The Battle Page 2
Together with the vanguard of the French cavalry, two batteries of horse artillery—a total of twelve 6-pounder cannon—had arrived at La Belle Alliance. The emperor ordered the gunners to unlimber the guns, get them into position, and open fire on the opposing ridge, where the waiting enemy cavalry could still be glimpsed through a veil of rain. At that distance, and in the steady downpour, the guns could do little damage, but if the English riders were simply carrying out a covering operation, they would abandon their positions and join the retreat, the infantry being safe. Before much time had passed, however, the enemy artillery opened fire in response, and not with just a few pieces, but with a large number of batteries dispersed along the whole length of the ridge. The columns of French infantry that were approaching La Belle Alliance on the main road found themselves under fire and suffered some casualties before their officers could succeed in withdrawing them to a more secure position, and some cannonballs struck the inn of La Belle Alliance. After a little while, Napoleon judged that he had learned enough and ordered the artillery to stop firing. Wellington had decided to accept battle with his back to the forest, and in Napoleon’s view his army was doomed.
As long as a little light remained in the gathering dusk, the emperor continued to peer through his telescope, examining the terrain that would become a battlefield. The ridge of Mont-Saint-Jean was the principal defensive position, and doubtless the enemy army would await his attack under cover of that rising ground, which would shelter the Allied troops from artillery bombardment. According to the emperor’s generals, whom Wellington had defeated one after another during the long, ferocious war in Spain, this had always been the duke’s favorite tactic. Furthermore, there were a few positions ahead of the ridge that could impede the French offensive, and Napoleon had no doubt that his enemy would fortify them. In the center of the battlefield, right beside the Brussels road, stood the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte, a stone building surrounded by stout walls and half hidden in a fold of the earth. Before the French could break through the center of the enemy position, they would have to take La Haye Sainte. Away on the left, the emperor’s telescope revealed a thickly planted wood. His eye could see only trees, but the map indicated that they concealed a complex of buildings: the château of Hougoumont. Should he decide to turn the enemy’s right flank, Napoleon knew he would have to take possession of that wood, which extended toward him from the château. Hougoumont and its grounds lay at the bottom of the shallow valley, halfway between the two ridges of La Belle Alliance and Mont-Saint-Jean. Finally, at the opposite end of the terrain, far on the emperor’s right, barely visible in the midst of sparse clumps of trees, were some small communities, indicated on the map with the names of Papelotte, La Haye, and Smouhen (or Smohain, as it is written today), which if defended would protect Wellington’s left flank.
While Napoleon was surveying the position, his corps commanders reported to him and received instructions for the bivouac of their troops: on the ridge of La Belle Alliance, or farther to the rear, or—in the case of those units that were still too far from the front—along the road. Aside from the bivouac orders, the emperor gave his generals no further commands. Before mounting his horse to ride to the farm of Le Caillou, a few kilometers to the rear, where his numerous imperial staff were already preparing his dinner and his camp bed, Napoleon spoke to d’Erlon, the commander of the I Corps: “We’ll see tomorrow,” he said. And in truth, the emperor knew too little about the enemy positions on the other side of the ridge to be able to determine in advance what would happen. Besides, he himself had repeatedly declared that battles could not be blocked out and directed as though they were plays in a theater; one had to know how to improvise: “On s’engage, et puis on voit.” Provided that the enemy remained where he was, there would be plenty of time to force him to reveal his positions, and only then would the emperor see where to deliver the decisive attack.
Napoleon dined alone, in a room in the farmhouse of Le Caillou. In an adjoining room, another table had been set for his aides-de-camp and several high-ranking officers, among them Colonel Combes-Brassard, the VI Corps chief of staff. In the course of the officers’ dinner, one of them spoke in a loud voice about the battle awaiting them on the morrow, and the emperor heard him. Napoleon burst into the room and took a few paces with his hands behind his back; then, without turning around, addressing no one in particular, he exclaimed: “A battle! Gentlemen! Are you sure you know what a battle is? Between a battle won and a battle lost, there are empires, kingdoms, the world—or nothing.” Saying no more, he returned to his chamber. A few days after the battle, Colonel Combes-Brassard wrote that in that moment he had seemed to hear the sentence of Fate.
TWO
“WHO WILL ATTACK THE FIRST TOMORROW?”
The Duke of Wellington never had any intention of abandoning Brussels without a fight. Two days previously, when he received the appalling news that Napoleon had invaded Belgium—catching the duke, whose spies had given him no warning, by surprise—Wellington had sought to concentrate his army between Brussels and the Belgian-French border so that he might intercept the enemy advance as soon as possible. Meanwhile, farther to the east, the duke’s Prussian colleague, Field Marshal Blücher, began gathering his forces. On June 16, all this activity had resulted in two simultaneous battles, one at Quatre Bras and the other at Ligny. At Quatre Bras, Wellington had barely managed to halt the advancing French columns led by Napoleon’s second-in-command, Marshal Ney, while not far away at Ligny, the emperor, commanding the bulk of his army, had defeated the Prussians. The following morning, perceiving that the Prussian rout had made his position at Quatre Bras indefensible, Wellington had ordered his troops to retreat. “Old Blücher has had a damned good licking and gone back to Wavre, eighteen miles. As he has gone back, we must go too.” Nevertheless, the duke was determined to try his luck again and fight Napoleon on this side of Brussels. If he abandoned the capital of Belgium without a fight, he realized, the bloody encounter at Quatre Bras would look like a defeat, and the English press would eat him alive. Wellington was a prudent general, but he was also an ambitious politician with an image to maintain, and his only choice was to face another battle.
Given the situation, there was but one place where he could do so: in front of the village of Waterloo, the last inhabited spot before the great forest. An episode that supposedly took place in the Duke of Richmond’s house in Brussels on the evening of June 15 has passed into legend. Having first expressed his irritation at the way things were going (“Napoleon has humbugged me, by God!”), Wellington is said to have pointed at two spots on the map spread out before him: Quatre Bras (“but we shall not stop him there”) and Waterloo (“and if so, I must fight him here”). In reality, no superhuman clairvoyance was required for this perception; along all the nearly thirty-five kilometers of road that stretched between Quatre Bras and Brussels, the series of parallel ridges and shallow valleys south of Waterloo presented the most suitable terrain for a defensive battle. On an inspection tour the previous year, Wellington had observed the position, surveying it with the eye of a professional accustomed to evaluating the lay of the land wherever he found himself and filing away a mental note that might prove useful in the future.
Recently, moreover, after it had become clear that Napoleon was preparing to strike, the duke had returned to Waterloo and asserted to more than one officer that, should he ever find himself compelled to defend Brussels, this was the place where he intended to make his stand. At dawn on June 15, very shortly after the Allied troops had been put on alert, word was already circulating among the British officers that the army was going to have to march to a place called Waterloo, a name that meant nothing to most of them. That morning, the commander of the Allied horse artillery, Sir Augustus Frazer, after a conversation with his superior officer, Sir George Wood, sat down and wrote a letter to his wife: “I have just learned that the Duke moves in half an hour. Wood thinks to Waterloo, which we cannot find on the map: this is th
e old story over again.” The following day, as the retreat from Quatre Bras was getting under way, Wellington sent his quartermaster general, Colonel De Lancey, back to Waterloo, with orders to reconnoiter the ground and identify precisely the position that the Allied army would defend. Sir William De Lancey first considered the ridge of La Belle Alliance, but he decided that there the defensive line would be too long, and in the end he opted for the next ridge, on Mont-Saint-Jean.
In that late afternoon of June 17, therefore, the Duke of Wellington did not order his troops on to Brussels; they marched up the slope of Mont-Saint-Jean and down the other side, disappearing from the enemy’s sight, and as the units reached him, the duke sent them into bivouac, one after another, along the entire length of the ridge, where they would be in position to receive the French attack the next day. A small road ran along the ridge, crossing as it did so the main road to Brussels. This secondary road, the chemin d’Ohain, was actually a deeply sunken lane, bordered for most of its length by willow trees and thorny bushes. The Allied troops took up their positions beyond the lane; the artillerymen ranged their guns in batteries and prepared to bivouac under the ammunition wagons, while the exhausted infantry soldiers, who were without even so poor a shelter as this, lay down in the fields to sleep as they could. Only the innumerable carts loaded with severely wounded troops from the Quatre Bras battle and their escort—the throng of those less seriously hurt and still able to plod along on their own two feet—continued the dismal march on the cobblestones, bound for the hospitals of Brussels.
When the French appeared in force on the high ground of La Belle Alliance and their artillery began firing, the Allied gunners up and down Wellington’s line, acting either on orders from the nearest generals or on the initiative of the battery commanders themselves, returned to their weapons and set up an answering fire. “We opened our fire upon the French Infantry who had followed us up rather too close, and [were] disposed to continue,” one of the officers remembered. “The range we had was La Belle Alliance, or just where the road widens into a quarry or open space.” The Duke of Wellington, who had given no such order, was distinctly irritated by the indiscriminate bombardment, which revealed his positions to the enemy, and he took steps to silence the guns. Some time passed, however, before the cease-fire order could reach the farthest batteries.
Captain Cavalié Mercer, commander of a troop of horse artillery, was enthusiastically participating in the cannonade when a civilian appeared in the midst of his guns and started chatting with him. The stranger wore a threadbare greatcoat and a round hat that had seen better days. Convinced that the man was an English tourist who had come from Brussels to see the battle, Mercer spoke to him rather brusquely, and only after his visitor finally went away was the captain told that he was Sir Thomas Picton, one of the most famous generals in the British army, respected for his courage and feared for his irascible temperament. (To the men who had known him in Spain, he was simply “that old rogue Picton.”) Meanwhile, the darkness gathered, and the guns started falling silent all along the line. One of Mercer’s officers waved his hand in the direction of the French and shouted, “Bonsoir, à demain!”
In the village of Waterloo, the officers in charge requisitioned the peasants’ houses, scribbling in chalk on the doors the names of the generals who would spend the night there. Before retiring, the Earl of Uxbridge, commander of the Allied cavalry, decided to inquire into the duke’s plans for the following day. Lord Uxbridge was one of the many officers at Waterloo who had never fought under Wellington’s command and had been forced on him by the minister of war, a state of affairs that elicited from the duke a variety of nasty comments. The presence of Uxbridge was all the more disagreeable to Wellington in that six years previously the earl, who was one of the prince regent’s favorites and a companion of his revels, had run off with Lady Charlotte Wellesley, the duke’s brother’s wife and the mother of four children. Although he himself had a wife and eight children, Uxbridge had eventually married Lady Charlotte, after a year and a half of hesitation and gossip, a double divorce, a duel, and the birth of an illegitimate daughter. The Victorian Age was still to come, and the Duke of Wellington was certainly not a man to be scandalized by so small a matter; nevertheless, it seems he was less than overjoyed to find Uxbridge again in his path, this time in Belgium. The earl’s appointment was equally unpopular with his officers. Shakespear, of the Tenth Hussars, spent the eve of the battle reflecting on the errors His Lordship had committed up to that point and on those he would very probably commit the next day; according to Tomkinson, of the Sixteenth Light Dragoons, Uxbridge was “too young a soldier to be much relied on with a separate command.” Apparently, the earl’s brash style—he continued to wear the uniform of his old regiment, the Seventh Hussars—did a pretty effective job of hiding his forty-seven years.
Lord Uxbridge made his way to the Waterloo inn, where the door bore the chalked legend “His Grace the Duke of Wellington,” went inside, and asked the duke to tell him his plans for the next day. His Grace responded with a question of his own: “Who will attack the first tomorrow—I or Buonaparte?”
“Buonaparte,” the general replied.
“Well,” said the duke, “Buonaparte has not given me any idea of his projects; and as my plans will depend upon his, how can you expect me to tell you what mine are?”
At this point, however, Wellington realized he was going too far and tried to smooth things over. “There is one thing certain, Uxbridge, that is, that whatever happens, you and I will do our duty.”
THREE
“THE DECISIVE MOMENT OF THE CENTURY”
Like Napoleon and Wellington, Prince Blücher, the commander of the Prussian army, had ridden on horseback through downpours the entire day, with the difference that he was not forty-six years old, as were both his colleagues in arms, but seventy-two. The night before, at the end of the battle of Ligny, the old man had nearly been killed while commanding a cavalry charge and had escaped capture only by a miracle: An aide had covered him with his coat while French cuirassiers galloped past them a short distance away. But on June 17, after having his contusions massaged with a mixture of garlic and schnapps and fortifying his stomach with a magnum of champagne, Blücher was back in the saddle. When he met the English liaison officer, Sir Henry Hardinge, the prince felt obliged to excuse himself. “Ich stinke etwas,” he said—“I stink a bit”—though it seems likely Sir Henry’s thoughts were elsewhere, given that his arm, shattered by a cannonball, had just been amputated. The old man remained in the saddle until nightfall, riding through the rain in the midst of his soldiers as they retreated northward toward the road junction at Wavre.
In the chaos following the battle of Ligny, the small town of Wavre had been chosen as a rendezvous point for all the retreating Prussian troops, chiefly because it was readily identifiable on maps. Early on June 17, when Baron von Müffling, the Prussian liaison officer at Wellington’s headquarters, found Wavre on the map, he was shocked to see how far to the rear it was. “Ma foi, c’est fort loin!” he said.1 Only then did Wellington, who until that moment had been convinced that Blücher would hold out at Ligny, perceive the necessity of abandoning his lines at Quatre Bras and withdrawing equally far to the north, in order to avoid being flanked.
But the map also showed that Blücher’s troops, once arrived in Wavre, could easily interrupt their northward retreat, turn west, and march toward Waterloo. By deciding to retire on Wavre, instead of heading farther east to Namur or Liège, the Prussian generals had kept open the possibility of remaining in contact with their ally; rarely has a strategic decision, made in a few minutes by candlelight, under a driving rain, and in the midst of the chaos that attends a disintegrating army, proved more unerring. It was, Wellington later remarked, “the decisive moment of the century.”2
After having decided to retreat from Quatre Bras early on June 16, the duke sent a letter to Blücher, informing him that he would give battle at Mont-Saint-Jean the next d
ay, provided that the field marshal would send at least one army corps to his aid. That evening, in the midst of their troops’ immense bivouac in the fields around Wavre, the Prussian generals discussed at length what course of action they should take. The decisive voice in this council was that of the chief of staff, General von Gneisenau; for although Blücher was the commander in chief, a national hero, and a military leader capable of exercising an extraordinary moral ascendancy over his soldiers, Gneisenau, for all practical purposes, planned the army’s movements. As Müffling maliciously observed, “In Europe it was no secret that old Prince Blücher, having passed his seventieth birthday, understood absolutely nothing about conducting a war; indeed, when his staff submitted a plan to him, he was incapable of forming a clear idea of it or of judging whether it was good or bad. This state of affairs made it necessary to place at his side someone in whom he would have absolute faith, someone who possessed inclinations and abilities that would be employed in the general interest.” However, this system of dual command—which imperial Germany would reinstate a century later with another famous pair, Hindenburg and Ludendorff—wasn’t simply a matter of coupling a politician and a military technician; in this particular case, the “technician,” Gneisenau, had his own ideas, which didn’t always coincide with those of his superior officer.