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

What followed is one of the most famous incidents in the Duke’s life. It was after midnight and the Duke was leaving the ball, and as he was escorted through the hall he turned to the Duke of Richmond and whispered, ‘Have you a good map in the house?’

Richmond took Wellington into his study, where a map was spread on the table. The Duke studied it by candlelight, then exclaimed, ‘Napoleon has humbugged me, by God! He has gained twenty-four hours march on me!’

Napoleon’s troops were poised to separate the allies. The Emperor’s plans were working.

* * *

The wonderfully named Hyacinthe-Hippolyte de Mauduit was a Sergeant in Napoleon’s Imperial Guard. That made him crème de la crème. He was in the Old Guard, part of the second battalion of the first regiment of Grenadiers. The Imperial Guard was Napoleon’s favourite unit, the shock troops of the French empire. Every man was a veteran, they received privileges, wore a distinctive uniform and were fiercely loyal to the Emperor they guarded. Benjamin Haydon, a spendthrift British painter, caught a glimpse of the Guard just after Napoleon’s first abdication and wrote:

More dreadful-looking fellows than Napoleon’s Guard I had never seen. They had the look of thoroughbred, veteran, disciplined banditti. Depravity, indifference and bloodthirstiness were burnt in their faces; black moustachios, gigantic caps, a slouching carriage and a ferocious expression were their characteristics. If such fellows had governed the world, what would have become of it?

Sergeant Hippolyte de Mauduit was one of these banditti and, while the Duke of Wellington was at the ball, the Sergeant was settling into the courtyard of an ironmaster’s house in Charleroi which was Napoleon’s temporary headquarters.

We busied ourselves cooking food for a morning meal as well as for an evening meal because we had been on the march for nearly eighteen hours without being able to even unhook our cooking pots and everything indicated it would be the same next day … Aides-de-camp and staff officers came and went constantly and in the course of rushing around they often knocked over our piles of muskets.

The soldiers of the Guard had no real idea what was happening. They had marched all day, heard the sound of firing, marched again, and now, like the veterans they were, they were making certain they had food in their knapsacks. But one of the guardsmen had an old map of Flanders and Hippolyte recalls how they crowded round and worked out from the map what the Emperor’s plan might be.

Did Napoleon even have a plan? He had said, often enough, that the best plan was to make contact with the enemy and only then make the crucial decisions. That day, 15 June, the French had made contact with the Prussians. The first fighting had been south of Charleroi, but resistance stiffened once the French crossed the Sambre and pushed north, and what Hippolyte de Mauduit and his companions would have seen on their map was the main road to Brussels running north out of Charleroi. Just a couple of miles out of town that main road crossed a second road, an old Roman highway, and the Prussians, it seemed, were using that second road for their fighting retreat. They were going eastwards, towards distant Prussia, and no one, it appeared, was defending the main road north to Brussels.

The Waterloo campaign is all about roads. Roads and crossroads. The armies needed the roads. Cavalry and infantry could advance across country without roads, though their progress would be painfully slow, but guns and supply wagons had to have roads. To understand the road map north of Charleroi is to comprehend the problems that the three commanding generals faced, and on the night of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball the problems were almost all on the allied side. Napoleon had grasped the situation, and his strategy of dividing the allies was working. Indeed, Wellington’s caution was making it even easier for the Emperor.

The Prussians are not retreating far. On the night of 15 to 16 June, while the Emperor is in Charleroi and the Duke of Wellington is dancing, the Prussians halt at a small village called Sombreffe. There they will make a stand. Why Sombreffe? Because here another road is important, a road which crosses the Roman road and leads westwards, and the British–Dutch army is off to the west. That minor road, usually known as the Nivelles road, crosses the Charleroi-to-Brussels highway at an insignificant hamlet called Quatre-Bras. So if the Prussians retreat any farther east then they risk losing contact with Wellington’s forces. The Nivelles road is the last connecting road which will let the British come to the aid of the Prussians, so Blücher orders a stand there.

There is a problem, though. The Duke of Wellington waited too long and the British–Dutch army is assembling late. The Emperor has stolen a march, and the vital crossroads of Quatre-Bras, the place where the British–Dutch must assemble if they are to help Blücher, is virtually undefended. Seize that crossroads and the Duke of Wellington’s army cannot march to help the Prussians.

And at dawn on 16 June the Emperor sends Marshal Ney to capture Quatre-Bras.

It is a hot day, a sweltering summer’s day in Belgium. The Imperial Guard leave Charleroi late, at around 9 a.m., and follow the Emperor’s main forces towards Sombreffe. The Emperor has found the enemy and he knows exactly what he must do. Marshal Ney will capture the vital crossroads at Quatre-Bras, thus keeping Wellington away from the battle the Emperor will fight at the village of Ligny, which is close to Sombreffe. That battle will be between France and Prussia. If Napoleon wins that battle then the Prussians can be driven away east towards their homeland, and the Emperor can turn on the British.

Hippolyte and his fellow guardsmen march behind their regimental band. They pass the unburied corpses of the men killed in the previous day’s skirmishes between the Prussian rearguard and the advancing French. Hippolyte recalls that he more or less understood the Emperor’s plan, the map helped him understand it, but in truth that plan is not his business. All he needs to know is that his beloved Emperor has chosen to fight, that the enemy is in disarray, and that if the battle becomes desperate then the Imperial Guard will be thrown into the fight. That is their purpose, to win battles, and their boast is that they are undefeated. They are the Emperor’s picked men, the bravest soldiers of France, the indomitable Guard.

The Imperial Guard would doubtless have liked to call themselves ‘the bravest of the brave’, except that soubriquet belonged to Marshal Michel Ney, who only joined the army that hot morning of June 16th. ‘Ney,’ the Emperor greeted him, ‘I am glad to see you,’ and while Hippolyte and the rest of the army marched east to deal with the Prussians, Ney was given 9,600 infantry, 4,600 cavalry and 34 cannon and ordered to seize the crossroads at Quatre-Bras. It was, truly, the simplest of tasks, and Ney possessed an overwhelming force with which to achieve it.

Capture Quatre-Bras and the Prussians are almost certainly doomed.

Capture Quatre-Bras and the British will be Napoleon’s next victims.

It has all started so well for the Emperor. Then a Dutchman decided to be disobedient.

* * *

Major-General Baron Jean-Victor Constant-Rebecque was born in Switzerland and was to die in what is now Poland. His first military service was with the French, but after the Revolution he joined the Dutch army. He was forty-three in 1815 and knew the British well because when Slender Billy, the Crown Prince, had been made an aide-de-camp to Wellington in the Peninsula, Rebecque had accompanied the young man. Now he was Chief of Staff to Slender Billy.

Rebecque was a level-headed, intelligent man. On 15 June he had received orders to assemble the 1st Corps, which was commanded by the Crown Prince, at Nivelles, a town which lies to the west of the Charleroi-to-Brussels highroad. The orders had come late because the Duke of Wellington had hesitated all day, still fearing that French attack through Mons, but at last the Anglo-Dutch army was moving.

And Rebecque decided it was moving to the wrong place.

Nivelles was not a bad place for part of Wellington’s army to assemble. A road went eastwards from the town, the Nivelles road, and led to where Blücher had decided to make his stand. Except between Nivelles and Sombreffe was that insignificant crossroads called Quatre-Bras. Napoleon had grasped the importance of that crossroads and ordered Marshal Ney to capture it. If the French held Quatre-Bras then they had come between Nivelles and Sombreffe, between Wellington and Blücher. Capture Quatre-Bras and Napoleon’s aim of dividing the allies was achieved.

And Rebecque understood that.

So despite the orders to assemble at Nivelles, Rebecque sent troops to Quatre-Bras. They were not many, just over 4,000 men of the Dutch army, but they were at the crossroads and, even while Wellington was dressing for the ball, they fought off the advancing French. Those Frenchmen were patrolling and, just south of Quatre-Bras, came under fire from Dutch artillery and infantry. The French did not press their attack. They probed, discovered the Dutch forces, and then retreated. It was late, the sun was almost down, and the attack on the crossroads could wait till morning. The Dutch troops who repelled the French probes were actually Germans from Nassau. They were in Dutch service because, in the same manner that the ruler of Hanover had become the King of England in Europe’s game of musical thrones, so the Prince of Nassau had become King William I of the Netherlands. The men who fought off the first French attacks were under the command of a 23-year-old Colonel, Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, and that night, as the chandeliers were being lit for the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, the young Colonel sent a report of the day’s action to his immediate superior. He reported that he had repelled French cavalry and infantry, but was worried because he had no contact with any other allied troops. He was quite alone, in the dark, without any supporting allies. There was worse:

I need to confess to Your Excellency that I am too weak to hold here long. The Second Battalion of OrangeNassau still have French muskets and are down to 10 cartridges per man … every man is likewise down to 10 cartridges. I will defend the post entrusted to me as long as possible. I expect to be attacked at daybreak.

So as night fell on Belgium the Emperor’s plan seemed to be working. His army had crossed the Sambre and pushed northwards. The Prussians had retreated north and east, but had stopped close to the village of Ligny, where they planned to make a fight of it. Blücher was depending on Wellington coming to his aid, but the British had been slow in concentrating their forces, and were still a long way from their Prussian allies. They could still reach Ligny, but only if the Nivelles road was open, and that meant holding the crossroads at Quatre-Bras where a small force of Germans in Dutch service was now isolated and almost out of ammunition. Those 4,000 Germans expected to be attacked in the morning, and that attack would come from Marshal Ney, ‘bravest of the brave’.

Thus as the sun rose early on 16 June the allies could expect two battles, one at Ligny and the other at the vital crossroads of Quatre-Bras. And Napoleon understood the importance of that crossroads. Capture Quatre-Bras and he would have divided his enemies. Yet the fog of war was thickening. While Wellington danced the Emperor was under the illusion that Ney had already captured Quatre-Bras. On the morning of the 16th he sent even more troops to reinforce Ney, who would now command over 40,000 men. Those extra troops were not sent to help Ney capture the crossroads, so far as Napoleon was aware Ney had already done that; instead their task was to hold the crossroads and so stop Wellington’s troops from joining Blücher’s. There was more: ‘You will march for Brussels this evening, arriving there at seven o’clock tomorrow morning. I shall support you with the Imperial Guard.’

So Napoleon believed he could shove the Prussians further away, then switch his attack to the British. It was all going to plan and the Emperor would take breakfast in Brussels’s Laeken Palace on Saturday morning.

Except Ney had still not captured Quatre-Bras.

‘The Duchess of Richmond’s Ball, 15 June 1815’, by Robert Alexander Hillingford. Virtually every senior officer in his army was at the ball, making it easy for Wellington to find and direct them – the ball, in truth, served as an orders group.

Major-General Baron Jean-Victor Constant-Rebecque, by J. B. Van Der Hulst: ‘Then a Dutchman decided to be disobedient.’

Field-Marshal August Neidhart, Count of Gneisenau, by George Dawe. Gneisenau complained that Wellington was slow in assembling his army and added snidely: ‘I still do not know why’.

The formidable 71-year-old Prince Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher – nicknamed ‘Marschall Vorwärts’ … Marshal Forwards. Wood engraving after a drawing by Adolph Menzel.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_c895bc43-b6e9-51f4-b481-0ce1cc41ab89)

The fate of France is in your hands! (#ulink_c895bc43-b6e9-51f4-b481-0ce1cc41ab89)

THE 16TH OF JUNE was a Friday. It dawned hot and sweltering. The Prussians were assembling their army close to the small town of Sombreffe, the French were advancing towards them, while the British–Dutch army was desperately trying to regain that lost day’s march. Wellington, realizing the importance of that insignificant crossroads at Quatre-Bras, had ordered his army to march there, but he had left the order late. Too late? Some troops marched from Brussels by moonlight, leaving the city at two in the morning, but most waited until dawn. The city was close to panic. Captain Johnny Kincaid, an officer of the 95th Rifles, slept on a pavement, or rather he tried to sleep:

But we were every instant disturbed by ladies as well as gentlemen; some stumbling over us in the dark, some shaking us out of our sleep, to be told the news … All those who applied for the benefit of my advice I recommended to go home to bed, to keep themselves perfectly cool and to rest assured that, if their departure from the city became necessary (which I very much doubted) they would have at least one whole day to prepare for it as we were leaving some beef and potatoes behind us, for which, I was sure, we would fight rather than abandon!

Few did sleep that night, though the Duke snatched a couple of hours before leaving for Quatre-Bras. English visitors to Brussels, and there were many, said their goodbyes to the soldiers. One of those visitors, Miss Charlotte Waldie, recalled ‘the tumult and confusion of martial preparation’:

Officers looking in vain for their servants, servants running in pursuit of their masters, baggage waggons were loading, trains of artillery harnessing … As the dawn broke the soldiers were seen assembling from all parts of the town, in marching order, with their knapsacks on their backs, loaded with three days’ provisions … Numbers were taking leave of their wives and children, perhaps for the last time, and many a veteran’s rough cheek was wet with the tears of sorrow. One poor fellow, immediately under our windows, turned back again and again to bid his wife farewell, and take his baby once more in his arms; and I saw him hastily brush away a tear with the sleeve of his coat as he gave her back the child for the last time, wrung her hand, and ran off to join his company which was drawn up on the other side of the Place Royale.

Miss Waldie does not say what nationality that poor soldier was, though it is very possible he was British. A small number of wives and children were allowed to accompany a battalion on foreign service. They were chosen by lottery on the eve of departure and the women were expected to be launderers and cooks, but the families had been instructed to stay in Brussels as the troops marched south. Lieutenant Basil Jackson of the Royal Staff Corps watched the exodus:

First came a battalion of the95th Rifles, dressed in dark green, and with black accoutrements. The28th Regiment followed, then the42nd Highlanders, marching so steadily that the sable plumes of their bonnets scarcely quivered.

Lieutenant Jackson had been awake most of the night, delivering a message eastwards, and now he had a moment to rest before mounting his tired horse and following those steady Highlanders towards the crisis.

And it was a crisis. Quatre-Bras marked the last place where the allies had easy access to each other. Lose Quatre-Bras and the only connecting roads would be country lanes which twisted through hilly country and were obstructed by narrow bridges, so if Napoleon could thrust the British away from the crossroads then communication between the British–Dutch and the Prussians would become far more difficult. All the French needed to do was push, and the Emperor had massively reinforced Ney’s force. Indeed, by the morning of the 16th, the French had over 40,000 troops with which to overwhelm the small Dutch contingent under Saxe-Weimar. Those Nassauers had little ammunition left, just ten rounds a man. ‘I will defend the post entrusted to me as long as possible,’ Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar had promised, but how long could 4,000 men who were short of ammunition hold out against Ney’s overwhelming force?

But Marshal Ney, astonishingly, did nothing. He could have captured the crossroads any time that morning with little effort. He had an overwhelming advantage in numbers, yet still ‘the bravest of the brave’ hesitated. He claimed later to be waiting for further orders from Napoleon, yet he had not even obeyed the Emperor’s previous orders, which were clear enough, capture Quatre-Bras, and while he waited the British–Dutch reinforcements were marching from Nivelles and from Brussels. Many explanations have been offered for Ney’s inactivity: that he really was confused and waiting for orders, or that he misunderstood the Emperor’s intentions, or, perhaps, that he was being extremely cautious.

Ney knew he was facing the British–Dutch army that was commanded by the Duke of Wellington, and Ney had faced Wellington before. He had been at Busaco in 1810 when 65,000 French troops had attacked Wellington’s 50,000 and been bloodily repulsed. Ney had commanded an army Corps that had attacked the centre of the British line, and all seemed to be going well as the French troops advanced uphill against a fairly scattered skirmish line of British and Portuguese troops, but just as the Corps reached the heights of Busaco the British sprang their trap and two concealed battalions of redcoats stood and fired a tremendous volley at close range and followed it with a bayonet charge that sent Ney’s men reeling in panic down the hill.

Wellington was a master of the ‘reverse slope’. Very simply, that means he liked to conceal his troops behind a hill. At Busaco the British objective was to hold the high hill, but if Wellington had positioned his men on the crest, or on the forward slope, then they would have become targets for the deadly efficient French artillery. By placing them just behind the crest, on the reverse slope, he kept them safe from most artillery fire and concealed his dispositions from the enemy. One biographer of Napoleon called this a ‘tired old dodge’, which is a remarkably stupid comment. It was, perhaps, an obvious tactic, but concealing and protecting troops is neither a ‘dodge’ nor ‘tired’, and the surprising thing is how rarely other commanders used the tactic.

Ney, south of the crossroads, could not see what awaited him at Quatre-Bras. His view northwards was obstructed by thick woods, by some gentle undulations in the ground and, especially, by those tall crops of rye and other cereals. His experience in Spain, and his knowledge that he faced Wellington, could well have convinced him that the innocent-looking landscape actually concealed the whole of the British–Dutch army. This was a moment when Wellington’s reputation served him well. In truth the British–Dutch army was still marching on dusty roads under a sweltering sun and the crossroads was there for the taking, but Ney hesitated.