by Tim Clayton
Officers came from a different class and there was a social chasm between them and their men. There was no prospect of promotion to motivate British soldiers: talent might get you as far as sergeant-major, but commissions had to be bought. ‘When I joined the army,’ wrote Sergeant Tom Morris, ‘I was foolish enough to imagine that by steady good conduct, or some daring act of bravery, I should be fortunate enough to gain a commission; but I very soon discovered the fallacy of this expectation. I certainly have known two or three instances in which commissions have been bestowed as the reward of merit; but such cases are “like angel’s visits, few and far between”.’12
Both commissions and the equipment an officer needed after obtaining one were so expensive that a career as an officer was only open to the wealthier classes and influence tended to limit entry to a circumscribed elite. Most officers came from the landed gentry, often again Irish or Scottish, while officers of the Guards were sometimes titled aristocrats. Some officers took their profession very seriously; others did not. The hard experience of a few years of campaigning was usually required to sort the wheat from the chaff, and this made veteran British units a great deal better than raw ones. Not only had they learned to live and fight as soldiers, but they had usually shed those who one way or another did not pull their weight.
As the troops came in, so also Wellington’s people began to arrive. The two principal staff departments were those of the Adjutant-General, dealing with discipline, arms, ammunition and clothing, and the Quartermaster-General, responsible for movement, quartering, encampment, deployment and equipment. The third department was the commissariat, whose business was to procure and supply food and forage and to provide transport. As Adjutant-General, Wellington got Sir Edward Barnes, who had served on his staff in the Peninsula and had commanded a regiment before that. As Quartermaster-General, he inherited Sir Hudson Lowe, but he quickly made it plain that he wanted his own man.13 He first demanded Sir George Murray, his right-hand man in the Peninsula, but Murray was in America and had not yet received his orders to sail to Belgium. Meanwhile, therefore, he took Murray’s deputy, the newly married Sir William Delancey, who arrived at Brussels in late May and, as it turned out, had little more than a fortnight in which to find his feet.
Nor was Wellington allowed the services of his trusted cavalry commander. Stapleton Cotton, who was reliable rather than brilliant, was not appointed to Wellington’s army. Instead, as second-in-command and cavalry leader he was given the forty-seven-year-old Henry Paget, Earl of Uxbridge, who was brilliant rather than reliable. Uxbridge had commanded the cavalry in Spain under Sir John Moore in 1808, but had then run off with the wife of Wellington’s brother Henry, making him persona non grata with the Wellesley clan, and he had not served with Wellington since. This meant that Uxbridge lacked battlefield experience, but he was highly regarded and new colleagues generally liked working with the flamboyant officer who wore the uniform of his favourite 7th Hussars. Sir Augustus Frazer, the capable and experienced commander of Wellington’s horse artillery since 1813, found Uxbridge agreeably ‘quiet in business and very decided; this is the true way to do much in a little time’. According to Surgeon Gibney of the 15th Hussars, usually a critical witness, ‘it was a universal opinion that his lordship was the first cavalry general in the British army.’14
Rowland, Lord Hill, aged forty-two, commanding II Corps, had been one of Wellington’s generals throughout the Peninsular campaign and, latterly, his second-in-command. In contrast to the Duke, he was loved by the troops, who called him ‘Daddy Hill’, reflecting his well-deserved reputation for kindness and generosity to his men. His admiring aide jotted in his journal that when Hill was ennobled in 1814 he ‘ought to have taken the title of Lord Mountain because he is a great hill’.15
During May twelve crack battalions of veteran Peninsular infantry arrived. Reaching Brussels on 12 May, the first battalion of the 95th Rifles found the French-speaking inhabitants much less friendly than the Flemings; one of their number recalled ‘crowds of natives who were gaping and staring at us. I heard no Vivas, they appeared to treat the whole concern very coolly indeed.’16 The Highland Brigade united at Ghent in mid-May and marched to Brussels on the 28th.
Two of the three Highland battalions, along with other veterans, should have been on their way to fight the Yankees, but had been delayed by bad weather. The 28th North Gloucesters had embarked at Cork for America in January but adverse winds held them there until mid-March, and when they finally sailed, a storm drove them back to harbour the same night. Learning that the war against the United States was over, they marched to Northern Ireland where they heard of Bonaparte’s return and left for Dublin to embark for England. On 10 May they anchored in the Downs, transshipped to transports and sailed to Ostend. Having spent a week at Ghent, they arrived at Brussels on 26 May. Had they all sailed for America in January they might never have made it back in time, and Wellington would have been in a sad plight.
By June Wellington had four battalions of Foot Guards, twenty of line infantry, three light and three rifle battalions, and eight of the King’s German Legion, including two of riflemen. Of these, only four line battalions were seriously inexperienced, while eighteen of the British battalions and all of the German had seen years of proper campaigning.
Cavalry had also trickled in from early April to reinforce the crack squadrons of the King’s German Legion. The German squadrons were large, well disciplined, highly experienced and trusted even by Wellington: the 1st Hussars was regarded as the best cavalry in the army (although they had been brought to strength with former Westphalian soldiers and forty of these had deserted between March and May).17 The others were of mixed quality: the Royal Dragoons and four of the five regiments of light dragoons were highly experienced, the four Hussar regiments less so. Dressed in spectacular uniforms and known as the ‘Glory boys’ or ‘Wellington’s darlings’, the Hussars were a racy lot, favoured by Lord Uxbridge who regarded himself as one of them.18 The Household Cavalry had seen little active service, while the King’s Dragoon Guards, the Scots Greys and the Inniskilling Dragoons were complete novices, the Greys having only one officer who had ever campaigned.
The horse artillery arrived from Britain troop by troop and was gradually re-equipped with more powerful 9-pounder guns. There were new British guns for the Hanoverian troops, too, though the problem there was finding enough men and horses to pull them, as the heavier artillery required eight horses instead of six.19 By June the horse artillery had five troops with 9-pounders, three with 6-pounders, one specialist howitzer battery and one troop armed with 12-pounder Congreve rockets.
Rockets were a British secret weapon, one they had stolen from Indian enemies. After admiring their use by Hyder Ali and Tipoo Sultan, William Congreve researched the technology. Small numbers had been employed in America and at Leipzig. They were, however, still at an experimental stage and Wellington barely tolerated their presence on the battlefield, considering them as dangerous to friend as to foe. When he told the artillery commander, Sir George Wood, that Captain Whinyates’s rocket troop must deploy with 6-pounder guns, Wood replied that this would break Whinyates’s heart. ‘Damn his heart, sir,’ insisted the Duke; ‘let my order be obeyed.’20
In battle, the horse artillery was under the orders of the cavalry commander, but Wood also controlled ten companies of British and Hanoverian foot artillery with 9-pounders and two with 18-pounders, though in June the latter were still struggling to find enough horses and drivers. Wellington had amassed 132 British and Hanoverian guns, excluding the siege train.
Other promised reinforcements appeared too. It was natural that Friedrich Wilhelm, Duke of Brunswick should fight with the British, since his mother was George III’s sister and his own sister Caroline was married (very unhappily) to George III’s son the Prince Regent. Friedrich Wilhelm had been a Prussian officer from 1789 until his father was mortally wounded commanding the Prussian army at Jena. He then inherited Brunswick because
his eldest brother was dead and the next two were mentally retarded, but the French took his duchy from him and made it part of Westphalia. In 1809 he raised a corps to fight with the Austrians and dressed them in black to signify mourning for his dead father and lost duchy. His Black Legion of Vengeance and Death refused to surrender after the Austrian defeat at Wagram and, joined by Wilhelm von Dörnberg, who had led a failed rising in Westphalia, they marched north, briefly liberating Brunswick before marching to the coast, seizing ships and sailing to British Heligoland. Friedrich took his corps to fight for the British in Portugal and Spain, while many of his other male subjects died fighting for the French in Spain and in Russia. The Duke was popular and highly regarded as a soldier and a freedom fighter.
With the exception of a couple of experienced elite battalions, the corps of 6000 infantry, 1000 cavalry and 16 guns that Brunswick brought to Brussels from 15 May was composed of very young men – mere boys – as various British soldiers noted, although they were animated with fierce patriotism and their dedicated Duke trained them hard. One day in May a touring British officer was alarmed to see riflemen posted and on the alert near his road; he thought the fighting must have started, since he could hear shots in the woods. But a sergeant told him that the troops he could see were Brunswickers and that, being inexperienced, the Duke made them behave as if at war, with sentries and outposts set; the firing ‘proceeded from a party practising with their rifles at targets cut in the shape of, and painted to resemble, French soldiers’.21 Many Brunswick officers had also seen years of campaigning with the Duke, so the new recruits slotted into an established structure.
Last to arrive – they did not reach Brussels until June – were very inexperienced contingents of nearly 3000 young soldiers from the Wiesbaden area on the Rhine sent by the Duke of Nassau under General August von Kruse, and a second battalion of Orange-Nassauers from Dillenburg. When added to the Nassovian regiments already with the Netherlands army they took the contingent from the mid-Rhineland and Hesse to over 7000 men.
A wet spring turned to a wet early summer, with a bewildering alternation of hot sun and torrential downpours, but despite repeated rumours and alarms Napoleon didn’t attack, and day by day Wellington became stronger, more confident and better prepared. By early June his army may not have been ‘the most complete machine for its numbers now existing in Europe’, as he had dubbed his Peninsular force, but it was no longer the ‘infamous’ army of early May, however much the Duke might continue to bemoan its inadequacies. The solid British and Hanoverian component at the core of it was very well equipped and for the most part battle-hardened. The other German and Netherlands troops looked fragile, but they were to prove more determined than their sceptical British colleagues expected.
Defensively, Wellington was confident, almost complacent. Between them the allies had nearly 220,000 men and 500 guns, far more than Napoleon could deploy against them, and enough not only to defeat but probably to deter any attack. It was now just a case of waiting for the Austrians and Russians to be ready before launching an invasion of France.
8
Intelligence
In the spring of 1815, acquiring intelligence about the enemy’s intentions was not straightforward. Once war had been declared generals would send cavalry patrols into enemy territory to probe defences and seize prisoners for interrogation, but in this case there had been no declaration of war. With France and the Netherlands at peace, visitors to France required a passport and cavalry patrols that strayed over the border were ushered gently home to their lodgings.
Before an army began a campaign its troops were billeted over areas in which they could be fed and housed conveniently. The position of these ‘cantonments’ was a compromise between strategic and logistical considerations. Cavalry and horse artillery required abundant supplies of fresh grass or hay – forage – for their horses, so Wellington’s were scattered around the villages in the lush meadows of the Dender valley about twenty miles west of Brussels. There, they bought their supplies from the local population and lodged with them in their houses and barns.
While the allies waited to attack France they had to guard against the possibility that France would attack them. Their armies had to defend roughly 150 miles of frontier from Ostend on the sea to Liège in the east. Only for a few miles was the border defined by a river barrier; generally it was open but protected by chains of fortresses on either side of the border, until to the east of Namur the hills and forests of the Ardennes prevented fast movement by invading armies.
Wellington’s troops were disposed to resist a variety of possible French attacks. The general had to guard against a march aimed at severing his communications with the sea at Ostend and Antwerp, and he was especially anxious about a move from Lille to seize Ghent, forty miles to its north-east, to cut the British supply line to Antwerp and sweep down on Brussels from the rear. Napoleon had pulled off such bold moves in the past and some such sudden swoop might make Wellington look as foolish as the Austrian General Mack had at Ulm in 1805, when an Austrian army subsidised by Britain surrendered without even fighting, mesmerised by the speed of French manoeuvre.
To counter such a strike he posted his trusted lieutenant Rowland Hill behind the fortress city of Tournai, on the border opposite Lille, with II Corps. I Corps under the Prince of Orange was placed with its headquarters at Braine-le-Comte, about twenty miles south-west of the capital, to block the most direct route from Paris via the French fortress towns of Valenciennes or Maubeuge to Brussels through the Belgian fortified city of Mons. The reserve was in Brussels itself, where the officers and staff rented houses or rooms. As a consequence of these combined considerations, Wellington’s men were spread over an area fifty miles wide and fifty miles deep.
The Prussians were in a similar situation, guarding a long stretch of border territory to the east of Wellington, with their troops widely distributed to put less pressure on the resources of the local population. The distance from the westernmost Prussian post at the walled town of Binche near Mons to the eastern headquarters at the city of Liège was seventy-four miles. Ludwig Nagel’s Lützow Freikorps had been placed in advance of the main defence line fifteen miles south of Namur near Dinant on a picturesque stretch of the Meuse, where Nagel enjoyed walking on the wooded cliffs over the river and dining in a medieval castle perched on an island.
To discover the enemy’s intentions both sides relied on travellers, deserters and spies. The Duke of Wellington believed his espionage was good. Henri Clarke, duc de Feltre, who had been Minister of War for Napoleon and then for Louis XVIII, had provided the order of battle for the French army in March as well as a stream of information sent by ‘a person of the War Office, upon whom he could depend’. On 16 May Wellington passed on to the Dutch and Prussians an updated account of the strength and disposition of the French army corps as at the beginning of May.1 Further reports emanated from the French king’s brother, the comte d’Artois, who controlled what was thought to be a reliable organisation of royalist agents. Finally, Napoleon’s magnificently duplicitous Minister of Police, Joseph Fouché, duc d’Otranto, claimed in his memoirs to have been in contact with the Duke and to have promised Wellington advance warning of any attack by Napoleon, together with his plan of campaign. After their publication doubt was cast on the authenticity of Fouché’s memoirs, but current opinion is that they are genuine. Although he was well aware that both Fouché and Napoleon wove webs of trickery and deception, Wellington put great faith in his Parisian sources.
During April and May Wellington even entertained high hopes that Bonaparte would be assassinated by republicans during the Champ de Mai ‘and that Bonaparte and his reign would both be put an end to on that day’. Insight into a republican plot might well have come from the old Jacobin Fouché. When nothing happened Wellington laughed it off in public, but the British ambassador said of him that ‘I never saw a fellow so cut down in my life than he was in the morning when he first heard the news.’2
It has been said that Grant recruited a man and a woman as spies and sent them into Paris, and that he himself took up station ‘in advance of the British outposts’, but there is no evidence that Grant really crossed the border into France. He is mentioned only twice in Wellington’s papers. First, on a list obtained on 25 May of the troops commanded by Napoleon’s general Honoré Reille, is an instruction to ‘communicate this to Colonel Grant and let him take an account of the corps in Reille’s army, their strength, commanding officers, & c. Wellington’, which Wellington was unlikely to have written had Grant been under cover in France; second is an incomplete and fairly inaccurate attempt at a detailed French order of battle, signed by Grant and dated Brussels 7 June, indicating that a week before the campaign opened Grant was at headquarters, which was indeed the proper place for a head of intelligence.4 In any case, Scovell and Grant’s main efforts were presumably directed towards planning the coming invasion of France.