The Battle Page 3

  For example, Gneisenau had little faith in Wellington, with whom he had quarreled during the preparations for the campaign. When Gneisenau sent Müffling to the English, he recommended that the baron “remain very much on guard” in his dealings with the duke, “because his relations with India, and his experience in negotiating with the shrewd nabobs, have so accustomed this distinguished general to deceit that he has become a master of the art, surpassing in duplicity the nabobs themselves.” During the catastrophic night that followed the Prussian defeat at Ligny, Gneisenau had bitterly recalled the promises made by Wellington in the course of the previous days and repeated on the very morning of the battle, when the duke had again guaranteed that his army would come to the Prussians’ aid. Today we know that Wellington was himself under severe pressure from the French at Quatre Bras and unable to fulfill his promise, but in those anxious hours, Gneisenau could not know these facts, nor did he wish to know them; and so he remained convinced that his ally could not be trusted.

  Understandably, therefore, the idea of exposing his army to great risk by rushing to assist Wellington displeased Gneisenau greatly, and all the more so because on the night of June 17 the Prussian command was still without news of a large part of its munitions train, with which contact had been lost during the retreat. But Blücher was determined to adhere to the terms of the Allies’ treaty, and in the end he succeeded in winning over his reluctant chief of staff. At eleven o’clock that night, Blücher gave the good news to Sir Henry Hardinge (“Gneisenau has given in. We are to march to join Wellington”) and immediately dictated a letter to Wellington, in which he guaranteed that General von Bülow’s IV Corps—the only one of the four corps in the Prussian army that had not yet been in combat, and therefore the freshest—would begin marching toward Waterloo at dawn, while the II Corps, commanded by General von Pirch, would be ready to follow it. On paper, these two corps were nearly equivalent to Wellington’s entire army; their arrival would dramatically shift the balance of power against Napoleon.

  FOUR

  THE NATURE OF THE ARMIES

  In general, the quality of the troops that were about to confront one another between La Belle Alliance and Mont-Saint-Jean was relatively homogeneous. By 1815, Europe had been at war for more than twenty years, and this practical experience had raised the professional competence of all European armies to the highest level, so that basically they all resembled one another. The tactical differences between the most advanced armies, as the French army was in 1815, and the most conservative, the British, were much smaller than they had been at the beginning of the French Revolutionary Wars. French troops were still capable of marching more rapidly and performing maneuvers more smoothly than any other, but the discrepancies were no longer great enough to decide the outcome of a battle.

  Nevertheless, there were still some identifiable differences in quality between the armies in the field that had little to do with national character. Such an assertion would have surprised the combatants’ contemporaries, who put great faith in clichés about the racial qualities of various peoples; indeed, many generalizations of this kind were considered to have indisputable scientific value. In fact, however, the comportment of troops on the battlefield at Waterloo was substantially the same whatever their nationality. Even in Wellington’s composite, heterogeneous army, the gap between British troops and “foreign” troops—a gap that British officers and soldiers, with their ingrained chauvinism, considered unbridgeable—did not prove significant under fire. Only 35 percent of the duke’s soldiers were in British units; the Dutch-Belgian army contributed 26 percent, Hanover 16 percent, and Brunswick 9 percent, while another 9 percent belonged to the so-called King’s German Legion, and a contingent from the duchy of Nassau made up 5 percent. So heterogeneous an army certainly had its disadvantages from an organizational point of view, but on a tactical level, contrary to what some historians have maintained, the fighting quality of battalions and squadrons in Wellington’s army was substantially the same irrespective of their nationality.

  On the other hand, there were important differences in the methods used to recruit the troops, and the decisions made in this area were essentially political. The armies of 1815 found themselves in the middle of the transition from professional or “mercenary” recruitment to the compulsory military service that was to characterize the national armies of the future. Revolutionary France had been the first to adopt the principle of universal conscription, according to which all young men of draft age were subject to being called up; in fact, however, a system of drawing names was in place, and as a result, only a minority of those eligible were enrolled every year. Generally speaking, under the empire one hundred thousand conscripts were called up annually, which meant that about one name in seven was drawn. The last conscripts to join their units en masse were those of 1814, whose call-up had been advanced to the preceding year. The majority of the army that Napoleon rebuilt after returning from Elba, therefore, was composed of soldiers who had at least one campaign behind them, although in the eyes of veterans of Egypt or Austerlitz, the recruits of 1814 (nicknamed the “Marie Louises” from the name of Napoleon’s empress) still seemed like little boys.

  Apart from France, the only nation that practiced conscription was Prussia, where the national reawakening that sparked the 1813–14 wars of liberation had allowed the government to institute the revolutionary policy of universal, compulsory military service. Since the available human resources were less abundant than in France, every year one Prussian conscript out of five was called to serve. But precisely because conscription had been adopted so recently, Prussian subjects who were more than twenty years old had never performed any compulsory service, and the king could not allow himself to disregard such a resource. Therefore, alongside the regular army, Prussia had organized a territorial militia, the Landwehr, composed of civilians chosen by lot from each province. These troops were required to undergo periodic training under the command of officers on loan from the regular army or recalled from retirement to serve in this capacity.

  By contrast, the different national contingents that made up Wellington’s heterogeneous army reflected governments which, for political reasons, could not permit themselves to adopt universal conscription. In the armies of England, the Netherlands, Hanover, Brunswick, and Nassau, the infantry units were manned by paid soldiers who signed up to serve for several years or, more frequently, for life. They were enrolled by recruiting officers who scoured the country for volunteers, luring them with offers of cash premiums. The British army’s recruitment pool encompassed the British Isles, so the vast majority of volunteers were subjects of the king, and the army retained a distinctly national connotation. By contrast, the kings of the Netherlands and Hanover and the minor German princes, who had barely regained possession of their territories after the long hiatus of French occupation, had all formed their armies by enlisting professional soldiers, many of them recently discharged from the French army or from that of the Napoleonic Kingdom of Westphalia, without much concern for the nationality of those who signed up.

  Thus all these sovereigns spared their subjects the burden of compulsory military service. Even in these countries, however, the thirst for manpower provoked by the Napoleonic Wars was so great that the regular army had to be backed up with a territorial militia, formed from the civilians that every province was obligated to provide in proportion to the number of its inhabitants. In general, the drawing of lots for the militias was carried out according to criteria designed to reduce its social impact and to avoid any confusion with the hated policy of conscription. In the Kingdom of the Netherlands, for example, the militia was recruited on the basis of one man for every hundred inhabitants, with broad exemptions for only sons and orphans with sisters to support, in order to render the measure more politically tolerable. By this means, it was possible to make use of the human potential available in the country without arousing the kind of opposition that would have greeted universal conscrip
tion. In Wellington’s army, therefore, the Dutch-Belgian, Hanoverian, and Nassauer contingents consisted in part of regular army regiments and in part of militia regiments; only the British contingent was entirely composed of regular soldiers, because in Great Britain constitutional guarantees blocked the use of the militia outside the kingdom.

  The difference between troops of the line and militia presented, in terms of effectiveness, the greatest discrepancy on the battlefield at Waterloo. Cobbled together and improperly trained, militia units, even though commanded by professional officers and noncommissioned officers, inevitably possessed a level of preparation and moral cohesion inferior to that of regular troops. This discrepancy was perhaps less marked among the Prussians, owing to the strong national spirit that animated a large part of their Landwehr, but it was particularly evident in the other continental armies; and it was one of the reasons why the Duke of Wellington, assessing the army that had been placed under his orders, had judged it “an infamous army, very weak and ill equipped.” The quality of his troops explains why Wellington had been obliged to establish and defend his line, while Napoleon, with the more professional army, had pursued him defiantly the day before and would attack him relentlessly on the eighteenth.

  FIVE

  THE BRITISH ARMY: “THE SCUM OF THE EARTH”

  The fact that the British army was composed entirely of professional military men carries none of the elite implications that the expression may suggest to the modern reader. The soldierly profession, badly paid and subject to the harshest discipline, was not greatly appreciated in the United Kingdom—was, in fact, a decidedly proletarian vocation. It was no accident that a high percentage of those who enlisted were Irish, since Ireland, overpopulated as it was with a deeply impoverished peasantry, had always been the major provider of cannon fodder to His Majesty’s armies; except for a few Scots regiments whose recruiting had been notably regional, Irish soldiers generally made up between 20 percent and 40 percent of the infantry battalions that Wellington marshaled at Waterloo.

  Furthermore, in the course of the Napoleonic Wars, the British army, desperately short of men, had been obliged to avail itself of the reservoir of recruits constituted by the militia: Men chosen by lot in local drawings to join the territorial regiments were strongly pressured to sign up for the regular army after completing their training; hence, in many regiments at Waterloo, more than half of the men had enlisted after some experience in the militia. These recruits likely produced a statistical rise in the average level of education and social class among the troops, which by then included some decently educated, lower-middle-class young men whose ineluctable fate it was to become noncommissioned officers; to such men we owe the relatively few letters or diaries written by enlisted men, as opposed to officers, in Wellington’s army.

  The vast majority of soldiers still came from the ranks of the otherwise unemployed, men who had not found another way to earn a living. The few available statistics show that around half of the troops had been farm laborers and the rest textile workers or apprentice tradesmen. In such a class-conscious society as England’s, the proletarian origins of the troops opened a chasm between them and their officers; one day the Duke of Wellington, a man devoid of democratic feelings and little given to mincing his words, said that the English army was recruited from among “the scum of the earth.”

  His enemies shared this uncharitable judgment. Years later, when French veterans recalled the Angluches, they were still surprised by the rigid class lines that divided the men from their officers. According to the French, English soldiers obeyed blindly; if they commited a fault, they were punished with the whip; and when off duty, they got fabulously, unconscionably drunk. The noncommissioned officers were excellent; “they never rise higher in rank; the concept of class is so ingrained in them that they take this to be the natural order of things.” As for the officers, “they are, for the most part, quite courageous, but fairly ignorant of their trade, for the English education is not directed toward the profession of arms; moreover, all their manners are those of aristocrats: haughty and disagreeable.” The impression that the British and their army made on the French was a reflection of undeniable social realities. As one of Napoleon’s veterans remembered, “The officers were all upper-class, all nobles or gentlemen, and the soldiers, who were all from the working class, obeyed them without question.”

  A more modern attitude, the notion that troops should be treated more humanely, was just beginning to manifest itself in English society; but Great Britain was still the country where a person could be sentenced to death for any one of more than sixty different crimes, and where women or half-grown children were hanged every day for the theft of a piece of fruit. Unsurprisingly in such a society, army officers, particularly those of the old school, maintained a rigid, pitiless discipline. Even for minor infractions, a soldier could be condemned to hundreds of lashes, which grew to one or two thousand in the most serious cases. Lashes were administered with a cat-o’-nine-tails until the victim fainted. In the weeks that preceded Waterloo, several sentences of this type were carried out in public, to the disgust of the Belgian citizenry and the dismay of the local authorities, who appeared before the British high command and requested them to put a stop to these barbaric displays.

  Not all officers, however, were members of the aristocracy. Among the lower-ranking officers in the British regiments, many were the sons of clerks or shopkeepers, members of the hardworking urban middle class that was creating England’s wealth. Still, such officers were unlikely to receive much advancement; lacking the money to buy a higher rank, they grew old as lieutenants or captains. Indeed, the customary way to obtain promotion in the army was to purchase a “commission,” which was both a rank and an appointment to a command. There was a comparable practice in all the old monarchies, where all public offices were for sale to the highest bidder. In every respect, the acquisition of a rank was an investment; if an officer grew tired of military life, he could always sell his commission. The War Ministry limited itself to ratifying the transaction and to making sure that no one skipped one or more grades, for an officer on his way up in the army was required to occupy all the ranks, one after the other. The rich were still able to advance quickly, buying a commission to the next-higher rank as soon as one was offered in any regiment whatsoever. Before he became the Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley had been an ensign at the age of eighteen and a lieutenant colonel at twenty-four; in six years, he had received five promotions, all of them in return for payment, and he had passed through seven different regiments, without having served a single day in battle.

  Nonetheless, promotion based on merit was not totally unknown in His Majesty’s army, and there were several astonishing cases of men who started at the bottom and came up through the ranks. Sir John Elley, a colonel in the Royal Horse Guards, wounded at Waterloo while serving on Wellington’s staff, was a porter’s son who had enlisted in the army as a simple soldier. The criterion the ministry followed was to grant promotions on merit only in order to replace officers fallen in battle, since in such cases the positions came open of themselves and there was no need to reimburse anyone. Accordingly, one can understand why the officers of Sir John Lambert’s brigade, sailing from America to England in spring 1815, exulted when they learned that Napoleon had escaped from Elba. Major Harry Smith, the brigade adjutant, upon hearing the great news from a merchantman encountered in the English Channel, threw his hat into the air: “Such a hurrah as I set up, tossing my hat over my head! ‘I will be a Lieutenant-Colonel yet before the year’s out!’” Troops of the Fortieth Regiment on board another ship learned the news from an English frigate, and “the young officers, who were looking ravenously forward to promotion, were so rejoiced at the news that they treated all the men to an extra glass of grog, to make everybody as lively as themselves.”3

  By 1815 the British army had been fighting without interruption for many years, and the battles of the Peninsular War had exacted
an enormous toll in blood; it seems legitimate, therefore, to assume that the percentage of officers who had been promoted on merit was much higher at Waterloo than it had been a few years before or would be a few years later. All in all, Wellington’s army was more middle-class and more meritocratic than one might suppose, yet this alone did not make it more professional. Wellington complained that nobody in the British army ever read a regulation or an order except as one might read an amusing novel, and the conduct of many British officers at Waterloo corroborated his observation. The worth of a good officer was determined by the physical courage with which he led his men, and by nothing else. His bravery was the result of the rigid sense of honor that all gentlemen shared.

  The process by which officers were assigned to command a brigade, division, or corps was quite deliberate. Such assignments could not be purchased; rather, they were temporary appointments, granted for the duration of a campaign. In this matter—the selection of the army’s highest commanders—the government proceeded with great care, as befitted one of the old monarchies. The average age of the corps and division commanders in the British army at Waterloo was forty-four and a half. An exception was the Prince of Orange, the son of the king of the Netherlands, to whom the command of a corps had been entrusted—for obvious political reasons—even though he was only twenty-three years old, in conformity with another custom that was widespread in the old monarchies.

  On the whole, the harsh judgments on the British army pronounced by the Duke of Wellington and the French veterans had nothing to do with its military efficiency. However proletarian and semiliterate he may have been, the English soldier, well nourished with meat and beer, stimulated with gin, and convinced of his own racial superiority to the foreign rabble he had to face, was a magnificent combatant, as anyone who has ever seen hooligans in action at a soccer match can readily imagine. This analogy is not disrespectful, given that Wellington himself admitted the frequency and the enormity of the crimes committed by his soldiers against the civilian population, adding that he could not explain it except with the fact that many soldiers in the army, lured by the temptation of a few guineas to finance their binges, had left their families to starve.