by Tim Clayton
Ravard’s sixteen-year survival in the army was unusual. Of the 216 conscripts who joined alongside him in 1799, 24 had been killed in action, 28 had died from illness, 50 had been declared unfit for service and 84 had disappeared in Russia.6 He exemplifies the toughness of the veterans. Having started a poor peasant, he had spent almost his entire adult life in the army and in the process had learned to write fluent French; as one of only three of his fellow conscripts to reach officer rank, he now earned 2000 francs a year. Whereas nearly all officers in Britain bought their commission, three-quarters of Napoleon’s officers had risen through the ranks.
Compared with the Netherlands, Hanoverian and Prussian armies, which contained high proportions of barely trained militia, all of the French units were regular and all had considerable experience of war. On the other hand, many regiments had been reorganised recently and their men were unfamiliar with their officers, whom they did not always trust, for even after Bonaparte ejected known royalists in May 1815, he left behind a good number who deserted during the campaign in June. Regiments brought to strength with drafts of fresh recruits, former prisoners of war or remnants of other shattered units had had little opportunity to train together. In this respect the cavalry was better than the infantry, ‘which could have done with a few months of manoeuvres in which to develop the team spirit that binds soldiers to one another and constitutes the strength of that arm’. There simply wasn’t time to instil the high morale and discipline of the army of 1805.7
The army similarly lacked the cohesion acquired by veteran forces after several years and possessed, to some degree, by the British. Officers did not know one another, generals were unfamiliar with their troops and sometimes with their colleagues, people were uncertain of their duties, of all the skills and routines that came with practice. This was especially the case with the general staff and the staffs of the senior officers. Most of all they had to get used to each other and develop working routines: there was no chance for exercises or any kind of practice. The rawness of the army in this respect was to play a large part in its undoing.
Fear of treachery was widespread and nobody was quite sure who could be trusted. On 25 April General d’Erlon wrote to Marshal Davout, having discovered that the magazine at Lille was distributing dud cartridges. He had the director of artillery there put under surveillance and all regiments were ordered to check their cartridges.8 The soldiers were moreover suspicious of the marshals who had betrayed Napoleon the year before – the kind of treason they referred to as a ragusade, after Marshal Marmont, Duke of Ragusa, who in March 1814 had opened the gates of Paris to the allies instead of defending the city.9
Whether to employ his old marshals and, if so, how to employ them, was a difficult issue. A number were too old to campaign, others were in disgrace and some were needed to cover Napoleon’s back. Although their presence with the field army might have seemed desirable, Napoleon appointed the formidable Marshal Louis Davout to look after affairs in Paris, the superbly efficient Marshal Louis Suchet with VII Corps to command on the Austrian border, where he might need a man with initiative, and the dependable General Jean Rapp with V Corps to defend the north-eastern border, based near Strasbourg.
The Emperor’s single most serious handicap was the absence of Marshal Louis Berthier, who had been his chief of staff and closest military colleague since his first Italian campaign in 1796. Berthier had created the Imperial Staff and had organised every war the Emperor had fought. On campaign he travelled with Napoleon, ate with Napoleon and knew Napoleon’s mind so intimately that he could translate his intentions into orders and supply any detail that the Emperor had omitted in the celerity of his thought.
The sixty-two-year-old Berthier had followed Louis XVIII to Ghent, had then gone to visit his family in Germany and had not returned. In his place Napoleon initially appointed his experienced and capable deputy, François Gédéon Bailly de Monthion, but then he persuaded himself that he needed a marshal in charge and decided to appoint Marshal Soult as major-général, the French title for the chief of staff. Soult’s apparent zeal as war minister to the Bourbons had made him odious to many republicans and Bonapartists and that may be why Napoleon did not give him a field command. Napoleon may still have hoped for Berthier’s return, but Berthier fell to his death from the window of a castle in Bamberg on 1 June. Whether he was murdered by royalists or by Bonapartists, committed suicide or fell by accident has never been resolved.10
Napoleon’s other wartime intimate was also unavailable. Louis Bacler d’Albe was a fellow artillerist who had fought with Bonaparte at the siege of Toulon in 1793 and had been by his side ever since, a longer acquaintance even than that with Berthier. Bacler was Napoleon’s chief topographer, keeper or maker of his maps. His office at the Tuileries opened onto Napoleon’s own room and in the field his tent had always been close to that of the Emperor. They planned campaigns and marches together, employing huge maps spread out on a table with pins with flags stuck into them to mark the current positions of units. Napoleon’s private secretary said that on several occasions he had found the pair stretched out on the table in close study of the map as Bacler explained to the Emperor what the terrain would look like. Now in charge of the topographical department in Paris, Bacler had retired from campaigning, exhausted, in 1813. However, his substitute, General Simon Bernard, was himself a very able topographical engineer.
As it once again strove to rid France of Bourbons and drive back invading tyrants, Napoleon’s army was encouraged to revive the egalitarian ideas of the Revolution. The negative side of this was the reawakening of a revolutionary mood in which noble officers were not to be trusted and in which priests deserved to be looted. This revival of old revolutionary attitudes seems in part to have underlain the poor disciplinary record of the army which would be revealed during the campaign. Discipline in French armies was usually lax when it came to matters like looting, and in this army it was spectacularly poor.
The positive side was enthusiasm for a cause in which, once again, they were clearly fighting for the freedom of France and a world without kings, feudal rights and rich priests. And to reinforce these ideals, on 1 June Napoleon held the ceremony of the Champ de Mai. A throne was set up against the façade of the Ecole Militaire. A covered room, open at the centre to allow the throne to be seen from the Pont d’Iéna, and equipped with benches for 10,000 people, housed deputations from the regions, the electoral colleges and the representatives of the people. The route from the Tuileries Palace to the Pont d’Iéna and the Champ de Mars was lined with 30,000 Imperial Guards and Parisian National Guards, while 300,000 people stood beyond the human hedge to watch. The sun shone for the great set piece and around 10 a.m. all the officials took their places. The Emperor left the Tuileries at eleven and processed to the throne. The acceptance of the new constitution was announced, a Te Deum was sung and a choral mass was celebrated. Then the eagles were blessed and the Emperor took his place on a second, raised throne 200 paces into the Champ de Mars. The colonels of the regiments gathered with the officers of the Imperial and National Guard and they swore their oaths to defend their eagles to the last.
General Claude-Etienne Guyot, commander of the Horse Grenadiers of the Guard and a devoted adherent of the Emperor, was impressed by the good order and calmness in this gathering of innumerable people from every part of France and thought that ‘it must prove to our external enemies and might teach our internal ones that they should despair of again changing the form that the Government wishes to adopt and the chief that France has just chosen once more.’11 The rhetoric of Marshal Soult’s order of the day, meanwhile, matched the inspiring grandeur of the spectacle:
What does this new coalition hope for? Does it want to eject France from the ranks of the nations? Does it want to plunge 28 million Frenchmen into servitude? Has it forgotten that the first league to be formed against our independence contributed to our independence and our glory? A hundred striking victories that some temporary setb
acks and unfortunate circumstances cannot efface, remind it that a free nation led by a GREAT MAN is invincible. Everyone is a soldier in France when national honour and liberty are at stake.
He promised the army a new career of glory, more striking because the enemy was numerous, but nothing beyond the genius of Napoleon or their strength … ‘Napoleon will guide our steps, we will fight for the independence of our beautiful patrie, we are invincible!’12
The Bonapartists were putting a brave face on it. Yet, as he later admitted, even the great man himself was inwardly troubled, his self-confidence dented to the point that he no longer trusted his instinct: ‘I no longer had in me the feeling of ultimate success; my early confidence had gone … I had within me the instinct that things would turn out badly; not that this in any way influenced my decisions or my course of action, to be sure; but I always had that feeling lurking inside me.’13
The Emperor said this long afterwards and there is little evidence of such anxiety at the outset of the campaign. As misfortunes began to occur, however, uncertainty would start gnawing into his self-confidence.
7
The Scum of the Earth
One day in late March 1815 the 51st West Riding light infantry were at Portsmouth having breakfast when the bugle-major came in with the post and the newspaper.
Someone opened it, and glanced his eyes carelessly and coldly 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 – nay, that night at mess, the moment the cloth was removed, the President rose and drank success to old Nap with three times three – our joy was unbounded, and few, I believe, went to bed that night sober.
This unexpected news brought back ‘all the delights of service, novelty, hopes of promotion, and active service’ and flung to the winds ‘the frivolous and dissipated life of a peace-soldier, only to be felt by him who has never felt the delights of a war one’. In less than a week the battalion was off to the Netherlands.1
Not every officer rejoiced at the prospect of renewed fighting, however, and some had become downright cynical. A lieutenant of the Gordon Highlanders, while admitting that others ‘who had friends who could give them an additional hitch up the ladder, or help them to some snug staff situation, were quite delighted on the occasion’, recalled that men like himself ‘who, during the previous contest, had ascended the ladder of promotion at a pace little swifter than that of the snail, viewed the prospect of another interminable contest with no very agreeable feelings’.2
War-weary or keen as mustard, troops were loaded into transports to cross the Channel. The voyage was usually uncomfortable but short. Departure from a relatively distant port like Portsmouth or Cork, combined with adverse winds, could make it much longer and more uncomfortable still, with men hideously seasick for days on end. Assistant surgeon John Haddy James of the Life Guards, a twenty-six-year-old from Exeter, who had qualified as a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1811 in London and then secured an appointment with the Life Guards, ‘had not been on board more than three hours when that vile sensation, seasickness, came upon me. Wrapped in my cloak, I lay upon deck, until the spray obliged me to go below.’ Another surgeon, William Gibney of the 15th Hussars, whose broad-minded view of Bonaparte was noted earlier, passed his voyage discussing with his senior colleague ‘medical subjects and politics; these last leading to an argument for and against the return of Napoleon; my view being that if the French liked to have him as their ruler, they were justified in welcoming his return, and that a Frenchman’s view of war and glory altogether differed from ours’.3
The troop transports had to be small to get over the sandbar to Ostend. The 16th Light Dragoons embarked, said one eye-witness, in ‘small colliers, holding from ten to thirty-five horses each’. Their horses were loose in the hold; others described them as standing on a ballast of beach stones with their backs to the boat’s sides and a manger down the centre to which they were tied. The 16th disembarked ‘by throwing the horses overboard, and then hauling them ashore by a long rope attached to their head-collars’. Sir George Scovell’s groom saw his horses unloaded with swing pulleys, after which the men had to wade out into the water to bring them in. ‘Fancy between 20 and 30 ships discharging a similar cargo to the Scipio’s, [40 horses] all onto the beach – the luggage thrown in all directions, numbers of horses running loose …’ But within an hour and a half the sailors had discharged their cargoes and the transports were sailing back for more.4
From Ostend the infantry marched a mile to the canal head and embarked in barges for the twelve-mile journey to Bruges, while cavalry rode along the towpath of the canal. Sergeant William Wheeler of the 51st West Riding was a Peninsular veteran who had been with his regiment for six years. Wounded at the end of the campaign, he had recently been promoted to sergeant in an experienced battalion brought to strength with many new faces. Bruges was an attractive city and Wheeler found ‘plenty of good grub, gin and tobacco’ there, while the Flemish-speaking inhabitants welcomed him and his companions.
On the other side of town they embarked again and more substantial barges took them the twenty-one miles to Ghent, both legs being much longer by land. The large, regular passenger barges were comfortable – ‘At either end is a cabin, nicely fitted up. In the middle is a kind of public house; on one side an excellent kitchen, on the other larders and storerooms’ – and Wheeler enjoyed his journey: ‘On board the boat it more resembled a party of pleasure than soldiers going in search of the enemy, the social glass and song went round ’til midnight, all was mirth and festivity, then sleep put an end to our carousals.’5
On the news of Bonaparte’s return a British force, resembling as closely as possible Wellington’s Peninsular army, gathered in the region of Brussels. In some respects old-fashioned, the British army was organised on significantly different lines from its continental equivalents. British regiments were organised into battalions theoretically containing 1000 men in ten companies of 100 each, but rarely that strong in reality. A regiment had a first battalion supposedly made up of the best soldiers and junior battalions serving at home in support. When sent to serve abroad, senior battalions were brought up to strength by drafts from the second battalion, and junior battalions by drafts from the militia. The core of experienced veterans, like Wheeler, in a battalion quickly knocked the unfamiliar recruits into shape and gave them confidence.
Unlike the conscripted citizen armies of France and Prussia, the British rank and file was composed of men who had volunteered to enlist for a fixed term of years. Whereas for British seamen service in the navy was obligatory in time of war, Britain’s small army was a mercenary force of professionals who enlisted for a bounty, a princely sum of up to eighteen guineas paid in advance. This incentive attracted what Wellington called ‘the very scum of the earth. People talk of their enlisting from their fine military feeling – all stuff – no such thing. Some of our men enlist from having got bastard children – some for minor offences – many more for drink; but you can hardly conceive such a set brought together, and it is really wonderful that we should have made them the fine set of fellows they are.’6 There was much truth in the Duke’s analysis of his soldiery, but there were also patriotic adventurers of good character in the ranks, and some of these, like Tom Morris, became sergeants – although this was another class of men towards whom Wellington’s attitude was ambivalent: ‘nothing so intelligent, so valuable as English soldiers of that rank, if you could get them sober, which is impossible!’7
Indeed, heavy drinking was normal at all levels of the British army. A surgeon wrote with despair of a convalescent patient who had become ill again – and subsequently died – after he ‘drank Lord Wellington’s health. The extent of this patriotic draught I ascertained to be nearly
one pint of brandy and some quarts of strong Brussels beer, swallowed within three hours in an adjacent brothel, where he had passed the night with a most abandoned crew of Belgian prostitutes.’ The same surgeon described the typical arrival of a wounded British soldier at hospital: ‘They too often come either furious or stupid from intoxication, totally bereft of their necessaries, or with such masses of rags as serve only for fomites of contagion, and often with a female attendant, whose appearance and behaviour are more those of an infuriated bacchanal than a nurse.’8
Soldiers were badly paid and subject to a discipline enforced by corporal punishment that made the floggings inflicted in the navy look gentle. Where 24 lashes was theoretically the legal maximum at sea, the maximum on land was 1200 lashes, and 200 lashes was a commonplace punishment for a minor offence. The official defence, maintained by senior army officers for decades, was that ‘the British Army is raised by voluntary enlistment for bounty, and its ranks are thus unavoidably filled by men of dissipated habits, requiring great restraint, and the enforcement of a very strict discipline.’9
Service in the lower ranks of the armed forces tended, therefore, as Wellington said, to appeal to desperate men from very poor rural areas or those who had a very good reason to disappear from local society. Usually, between 20 and 40 per cent of men in English infantry regiments were Irish and the army also contained a high percentage of Scots.10 Lifeguardsman Thomas Playford, a big, handsome Yorkshire lad, left his south Yorkshire village to join the army at fifteen after getting his schoolmistress pregnant.11 Some of these people turned out well in the rough but comradely society in which they found themselves and grew to like the life.