘even one corps only’ in support. His great fear now was that Napoleon would use the early morning to march forward and occupy the position on his left flank vacated by the Prussians and attack before he could withdraw his forces from the exposed position at Quatre Bras, although he was partly protected to that side by boggy ground.

Inexplicably no attack was made by the French and around 11 a.m.
Wellington’s forces, which by now had pulled back from the village, were retreating cautiously north, completing the task an hour and a half later, with his second-in-command, Lord Uxbridge, and his cavalry bringing up the rear. What had happened to the French? It seems that Napoleon had an acute attack of piles during the day, and possibly of cystitis, which would have given him a severe fever and pain, redoubled when urinating. Grouchy, one of his key commanders, was refused access to him throughout that night.

At around nine in the morning he rode to the battlefield at Ligny in leisurely, even self-confident, fashion, perhaps so as to diminish the pain, talking to his commanders and men. Grouchy rode up and asked for orders. Napoleon snapped back: ‘I will give them to you when I think fit.’ The Emperor’s problem, quite apart from his embarrassing and painful ailments, was that he had no certain knowledge of the disposition of the allied troops: he believed Blücher and the Prussians to be in full retreat.

He now made another near-fatal mistake. Abandoning his old tactic of attempting to divide the two armies and falling upon one with a superior force, he summoned a meeting of his generals at around ten o’clock and informed them he intended to split his own army into two, sending Grouchy in pursuit of the Prussians with 33,000 men and launching his own force of 70,000 men in a frontal attack against the retreating British and Dutch army. Both Ney, who had patiently awaited orders all morning from his position in front of Quatre Bras, and Soult remonstrated. Napoleon told the latter angrily: ‘Because you have been beaten by Wellington, you think him a great general! I tell you Wellington is a bad general, the English are bad troops, and this affair is nothing more than a picnic.’ While Soult believed that a frontal attack on the British was suicidal, Napoleon appeared to believe that the Prussians were much further away than they actually were. ‘A junction between them is impossible for at least two days.’

Then he mixed overconfidence about his ability to defeat British troops – which he had never personally fought before in a major battle – with a mistaken belief that they were finished if the Prussians did not come to their rescue. Still he did nothing, accepting the advice of his artillery commanders that the ground was too wet to move his guns
forward: possibly he felt he was in no shape personally to command the attack that day, but did not want to delegate the responsibility. At last at 1 p.m. he ordered his forces to Quatre Bras, riding at their head, to find that Ney, lacking specific instructions, had ordered his men to have lunch. Only after a further delay did the two forces combine and move forward, both Ney and Napoleon seeking to engage the British rearguard, but getting bogged down in mud.

By 6.30 Wellington had completely escaped, drawing up his forces into their new positions on Mont St Jean, twenty kilometres to the north. Napoleon had wasted an entire day: a quick follow up that morning could almost certainly have overwhelmed the exposed British forces at Quatre Bras and secured him victory. Now Wellington was entrenched in one of his classic defensive positions, skilfully chosen, along a low ridge, some seven kilometres wide, overlooking a broad and shallow valley. The bulk of his army was sheltered behind the brow of the hill on its reverse slope, which protected them from enemy artillery and concealed their true size and dispositions: it was one of Wellington’s favourite tactics.

From the ridge a road ran forward past the heavily built farmhouse of Mont St Jean, which formed a natural defensive bastion, down a cutting in a single lane into the wide valley rising on the other side to an inn called La Belle Alliance, half a mile away. To the right the land was broken up and planted with tall rye, which served to conceal the movements of men from one another. Ahead of his position there was a farmhouse, just as the road began its descent into the valley, called La Haye Sainte; to the right and farther on down the valley was a small château with a walled garden. Wellington ordered these positions to be heavily reinforced to slow the French attack.

He placed his men in a double line behind the ridge, with instructions to form squares if attacked by cavalry. These were supported by British artillery in clusters along the right. The cavalry were in the centre behind the infantry. However, still intent on securing his line of retreat, Wellington sent some 13,000 men to Hale, thirteen kilometres away. They were never to fight at all. It never occurred to Wellington to take the offensive against Napoleon: he had been surprised, was in his element in defence, and had 67,000 men to the French 74,000. A
British attack would have been suicidal. This was almost certainly the right tactic, even if it was far from heroic.

Having made his dispositions he returned to his headquarters at an inn in Waterloo just to the north, where he was spared the rain that drenched his soldiers that historic night. He was desperately anxious, having heard nothing from Blücher and preparing to retreat on Brussels if no aid from the Prussians was forthcoming. Not until 3 a.m. that night did he receive a message from Blücher’s headquarters in Wavre:

I hereby inform you that, in consequence of the communication made to me to the effect that the Duke of Wellington will tomorrow accept battle in the position from Braine l’Alleud to La Haye, my troops will be put in motion in the following way: Bülow’s corps will start very early at dawn from Dion-le-Mont and advance through Wavre by way of St Lambert, in order to attack the enemy’s right wing. The second corps will immediately follow the fourth [Bülow’s] corps; and the first and third corps hold themselves ready likewise to follow thither. The exhaustion of the troops, which in part have not arrived (namely, the tail of the fourth corps), makes it impossible to advance earlier. In return, I beg you to inform me betimes when and how the Duke is attacked, so that I may be able to take measures accordingly.

The order had come after a tense meeting of the Prussian high command at which Blücher had favoured a march to Wellington’s aid, and Gneisenau had opposed it as being too risky. In fact Blücher had already been reinforced by Bülow, which more than made up for his losses at Ligny, and the Prussians believed that the French had sent a force of only 15,000 men to attack them at Wavre, so they could easily afford to spare the troops. Still the cautious Gneisenau resisted his master, distrusting the British and instructing General Muffling to ‘find out accurately whether the Duke has the fixed intention to fight in his present position, or whether possibly nothing but “demonstrations” are intended, as these can only be in the highest degree compromising to our army’. This delayed the despatch of the First, Second and Third Prussian corps until midday the following day.

Napoleon spent the night in a farmhouse a few miles south, then rode up to La Belle Alliance. There he learnt that Grouchy had progressed only six miles towards Wavre and had bedded his army down at Gembloux. Nervously he went for a walk at 1 a.m. The night made an eerie spectacle, with countless small fires in the rain marking the positions of the two huge armies as the fateful dawn approached.

Still suffering from indecision, Napoleon woke at around 10 a.m. before issuing orders to Grouchy to abandon his march on Wavre and instead outflank Blücher by interposing himself between the British and Prussian armies and preventing reinforcements from the latter reaching Wellington. Grouchy misinterpreted the badly drafted orders and continued to move forward to Wavre, even when he began to hear cannon fire in the direction of Waterloo to his left. Napoleon was incensed when he heard. He took a rest in an armchair, lost in his own thoughts, enjoying the summer sunshine, as did both armies after the rainstorm of the previous night.

He decided to observe the battle from behind La Belle Alliance, delegating operational command to Ney, which scarcely suggested he had lost his confidence in him. But first he reviewed his troops. As the French historian Henri Houssaye wrote lyrically, somewhat overlooking the muddy, grimy state of the men:

It was a kaleidoscope of vivid hues and metallic flashes. After the chasseurs, wearing bright green jackets, with facings of purple, yellow or scarlet, came the hussars, with dolmans, pelisses, breeches à la hongroise, plumes upon their shakos, all varying in colour with each regiment . . . Then passed the dragoons with brass casques over turban-helmets of tiger skin, white shoulder belts crossed over a green coat with facings of red or yellow, long guns at their saddle bows and bumping against their stiff boots; the cuirassiers wearing short coats with Imperial blue collars, white breeches, top boots, steel cuirasses and helmets, with crests of copper and floating horsehair manes; the carabiniers, giants of six feet and clad in white, with breastplates of gold and tall helmets with red cords – like those worn by the heroes of antiquity. And now the entire body of the horse guards deployed on the third line; the dragoons in green coats faced
with white and with scarlet plumes on their helmets; the grenadiers in blue coats faced with scarlet, leather breeches and high caps of bearskin, with a plume and hanging cords; the lancers with red kurkas and blue plastrons, with light yellow aiguillettes and epaulettes, red trousers with a blue stripe, and the red shapka cap bearing a brass plate inscribed with an N and a crown, and surmounted with white plume half a yard long; and last the chasseurs, with green dolmans embroidered with orange braid, red pelisses edged with fur and kilbachs [or caps] of brilliant scarlet, with great plumes of green and red upon their heads. The epaulettes, the braids, the stripes, the gimps of the officers glittered with a profuse display of gold and silver.

Across the valley the British troops watched dispassionately, unimpressed by the performance. Wellington had ridden up with his staff officers from Waterloo, jovially as though about to attend a meeting of hounds. His attitude masked a desperate anxiety as to the course of the battle, which he believed hinged on whether the Prussians would fulfil their promise to arrive. He expressed contempt for Napoleon: ‘That fellow little thinks what a confounded licking he’ll get before the day is over.’

Meanwhile, back in Brussels the entire British community was panicking. Eerily the low cloud had funnelled the sound of cannon fire that night as far as Brussels and Antwerp; and the sight of stragglers and refugees streaming into Brussels had created a shock. Lord Uxbridge’s sister wrote: ‘The horrors of that night are not to be forgot. The very elements conspired to make it gloomy; for the rain and darkness and wind were frightful and our courtyard was filled during the night with poor wounded drenched soldiers and horses . . .’

After resting for a while, Napoleon at last gave the order to advance with a concentrated burst of artillery fire against the most advanced British position, the château at Hougoumont, at around 11.30. The British soon replied. The Battle of Waterloo had begun. Napoleon’s brother Jérôme was delegated to launch the first attack on the British position, which was defended by a few hundred men under the heroic James Macdonnell; it covered a small valley which would shelter a French column from British artillery: if it was captured the French would be able to pour troops on to the ridge above.

Soon Jérôme’s men were surging forward from the French side of the valley of death, where a total of 140,000 men faced each other, surrounding the walls of the garden around Hougoumont. Fierce fighting between attackers and defenders lasted an hour and a half, while both the main armies watched without moving. The attackers at last succeeded in breaking down the main gate, but Macdonnell counter-attacked and drove them out, killing all of those remaining within the compound. The buildings caught fire.

Wellington coolly wrote instructions to Macdonnell: ‘I see that the fire has communicated itself from the hay stack to the roof of the chateau. You must however still keep your men in those parts to which the fire does not reach. Take care that no men are lost by the falling in the roof or floors. After they will have fallen in, occupy the ruined walls inside of the garden, particularly if it should be possible for the enemy to pass through the embers to the inside of the house.’ The battle around the château raged all day, the gallant defenders holding out in
their outpost against far superior forces. Hougoumont was never captured: a colossal total of 10,000 men died in the struggle, most of them French.