by Tim Clayton
About two miles into Belgium Maigrot’s men encountered six hundred Westphalians defending the bridge over the Sambre at Lobbes and drove them across the river to the north bank, towards the church on its steep hill. The Prussians alerted General Steinmetz, who began to call in his outposts and muster his brigade. Not for nothing was Steinmetz commander of the first brigade of the first corps: he was a fearsome, highly decorated fire-eater, a dynamic leader whose reputation was based on his performance defending the fortress of Colberg in 1807 when, though only a captain, he had been chosen by Gneisenau as second-in-command.
The rain had turned to foggy drizzle, and Piré’s dripping cavalry trotted forward until the imposing walled hill town of Thuin loomed out of the mist. After coming under fire Piré called up his horse artillery, and at 4.30 a.m. the first cannon fire boomed out, quickly damaging the church on top of the hill. The defenders were six hundred fusiliers – light infantry – of the 2nd Westphalian Landwehr led by Major von Monsterberg, with orders not to abandon his post prematurely.
Monsterberg’s fusiliers were defending a strong position and it took time to dislodge them. Maigrot’s better-trained veterans stormed up the narrow paths into the upper town, but it took nearly an hour and some sharp street-fighting to make the Westphalians escape eastwards. They had left too late, for the French had already seized the bridge and the Rhinelanders had to run for the woods on the southern bank. More Westphalian fusiliers concealed among the picturesque ruins of the Abbaye d’Aulnes briefly delayed Maigrot’s men, but when Monsterberg emerged from the trees the squadrons of West Prussian dragoons sent to cover his retreat were overwhelmed by Piré’s cavalry and Monsterberg’s men were ridden down. The French cavalry killed 100 fleeing Germans and captured 260.5
Across the river, on the north bank, Steinmetz warned the neighbouring Netherlands light cavalry that he was about to evacuate Binche and Fontaine l’Evêque. He then commenced his pre-planned retreat to Gosselies, a small town about eight miles away and three north of Charleroi.
Further east, in the central French column, Hubert-François Biot, aide-de-camp to Claude Pajol, had joined Domon’s chasseurs-à-cheval, the most advanced scouts of the army, the advance guard of the light cavalry. In the early morning Domon had driven an outpost of white-coated fusiliers into the woods. Three more companies of the 28th Regiment, stationed further back and ordered to retreat, had already reached the bridge at Châtelet, three miles east of Charleroi, but the outpost company was not so lucky. After a few miles of hide and seek in the mist, the 4th Chasseurs spotted the two hundred men as they emerged from the trees and trapped them in a farm close to the Sambre. They defended themselves bravely until Biot sent for a howitzer, on seeing which they surrendered.6 Domon and Biot rode westward with their prisoners back to the main road, whereupon they came under fire from Prussian infantry concealed among the houses and hedges of the village of Marcinelle. Since there was little that cavalry could do to dislodge infantry from such a position, they pulled back, idly watching Prussian cavalry squadrons retiring slowly over the hills on the far side of the river valley.
Charleroi had been built in 1666 to guard the river crossing against the French. To the north, the town was vulnerable, the ground sloping gently upwards through woods, but the fortification was designed to prevent approach from the south. Its citadel stood on top of a steep hill dominating the river, lakes commanded by ramparts obstructed any approach from the west or the east and a fortified ‘Ville Basse’ defended the south side of the river, projecting into swampy water meadows that could be flooded. But the defences of Charleroi had been allowed to decay after the most recent siege in 1794 and, unlike those of the fortresses in Wellington’s sector, they had not been repaired in the last few months. The town, which straggled up the hill between the Ville Basse and the citadel, had rather more than 5000 inhabitants and was rapidly growing thanks to coal. There were factories making cloth and glassware, but coal was the region’s main industry, large quantities being mined from the surrounding woodland. The town’s commerce was aimed towards France and French was the only language spoken there.7
From the village of Marcinelle to the south, a causeway led across the flood plain to the decaying ramparts around the Ville Basse; from here a lane led to a central square lined with trees and opening onto a stone bridge, forty yards long and nine wide, with a wooden parapet, which spanned the broad river. General Pajol rode up to join his aide and sent one of his brigadiers to see if he could ford the Sambre further east and take the bridge from the rear. While Pajol waited, the Prussians pulled out of Marcinelle, anxious that they might be cut off by so many cavalry. When Pajol saw them retreating he launched the 1st Hussars in their distinctive light blue uniforms in a dash across the causeway, but determined volleys from the West Prussian regulars defending the Ville Basse sent the horsemen scurrying back. The brigadier reported (wrongly, in fact) that there was no ford and so Pajol waited for the infantry to catch up. The morning sun was burning off the mist and the day promised to become very hot indeed.
Napoleon was not far behind. He had set up his headquarters at the village of Jamioulx (marked on his map as Jamignou) from where paths led to both Marchiennes and Charleroi, three miles to the north. Grand Marshal Bertrand indicated a halt and the maître d’hôtel, two cooks and a boy got to work, warming pre-prepared food, as the extended entourage caught up with the Emperor’s party. Eventually, General Rogniat appeared with his sappers and seamen and Napoleon followed them to Marcinelle, the elite engineers being the first infantry to arrive.
On the other side of the river, at his headquarters at the Château Puissant, a mere half mile from the Sambre bridge, General Hans von Ziethen had been struggling to assess the extent of the danger. He was woken at the first sound of gunfire and soon after reported to Blücher, twenty miles away at Namur, that ‘since 4.30 there has been cannon fire and now musketry on the right wing; so far we have received no report.’ Between 5 and 6 a.m., judging that I Corps probably faced an attack rather than some inconsequential night alarm, Ziethen’s chief of staff, Ludwig von Reiche, ordered the firing of the alarm cannon, the signal for their troops to take up prearranged defensive positions around Charleroi.8 Otto von Pirch was already deploying his brigade with battalions guarding bridges and the rest in reserve behind Charleroi on the road to Fleurus.
After receiving reports from the front, Ziethen sent a second message to Blücher at 6.30 a.m. to inform him that his outposts had been attacked and that the enemy appeared to be aiming to seize the river crossings at Charleroi. It might have been a good idea to alert Wellington at this point, but he didn’t, cautious of embarrassing himself by issuing a false alarm. He still did not know whether he faced a real attack in force, a dummy attack concealing a main thrust elsewhere, or merely a flare-up between outposts.
At 9 a.m. Blücher received Ziethen’s first message and ordered him to find out all he could about the strength and direction of the French columns. Blücher’s staff were worried that Steinmetz’s evacuation of Binche and Fontaine l’Evêque could have allowed the French to cross the river and strike at Brussels from that direction (thus bypassing Mons and Charleroi); alternatively, they might have crossed the river at Thuin in order to get onto the Roman road leading north-east to Gembloux, which would enable them to outflank the Prussian position at Charleroi. Blücher warned Ziethen, therefore, to keep an eye on Binche and the Roman road. Blücher was anxious to discover the nature of this attack, and whether it was the only one.
Ziethen had recognised the danger that the French might have crossed the river at Thuin, and had ordered Otto von Pirch to establish on which side of the river and by which roads the enemy was advancing. At 8.15 he wrote to Blücher again, saying that the enemy had taken Thuin and was advancing along the left, southern, bank of the Sambre, and that Napoleon was present with his Guard, which suggested that the attack was serious. He advised his chief that he was pulling his brigades back to Gosselies, the town on the high r
oad to Brussels three miles north of Charleroi, and to Gilly, a village on the road from Charleroi to Fleurus.9 He told Blücher that he had informed Wellington of this and had begged Wellington to concentrate near Nivelles.10
By 8.30 the sound of musketry was alarmingly close to Charleroi, and since Ziethen was not to know that the French infantry were lagging behind their cavalry, he had every reason to suppose that the lower town and the bridge would soon fall, in which case it was high time to remove his headquarters to a safer place. Staff hurriedly packed up and got on the road to Fleurus, the streets of Charleroi and the roads out of it, black with wet dust from the region’s coal wagons, becoming clogged with refugees as many of the five thousand inhabitants sought to leave before the town became a battlefield.
The direct route to Brussels was dangerous, since French cavalry might already have crossed the river, so the messenger sent to Wellington might well have chosen the safer, longer route via Fleurus and Point du Jour, or even Fleurus, Gembloux and Wavre; he must moreover have set out in an atmosphere of confusion. And even if he took the direct route, Ziethen’s messenger had thirty-three miles to cover before he could issue the alarm.11
14
The Fall of Charleroi
15 June, 5 a.m.–3 p.m.
As Napoleon’s army surged along the south bank of the Sambre, aiming to seize the bridges at Charleroi, the Anglo-Dutch army to the north of the river was alert to danger but – as the fog and the wet, heavy atmosphere dulled sound to an unusual degree – unaware that anything dramatic was happening. At about 5 a.m. the Prince of Orange rode the fifteen miles from his headquarters at Le Miroir, an inn in the marketplace of Braine-le-Comte, to Jean-Baptiste van Merlen’s headquarters at Saint-Symphorien near Mons. All was quiet around the Dutch outposts, but while the Prince was there he heard some rumour of hostilities – probably a report from the forward vedettes reporting gunfire. As a sensible precaution, given the intelligence predicting a French attack, he ordered Merlen to concentrate his light cavalry division on the road to Mons and General David Chassé to bring together the 6500 infantry of his 3rd Netherlands Division on high ground on the road to Nivelles, dispositions aimed at countering a potential French thrust northward across the river from Thuin. In mid-morning Orange returned to headquarters, informed his chief of staff of his actions, and set off for Brussels where he was engaged to dine with Wellington before attending the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, the highlight of the social week.
At about 9.30 Dörnberg added a postscript to an otherwise unremarkable report to the effect that he had just heard that the Prussians had been attacked. He sent it on to Braine, where its forward progress was delayed because Sir George Berkeley, the British liaison officer, unaware that the Prince had already left for Brussels, kept it to show to the Prince.
In the early afternoon the Netherlands chief of staff, Jean Victor Baron de Constant Rebecque, learned that Steinmetz had been attacked at Thuin, had abandoned Binche and was retreating to Gosselies. All was quiet around Mons. With the Prince absent, responsibility for his army corps devolved upon Constant, but it was better that way. Orange’s appointment had been political – his father had insisted that he should command a corps – and he was young for such a command; his former tutor in contrast was a very capable officer whose presence mitigated the Prince’s inexperience. Constant was a career soldier: son and grandson of Swiss officers in Dutch service, he had escaped from the massacre of the Swiss Guards in Versailles in 1792 and had then fought in the Dutch, Prussian and British armies. About 2 p.m. he forwarded the various messages – including Dörnberg’s, which Berkeley had finally brought over – to Orange at Brussels.
Constant then ordered the Prince’s corps to concentrate ready for action, instructing Hendrik de Perponcher to assemble his first brigade at Nivelles and his second at Quatre Bras, telling the cavalry commander to join Chassé, and warning Generals George Cooke and Karl von Alten, whose British divisions belonged to Orange’s corps, to gather their forces in a state of readiness.1 A messenger alerted the Guards division at Enghien and although Cooke, both brigadiers and most senior staff had already left for the ball at Brussels, their deputies began to summon the troops from their scattered lodgings. The headquarters of Alten’s 3rd Division at Soignies was only four miles away, so messages were quickly relayed to the regiments and Ompteda’s 2nd Brigade was ready by 3 p.m. Sergeant Tom Morris of the 73rd recalled that ‘some of the officers and men were playing at ball against the gable-end of a house in the village’ when an orderly dragoon from General Colin Halkett rode in about 4 p.m. with their marching orders.2
At Brussels the morning passed quietly. An aide bringing a message from Field Marshal Schwarzenburg, the Austrian commander, had arrived together with a Russian general during the night, and Wellington wrote a long letter to the Tsar about their plans to attack France, since the Russians were now ready to cross the Rhine. At 1 p.m. Wellington, still blissfully insouciant, wrote to General Clinton about the renumbering of the British divisions. He remained confident that the apparent threat to Mons was no more than a bluff, and told the Dutch Secretary of State for Belgium, ‘I do not believe that they will attack us, we are very strong’ and that he only intended to move when it became clear what, if anything, the French were up to.3 The Prussian liaison officer at Brussels, Carl von Müffling, sent Dörnberg’s report of the massing of French troops around Maubeuge and Beaumont to Blücher, but reassured him that Wellington’s corps could concentrate very quickly, having concerted plans with Wellington to counter French attacks on either flank.4 There was no sense of any urgent threat.
Ziethen’s second message, announcing a definite attack towards Charleroi, probably reached Prussian headquarters at Namur shortly before 11 a.m. The Prussians took Napoleon’s presence to indicate that this was the main threat. Accordingly, Quartermaster-General Karl von Grolmann ordered Ziethen to hold the French at Fleurus because Blücher intended to concentrate the army to fight in the Ligny position next morning, and told him that headquarters was about to move there. At 11.30 Grolmann ordered Bülow to reach the battlefield area at daybreak tomorrow at the latest, sending the message to Hannut in the belief that Bülow had marched there in accordance with the order sent the previous night. Unfortunately, there had been a serious misunderstanding and IV Corps was still at Liège.
Friedrich von Bülow was a Prussian hero of a stature almost equal to Blücher. He had defended Berlin against Marshal Oudinot, defeated Marshal Ney at the battle of Dennewitz, played a conspicuous part at Leipzig and subsequently visited Britain with the successful allied leaders. At sixty, he was older than the other Prussian corps commanders, and though talented, he was vain and touchy and tended to implement orders only after close scrutiny and modification (Prussian military convention allowed officers more initiative than was countenanced in Britain or France). A pure Prussian aristocrat, he disliked being subordinate to Blücher. Ziethen’s chief of staff, Reiche, thought him ‘truculent, passionate and obstructive’ and Gneisenau simply did not know how to handle him: their strained and prickly relationship was almost to lead to disaster.5 Bülow was senior to Gneisenau and considered Blücher’s Saxon-born henchman an upstart; it was his consciousness of this that had caused Gneisenau to phrase his midnight instruction to march to Hannut so over-politely. Moreover, since it was not signed by Blücher, Bülow had taken this second warning of imminent action as advice from a junior officer and had mistaken or ignored its urgency. His corps was still thirty miles further east than the Prussian staff thought, and Grolmann’s messenger, thinking Bülow’s arrival imminent, compounded the catastrophe by waiting for him at Hannut rather than going to look for him.
At midday Grolmann wrote to Müffling in Brussels to inform him that the French had attacked at dawn towards Charleroi, that the Guard and probably Napoleon were present, that Ziethen was to retreat no further than Fleurus, and that Blücher was concentrating the army at Sombreffe, where he would set up his headquarters, intending
to accept battle next day. He asked Müffling to ‘inform us as soon as possible when and where the Duke of Wellington intends concentrating his forces and what he has decided to do.’ An hour later Blücher wrote to tell his wife: ‘At this moment I have received the report that Bonaparte has engaged my whole outposts. I break up at once and take the field against the enemy. I will accept battle with pleasure.’6
Unaware that the Prussian army was mustering to oppose him, Napoleon emerged from the woods and got his first sight of Charleroi a little before 11 a.m. The sun had broken through the mist and the day was becoming increasingly hot. When they saw General Rogniat’s engineers together with Napoleon, his staff and his escort squadrons, the Prussians in the Basse Ville withdrew across the Sambre, leaving the bridge intact. Rogniat’s sappers and seamen quickly dismantled the barricades the Prussians had constructed and General Pajol crossed the river in pursuit of the retreating enemy.7
Napoleon was welcomed enthusiastically by citizens who preferred the French to the Prussians, and was invited to eat Ziethen’s lunch at the Château Puissant, where his lodgings marshal and palace quartermaster had established his palace. He had reason to be satisfied since, despite unfortunate delays, the Sambre bridges had all been captured intact. Around 1.30 p.m. he rode up to the citadel of Charleroi to check the whereabouts of his other columns, to be told he could get a better view to the west, just outside the Brussels gate at Belle Vue. From the coal pits there the ground cut away steeply to the flood plain, revealing Marchiennes, three miles away, and the Brussels road. Taking a seat outside the miners’ canteen, the stout little man in the famous grey greatcoat and black bicorne surveyed the progress of Reille’s corps, his page supporting his telescope, surrounded by his staff with their plumed hats and his orderly officers in sky blue and silver. Meanwhile, his Young Guard filed down from Vauban’s ramparts and marched past him onto the cobbled main road, throwing up coal dust, cheering loudly. Napoleon snatched some sleep, dozing in the hot sunshine. The first stage had not gone badly, but now there were new decisions to be made. The breakthrough had to be exploited.