by Tim Clayton
It is not surprising that from an early stage historians sought to supplement the official records with accounts by individuals and these were soon very plentiful. Only on the French side was there a degree of reticence; accounts from Wellington’s army were plentiful. This kind of ‘oral history’ was not to the Duke’s taste and the very idea of ‘history from the bottom up’ would have appalled him, although he identified the pitfalls of such accounts correctly enough: they are unreliable, sometimes ill-informed, sometimes sensational, sometimes deliberately mendacious, often exaggerated and frequently self-glorifying or self-justifying.
These problems with the stories told by participants were compounded by the market for them: the Napoleonic wars turned the war memoir into a saleable literary genre, and as a by-product fictional or semi-fictional biographies and serialised accounts began to appear. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish the factual from the fictional: the narrative of a genuine participant may be dressed up with invented detail, while a fictional narrative may be based on the composite experiences of real participants so well observed as to be as valuable as a genuine memoir.14
Given these difficulties, it is only by piecing together as many fragments of evidence as possible, while interrogating each of them in order to discover what impression they might have been seeking to convey, that anything resembling the true pattern of events can be reconstructed. The most extraordinary thing about this extraordinary campaign, given that it came to be studied in such detail, is that so much of what happened still remains unknown. How both sides failed to bring their full force to the battlefield on 16 June has provoked enduring controversy and each phase of the battle on 18 June remains contentious.
In recent years a number of diligent researchers have made readily available for the first time a vast number of new first-hand accounts as well as official reports and statistics from British and European archives. Important among these are the publication of most previously unpublished letters to Siborne and (to date) five volumes of letters, journals and memoirs relating to the Waterloo campaign, by Gareth Glover. This source is supplemented (and sometimes duplicated) by at least 250 accounts published online by 1815 Limited and in volumes devoted to the Netherlands and Hanoverian forces. I wanted to use the fresh insights afforded by this significant body of new material to reconsider the various controversies that bedevil the story of the Waterloo campaign. With many new revelations to take into account, and details that influence interpretation, I have re-examined the early primary and secondary sources, stripping back as far as possible the layers of later legend to try to rediscover the true sequence of events. This task was facilitated by the recent digitisation of many rare and otherwise inaccessible books as well as maps and prints. I have also benefited from the efforts of Pierre de Wit to unravel the details of each army’s progress on his website, where he has published most of the surviving orders and reports in their original languages. Many other web-based studies also contributed significantly to research.
I have taken the opportunity to incorporate all the new material into a detailed and authoritative account of the campaign that seeks to bring out all the elements of luck, judgement, planning, accident and weather that combined to decide the outcome.
New accounts affect the interpretation of almost every familiar element in the campaign: the difficulties encountered by Napoleon on 15 and 16 June; Wellington’s spies and intelligence; the delayed concentration of his army and his commitment to help the Prussians; the reasons for d’Erlon’s failure to contribute to either battle on 16 June; and Wellington’s retreat in the rain on 17 June. The impact of new insight is most appreciable wherever German troops were fighting with Wellington’s army: a great deal is revealed about the fighting in and around Hougoumont, and especially about the collapse of the centre of Wellington’s line at Waterloo. Waterloo itself was a narrow victory but if things had gone only a fraction better for Napoleon on the first and second day of the four, there would have been no battle to give us its name. The battle alone is at most half the story.
I have tried to get into the minds of the commanders as their plans changed on contact or unravelled in the smoke and confusion, or as the pouring rain ruined a rapid forced march. I wanted to explain the significance of each new revelation, each unfortunate blunder, as the generals thought their way through the fog of battle from moment to moment. In conveying a sense of the discomfort, fear, hunger, and hideous wounds suffered by those who took part, and in describing the anxieties and motivations of generals and common soldiers of all the nations involved in the campaign, I hope to give a vivid impression of what it was like to be there. Fresh material has allowed me to describe the previously overlooked participation of Hanoverians, Brunswickers and Nassauers much more fully. I have sought to offer glimpses of the lives and mentalities of participants from all nations and social backgrounds, to provide a flavour of this rich and vibrant period, its dramatic politics and its colourful fashions.
I have sought too to give the view of all sides and to offer a fair account of the part played by all national contingents – although, this book being an English-language publication, most attention is paid to the British. I hope I shall not offend national sensibility by robbing British troops of the superhuman qualities with which some authors have endowed them in the past, by allowing other nations a greater share of credit for the victory than they have sometimes been given and by attempting to account for the love felt by French and even foreign soldiers for Napoleon.
This book was designed to be not only a full and thorough account of the Waterloo campaign, but also to convey a sense of the realities of Napoleonic warfare to the general reader who comes fresh to the subject. My aim is to provide sufficient detail to satisfy those who are already familiar with Napoleonic warfare without straining the patience of those who are not. This is a difficult trick to pull off and I beg indulgence from all sides, but this is why I have avoided naming every officer, unit and place.
The sequence of events that followed Napoleon’s sudden and unexpected invasion of Belgium is crucial to an understanding of why the famous battle of Waterloo turned out as it did. Indeed, Napoleon’s best chance of beating the allied armies came not on 18 June but on 16 June. Consequently, this book describes in detail the three days of marching and fighting that preceded Waterloo, including the less celebrated but vitally important and bloody encounters at Ligny and Quatre Bras, and gives a much briefer account of the fourth battle, fought simultaneously with Waterloo, a few miles away at Wavre between the Prussian rearguard and a detachment of troops commanded by Marshal Grouchy. I have given only a brief summary of the action that followed Waterloo.
Before describing the four-day campaign, I have tried to lay out some of the historical, military and cultural background to it. For more than twenty years following the French Revolution, Europe had been in a state of near constant warfare. For the last fifteen years world events had been dominated by Napoleon Bonaparte, the Corsican artillery officer who had made himself Emperor of France, forged a reputation as the greatest general of modern times and proceeded to redraw the map of Europe to his own design. In 1814 the combined might of all the other European powers had finally defeated Napoleon. He had been forced to abdicate and accept exile as ruler of the tiny island of Elba off the coast of Italy. Everybody celebrated the general peace. King Louis XVIII had been restored to the French throne, but in France the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy was not universally popular and many mourned the passing of the Republic or yearned for the return of the Emperor. Nevertheless the last thing that people expected, least of all the rulers of the victorious Great Powers, was that suddenly, early the following spring, Napoleon would have the temerity to invade France at the head of the army of Elba, a force of a thousand men.
PART I
Preparations
1
The Violet Season
The violet was Napoleon’s flower. The Empress Josephine wore them at her wedding an
d Napoleon’s second, Austrian wife, Marie Louise, cultivated them too. Before he left for exile as ruler of the island of Elba in April 1814, Napoleon promised his supporters that he would return in the violet season. They displayed their secret allegiance by wearing bouquets of artificial violets instead of the proscribed tricolour cockade of the Empire. Friends were identified by the question ‘Aimez-vous la violette?’; a Bonapartist answered not ‘Oui’ but ‘Eh bien?’, to which the response was ‘Elle reparaîtra au printemps.’ They drank to the return of Corporal Violet and prints were published in which the silhouettes of Napoleon, his wife and son could be discovered, concealed in a pot of violets.1
Nobody expected Napoleon to fulfil his promise the very next spring but on 26 February 1815 he left Elba. Two days later, the horrified British commissioner discovered that Bonaparte’s little fleet had sailed away while he had been visiting his Italian mistress on the mainland. He alerted the nearest ports, Livorno and Genoa, expecting the former Emperor to head for Italy, but instead Napoleon landed on the French coast near Cannes, where his soldiers camped on the beach while the mayor, François Poulle, sought out bread, meat, post horses and wagons. Bonaparte’s army consisted of 551 grenadiers of his Old Guard, 94 Polish lancers and 301 voltigeurs Corses (Corsican light infantry), in a total expeditionary force of 1026.2
Napoleon led his band by night into the mountains, along what is still known as the ‘Route Napoléon’. Marching at their famous fast pace the Old Guard reached Grasse next morning and then raced for Sisteron, a hundred miles from Cannes, whose citadel, guarding the bridge over the Durance, presented the only serious obstacle to their progress. The governor put up no resistance when their advance guard seized the bridge in the middle of the night, and their march continued another thirty miles to Gap, where the townspeople, in their enthusiasm, raised a liberty tree and sang revolutionary songs.3
At 11 a.m. on 5 March the Bourbon court learned of the invasion. Courtiers laughed, confident that Bonaparte’s robber band would be rounded up and hanged, but Louis XVIII foresaw a new revolution in the news. He sent for his minister of war, Jean de Dieu Soult, formerly one of Napoleon’s marshals, who ordered the regiments quartered in the Alpine foothills to arrest the renegade’s progress. It looked simple: Fitzroy Somerset, twenty-six-year-old military secretary to the Duke of Wellington and acting British ambassador to France, reported to his brother the Duke of Beaufort, ‘Preparations are making to get rid of the monster and I hope to god they will kill him.’4
On 7 March a battalion of the 5th Regiment of the Line barred the road to Grenoble at the village of Laffrey. Followed by generals Antoine Drouot, Henri Bertrand and Pierre Cambronne, his companions in exile, Napoleon walked calmly towards them, then stopped, threw open his familiar grey greatcoat, and shouted, ‘Soldiers of the Fifth – you recognise me. If there is one among you who wishes to kill his Emperor, I am here.’ Nobody pulled a trigger; instead, with shouts of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ they threw away their white Bourbon cockades and ran forward to embrace the men of the Imperial Guard.
The same day a second regiment joined his cause, led to him this time by its colonel. Charles de la Bédoyère assembled the 7th Regiment to more cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ and, after a brief consultation with his officers, marched them south to double Napoleon’s force. The Emperor made La Bédoyère an imperial aide-de-camp, his first task to write a proclamation from the 7th Regiment to the army in general, inviting them to join the cause.
Soldiers barely needed such prompting. Napoleon’s little army of 3000, now 190 miles from Cannes, halted outside the barred gates of Grenoble, an artillery arsenal defended by 5000 men, only until La Bédoyère strode to the gatehouse and shouted to those within to join Napoleon. They too responded with a resounding chorus of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ When the governor delayed opening the gates, the townsfolk brought up wooden beams to smash them apart; they sang the Marseillaise as Napoleon left. The march north-west became a series of triumphal entries and when the king’s brother, the comte d’Artois, arrived at Lyons on 9 March to defend the second city of France, he found it in turbulent insurrection against royal rule; he fled north while the garrison marched south to join the Emperor, whose army was now 12,000 strong.
Soult summoned the great hero Marshal Ney to Paris. The son of a cooper, the red-headed Michel Ney was a revolutionary who had become a key supporter of Napoleon, making a reputation as the brave des braves (bravest of the brave), the hero of rearguard actions against the Russians in 1812, before he had helped to force him to abdicate. Ney left Paris with Artois’ son, the duc de Berry, declaring to the king that he would bring back Napoleon ‘dead or alive in an iron cage’.
When Ney reached his troops at Lons-le-Saulnier his call for loyalty to the king was answered by murmurs of discontent. Learning that Lyons and other cities had declared for Bonaparte, Ney reached the conclusion that a new revolution was what the nation wanted and when, on 14 March, the time came to march against Napoleon, he surprised his closest aides by changing sides. Instead of delivering a rousing speech in support of the French king, Ney commenced his harangue, ‘The cause of the Bourbons is lost for ever … Liberty has triumphed finally, and Napoleon, our august Emperor, will consolidate it for ever … Vive l’Empereur!’ His regiments joined Napoleon at Auxerre four days later.5
‘The English who had flock’d to Paris are flocking back again, & say that the Troops at Calais & Boulogne are not to be depended on & are crying out Vive l’Empereur,’ wrote Lady Lucas, the blue-stocking granddaughter of a former Lord Chancellor whose cousin and nephew were in government, on 16 March. Half-pay officers were recalled to Paris wondering what would happen, but events moved fast. One such officer, André Ravard, arrived too late to witness the climactic scenes which were described to him, as he wrote to his brother:
I think I said to you when I left you that I had no idea whether I was on my way to serve the king or the emperor; you will know now that it is the latter. On the 19th of this month the king reviewed the troops that were in Paris to the number of about sixty thousand men. He asked that those who would volunteer to defend him should step forward. About 150 of them stepped forward. At that, the king, seeing himself abandoned by all his soldiers, decided on the night of the 19th to the 20th to leave with his whole household for England …
In essence, the report was true: the elite regiments had marched off to Fontainebleau to welcome Bonaparte and the National Guard refused to fight for Louis XVIII, who left the Tuileries soon after midnight and fled to Belgium.6
By the middle of the next day, a British diplomat remarked, ‘The King’s pictures, which the day before had ornamented the shops, gave place to pictures of Bonaparte. The white ribbon disappeared, and the red, and in some cases the tricolour, usurped the place of it.’ More than five hundred unemployed officers, recalled to Paris by the Bourbons to fight the usurper, now declared for Napoleon and, led by General Exelmans, marched on the Tuileries, taking control after negotiation with the National Guard. A tricolour flag rose over the palace. As the news spread, Bonapartists sporting bouquets of freshly picked violets gathered to celebrate at the Café Montansier in the Palais Royal.7
That afternoon Napoleon’s sisters-in-law, Julie Clary and Hortense Beauharnais, began to redecorate. They found that in the throne room the blue carpet that used to buzz with Napoleonic bees was now a vast field of fleurs-de-lys, but one of their ladies noticed that a lily had a loose edge. ‘She tore it, and soon the bee was revealed. All the ladies set to work, and in less than half an hour, amid shouts of joyous laughter from the whole company, the carpet became an imperial one again.’ Meanwhile, gradually, the entrance hall filled with unemployed officers until at nine o’clock a huge shout of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ rang out and Napoleon entered the Tuileries to wild acclamation, ‘literally carried in triumph by generals Lobau, Exelmans and others’ up the grand staircase. Bonaparte was back.8
On the Belgian border chasseurs-à-cheval, light cavalr
ymen formerly of the Imperial Guard, haunted the cafés, waiting impatiently for the next newspaper. ‘The first were sarcastic and insolent. They said: The Corsican Ogre has landed. The next, Bonaparte the Usurper is marching on Grenoble. The third lot: General Bonaparte has entered Grenoble. The fourth bunch: Napoléon Bonaparte has entered Lyon. The closer he got to the capital, the less colourful their epithets.’ For two days no newspapers arrived at the cafés, then, late in the afternoon of 21 March, one came: the impatient chasseurs learned that The Emperor had left Lyons and was marching on Paris; finally, next day, The Emperor Napoleon had made his entry into Paris on 20 March. ‘We hugged each other in the cafés, in the streets, in the squares, we sang, we danced, the whole place went crazy.’
Soldiers from ordinary regiments were equally pleased. Lieutenant Jacques Martin had spent a tedious six months with the 45th Regiment at the northern fortress of Condé, where the troops celebrated wildly. Martin, a volunteer from Geneva aged only twenty but already a veteran of bitter campaigning, was devoted to Napoleon. In 1813 he had swum the swollen Elster to escape capture after the French defeat at Leipzig, and he was keen for a rematch at slightly better odds. Corporal Louis Canler’s battalion of the 28th had left Saint-Omer, near Calais, to ‘fight the usurper’, as their royalist colonel put it. Canler was the son of a soldier: brought up as an enfant de troupe, he had joined the 28th in 1811 at the age of fourteen as a drummer, for each company was allowed two children of this age and Canler had already learned to play the drum. Two years later he was a proper soldier; promoted to corporal, he helped to defend Antwerp against the allies. Now his regiment was marching against their hero, but having reached Béthune they were sent back to Saint-Omer, and in the evening they learned that Napoleon was at Paris. ‘All the windows were illuminated spontaneously, as if by enchantment, and a real party began, celebrated to cries of “Vive l’Empereur!”’9