The War of Wars (125 page)

At a lonely dinner he said that ‘the hand of God almighty has been upon me this day’. He fell asleep on the floor until 3 a.m., when he composed a victory despatch of great professionalism and cool detachment. He summarized the role of the Prussians generously and fairly. ‘I should not do justice to my feelings or to Marshal Blücher and the Prussian army, if I did not attribute the successful result of this arduous day, to the cordial and timely assistance I received from them. The operation of General Bülow, upon the enemy’s flank, was a most decisive one; and even if I had not found myself in a situation to make the attack, which produced the final result, it would have forced the enemy to retire, if his attacks should have failed, and would have prevented him from taking advantage of them, if they should unfortunately have succeeded.’ He told Thomas Creevey, a Whig observer: ‘It has been a damned serious business. Blücher and I have lost 30,000 [actually nearer 23,000] men. It has been a damned nice thing – the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.’

The horrors of the day were not over yet. Four miles behind La Belle Alliance, the tens of thousands of French soldiers streaming into the village of Gemappe were funnelled onto a single bridge across the river some eight feet wide. It was the crossing of the Berezina in Russia all over again: men trampled each other underfoot and slashed at each other with their sabres to get across. The Prussians caught up, slashing at the French rearguard. Several hundred perished – although the river was only three feet deep and could have been forded.

Napoleon and a small protective guard forced their way through, although his lavishly equipped carriage with its gold dinner service and lavatory, its folding bed and writing desk and his diamond-studded
uniform worth some 200,000 francs had to be abandoned. He escaped across the bridge on his horse. As he reached Quatre Bras on that spectral ride, he saw 4,000 bodies stripped of their clothes by looters, a grotesquely macabre sight in the moonlight, apparently moving with the movement of the clouds. ‘We thought we saw ghosts calling from their graves,’ remembered one French soldier. Then it was on to Charleroi, where the bridge gave way and still more French soldiers were drowned. Behind him the retreating Emperor had left some 40,000 dead and wounded along with 10,000 horses and 160 guns.

David Howarth in his vivid study of the battle based on eyewitness descriptions, told a story of the horrors on the night of Waterloo:

Among the wounded, somewhere on the slopes below La Belle Alliance, was Colonel Ponsonby of the Scots Greys, the man who had last been seen that morning leading the cavalry charge against Napoleon’s guns with both his arms hanging useless and the reins in his teeth.

His horse had carried him into the thick of the enemy cavalry, and he was cut down by a sabre and fell on the ground unconscious. When he came to his senses he raised his head to see if there was any escape – and a French lancer passing by saw the movement, shouted ‘You’re not dead yet’, and ran his sabre through his back. Blood gushed into his mouth, his head fell again, he could hardly breathe and he thought he was dying. A French skirmisher stopped to plunder him, and threatened to finish him off. The colonel told him there were three dollars in his side pocket – it was all he had – and the man took them, but also tore open his waistcoat to look for more and left him lying in a painful position, unable to move at all.

Later in the day, while the battle still raged all round him, a kindly French officer gave him some brandy, turned him on his side and put his head on a knapsack – and told him he had heard that Wellington was dead and six British battalions had deserted. And some time in the afternoon, a cheerful French skirmisher used his body as cover, firing over him and chatting gaily while he loaded. ‘You will be pleased to hear we are retreating,’ he said at last. ‘Goodbye, my friend.’ And then, as the French receded, the Prussian
cavalry rode over him at a full trot, kicking and lifting him off the ground and rolling him about most cruelly.

During the night, he found a man was lying on his legs, a man wounded like himself in the lungs: he could hear the breath wheezing through the wound. Prussians wandering about in search of plunder looked at him greedily, and one began to search him. He told the man he was a British officer and had been plundered already, but he would not stop and pulled him about roughly.

About midnight, an English soldier came by. Probably he was looking for plunder too, but when he found a wounded English colonel, he either took pity or saw a chance of reward. He heaved the dying soldier off Ponsonby’s legs, picked up a sword and stood sentinel over him until dawn to protect him from other marauders. At six in the morning a cart came long, and Ponsonby was bundled into it and taken to Waterloo. He had lain on the field for eighteen hours with a punctured lung and six other wounds. The surgeons set to work to bleed him.

Wellington had been right: it had been a close run thing.

In fact perhaps the most celebrated battle in history was something of a fraud. It had not been fought at Waterloo, but at Mont St Jean. Wellington chose the name because it had a British ring. Napoleon had been the French commander in little more than name: Ney had a much greater claim to the role; the dim-witted General Grouchy had all but ignored the Emperor’s orders.

Although Wellington’s biggest battle, it was far from being his finest and he only narrowly avoided a defeat caused by his errors and excessive caution – although the final charge was certainly perfectly executed and a masterstroke. The battle dealt the coup de grâce to Napoleon; but the Emperor was already a defeated man, with scant hope of survival in spite of his reckless adventurism in returning to take power in France: inexorably, large allied armies were advancing on him from all sides.

The battle had been lost by Napoleon, not won by Wellington. Wellington had made a series of mistakes: in exuding complacency
before the battle in the face of so dangerous an opponent as Napoleon, in believing that the main French attack would come to the west, in despatching part of his forces to counter that imaginary thrust, in failing to support the Prussians adequately at Ligny (although his forces were hard-pressed at Quatre Bras), in stretching his forces along too extended a line at Mont St Jean, in showing little urgency in redeploying his troops along the line to where the danger was greatest (a road ran along the ridge) or keeping adequate reserves to resist the main French thrusts which, true to Napoleon’s recent tactics, were in massed columns, not lines.

Wellington later made light of this last failing: ‘We pummelled them, they pummelled us and I suppose we pummelled the hardest since we gained the day.’ And again: ‘Bonaparte did not manoeuvre at all. He just moved forward in the old style, in columns and was driven off in the old style.’ Yet the British commander should have foreseen these attacks in massed columns: his own ‘old style’ of a long line simply dispersed his forces: in the past he had expertly brought forces forward to reinforce his weaker points.

Yet, unlike Napoleon, he had also displayed true leadership in battle, remaining in the thick of the fighting throughout, like Ney, never losing his cool judgement and detachment and knowing exactly when to strike as the tide of battle turned. His tactics had been defensive and unimaginative, although his choice of terrain displayed his old meticulous brilliance: a more imaginative general might have taken advantage of the French weakness and his own reserves to seek to turn the tide sooner – although that would have been risky. But his conduct was ultimately vindicated by victory – by the narrowest of margins, and particularly through the luck of the Prussians arriving at the last minute, which helped to panic the French. Wellington’s most famous and most significant battle was far from being his best.

Equally, the Prussian record was decidedly mixed. Having blundered in his dispositions at Ligny and been soundly thrashed, Blücher had at least prevented the general retreat favoured by his most senior officers and then prevailed in insisting on marching to Wellington’s aid – no mean feat for a defeated and demoralized army. But the contribution the Prussians made to the actual fighting at Waterloo
was hardly decisive –
pace
some modern historians. Their last-minute appearance had been hugely important psychologically – although the French spirit appeared to have been broken before then and the retreat of the Imperial Guard under British pressure was the deciding factor.

But an earlier appearance would have been much more pivotal, and the Prussians’ main physical contribution to the actual fighting at Waterloo was the merciless slaughter of fleeing men afterwards, which dispirited even Wellington. The battle at Plancenoit off the battlefield was of course fierce and important, in diverting troops from the main battlefield; a breakthrough there earlier would have wiped out a large part of the French army; but this did not happen until the main battle was already won, so it can hardly be called decisive.

The key factor at Waterloo was Napoleon’s own incompetence. It was not just that he made mistakes: it was that he failed in virtually every respect to exercise either the courage or the competence of even a mediocre military commander. His fever and piles do not explain this: he had frequently been ill in battle, yet excelled. The only explanation is that his overthrow the year before – which had driven him to attempt suicide – and his months of exile at Elba had changed him as a man.

At Waterloo he showed himself to be cowardly, indecisive, poor at man-management, remote, haughty, unyielding, unwilling to listen, inept and, as Wellington had observed, extraordinarily lacking in his old flexibility and ingenuity in tactics. Being so far from the front line and delegating to Ney, he inevitably failed to take the right decisions. By leading his men into battle and then shying away at the last moment, he came across as woefully lacking in his old courage. By being so inert, unapproachable and lacking in energy, he behaved like a conventional general well past his prime, not the extraordinary man-machine of manic energy that had prostrated a whole continent before him.

Perhaps seduced by the ease with which he had regained power in Paris, he was lazy, overconfident and detached, seemingly believing that the sheer magic of his name and a single forced march would confound and instil terror into his enemies. At Ligny he had won a straightforward victory but his contrary orders had prevented this from routing the Prussian army. His inertia the following day prevented a
crushing defeat of the Anglo-Dutch forces, which were tamely allowed to escape. At Waterloo itself, far from the battle, he was little more than a spectator, and the few decisions he made himself were almost always damaging.

One of Napoleon’s most unattractive traits was his tendency immediately to unburden blame on to the shoulders of his subordinates. Soult and Grouchy were much criticized for the Waterloo debacle, and in many respects rightly so, but none more so than Ney, in spite of his superhuman courage and persistence. Ney made mistakes – he had been uncharacteristically slow and cautious in attacking the small force initially based at Quatre Bras, which may have contributed to his failure to dislodge it; yet Ney’s loss of his backup army under d’Erlon at the crucial moment, thanks to Napoleon’s blundering order, was just as significant a factor.

Ney’s uphill cavalry charge at Waterloo, unsupported by infantry, was also a huge error – although he had little idea of the size of the British army on the reverse side of the ridge and believed that a single act of boldness would finally rout the wavering British line. But, if effectively supported by d’Erlon, he would have won at Quatre Bras. Had he been sole commander at Waterloo he would have had the decisive support from the Imperial Guard at the right moment to overwhelm the British.

Was Napoleon right to keep the Guard in reserve for a Prussian attack from Plancenoit? In the event clearly not; he underestimated the extent of British resistance in the centre, and overestimated the strength of the Prussian attack, perhaps because he feared capture by the later. (Both Blücher and Gneisenau had sworn to kill him on the spot as an outlaw if they caught him.) The Prussians on the Plancenoit front broke through too late to influence the main battle: he should have thrown his Imperial Guard in earlier and in much greater force. By contrast Ney’s leadership of men in battle if anything exceeded Wellington’s a kilometre away. At Waterloo Napoleon was largely an armchair general. By the standards of his previous battles his tactics were crude, even nonexistent.

Nearly as many fought at Austerlitz, Jena, Eylau and Friedland, and the casualties were much lower. At Aspern-Essling, the armies were
bigger than at Waterloo and the casualties the same. But then the position changed at the much bigger battles of Wagram, Borodino and Leipzig. Waterloo was significantly smaller than each of these: in its frontal assault tactics, Waterloo in fact in many ways resembles Borodino as an example of sheer attrition and relentless ‘pounding’ – winning the field – although casualties were far smaller than at Borodino. In some ways those two battles were precursors to First World War-style frontal massed assaults.

Napoleon had a slender hope during the Waterloo campaign of inflicting a significant defeat on the allies which would then force them to negotiate and accept his return. It was a forlorn hope in the first place – even if he had won in Belgium he would almost certainly have been defeated by much larger armies elsewhere – and now after defeat he retreated into a world of fantasy. All was not lost – indeed not only nothing had been lost – he could reassemble a huge army to defend Paris at the drop of a hat, as he wrote to ‘King’ Joseph, his brother, the day after Waterloo. The fantasy was soon cruelly at an end.

Napoleon rode back, still caught up in his dreams of raising new armies. He reached Paris by a circuitous route to avoid being intercepted by the murder-bent Prussians. He arrived on the morning of 21 June. There he found parliament opposed to him, spearheaded by the rascally old Fouché who believed his time had come, while some loyalists urged him to impose martial law and establish a dictatorship. They included the faithful Davout and Carnot, as well as his brother Lucien. Napoleon, who had endured three days without eating or washing on the road, headed straight for a bath and a meal. He hesitated. Fouché promptly seized power, establishing a provisional government.