The Battle Read online

  The history of a battle is not unlike the history of a ball! Some individuals may recollect all the little events of which the great result is the battle won or lost; but no individual can recollect the order in which, or the exact moment at which, they occurred, which makes all the difference as to their value or importance.

  —Wellington

  I object to all the propositions to write what is called a history of the battle of Waterloo…. But if a true history is written, what will become of the reputation of half of those who have acquired reputation, and who deserve it for their gallantry, but who, if their mistakes and casual misconduct were made public, would NOT be so well thought of?

  —Wellington

  Leave the battle of Waterloo as it is.

  —Wellington

  CONTENTS

  Campaign Maps

  Prologue

  PART ONE – “We’ll See Tomorrow”

  1. The Night Before

  2. “Who Will Attack the First Tomorrow?”

  3. “The Decisive Moment of the Century”

  4. The Nature of the Armies

  5. The British Army: “The Scum of the Earth”

  6. The French Army: “All Must March”

  7. The Prussian Army

  8. The Minor Armies

  9. “As Bad a Night as I Ever Witnessed”

  10. On the Brussels Road

  11. Letters in the Night

  PART TWO – “It Will Be as Easy as Having Breakfast”

  12. “Very Few of Us Will Live to See the Close of This Day”

  13. The Emperor’s Breakfast

  14. The Numbers in the Field

  15. Wellington’s Deployment

  16. Napoleon’s Deployment

  17. “Vive l’Empereur”

  18. What Is a Battle?

  19. Napoleon’s Orders

  20. Napoleonic Infantry Tactics

  21. The Skirmish Line

  22. Hougoumont

  23. The Defense of the Château

  24. The Bombardment in the Hougoumont Sector

  25. The Attack on the North Gate

  26. The Grande Batterie

  27. News of the Prussians

  28. Bülow’s March

  29. New Orders for Grouchy

  30. La Haye Sainte

  31. The First Attack on La Haye Sainte

  32. Crabbé’s Charge

  33. D’Erlon’s Advance

  34. The Attack on the Sunken Lane

  35. The Firefight Along the Chemin d’Ohain

  36. The Intervention of the British Cavalry

  37. The Charge of the Household Brigade

  38. The Charge of the Union Brigade

  39. Dragoons Against Guns

  40. Jacquinot’s Lancers

  41. “Tu N’es Pas Mort, Coquin?”

  PART THREE – “A Stand-up Fight Between Two Pugilists”

  42. “It Does Indeed Look Very Bad”

  43. Papelotte

  44. The Second Attack on La Haye Sainte

  45. The Great French Cavalry Attacks Against the Allied Squares

  46. “Where Are the Cavalry?”

  47. “Vous Verrez Bientôt Sa Force, Messieurs”

  48. Blücher Attacks

  49. Plancenoit

  50. “I’ll Be Damned If We Shan’t Lose This Ground”

  51. The Nivelles Road

  52. “Infantry! And Where Do You Expect Me to Find Infantry?”

  53. The Last Effort to Take Hougoumont

  54. The Capture of La Haye Sainte

  55. The Advance of the French Artillery

  56. The Renewed Attack on Plancenoit

  57. Ziethen at Smohain

  58. Napoleon’s Last Attack

  59. “Voilà Grouchy!”

  60. The Imperial Guard’s Advance

  61. The Attack of the Imperial Guard Grenadiers

  62. “La Garde Recule!”

  PART FOUR – “Victory! Victory!”

  63. The Allied Advance

  64. The Squares of the Old Guard

  65. The Meeting at La Belle Alliance

  66. The Prussian Pursuit

  67. Night on the Battlefield

  68. “A Mass of Dead Bodies”

  69. Letters Home

  70. “I Never Wish to See Another Battle”

  Epilogue

  Illustrations

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Compaign Map

  Detail of a Ferraris & Capitaine map of 1797, as used by Napoleon and on which Wellington’s own map was based.

  Europe in 1815

  Overview of the Battle Area

  Allied Advances in June/July 1815

  Deployment of French troops

  Battle of Waterloo, 10.00hrs, 18 June 1815

  Battle of Waterloo, 16.00hrs, 18 June 1815

  PROLOGUE

  In the afternoon of March 1, 1815, a fleet consisting of one warship and six smaller vessels dropped anchor off Golfe-Juan on the southeastern coast of France, in view of what are today the most luxurious vacation spots on the Côte d’Azur but were then miserable fishing villages clinging to the edge of an inhospitable landscape. As soon as they were anchored, the ships lowered their small boats. Shortly thereafter squads of soldiers began to disembark on the shore, despite the protests of the flabbergasted customs official who had rushed to the scene to contest this highly irregular landing. The first troops to reach solid ground went to knock on the gates of the nearby French fort at Antibes and were immediately placed under arrest; but the small boats kept bringing ashore other soldiers, and soon more than a thousand grenadiers had been disembarked, along with two cannon and an entire squadron of lancers who spoke Polish among themselves. Finally, toward evening, the leader of this host came ashore in person, walking over an improvised gangway, which his men, standing in water to their waists, held up for him; and an officer was sent to notify the commandant of the fort that the emperor Napoleon, after ten months of exile on the island of Elba, had returned to France to reclaim his throne.

  Even in an age without the benefit of mass media, the news of Napoleon’s return was so astonishing that it traveled throughout the continent in a few days, arousing consternation or enthusiasm everywhere. Europe had really believed that the Napoleonic Wars were over, and with them the French Revolution, which together had inflamed the world for twenty-five years. Kings had regained possession of their thrones, armies had been demobilized, and a cosmopolitan, self-satisfied political class was preparing for the tranquil task of managing a long period of peace. The fact that Napoleon was still alive, exiled to an island somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea, was certainly irritating, but people tried hard not to think about it. When the Duke of Wellington announced to the Congress of Vienna—where, since Napoleon’s abdication, representatives of the European powers were leisurely redrawing the political map of Europe—that the exile had escaped from Elba and landed in France, the delegates burst into laughter, believing that the announcement was some sort of joke. A few days sufficed to change their minds: On March 13, the Congress published a resolution, couched in the diplomatic French of the period, in which Napoleon was proclaimed an outlaw, subject to “vindicte publique,” whereupon the English Parliament and half the chancelleries of Europe began discussions to decide whether this formula meant that anyone could kill him with impunity, or whether it would first be necessary to arrest him and put him on trial.

  Meanwhile, on March 20, the emperor made a triumphant entry into Paris, while King Louis XVIII and the whole Bourbon family fled hurriedly to Belgium. From there he sent personal letters to all the sovereigns of Europe, assuring them in the most modest tones that he desired only peace and that he renounced all claims whatsoever to any of the territori
es that previously, at the apogee of his empire, had belonged to France. But the European chancelleries did not deign to respond to these missives; in London, the prime minister would not even permit the prince regent to open the letter and had it returned with its seal intact. One year earlier, four great powers—England, Austria, Russia, and Prussia—had combined to defeat Napoleon; now, on March 25, 1815, the same four countries signed a treaty in which each of them pledged to put an army of 150,000 men into the field as soon as possible, with the set purpose of invading France from all sides. England, then the dominant economic power in the world, agreed to finance the mobilization of the Allies, and the Rothschild bank began gathering quantities of cash, eventually furnishing His Majesty’s government with the immense sum of 6 million pounds sterling, which corresponded to the estimated total cost of the undertaking.

  In these circumstances, Napoleon’s only recourse was to rearm, and he did so with all his extraordinary talent for organization, a talent that the passage of time had not diminished. The army he inherited from the Bourbons was brought back up to full strength, the previous year’s conscripts were recalled, the National Guard was mobilized, the mass production of muskets began, and all available horses were either bought or confiscated; as a result, French treasury reserves were consumed in a few weeks’ time, and financing had to be extorted from reluctant banks. Even with their help, however, the emperor could not hope to be successful in opposing the four armies that were about to invade France; he had tried to accomplish such a feat a year before, when his resources were decidedly more extensive, and things had not turned out well for him. His only hope was to beat his opponents to the punch.

  Even though the training period for new conscripts could be reduced, in times of emergency, to a few weeks, the armies of the day still required several months to equip their forces properly and put themselves on a war footing. As spring drew to an end, only two of the four invading armies had assembled on the borders of France. The one commanded by the Duke of Wellington included, along with its British contingent, troops from the Low Countries and from various German principalities; the other army was Prussian, commanded by the elderly field marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher. Considered alone, each of these two armies was weaker than the Armée du Nord, which Napoleon had assigned to defend his northern border. If the emperor could manage to attack them separately, therefore, he had a good chance of defeating them.

  A quartered army awaiting the start of military operations occupied a vast amount of territory. Soldiers were lodged with civilians, who were legally obligated to provide the troops with room and board, and it was indispensable to spread out such a great number of men and horses if they were to obtain proper food and shelter. In early June, Wellington’s and Blücher’s armies were quartered over nearly all of Belgium, one in the northwest and one in the southeast. Calculating that each of these generals would need at least two or three days to concentrate his forces and give battle under optimum conditions, the emperor planned to make a surprise advance between the two armies and destroy the first one he came upon before the other could intervene. Obviously, secrecy was indispensable to the success of Napoleon’s plan: In the first days of June, he closed the borders and ordered that not one man, not one carriage, not one letter should exit France. Then, very swiftly, he concentrated the Armée du Nord close to the Belgian border, and at dawn on June 15 the first cavalry patrols crossed over into enemy territory, followed at once by long columns of infantry. Thus began the Waterloo campaign, which survivors from both sides—all equally convinced of having striven in a just cause—would later consider, in the words of an English officer, “a terrible fight fought for a terrible stake: freedom or slavery to Europe.”

  PART ONE

  “We’ll See Tomorrow”

  ONE

  THE NIGHT BEFORE

  The rain had started falling in the early afternoon of June 17, 1815, soaking the Brabant hills and turning them into a sea of mud. Only the cobblestone road, the big main highway that led from the French-Belgian border to Brussels, was still practicable—though with difficulty—and this road was crowded with Napoleon’s soldiers, horses, and guns, all in pursuit of Wellington’s retreating army. Under normal conditions, the mid-June daylight should have lasted until well past nine o’clock, but on this day, after a series of cloudbursts had displaced the warm morning sunshine, the horizon had grown steadily darker, as though night were falling early. All the soldiers in both armies, right down to the lowliest Dutch or German farm boy recruited into the militia a few weeks earlier and completely ignorant of war, understood that there was no more chance of fighting a battle that day.

  Riding on horseback in the torrential rain, Napoleon arrived at an inn and farmhouse called La Belle Alliance, which stood, and stands today, on a panoramic spot near the main road, in the commune of Plancenoit. From there one could see the road descending in dips and rises across a broad area of cultivated fields, which the rain had reduced to bogs, and then climbing toward a long ridge, parallel to the line of the horizon and marked, in those days, by a large, solitary elm tree. There the Brussels road intersected another, smaller road, a lane, sunken in some places and known locally as the chemin d’Ohain, which ran the entire length of the ridge. Past this crossroads, the main road, no longer visible from the farmhouse, descended to another farm and a small cluster of houses, barely a village; both farm and village were called Mont-Saint-Jean. A man on foot needs a good quarter of an hour to cover the distance between La Belle Alliance and the crossroads, which still exists today, though to be sure the surfaces are all paved, and a little group of hotels and restaurants has replaced the elm.

  Extending the telescope that one of his aides had hastened to offer him, Napoleon studied the horizon. A dark column of enemy infantry was crossing the shallow valley at a brisk pace and preparing to march up the opposite slope, under the protection of the British cavalry standing in line along the ridge and ready to charge, as it had already done several times during the course of that arduous day, to cover the retreat of these last foot soldiers. The vanguard troops of the French cavalry had ridden into the valley as well, and they were maintaining but little distance between themselves and the enemy’s rear guard, wishing to make the retreating soldiers feel the hot breath of their pursuit. The rain came down in torrents, and it was impossible to see anything else in the gloomy gray light. The bulk of Wellington’s hastily assembled army—whose English, German, Belgian, and Dutch troops spoke in four different languages—had already disappeared behind the ridge of Mont-Saint-Jean.

  The emperor dismounted from his horse and entered the inn. While he was removing his rain-drenched hat and overcoat, he ordered his map to be spread out on a table. This map, which Napoleon always carried in a special compartment of his traveling carriage, together with all the books and documents that might prove useful to him during the course of a campaign, had been drawn by Ferraris for the Austrian government in 1777 and printed in Paris by Capitaine in 1795. On it the emperor could see that the road to Brussels, after it crested the ridge and passed the village of Mont-Saint-Jean, ran past a few more isolated farms and some windmills before coming to another, larger village: Waterloo. Beyond Waterloo stood a vast woodland, the forest of Soignes; the road passed through the village and advanced resolutely into the trees. Continuing to follow the road with his finger on the map, the emperor could easily calculate that an infantry column, marching on the pavé—the cobblestones—could traverse the forest in a few hours; and when the troops broke into the open, they would be within sight of the bell towers of Brussels.

  For Napoleon, the situation was clear. If Wellington intended to defend Brussels, he would have to turn and give battle before reaching Waterloo, and so his army must have halted behind the long, low ridge that hid the duke’s forces from the emperor’s telescope. In a time when a general and his officers could rely only on the sight of their persons and the sound of their voices to maneuver an army and maintain its c
ohesion, one did not give battle in a forest. As for the possibility that the duke and his entire army might take refuge in the city and passively await the course of events, perhaps generals of another generation would have done so; but, after the lessons that Napoleon had taught the world, no commander would be so mad as to place his forces in such a trap voluntarily, particularly when his opponent was the emperor himself. Therefore, if Wellington wished to defend Brussels and spare his ally, the king of the Netherlands (which at that time included Belgium), the shame of losing one of his two capital cities in the very first days of the war, he would spend the night at Mont-Saint-Jean, and tomorrow he would give battle.

  If, on the other hand, the enemy columns were continuing their gloomy retreat through the pouring rain, that would mean the vanguard had already entered the forest of Soignes and the duke had abandoned the defense of Brussels. But this hypothesis, despite its favorable appearance, could have brought no joy to the emperor’s heart. Among the same gently rolling hills, somewhere to the east but not too far away, another army was on the march in the rain. The Prussian army, which Napoleon had defeated at Ligny the previous day, was retreating, although Napoleon could not yet know on what roads and in what direction. If Wellington accepted the loss of Brussels and continued to withdraw, he would still be able to join forces with the Prussians; in that case, the capture of the city would cease to have any significance. The purpose of Napoleon’s invasion of Belgium and his surprise advance against the two enemy armies massing along the border with France had been to face and defeat them separately; to allow the English to escape and link up with the Prussians would be equivalent to watching the objective of his campaign go up in smoke.

  For this reason, the emperor preferred that Wellington should not march his exhausted men any farther into the nocturnal darkness, but rather that he should halt and prepare to accept battle on the Mont-Saint-Jean ridge. Napoleon felt confident of winning that battle, and then the forest of Soignes would be transformed into a fatal trap for the defeated army. It was imperative, therefore, to discover Wellington’s purpose; because if his troops were continuing their retreat on the other side of the hill, the emperor’s forces would have to push forward at once and pursue the enemy without giving him a chance to breathe. But if the enemy army was preparing to bivouac just beyond the ridge, then the similarly exhausted French units, as they reached La Belle Alliance, could also be ordered into bivouac, there to prepare for battle the next day by cooking their soup and trying to get a few hours’ sleep in the rain.