A Model Victory

Under these circumstances I hope he will not be allowed any longer to remain under pecuniary difficulties, but that the means he proposes may be taken to supply him with the sum requisite to finish the Model.

Ever my dear Ellice,

Very faithfully yours,

Hussey Vivian

War had come to threaten Europe so quickly, it was hard to believe it was less than four months since the emperor had returned from his island exile. It was harder still to remember that, when Napoleon had landed at the end of February, his invasion force had consisted of eleven hundred soldiers and a fleet, if such it could be called, of three ships. Not that the size of his army had mattered when he set foot on French soil. Many thousands of French soldiers, ranged against him at Grenoble, had simply laid down their arms and cheered their emperor’s return. Soon the miniature army, swelled by deserters, was built upon an altogether grander scale and a country which contained an emperor and a king could not hold both within its boundaries. Within a month, Louis XVIII had fled the country and the French monarchy had collapsed. But that was not the end of Napoleon’s ambitions, and his enemies knew it. Europe’s political masters, whose representatives had gathered at the Congress of Vienna, realised it was only a matter of time before war broke out. Now it had actually happened, but still Napoleon had managed to take everyone by surprise.

Through the brilliance of his manoeuvres, Napoleon was able to dictate the course of events, and to scatter the two armies, of Britain and Prussia, which had hoped to unite against him. In doing so, he not only gave himself a chance of victory which would have been denied him if they had joined forces, but he placed their alliance under a strain which nearly broke it. In this way, he so undermined the little trust that the two armies placed in each other that the British military authorities would give little or no credit to the Prussians for the victory they came to win. The seeds of this discord lay in the speed of Napoleon’s attack which kept Wellington’s army and the Prussian forces apart until the very end of the Battle of Waterloo. As William Siborne discovered, the eventual result of their separation was to infect the battle’s history beyond his cure.

When the first dozen regiments of French cavalry thundered through the countryside, it was not yet dawn, and Wellington had no idea that his enemy was on the move. The horsemen, brass-helmeted, spurred on their charges, and barely noticed the land as it fell away behind them. Their road led north, and soon it brought them to a small river which marked the frontier of France and Belgium. A hundred hooves, followed by many hundreds more, came crashing through the river at its shallow fording-place, so that spray was sent high into the air, to hang for a moment in the half-light. The horses climbed up and over the riverbank and took their thunder with them. The River Sambre resumed its gentle course, and the birds returned to their resting place in the trees. But the world was no longer at peace. The enemy had crossed the border and there were thousands more waiting to follow the bridgehead they had made. It was 15 June 1815 and the invasion had begun.

If Napoleon was to narrow the odds against him, he had to catch the enemy off-guard. To take on the Duke of Wellington, who was undefeated in battle, was one matter, even though the Emperor did not rate his tactical abilities: too slow, too cautious, and no flair, he thought. But to take the Anglo-Allied army on at the same time as the Prussian army of old Blücher was military madness. The Emperor must keep the two sides apart or else be hopelessly outnumbered. That was why speed was all. His spies had told him that it would take many hours to bring together Wellington’s scattered army, and many hours more for the two armies to become one force. If he could take on each army separately, then they might never unite. And that was entirely their own fault.

Wellington and Blücher had first met only six weeks earlier to discuss their joint campaign. They met again in Brussels at the end of May, where Blücher had been granted the rare honour of inspecting some of the Duke’s cavalry. Their discussions had led to them to agree that their armies would cooperate in battle, but their pact was incomplete. United by a common enemy, the two armies were not brought together on the ground. There was no joint command, and their forces operated in different parts of the country, which made coordination difficult. Wellington’s base lay in Brussels, and his supply lines ran from Ostend and Antwerp. Blücher’s headquarters were being transferred from Liège to Namur, and his supply lines ran in the opposite direction to those of Wellington. If the two armies were forced to retreat, they would be pulled even further apart. But the two leaders had, at least, agreed on tactics. They planned to advance into France on 27 June to attack Napoleon, and to try to defeat him through the use of overwhelming force. If the plan failed, then the Allied army and the Prussians would try to protect each other. Now, although they did not know it, the plan was failing, and their pact would be tested to destruction.

The alliance with the Prussians was, in any case, an unlikely one, because in battle as in life, Wellington and Blücher were polar opposites. Blücher was born to be obstinate, and he had lived his life according to his own drumbeat in a military career which was as rich as it was varied. A member of a military family, he had joined the Swedish army as a cavalryman in 1742 and had taken part in three campaigns against Prussia’s Frederick the Great. When he was captured by his enemy in 1760, he changed sides and became a loyal, but uncontrollable soldier. He then served with distinction against France’s revolutionary armies, but the disastrous 1806 campaign had led to his enforced retirement. When Prussia again took up arms against the French in 1813, Blücher returned to fight with typical ferocity until the emperor was defeated at Laon, forcing his abdication. Now the two rivals were to face each other again, with Blücher, at seventy-two, the oldest man on the battlefield, and the only man to have beaten Napoleon more than once in battle.

In contrast, Wellington was cautious and conservative, a methodical commander who considered defence was the best form of attack, who wanted to lure his enemy into making mistakes, and who instinctively eschewed unnecessary risks. He had never met Napoleon directly in battle though the two had circled each other warily. The Duke had forced the Emperor into exile on Elba the year before, and there was a certain inevitability in their meeting now, the scion of the establishment ranged against the avowed outsider, the imperial usurper of monarchy and tradition. The son of an Irish aristocrat, albeit an impoverished one, Arthur Wellesley had been educated at Eton, and had then taken a commission in the 73rd Infantry. India was the making of him. The war with France had effectively moved there, with the French encouraging native princes to resist the East India Company’s control. As brigade commander under General George Harris in 1799, Wellington impressed his superiors throughout the Seringapatam expedition against the rebellious Tippoo Sahib of Mysore, who had been stirred into action by his French allies, and he was made administrator of the conquered territory.

It was the Peninsular War against the French in Spain, however, which had cemented Wellington’s growing reputation and which taught him a mastery of defensive warfare. Between November 1809 and September 1810 he had supervised the construction of protective lines of trenches and redoubts, north of Lisbon, stretching from the Atlantic to the Tagus. The ‘Lines of Torres Vedras’ were crafted out of two successive ridges of hills. Buildings, sunken lanes, olive groves and vineyards were all erased from the landscape, denying any cover to an attacking force. It was a brilliantly successful tactic, and after driving the French from the Peninsula, Wellington pushed on into France itself in 1814 until Napoleon, pressed by Wellington in the south and by a triple alliance of Prussia, Russia and Austria in the north and east, had been forced to abdicate.

But a year later, with every mile of Belgian countryside covered by his light dragoons, his hope of revenge was growing. After securing the crossing at the River Sambre, his Armée du Nord had moved fast to form a wedge between its two enemies. Marshal Ney led the left wing towards Frasnes and Quatre Bras, while Marshal Grouchy took the right wing towards Fleurus and Sombreffe. A mobile reserve was kept at Charleroi to reinforce either of the commanders. By seizing Quatre Bras, the French would control the main highway, and the chances of the two armies joining up against them would be as likely as this year’s harvest failing, and already the crop was as high as the tallest cavalryman. Instead, Wellington and Blücher would be forced to fall back across country, slowed down by the rutted landscape and the sun-baked soil. The Emperor had sprung his trap before his enemies knew anything about it. Soon, he would be the conqueror of Brussels.

That evening, in a large room on the ground floor of the Duchess of Richmond’s residence, the young ladies of Brussels were dancing with the British officers, resplendent in their scarlet, gold and white uniforms. The ball, it should be said, was the scene of the first of many myths which came to cloak the history of the Battle of Waterloo. As William Siborne was to find, the imprecision of legend began even before the combatants reached the battlefield.

The building in which the ball was held has long since disappeared, enabling novelists, painters and poets to let loose their imaginations, so that the ball has entered the classical literature of England without regard to fact. Over the years, it became a grand affair, in a magnificent ballroom, with sparkling chandeliers, great sweeping curtains and sumptuous furniture. But it was a memory based on fiction, created partly by Thackeray, by Turner, who painted a ornate ballroom modelled on an entirely different building, and especially by Byron, who ensured that romanticism prevailed, rather than historical accuracy. It was left to the son of a Waterloo veteran, Sir William Fraser, to prove, though not conclusively, the mundane truth: that the ball had in fact taken place, not in a high hall, but in a long, low-ceilinged room supported by square wooden posts.

The guest list for the ball is, however, well documented. More than two hundred people had been invited: His Royal Highness the Prince of Orange was there, and the Duke of Brunswick and the Prince of Nassau and the Duc d’Aramberg and a clutch of counts and countesses. There were more than eighty British officers, too, on the guest list, many of whom would play a prominent part in the battles which lay ahead, including the Earl of Uxbridge, Wellington’s deputy; Maj.-Gen. Lord Edward Somerset; Lord Hill; Lt.-Gen. Sir Henry Clinton, and his wife, Lady Susan; Lt.-Col. Lord Saltoun; Sir John Byng; Sir William Ponsonby; Maj.-Gen. Sir Hussey Vivian and Maj.-Gen. Sir James Kempt. They did not know that the room they occupied had more humble origins as the storeroom of a coachbuilder who still owned the rented property, for its rose and trellis wallpaper camouflaged its previous existence from the party-goers, as if their evening’s pleasure was a veneer which could be stripped away.

During the morning of 15 June, there had been rumours in the city that the Emperor had invaded the country. But although there is a dispute about when reports reached Wellington, it seems there was no definite information on which he could rely. A messenger on a good horse would take only three hours to gallop the distance which separated the city from the border. And yet there had been no definite sighting, not even a suggestion of a cloud of dust created by an army on the move. Besides which, the Duke of Wellington needed to keep up appearances: there were too many supporters of Napoleon in the city who resented the yoke of the Dutch rule. It would not do to raise their hopes or give them encouragement, which was why he intended to go to the Duchess of Richmond’s ball.

By mid-afternoon, Wellington knew that there had been an attack, but he could not discern if it was merely sabre-rattling by the Emperor or if a full invasion had been launched. A clash of Prussian and French skirmishers did not tell him anything, for he knew enough of Bonaparte’s brilliance not to be lured into a false move: the attack might simply be a feint, to mask his true intentions. Was Napoleon really heading directly through Charleroi? Or would he attack more centrally, with a strike at Mons? Perhaps further east still, darting between Condé and Tournai? It was impossible to judge. If the Duke was tricked into sending his men to Charleroi, then the road from Mons would lie open. In the end, he thought his army was most vulnerable to an attack on its supply links to the Channel, and so he issued orders for his divisions to gather at their assembly points in readiness for battle, a decision which pulled men away from Brussels, in the opposite direction to where they were needed.

At nightfall, more reports arrived. Wellington learned that the Prussians were mobilising at Sombreffe, against a French push east; he learned too, from the young Prince of Orange, that there had been the sound of gunfire near the border. But still he was unable to calculate the position of the main French force. So he did not commit his men to Quatre Bras, as he should have done, and its strategically vital crossroads remained unguarded.

In the end, given the confusion the day had brought, it was appropriate that the threat of war should finally come to wrap itself, incongruously, around Brussels society as it paraded on the dance floor. For as the guests danced and talked and ate, Lieutenant Henry Webster, of the 9th Light Dragoons, an aide-de-camp to the Prince of Orange, was pounding the road between Braine-le-Comte and Brussels, bearing news of the French advance from Maj.-Gen. Jean-Victor Constant-Rebecque, the incisive chief of staff of the Prince of Orange. ‘I was in my saddle without a second’s delay; and, thanks to a fine moon and two capital horses, had covered the ten miles I had to go within the hour! Such was the crowd of carriages, that I could not well make way through them on horseback; so I abandoned my steed to the first man I could get hold of, and made my way on foot to the porter’s lodge.’ Even so, Webster was forced to wait because the Duchess of Richmond had just given orders for the band to go upstairs, and he was told that if he burst in suddenly it might disturb the ladies. Peering in between the doors he saw two couples on their way to the ballroom, the Duchess of Richmond with the Prince of Orange, and Lady Charlotte Greville on the Duke of Wellington’s arm. Webster slipped quietly into the house to deliver his vital message.

After reading Rebecque’s despatch, Wellington remained at the ball for twenty minutes, then quietly asked his host if there was a good map in the house. The Duke of Richmond took him upstairs into his own dressing-room, and as the two men pored over the chart, the full impact of Napoleon’s lightning strike became clear. It was only now that Wellington realised how disastrously he had miscalculated. Famously, he was said to have declared, ‘Napoleon has humbugged me, by God! He has gained twenty-four hours’ march on me,’ and he ordered men to move to Quatre Bras. ‘But we shall not stop him there,’ Wellington reflected, ‘so, I must fight him here.’ And he put his thumbnail on the map, on the village of Mont St Jean, just south of Waterloo.

Wellington was to say afterwards that this was the first he had heard of Napoleon’s attack on the Prussian outposts. But the Prussians were convinced that Wellington had received news of the attack which they had sent in the afternoon, and that he had broken his promise to support them. Tonight, there would be no help for the Prussians from the Duke of Wellington’s army, and they would come to connect his apparent failure to help them with the terrible defeat they were to suffer the next day. With every minute that went by, and with every mile his men pushed on into Belgium, Napoleon was on his way to victory.

Both armies paid the price for Wellington’s mistake. At the crossroads of Quatre Bras on 16 June the gunfire started at first light. Eight thousand men in the Dutch-Belgian army had spread out in a wide circle, south of the crossroads, facing twenty-eight thousand of the enemy. There were not enough of them to hold the French but there were enough to delay them if Wellington’s men arrived, and their skirmishers were already at work, sniping at enemy forces. But they would have to wait several hours for reinforcements, for Wellington’s orders of the night before were only just beginning to get through to some units, so that new orders which referred to previous orders confused the men who had not received the first set of paperwork. Captain Alexander Cavalié Mercer of the Royal Horse Artillery was told to head for Braine-le Comte: ‘that we were to move forward, then, was certain … but the suddenness of it, and the importance of arriving quickly at the appointed place, rather alarmed me … First, all my officers were absent; secondly, all my country waggons were absent; thirdly, a whole division (one-third of my troop) was absent at Yser-ingen.’ Ensign Edward Macready, who was the brother of a famous actor, William Charles Macready, had lost contact with his regiment, the 30th (Cambridgeshire), which had been billeted in the little town of Soignes, the headquarters of the 3rd British Division. Macready was only seventeen, and had joined the 2nd Battalion of the 30th Foot the previous year as a volunteer, serving in Holland. He kept a private journal of his experiences. That morning he had ridden over to the regiment ‘and pulling up in the market-place, was thunder-struck. Not a soul was stirring. The silence of the tomb reigned where I should have met 10,000 men. I ran into a house and asked, “where are the troops?” “They marched at two this morning,” was the chilling reply.’ If it was a shock for such a young soldier, then soon he was acting like a veteran: by the end of the Battle of Waterloo, such was the casualty rate, he was commanding his own light company.

When Wellington arrived to take charge at Quatre Bras, he was facing a crisis of his own making. Not only were the defending forces in disarray, but he had to fight the battle in a place which was not of his own choosing. The landscape was flat and featureless, its only features a brook which ran parallel to the Nivelles road and the Bossu Wood towards which it meandered, where the Dutch troops had taken shelter. There could be no question of the Duke developing a considered strategy or dictating the pace of events. His army was not yet fully assembled and it would grow incoherently and unpredictably as the hours went by, so that each fresh unit would be flung straight into the fray as soon as it arrived.

Wellington improvised brilliantly to disguise the weakness of his forces and his lack of cavalry. He pushed forward two brigades, to slow down the French advance and to stop the enemy from moving beyond the lake. But his army took heavy casualties. Sergeant James Anton, shrewd and tough, was a Scottish soldier who had joined the 42nd Regiment ten years earlier. Coming from a poor background, and brought up by his mother after his father died when he was still a child, he was so small that he had only been accepted by the Aberdeen militia at his second attempt, by standing on tip-toe. He made up for his lack of inches by being steady under fire: ‘We instantly formed a rallying square; no time for particularity; every man’s piece was loaded, and our enemies approached at full charge; the feet of their horses seemed to tear up the ground. Our skirmishers … fell beneath their lances, and few escaped death or wounds; our brave colonel (Sir Robert Macara) fell at this time, pierced through the chin until the point of the lance reached the brain … Colonel Dick assumed the command … and was severely wounded; Brevet-Major Davidson succeeded, and was mortally wounded; to him succeeded Brevet-Major Campbell. Thus, in a few minutes, we had been placed under four different commanding officers.’

Lt. Frederick Pattison of the 33rd Regiment, who published a short account of his experiences fifty years after the battle, remembered the impact of the French artillery: ‘The destruction was fearful. At this time, Captain Haigh, having moved from the head of his company to encourage the face of the square, fronting the enemy, was cut in two by a cannonball, and poor Arthur Gore’s brains were scattered upon my shako and face.’

Reinforcements again came to Wellington’s rescue, two more Brunswick battalions and the 1st British (Guards) Division led by Maj.-Gen. George Cooke, which moved into the Bossu Wood. For the first time in the battle, Wellington had more men than the French, though he was still short of cavalry, and for the first time, too, he could dictate the pace of events. When his left wing captured the village of Piraumont, to the east, he gambled on a central push against the enemy. The 92nd was sent forward to tackle the French infantry which had occupied a house just east of the Charleroi road, braving the fire which rained down on them from the windows and from behind the hedge which ran from the back of the house. They took severe casualties. At the end of the battle, Lieutenant Robert Winchester of the 92nd – who was wounded at both Quatre Bras and Waterloo – recalled that ‘Sir Thomas Picton, to whose division we belonged, saw the remains of the regiment, and when he enquired what this was, he was told it was the 92nd, on which he asked, “Where is the rest of the regiment?”’ But the 92nd’s bravery was a crucial turning-point, allowing Wellington’s army to push south along both sides of the road. In the space of half an hour, the battle swung decisively towards the Duke, and the Anglo-Allied army recaptured all the ground lost by the Dutch-Belgians in the morning.

But Wellington’s success had been costly. More than two thousand British troops lay dead or wounded. Ensign Robert Batty of the 1st Foot Guards remembered that ‘as we approached the field of action we met constantly waggons full of men, of all the various nations under the Duke’s command, wounded in the most dreadful manner. The sides of the road had a heap of dying and dead, very many of whom were British … too much cannot be said in praise of the division of Guards, the very largest part of whom were young soldiers and volunteers from the militia, who had never been exposed to the fire of an enemy, or witnessed its effects.’ The 32nd had two hundred casualties in its ranks, and the 79th, three hundred; half the 42nd and half the 92nd were dead or wounded, more than five hundred men in all.

It was less than twenty-four hours since the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, and some of the victims were still dressed for the dance. But with their lives, the Duke had bought time, the very commodity which Napoleon had stolen from him by the speed of his invasion. And through fighting a brilliant, instinctive battle he had stopped the two wings of the French army from making a pincer movement on the Prussian army. Now he could now try to retreat to Mont St Jean, the place where he had left the mark of his thumbnail on the map, to make a stand in ground of his own choosing.

But, caught up in his own desperate struggle to survive, Wellington had not sent any troops to help his Prussian allies, deepening their suspicion of his leadership. More than fifteen years later, when he came to make his Model, William Siborne would discover the depth of the distrust in which the two allies held each other. On the Prussian side such feelings were, perhaps, understandable. From the east, there could be heard a faint rumble of thunder, the sound of guns at Ligny. A few miles beyond the horizon, they were dying in their thousands.

On the night of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, as Wellington’s men hurriedly took to the roads towards Quatre Bras, the Prussian army had marched urgently to support its forces which had been chased east by Marshal Grouchy and the right wing of the French army. The next day, as the two sides readied themselves for battle, it became clear that the French had seized the best position: they were on the high ground overlooking Fleurus, while the Prussians had spread out through the villages in the bottom of a valley, from Ligny in the west to Wagnelée in the east, placing them within range of the French artillery.

For seven long hours, in the scorching sun, the two sides waited for battle, the yellow cornfields dazzling their eyes in the harsh summer light. The two armies were evenly matched, some 84,000 Prussians, with 226 guns, against a French army with 78,000 men and 242 guns. Then the French advanced. Their infantry marched in columns towards St Amand, while their artillery launched a fearsome cannonade on Ligny. Their skirmishers spread out quickly in the ground between the villages, fighting for possession of the Ligny stream. Prussian musket-fire rattled out from the loopholes cut into the walls of every house on the front line, from hedges and orchards and from behind stone walls, but still the French pressed forward, and soon the village of St Amand fell. When Pirch, the leader of the Prussian 2nd Corps, sent his men out from Bry to counterattack, they were slaughtered by French artillery, or destroyed by musket-fire. Each time the Prussians, bravely, wrested the shattered buildings on the front-line from the French, superior enemy firepower rained down on them and forced them back. The fiercest fighting was at Ligny, where the bodies were piled up in doorways and alleys, and where the cobbled road ran with blood.

As they fought, the Prussians hoped that Wellington might come to their rescue, but he was too hard pressed at the crossroads of Quatre Bras. The French, too, were hoping for support from General d’Erlon, commanding I Corps, but because of a communication breakdown, he had spent fruitless hours galloping between the battlefields of Quatre Bras and Ligny in utter confusion as to whether he should be fighting the Anglo-Allied army or the Prussians. By crossing the River Sambre so swiftly, Napoleon had achieved his aim of dividing the two armies so that he might tackle each in turn. The irony was that a tactic intended to give him a greater chance of success, had also, in effect, divided his own army, reducing his chances of a quick victory.

But even without d’Erlon, the French were winning the battle. By nightfall, the Prussian defences could hold out no longer. They were short of ammunition while Napoleon had ten thousand men in reserve, and now they swarmed forward towards Ligny, forcing the Prussians to retreat. For Blücher, staring at defeat, there was only one response he could make: he would attack, heroically, and go down fighting with his men. He ordered his cavalry to form into line and led the charge himself, on the fine stallion which had been a present from the Prince Regent of England. A shot rang out, tearing into the horse’s flank, and suddenly Blücher was falling, pitching forward onto the ground, the horse on top of him. Then darkness: he remembered nothing more. It was left to Blücher’s deputy, his chief of staff, Lt.-Gen. August von Gneisenau, to signal the retreat.

It was a long, dark night of confusion for the shattered Prussian forces, their only solace the fact that the French were too exhausted from their efforts to pursue them through the dark. Men were scattered across the countryside in no formation, and the Prussian commanders had to try to round them up, to create order out of chaos. The plan was to make for Tilly but this was changed after the intervention of Lt.-Col. Ludwig von Reiche, the chief of staff of I Corps, who noted that, although it was almost dark, he could see that the place was not marked on his map. He realised that, if other officers had the same map, there would be confusion, so he proposed that another town further back, but on the same line of march, should be named as the assembly point. ‘I found that Wavre was just such a place.’

The Prussians had failed to hold their own against Napoleon, and, separated by miles of countryside, they could not easily link up with the Anglo-Allied army. But the distance between the allies was not just a physical separation, for it reflected too the gap between the two armies’ thinking, and the ambiguous relationship they had forged. Gneisenau was a leading critic of the Duke, and had previously accused him of being a ‘master in the art of duplicity’ because of his ability to ‘outwit the Nabobs’ during his time in India. Now he thought Wellington had reneged upon a commitment to send help to the Prussians at Ligny, and he blamed the Duke for the defeat. He recorded bitterly that ‘on the 16th of June in the morning the Duke of Wellington promised to be at Quatre Bras at 10 o’clock with 20,000 men … on the strength of these arrangements and promises we decided to fight the battle.’ Gneisenau, so long as he remained in charge, would not offer any further help.

Fifteen years later, William Siborne came to realise that the distrust still ran deep, and that it was mutual. Wellington claimed that the Prussians had been defeated because they had chosen the wrong position. ‘I told the Prussian officers that according to my judgement, the exposure of the advanced columns and, indeed, the whole army to cannonade was not prudent. The marshy banks of the stream made it out of their power to cross and attack the French, while the latter had it in their power to cannonade them, and shatter them to pieces, after which they might fall upon them by the bridges at the villages. However, they seemed to think they knew best, so I came away very shortly. It all fell out exactly as I had feared …’ There was no reflection that he, himself, might have precipitated their problems through the late deployment of his troops.

That night, the two armies were fighting a common enemy whose aim was to divide them. And they were falling into the trap.

While the French were masters of the battlefield, there was still hope for the Anglo-Allied forces. Napoleon was fearful that the Prussians were regrouping and so he decided he could not throw the weight of his full army against Wellington’s forces, lest the two enemies encircle him. And in doing so he let his enemies off the hook.

It was not until midday the next day, 17 June, that Grouchy received orders to follow the Prussians north. He then sent out cavalry to try to find out where the Prussians had gone and whether they had managed to reassemble as one force. By then it was nearly too late. Grouchy was unsure, he told his Emperor by messenger, of the location of the Prussians, though he thought, correctly, that they must have taken the road to Wavre. But he also thought, wrongly, that some of their army had moved even further east, so he divided his forces for the chase. By now, however, the weather had turned against the attacking army, clouding over and raining hard, making reconnaissance impossible.

And, by a miracle, Blücher was not dead. He had been carried from the field of battle to survive an ordeal which would have killed a lesser man. Gneisenau found him propped up on a camp bed in some farm buildings at the village of Mellery, north of Ligny. His right shoulder was very sore, and he smelled strongly of the medicaments which had been rubbed into his bruises, including brandy, gin, rhubarb and garlic. A British liaison officer, Sir Henry Hardinge, later to be Secretary at War, witnessed a fierce debate between the two men, as Blücher resisted pressure to resign because of his injuries. With firsthand experience of fighting Napoleon, he saw his old adversary as the enemy, and not the Anglo-Allied army. He told Hardinge ‘he should be quite satisfied if in conjunction with the Duke of Wellington he was able now to defeat his old enemy.’ Gneisenau, having successfully led the retreat of the exhausted troops, had to cede command to his Field-Marshal and his British ally. At Quatre Bras, Wellington finally learned what had happened to the Prussians, an event witnessed by Captain George Bowles of the Coldstream Guards: ‘The Duke of Wellington came to me and said he was surprised to have heard nothing of Blücher. At length a staff-officer arrived, his horse covered with foam, and whispered to the Duke, who without the least change of countenance gave him some orders and dismissed him. He then turned round to me and said, “Old Blücher has had a damned good licking and gone back to Wavre, eighteen miles. As he has gone back we must go back too. I suppose in England they will say we have been licked. I can’t help it; as they are gone back, we must go too.”’ The need to withdraw to safer ground was urgent. There would be no repeat of the tactical mess and barren terrain he had inherited at the crossroads.

In retreat, Wellington showed his strategic brilliance, ensuring that all four main routes into Brussels would be blocked by his army. It was a manoeuvre that was witnessed by Lieutenant Basil Jackson. Jackson was one of the longest-surviving Waterloo veterans, dying in 1889 at the age of ninety-four. The son of a major, he had entered military college in 1808, from where he was transferred to the Royal Staff Corps, where he was taught engineering, and the duties of the Quartermaster-General’s department. With this background, he could appreciate the organisational skill of Wellington’s retreat: he remembered that ‘the first intimation that the army was about to retire was the getting in of the wounded; troopers were sent to the front, who placed such disabled men as could manage to sit, on their horses, they themselves rendering support on foot. At times a poor fellow might be seen toppling from side to side, requiring two men to keep him on his seat; the horses moving gently, as if conscious that their motions were torturing the suffering riders. Some again required to be carried in a blanket, so that every man with life in him was in one way or another brought in and sent to the rear. It was about mid-day ere this important duty was completed, and the troops then began to move off by brigades …’ The men who had fought for Quatre Bras were to pull back along the main Charleroi highway, with their retreat covered by cavalry and horse artillery, and about two battalions of light troops, led by Lt.-Gen. Henry William Paget, the Earl of Uxbridge. Behind their shield, some 46,000 men would attempt to slip away by the road north, to fight another day. Invaluably, for three hours, their protection was not needed, and Wellington’s men were eight miles up the road before the French attacked the crossroads they had left. It was just as well, for the retreat was a logistical nightmare. The entire centre column of artillery and two brigades of heavy cavalry, with the 7th Hussars and 23rd Light Dragoons, the smallest light dragoon regiment, in the rearguard, had to cross a small river by the narrow bridge at Genappe.

Only when the truth dawned on Napoleon that Wellington’s army had escaped, did he give the order to advance. Manning a gun battery at the crossroads, Captain Mercer was in effective charge of the gunners, drivers and horses of ‘G’ troop of the Royal Horse Artillery. He saw the enemy silhouetted against the horizon as the sky darkened threateningly overhead. Mercer was thirty-two, and he had been brought up in a military family. His father had been a general in the

Royal Engineers, and he had already spent half his life in the army: after training at the military academy in Woolwich, he was commissioned at sixteen, serving in Ireland after the rebellion and, in 1808, he had joined Lt.-Gen. John Whitelocke’s ill-fated expedition to Buenos Aires, part of an ambitious, even absurd, attempt to seize the Spanish colonies of South America. But Mercer was a far more rounded individual than his background suggests: he had a quizzical view of life that enabled him to see the occasional eccentricities of military service and he enjoyed painting and writing, which he did in a descriptive, even poetic, vein. On this night, he wrote, ‘large isolated masses of thundercloud, of the deepest, almost inky black hung suspended over us, involving our position in deep and gloomy obscurity; whilst the distant hill lately occupied by the French army still lay bathed in brilliant sunshine.’ Heavy rain started to fall, and the ditches on either side of the road filled with water. Blinding flashes of lightning followed clap after clap of thunder. Uxbridge ordered Mercer to fire a round at the advancing French, then retreat as quickly as possible. ‘We galloped for our lives through the storm,’ wrote Mercer. ‘Retreat now became imperative. The order was given, and away we went, helter-skelter – guns, gun-detachments, and hussars, all mixed pele-mele, going like mad, and covering each other with mud, to be washed off by the rain, which, before sufficiently heavy, now came down again as it had done at first in splashes instead of drops, soaking us anew to the skin … The obscurity caused by the splashing of the rain was such, that at one period I could not distinguish objects more than a few yards distant. Of course we lost sight of our pursuers altogether, and the shouts and halloos, even laughter, they had first sent forth were either silenced or drowned in the uproar of the elements and the noise of our too rapid retreat … In this state we gained the bridge of Genappe.’

At Genappe, Uxbridge halted to make a stand against his pursuers. ‘Squadron after squadron appeared on the hill we had passed, and took up their positions, forming a long line parallel to ours,’ Mercer recalled. The French lancers moved into the town, their flanks protected by houses on either side. The 7th Hussars charged at them, but failed to make any impact, so Uxbridge sent in the heavy cavalry, the 1st Life Guards, the senior regiment, which smashed into the enemy, trapping it in the narrow streets. The rocket division sent missiles flying towards the French army, causing them to desert their gun batteries in alarm as the rockets spluttered and sparked and burst overhead. But the missiles, though spectacular, were notoriously inaccurate and Mercer noted that none of them ever followed the same course ‘whilst some actually turned back upon ourselves – and one of these, following me like a squib until its shell exploded, actually put me in more danger than the fire of the enemy throughout the day.’ Uxbridge thought that his cavalry had deployed ‘beautifully’ but the ground was so heavy from the downpour that the horses were quickly exhausted and he ordered their retreat. And still it rained.

The Mont St Jean ridge, chosen by Wellington as the ground on which he would make his stand after the retreat from Quatre Bras, was a defensive line in the exact image of Torres Vedras of the Peninsula, a natural fortification, a barrier against which, he hoped, the enemy forces would throw themselves and be wrecked in the process. The difference, however, was that the Portugal campaign had been long and drawn-out, a trial of patience and delay. This next battle would be warfare at its rawest and most concentrated, conflict distilled into a single day, as if Wellington and Napoleon had conspired to boil down the military art into its ultimate, bloody essence.

‘I had never yet heard of a battle in which everybody was killed,’ thought Lt. John Kincaid of the 95th Rifles. ‘But this seemed likely to be an exception.’

But there was still hope. An hour before midnight, on the night before the battle, the terms of the deal between the two armies which faced Napoleon were finally sealed. Blücher, at Wavre, received full details of the Anglo-Allied army’s position, and heard Wellington’s request for the assistance of one corps. ‘Gneisenau has given in,’ Blücher told the British officer waiting for a reply. ‘We are going to join the Duke.’ He promised to lead the troops himself against the enemy’s right flank as soon as Napoleon made any move against the Duke. The two armies would cooperate after all.

But the day ahead would stretch their fragile trust to breaking-point. William Siborne would find that it had still not been repaired when he came to make his Model.

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