Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles

Now he must march again, and he knew it. He sent peace feelers to the other European powers, saying that he had returned to France in response to the public will, that he meant no aggression, and that if they accepted his return then he would live in peace, but he must have known those overtures would be rejected.

So the Eagles would fly again.

* * *

The Duke of Wellington’s life was in danger. Appointing him as Ambassador to France was not, perhaps, the most tactful move the British government made, and Paris was filled with rumours about impending assassination attempts. The government in London wanted the Duke to leave Paris, but he refused because such a move would look like cowardice. Then came the perfect excuse. Lord Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary and the chief British negotiator at the Congress in Vienna, was urgently needed in London and the Duke was appointed as his replacement. No one could depict that move as a fearful flight from danger because it was plainly a promotion, and so the Duke joined the diplomats who laboriously attempted to redraw the maps of Europe.

And while they talked Napoleon escaped.

Count Metternich, the cold, clever, handsome Foreign Minister of Austria, was perhaps the most influential diplomat in Vienna. He had gone to bed very late on the night of 6 March 1815 because a meeting of the most important plenipotentiaries had lasted until 3 a.m. He was tired, and so he instructed his valet that he was not to be disturbed, but the man woke the Count anyway at 6 a.m. because a courier had arrived with an express despatch marked ‘URGENT’. The envelope bore the inscription ‘From the Imperial and Royal Consulate at Genoa’, and the Count, perhaps thinking that nothing vital would be communicated from such a minor consulate, put it on his bedside table and tried to go to sleep again. Finally, at around 7.30 in the morning, he broke the seal and read the despatch. It was very short:

The English commissioner Campbell has just entered the harbour asking whether anyone has seen Napoleon at Genoa, in view of the fact that he had disappeared from the island of Elba. The answer being in the negative, the English frigate put to sea without further delay.

It might seem strange that Sir Neil Campbell had sailed to Italy in search of the missing Napoleon rather than looking for the errant Emperor in France, but there was a widely held assumption that Napoleon, if he landed in France, would be swiftly captured by Royalist forces. ‘None would hear of France,’ the Duke of Wellington recalled, ‘all were sure that in France he would be massacred by the people when he appeared there. I remember Talleyrand’s words so well, “Pour la France? Non!”’ A landing in Italy seemed far more likely, especially as his brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, was King of Naples. Murat, who owed his throne to Napoleon’s generosity, had made his peace with the Austrians, but realized the Congress in Vienna would almost certainly strip him of his petty kingdom. As soon as he heard of Napoleon’s escape he changed sides again, attacking the Austrians, an adventure that failed utterly and led eventually to a firing squad.

Napoleon, of course, did go to France, but for days the diplomats in Vienna had no idea where he was, only that he was on the loose. The Congress, which had dithered and dallied and danced and debated, suddenly became decisive. ‘War’, Metternich recalled, ‘was decided in less than an hour.’ That swiftness was made possible because almost everyone that mattered, the decision-makers, were present at Vienna. The King of Prussia, the Emperor of Austria, the Czar of Russia, all were there, and Napoleon’s reappearance galvanized them. They did not declare war on France, because so far as the powers at Vienna were concerned France was still a monarchy ruled by Louis XVIII; instead they declared war on one man, Napoleon.

Four countries, Russia, Prussia, Austria and Great Britain, each agreed to raise an army of 150,000 men. Those armies would converge on France. Great Britain was unable to raise such a large army, so she agreed to pay subsidies to the other three instead. By now couriers were criss-crossing Europe, and one of them brought a letter to the Duke of Wellington from Lord Castlereagh: ‘Your Grace can judge where your personal presence is likely to be of the most use to the public service … either to remain at Vienna or to put yourself at the head of the army in Flanders.’

The Czar of Russia, Alexander I, had no doubt what the Duke’s choice would be. ‘It is up to you’, he told the Duke, ‘to save the world again.’

The Duke was doubtless flattered, but probably rather suspicious of such high-flown sentiments. Nor did he have any difficulty in deciding where he was likely to be of the most use to the public service. He replied to the government in London, ‘I am going into the Low Countries to take command of the army.’ He left Vienna at the end of March and was in Brussels by 6 April.

History rarely provides such a striking confrontation. The two greatest soldiers of the era, two men who had never fought against each other, were now gathering armies just 160 miles apart. The world’s conqueror was in Paris while the conqueror of the world’s conqueror was in Brussels.

Did Napoleon know that Wellington had been described as his conqueror? Diplomats are rarely discreet about such things, and it is more than possible, even likely, that the Emperor was told of that derisory remark. It would have angered him. He had something to prove.

And so the armies gathered.

* * *

There was confusion in France when Napoleon returned. Who ruled? Who should rule? For a few days no one could be sure what was happening. Colonel Girod de l’Ain was typical of many of the officers who had fought under Napoleon. With the return of the monarchy he had been forced to retire on half-pay and, though he was newly married, he wanted to rejoin the Emperor as soon as he could. He was living in the French Alps, but decided he should go to Paris:

The whole country was in turmoil. I travelled in uniform, but I took the precaution of providing myself with two cockades, one white and the other a tricolour, and depending on which colour flag I saw flying from the bell-towers of any town or village we passed through, I quickly decorated my hat with the appropriate cockade.

Colonel de l’Ain reached Paris and discovered his old regimental commander had already declared for Napoleon, as did almost the whole of the royal army, despite the oaths of loyalty they had sworn to Louis XVIII. Their officers might stay loyal to their royal oath, but the men had different ideas. Count Alfred-Armand de Saint-Chamans commanded the 7th Chasseurs, and as soon as he heard of Napoleon’s return he told his regiment to be ready to campaign, ‘because I believed we were going to fight the ex-Emperor’. His battalion, though, had a quite different objective:

Someone told me that several officers had gathered in the café and were determined to take their troops to join the Light Infantry of the Guard to support the Emperor, that others were having tricolour flags made which they planned to give to the men and so provoke a mutiny … I began to see the true state of affairs and to feel the misery of my position. What could I do? Any hopes I had of giving the King a fine loyal regiment to support the throne at this fateful hour were dashed to the ground.

The loyalty of the French army to Louis XVIII melted in a moment, giving Napoleon 200,000 troops. Thousands of veterans, like Colonel de l’Ain, were also volunteering, but Napoleon knew he needed an even larger army to defend against the attack that would surely come. One of Louis XVIII’s few popular measures had been the abolition of conscription, and Napoleon hesitated to reintroduce it, knowing how much people hated it, but he had no option, and that would raise another 100,000 men, though all would need training and equipping before they were ready to march, so the Emperor decreed that the National Guard, a local-based militia, would give him 150,000 troops. It was still not enough. The allies, he knew, would bring over half a million men to attack him.

France, in those first weeks, was frantic with preparations. Horses were requisitioned, uniforms made and weapons repaired. It was a compelling display of Napoleon’s administrative genius because, by early summer, he had one army ready to march and others placed to defend France’s frontiers. He still had too few men to resist the onslaught he knew was coming, and he needed yet more troops to suppress Royalist unrest in the Vendée, a region in the west of France which had always been Catholic and Monarchist, but by early summer Napoleon had a total force of 360,000 trained men, the best of whom were destined to assemble in northern France, where 125,000 experienced soldiers would form l’Armée du Nord, the army of the north.

Napoleon could have remained on the defensive that summer, stationing most of his men behind massive fortifications and hoping that the allied armies would batter themselves to destruction. That was not appealing. Such a war would be fought on French soil and Napoleon had never been a passive general. His skill was manoeuvre. In 1814 he had faced overwhelming odds as the Prussians, Austrians and Russians approached Paris from the north and east, and he had dazzled them with the speed of his marches and the suddenness of his attacks. To military professionals that campaign was Napoleon’s finest, even though it did end in defeat, and the Duke of Wellington took care to study it. Napoleon himself claimed:

The art of war does not need complicated manoeuvre; the simplest are the best, and common sense is fundamental. From which one might wonder why generals make blunders; it is because they try to be clever. The most difficult thing is to guess the enemy’s plan, to find the truth from all the reports. The rest merely requires common sense; it is like a boxing match, the more you punch the better it is.

The Emperor was being disingenuous. War was never quite that simple, but in essence his strategy was simple. It was to divide his enemies, then pin one down while the other was attacked hard and, like a boxing match, the harder he punched the quicker the result. Then, once one enemy was destroyed, he would turn on the next. The best defence for Napoleon in 1815 was attack, and the obvious enemy to attack was the closest.

It would take time for the massive Russian army to cross Europe and reach the French frontier, and the Austrians were still not ready in May. But just to the north of France, in the old province of Belgium that was now part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, two armies were gathering: the British and the Prussian. Napoleon calculated that if he could beat those two armies then the other allies would lose heart. If he defeated Wellington and drove the British back to the sea, there could even be a change of government in London which might bring a Whig administration inclined to let him stay as ruler of France. The enemy alliance would then fall apart. It was a gamble, of course, but all war is a gamble. He could have waited to raise and train more men until the French army almost matched the allies in number, but those two armies north of the border were too tempting. If they could be divided then they could be beaten, and if they could be beaten then the enemy coalition might collapse. It had happened before, so why not now?

The army he would take north was a good one, filled with experienced troops. If it had a weakness it was in the high command. Napoleon had always depended on his Marshals, but of the twenty Marshals still living four remained loyal to Louis XVIII, four more defected to the allies and two simply lay low. One of those two was Marshal Berthier, who had been Napoleon’s Chief of Staff and had a genius for organization. He fled to Bavaria, where on 1 June he fell to his death from a third-floor window of Bamberg Castle. Some suspect murder, but the most likely explanation is that he simply leaned too far out to watch some Russian cavalry pass through the square beneath. He was replaced by Nicolas Jean de Dieu Soult, a hugely experienced soldier who had risen from the ranks. Napoleon once called him ‘the greatest manoeuvrer in Europe’, but when Soult commanded armies in Spain he found himself constantly outfought by Wellington. He was a difficult man, prickly and proud, and it remained to be seen whether he possessed Berthier’s administrative talents.

Two of the Emperor’s most brilliant Marshals, Davout and Suchet, did not accompany l’Armée du Nord. Davout, a grim and relentless fighter, was made Minister for War and stayed in Paris, while Suchet was appointed commander of the Army of the Alps, a grand name for a small and ill-equipped force. Napoleon, asked which were his greatest generals, named André Masséna and Louis-Gabriel Suchet, but the first was in ill health and Suchet was left behind to defend France’s eastern frontier against an Austrian attack.

Napoleon created one new Marshal for the coming campaign: Emmanuel, Marquis de Grouchy. Davout advised against the appointment, but Napoleon insisted. Grouchy was an aristocrat from the ancien régime and had been fortunate to survive the slaughters of the French Revolution. He had made his reputation as a cavalryman; now he would be given command of one third of l’Armée du Nord.

Then there was the Marshal who was called the ‘bravest of the brave’, the mercurial and fearsome Michel Ney, who, like Soult, had risen from the ranks. He was fiery, red-haired and passionate, the son of a barrel-maker. He was forty-six years old in 1815, the same age as Napoleon and Wellington, and he had made his reputation on some of the bloodiest battlefields of the long war. No one doubted his courage. He was a soldier’s soldier, a warrior who, when Napoleon landed from Elba, had famously promised Louis XVIII to bring the Emperor back to Paris in an iron cage. Instead he had defected with his troops. He was renowned for his extraordinary courage and inspiring leadership, but no one would ever call Ney cool-headed. And, ominously, Soult detested Ney, and Ney detested Soult, yet the two were expected to work together in that fateful summer.

The Marshals were important, and none more so than the Chief of Staff, because it was his job to translate the Emperor’s wishes into mundane orders of march. Berthier had been a brilliant administrator, foreseeing problems and sorting them efficiently, and it remained to be seen whether Marshal Soult had the same ability to organize over a hundred thousand men, to feed them, move them and bring them to battle according to his Emperor’s wishes. The other Marshals would have the heavy responsibility of independent command. If the Emperor’s tactic was to pin one enemy army and keep it in place while he defeated the other, then a Marshal would be the man doing the pinning. At the opening of hostilities it was Marshal Ney’s job to keep Wellington busy while Napoleon fought the Prussians, and two days later Marshal Grouchy had to divert the Prussians while Napoleon destroyed Wellington’s men. Those tasks were not done by just following orders, but by imaginative soldiering. A Marshal was expected to take the difficult decisions, and Napoleon was entrusting them to Grouchy, new to his high rank and nervous of failure, and to Ney, whose only mode of battle was to fight like the devil.

L’Armée du Nord would face two armies in Belgium, of which the largest was the Prussian. It was led by the 74-year-old Prince Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, who had first fought for Sweden against the Prussians, but after being captured was commissioned into the Prussian army by Frederick the Great. He was vastly experienced, a cavalryman with the nickname of Marschall Vorwärts, Marshal Forwards, because of his habit of shouting his men forward. He was popular, much loved by his troops and, famously, prone to bouts of mental illness during which he believed himself pregnant with an elephant fathered by a French infantryman. There was no trace of this madness during the summer of 1815; instead Blücher marched with a fanatical determination to defeat Napoleon. He was bluff, courageous, and if he was not the smartest general he had the sense to employ brilliant staff officers. In 1815 his Chief of Staff was August von Gneisenau, a man of vast ability and long experience, some of which had been gained fighting alongside the British during the American Revolution. That had soured his views of the British army, and Gneisenau was extremely suspicious of British abilities and intentions. When Baron von Müffling was appointed as the liaison officer to Wellington he was summoned by Gneisenau, who warned him:

To be much on my guard with the Duke of Wellington, because by his relations with India and his transactions with the deceitful Nabobs, this distinguished general had so accustomed himself to duplicity that he had at last become such a master in the art as to outwit the Nabobs themselves.

It defies imagination to know how Gneisenau got hold of this strange opinion, but given Gneisenau’s responsibilities and Blücher’s high regard for his advice, it hardly boded well for future relations between the British and Prussians. There was mistrust anyway between the two countries over Prussia’s ambition to annex Saxony, a disagreement that had soured the Congress of Vienna. The British, French and Austrians were so opposed to this expansion of Prussian power that they had agreed to go to war rather than permit it. Russia had similar ambitions for the whole of Poland, and at one time it looked as if a new war would break out in Europe with Prussia and Russia fighting against the rest. That had been averted, but the bad blood remained.

Now the Prussian army was in the province of Belgium. It was an untested army. The Prussians had experienced defeat, occupation, reorganization and, after Napoleon’s abdication in 1814, demobilization. There were good, experienced troops in Blücher’s ranks, but not enough, and so the numbers were made up by volunteers and by the Landwehr, the militia. The call to arms was answered enthusiastically in 1815. Franz Lieber was just seventeen years old when he heard that call, so he and his brother went to Berlin, where they discovered:

a table was placed in the centre of a square … at which several officers were enlisting those who offered themselves. The crowd was so great that we had to wait from ten until oneo’clockbefore we could get a chance to have our names taken.

He reported to his regiment at the beginning of May, had one month’s training and then was marched into the Low Country to join Blücher’s forces. Lieber was intrigued to discover that one sergeant in his regiment was a woman who had so distinguished herself in combat that she had been awarded three gallantry medals. So by the summer of 1815 Blücher led at least one woman and 121,000 men, a formidable army on paper, but as Peter Hofschröer, an historian very sympathetic to the Prussians, writes, ‘a substantial part of Blücher’s forces consisted of raw levies capable of two basic manoeuvres: going forwards in a state of disorder, or going backwards in a state of chaos.’ That is witty and, as things turned out, those raw levies proved capable of fighting too, but it remained to be seen whether Gneisenau would overcome his Anglophobia and cooperate with the army gathering on the Prussian right.

That was the British–Dutch army led by the Duke of Wellington, who, famously, described it as ‘an infamous army’. And so it was when he first arrived in Brussels. It was under-strength, many of the Dutch regiments were from the French-speaking province of Belgium, and the Duke was wary of those troops because so many of them were veterans of Napoleon’s armies. The French-speaking Belgians were unhappy that their land had been given to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and the Emperor knew of that dissatisfaction. Pamphlets were being smuggled across the French border and distributed among the Belgian troops in the Duke’s army. ‘To the brave soldiers’, the pamphlets read, ‘who have conquered under the French Eagles, the Eagles which have led us so often to victory have reappeared! Their cry is always the same, glory and liberty!’ The Duke doubted the reliability of those regiments and took the precaution of separating them, brigading them with battalions whose loyalties were unquestioned.

Those loyal battalions were either British troops or the 6,000 men of the King’s German Legion (KGL), a unit which had fought brilliantly for the Duke during the long Peninsular War. The Legion had been raised in Hanover, which of course shared a King with Great Britain, and in 1815 Hanover sent another 16,000 men to join Wellington’s army. Those 16,000 were untested and so, like the Dutch army, they were split up and brigaded with either British or KGL battalions. It was not a popular decision. ‘It was a severe blow to our morale,’ Captain Carl Jacobi of the 1st Hanoverian Brigade complained:

The English generals were totally unfamiliar with the traditions of theHanoverians … In their eyes, everything was imperfect, even open to criticism if it did not conform to English concerns and institutions. There was no camaraderie among the allied troops, not even among the officers. The ignorance of the other’s language, on both sides, the major difference in pay and the resulting great difference in life styles prevented any closer companionship. Even our compatriots in theKing’s German Legion did not associate with us; the fifteen year old ensign with the red sash looked down on the older Hanoverian officer.

By summer, when the war began, Wellington had some 16,000 Hanoverians and just under 6,000 men from the King’s German Legion. The Dutch army, which was part of his ‘infamous’ army, numbered almost 40,000, of whom half were in regiments that were French-speaking and so of doubtful reliability. The rest of his army, some 30,000 men, were British, and the Duke wished he had more of them.

But Britain had just fought a war with the United States, and many of the best regiments, veterans of Wellington’s victories, were still across the Atlantic. They were returning, and some battalions found themselves travelling straight from America to the Netherlands. The Duke would have been far more confident if he had possessed his Peninsular army, which had been one of the best that ever fought under British colours. A few weeks before Waterloo he was walking in a Brussels park with Thomas Creevey, a British parliamentarian, who rather anxiously asked the Duke about the expected campaign. A red-coated British infantryman was staring at the park’s statues and the Duke pointed at the man. ‘There,’ he said, ‘there. It all depends upon that article whether we do the business or not. Give me enough of it, and I am sure.’

In the end there was just enough of it. A little over 20,000 British infantry were to fight at Waterloo, and they were to bear the brunt of the Emperor’s attacks. Napoleon’s generals warned him of those red-coated soldiers, saying how staunch they were. General Reille annoyed Napoleon by saying that British infantry were inexpugnable, impregnable, while Soult told the Emperor that ‘In a straight fight the English infantry are the very devil.’ And so they were. The Emperor had never fought against them and he dismissed the warnings, but Wellington knew their worth, and the similar worth of the King’s German Legion. Four years after the battle, walking the field of Waterloo, the Duke remarked, ‘I had only about 35,000 men on whom I could thoroughly rely; the remainder were but too likely to run away.’

The Duke had twenty-two British battalions, of whom fifteen had fought with him in Spain or Portugal. It was just enough. Yet even those experienced battalions were, like the Prussian regiments, filled with new recruits. The largest and one of the best battalions at Waterloo was the 52nd, the Oxfordshire Light Infantry, which had been in more or less continuous combat from 1806 until Napoleon’s first abdication. At Waterloo the battalion numbered 1,079 men, but of those 558 had joined since its last battle. The Guards Division was the same. Ensign Robert Batty of the 1st Foot Guards said the division was filled with ‘young soldiers and volunteers from the militia who had never been exposed to the fire of an enemy’.

Yet the old hands, the veterans, were full of confidence. Frederick Mainwaring was a Lieutenant in the 51st, a Yorkshire battalion that had fought at Corunna, Fuentes d’Onoro, Salamanca, Vitoria and in the battles of the Pyrenees and southern France. It was stationed at Portsmouth when the news of Napoleon’s return reached Britain. Mainwaring recalled:

I was seated with two or three others at breakfast in the mess-room, the Bugle-Major came in with the letters and as usual laid the newspaper on the mess-table. Someone opened it and glanced his eyes carelessly over its contents when suddenly his countenance brightened up, and flinging the newspaper into the air like a madman, he shouted out ‘Glorious news! Nap’s landed again in France, Hurrah!’ In an instant we were all wild … ‘Nap’s in France again’ spread like wildfire through the barracks … the men turned out and cheered … our joy was unbounded!

Captain Cavalié Mercer commanded a troop of Royal Horse Artillery at Colchester when the news arrived and tells the same story as Lieutenant Mainwaring. The order to march was ‘received with unfeigned joy by officers and men, all eager to plunge into danger and bloodshed, all hoping to obtain glory and distinction’.

The French and Prussians were no different. Eager volunteers had flocked to the Prussian colours, and in France most soldiers were overjoyed at the Emperor’s return. Many had been prisoners-of-war in the dreadful British prisons, either on Dartmoor or in the pestilential hulks that were great dismasted ships that lay at permanent anchor, and those men wanted revenge. They wanted glory. Captain Pierre Cardron, an infantry officer, recorded a scene that happened again and again across France. His regiment had sworn loyalty to the King, but after Napoleon’s return the Colonel summoned all the officers. They stood in two ranks ‘asking one another what was going on? What was there? In the end we were filled with worry,’ Cardron remembered, but then their Colonel appeared:

holding in his hands, what? You would not guess in a hundred years … Our eagle, under which we had marched so many times to victory and which the brave Colonel had hidden inside the mattress of his bed … At the sight of the cherished standard cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ could be heard; soldiers and officers, all overwhelmed, wanted not only to see, but to embrace and touch it; this incident made every eye flow with tears of emotion … we have promised to die beneath our eagle for the country and Napoleon.

No wonder that one French general wrote home that his men were in a ‘frenzy’ for the Emperor. And in that frenetic atmosphere Napoleon decided on a pre-emptive blow against the British and the Prussians. He would attack them before the Austrian and Russian armies could reach the French frontier, and for his attack he had 125,000 men and 350 cannon. Facing him was Blücher with 120,000 men and 312 cannon and Wellington’s army of 92,000 men and 120 guns. The Emperor was outnumbered, but that was nothing new and he was a master of manoeuvre. His task now was to divide the allies then destroy them one by one. War, he had declared, was simple. ‘It’s like a boxing match, the more you punch the better it is.’