by Tim Clayton
The new plan required Vandamme to pin the Prussians down and suck in their reserves, while Gérard attacked their right flank and General Girard’s division their left. If these forces proved insufficient then, with the enemy fully committed, Ney would complete their destruction by marching in from the west while the Guard attacked from the east. All Napoleon had to do was to tell Ney that the plan had changed and the new priority was to destroy the Prussians. So he instructed Soult to send another message to Ney, timed at 2 p.m.:
Marshal, the Emperor instructs me to warn you that the enemy has brought together a body [‘corps’] of troops between Sombreffe and Bry, and that at 2.30 Marshal Grouchy will attack it with III and IV Corps.
His Majesty’s intention is that you should also attack what is in front of you, and after having vigorously pushed it back, you should turn back on us to help us envelop the corps of which we have just told you. If this corps has already been broken, then His Majesty will manoeuvre in your direction to hasten the conclusion of your operations.
Inform the Emperor immediately about your dispositions and about what is happening on your front.5
The wording of this message was problematic. Until now, Ney had been reminded repeatedly not to tire troops destined to march on Brussels with ‘false marches’, so an order to march back to Ligny implied strongly that the Emperor now thought that the ‘corps’ – or ‘body’ (the French word is ambiguous) – might in fact amount to an army. But that Soult did not tell Ney that an all-out effort was required at Ligny in order to annihilate the Prussian army indicates continued uncertainty about the real strength and determination of the Prussians in front. Since Soult also said that if they beat the Prussians quickly they would march to Quatre Bras, Ney had no real reason to conclude that his intervention was needed urgently, or that the plan to march on Brussels had been abandoned. Naturally, Napoleon assumed that as Ney only faced a few battalions he could choose his course of action.
Depending on their route, Napoleon’s messengers had six to eight miles to ride to Frasnes. Then they had to find Ney, who would be somewhere further forward. It would take them more than an hour to deliver the order: if Ney were to receive it towards 3.30 p.m., he might arrive two or three hours later.
Behind Vandamme’s corps the French army was still marching forward in snake-like columns. Edouard Milhaud’s 3500 cuirassiers halted close to Fleurus. The infantry of the Imperial Guard emerged from the town about 2 p.m. and took position beneath the Naveau mill, with the Young Guard in front, then the chasseurs and grenadiers. The heavy cavalry of the Guard were to the right rear of the grenadiers.6 Without its light cavalry the Imperial Guard was 18,600 strong. Excluding Lobau’s corps, which was still at the crossroads near Charleroi, Napoleon’s force totalled about 65,000 men and 232 guns, nearly 20,000 fewer than the actual number of Prussians.7
Like the other troops, the Guards were wearing greatcoats and they were sweltering hot. Sergeant Hippolyte de Mauduit of the 1st Grenadiers recalled that as they marched, ‘an overwhelming dust enveloped us like a thick cloud, making it difficult to draw breath. The heat became stifling, there was no hint of a breeze to refresh the face, the sun was beating straight down.’ They piled their muskets and lay in the rye, hanging cloths to shade them from the glare. Some old grenadiers had fought in the campaign of 1794 and one even got an old map out of his pack, over which the veterans discussed the battle of Fleurus and explained it to youngsters like Mauduit.8
The French had formed up beyond effective cannon range of the Prussians. Vandamme’s 17,500 men took their positions in front of Fleurus opposite Saint-Amand, with Jean-Baptiste Girard’s division, 4600 strong, to their left, facing Saint-Amand-la-Haye. Grouchy’s cavalry was already out ahead on the right sweeping two miles of ground to the east of Napoleon’s windmill. Antoine Maurin’s division were to the west of the village of Boignée, and further right Rémy Exelmans’ 3300 dragoons and Claude Pajol’s 2400 light cavalry were sending patrols to the east of the village of Balâtre.
The first attack was to be launched by General Etienne-Nicolas Lefol’s division, 4700 strong, against Saint-Amand. In preparation for the assault, Lefol, an ardent republican, harangued his men, talking them to a pitch of excitement and enthusiasm. Then they formed up, looking across the ripening rye, baking in the heat, at the steeple of Saint-Amand church, almost hidden by the willows and orchards that gave the sleepy village the appearance of a wood.
At half past two the church clock chimed in Saint-Amand, the artillery of the Imperial Guard fired three shots – the traditional signal for battle to commence – and the skirmishers of the 15th light infantry trotted forward, fanning out into the corn. Behind them strode the battalion columns of Lefol’s three line regiments, sweating beneath grey greatcoats and heavy packs, led by Lefol in person. The 23rd Regiment had a band, as regiments whose colonels were wealthy generally did, with a bandmaster and brightly dressed musicians playing clarinets, flutes, hautboys, bassoons, horns, serpents and cymbals to supplement the drum-major, drummers and fifers of the field music. Some of the musicians might be as young as fourteen, for the enfants de troupe, orphans of soldiers and vivandières or blanchisseuses, could draw pay in the band from that age and might serve unofficially as fifers, although they could not be drummers until they were sixteen and strong enough.9
As they led the battalions into battle, the musicians played Le Chant du Départ, the old republican song about the defeat of foreign tyrants. ‘La Victoire en chantant’, it began, and it rose to an inspiring chorus:
The Republic calls us; we must know how to conquer or to die,
a Frenchman must live for her, for her a Frenchman would die.
23
Ney Attacks the Netherlanders
Quatre Bras, 16 June, 1.15–3.30 p.m.
Napoleon, having assessed the strength of the Prussian force in front of Fleurus, had accordingly changed his plan. Meanwhile Marshal Ney, seven miles to the west at the village of Frasnes, had been impatiently awaiting the arrival of enough of Reille’s men from Gosselies to enable him to launch an attack on the battalions that were blocking the road to Brussels at Quatre Bras.
Reille joined Ney on the high ground above Frasnes at 1.15. Hidden behind them to their right in the trees of the vast Bois Delhutte they had only General Bachelu’s 5000 infantry, the comte de Piré’s 1700 cavalry and fourteen guns, together with the 2000 Guard light cavalry and their twelve guns.1 Neyobeyed his instructions not to tire the Guard cavalry unnecessarily, but he employed their artillery.2 While he and Reille waited for the 5300 infantry and eight guns of General Foy’s division, they tried to assess what was in front of them.
Ney now feared that his operation would not be the pushover that he had anticipated, for things had changed since he had told Napoleon that he thought it would be easy to brush aside the opposition. Around noon a member of Lobau’s staff had spoken to several senior officers and had then questioned deserters; they had estimated enemy strength at up to 20,000 men – a huge increase on the 3000 thought to be there earlier, and many more than the 6500 actually present at that time. Presumably a deserter had warned that reinforcements were expected or cavalry patrols had watched Picton’s columns approaching. But, recalling from his Peninsular experience Wellington’s habit of concealing his troops, Reille was also anxious about what might be hidden in the Bois de Bossu.3
Looming to the west of the road to Brussels as Ney looked northward, the Bois de Bossu was a large wood capable of concealing thousands of troops. For more than half a mile, close to Quatre Bras, the wood was within five hundred yards of the chaussée, a nasty prospect if guns were hidden at its edge. A path from Frasnes ran past the farm of Grand Pierrepont, which was held by enemy skirmishers, and then through the wood to the village of Houtain-le-Val on the main road to Nivelles. To the east of the Brussels highway the ground ahead was open, rolling slightly, with marshy streams in the low areas. The fields were planted with wheat, rye and clover. These crops conce
aled stealthy movement and provided magnificent cover for skirmishers: The wheat stood five foot high and here, as elsewhere in Belgium, the rye was astonishingly tall. Recently a British cavalry officer had written home, amazed that ‘we rode through some rye that was high enough to conceal one on horseback: I brought home a root of it & found one stalk measure seven feet nine inches and this was by no means uncommon.’ Another had remarked that ‘The rye is now standing 7 feet high, the barley up to my chin.’4
About a mile to Ney’s right was the village of Piraumont and beyond it a lake; beyond them was the other cobbled road, running south-east from Quatre Bras towards Sombreffe and Namur. Behind the French generals to the east the Bois Delhutte, in which most of Ney’s troops were hidden, extended almost to Piraumont in the north and for over a mile southward to Villers Perwin; it was more than half a mile wide and cut off from sight the area in which Napoleon was operating.
General Maximilien Foy was a hardened fighter, a doughty adversary of the British in Spain, and a staunch republican whose promotion had been delayed by his principled opposition to Bonaparte’s seizure of individual power. As soon as he arrived with his division, taking French infantry strength to 10,300, Ney insisted on an immediate attack, whatever the risk might be. About 2 p.m. Maigrot’s light infantry stormed out of the wood towards Piraumont and drove away the skirmishing Jägers from the high ground to the west of the village where Ney placed his artillery. Finding Piraumont empty, the 2nd Light Regiment occupied it to secure the army’s right flank.
The Prince of Orange meanwhile now had a complete division united at Quatre Bras, although they were thinly spread, pretending to be stronger than they really were. On the right, Saxe-Weimar’s Nassauers lined the Bois de Bossu, with a strong reserve behind the wood towards Houtain-le-Val, supported by two guns. On the left General Bijlandt’s brigade of Netherlanders occupied the main road and the farm of Gémioncourt, with a second line in support behind Quatre Bras and the wood. The Dutch Jägers had outposts concealed in the seven-foot rye, observing a broad area to the east. Two 6-pounders and one howitzer were on the Charleroi highway with another gun and another howitzer to their right. The remaining three guns of the battery that Captain Bijleveld had withdrawn from Frasnes the previous evening had been placed on the eastern flank, in an effort to command the road to Namur. Six guns of the newly arrived battery were in reserve at Quatre Bras. When Maigrot’s light infantry pushed forward the Jägers fell back to the hedges along the stream that ran past Gémioncourt, with their elite companies in the buildings.5
About this time the staff at Quatre Bras received very disturbing news. In the early morning General Pierre Durutte’s chief of staff and principal aide had ridden from their camp near Jumet towards Nivelles in order to desert to the enemy. Having surrendered to a Netherlands light cavalry patrol, General Durutte’s chief of staff revealed that coming up the Brussels road towards Quatre Bras were eight divisions of infantry and four of cavalry amounting to nearly 50,000 men, commanded by Marshal Ney.6 While Napoleon might still attack Nivelles, all indications now pointed to an attack up the main road to Brussels, in which case they would soon be overwhelmed. The Prince dispatched all his aides to summon reinforcements to Quatre Bras as fast as possible.
Thousands of heavily laden allied troops were already converging on the crossroads at Quatre Bras. Just after 2 p.m. a messenger summoned Picton’s weary division, who were refreshing themselves two and a half miles away. ‘The day was oppressively warm, and the road very dusty,’ recalled Sergeant Robertson of the Gordon Highlanders. ‘We moved on slowly till we reached the village of Geneppe [sic], where the inhabitants had large tubs filled with water standing at the doors, ready for us, of which we stood in great need. They told us that a French patrole had been there that morning.’ Picton’s men overtook the Brunswickers, who were resting in the shade. The Duke of Brunswick told his men to load their guns and follow: ‘Children,’ he said, calmly puffing on his pipe, ‘let us charge the weapons quickly!’7
On the high ground above Nivelles, Alten’s Anglo-Hanoverians had recognised small arms fire and their three generals, Alten, Halkett and Kielmansegge, had ridden eastward to investigate when one of the Prince’s aides met them and ordered them to hasten to Quatre Bras. Halkett turned back to summon the men who, halted in a clover field, had just started cooking, so they threw their meat away or packed it half-cooked and marched off with artillery leading the column. They left Christian von Ompteda’s brigade behind in case the French attacked Nivelles.
General Cooke had marched the British Guards division towards Nivelles on his own initiative, for Orange’s earlier messenger had somehow failed to find him. He halted his men just short of the town in burning heat and dust and the companies sent out parties for water, expecting to spend the night there, but at 3 p.m. one of Orange’s aides found them and begged Cooke to make an immediate forced march to Quatre Bras. Private Matthew Clay of the 3rd Guards was nineteen; a native of the Nottinghamshire village of Blidworth, he had enlisted in the local militia in 1813 before transferring to the light company of the Scots Guards. He recalled:
The men whose wives had followed us to our halting ground were permitted to take farewell of them. They were ordered to the rear, and going a short distance away from the throng in the open field were joined by others who delivered to them for security their watches and various other small articles which they held in esteem. Others whose families were absent desired that their expressions of affection might be communicated to their absent wives and families. The parting embrace, although short, was sincere, affectionate and expressed with deep emotions of grief as their state of widowhood had suddenly come upon them, while the loud thunder of the destructive cannon was sounding in their ears.8
Meanwhile, to the south, Jérôme’s division of 6600 men with sixteen guns was approaching Frasnes; behind it d’Erlon’s corps, nearly 20,000 strong, complete, rested and fed, was marching north from Gosselies to reinforce Marshal Ney.
Ney’s attack developed methodically: a brigade of lancers protected the right flank while Bachelu’s light infantry pushed forward to the east, one of Foy’s brigades marched straight up the cobbled road towards Brussels and the Guard cavalry probed the left flank.9 Foy’s advance was designed to draw fire, in order to reveal the positions of enemy artillery. Orange obliged by calling forward his second battery of guns into the front line.
Excellent artillery was a traditional strength of French armies. They began with counter-battery fire, designed to destroy or drive away the enemy’s guns. Thirty-four French guns opposed Orange’s sixteen, and the Netherlanders lost the duel. The French gave Bijleveld’s battery such a pounding that it limbered up and withdrew half a mile, before shifting the full weight of their fire onto the other battery, disabling two guns and forcing the remaining four back to Bijleveld’s new position. When these guns opened fire again the French quickly ranged in on them and their commander was killed by a cannonball. A gun had to be left behind when they fell back hurriedly to Quatre Bras.
The young Prince sent the 5th Militia forward up the chaussée with the 7th line battalion to their right, to take position between Gémioncourt and the wood, west of the Jägers, holding the strongest defensive line available. Gémioncourt was a sturdily built dairy farm of which the oldest part was medieval, with hedged gardens and orchards on three sides of it and a stream fifty yards to the north. The edge of the Bossu wood was about 400 yards west of it and the marshy stream rose at the edge of the wood, trickling eastward under a bridge to feed the Etang de Materne, a lake three hundred yards long and one to two hundred wide, close to the Namur road. Orange was unwilling to retreat without a fight, but with the Dutch artillery driven back, the French guns pounded his infantry with impunity. The militiamen were inexperienced – of 454 men raised in Arnhem only 19 had ever seen action before – and they almost cracked under the barrage.10
A mile to the east squads of Colonel Maigrot’s 2300 light infantry trotted i
n loose order towards the hamlet of Thyle and the Bois des Censes, to the north of the Namur road, turning the Netherlanders’ left flank. At the same time three battalions of the 4th Light Regiment, over a thousand strong, marched up the road to Gémioncourt and stormed the farm. Foy’s other brigade drove the Nassauers on the western flank back from the farm of Grand Pierrepont towards the Bossu wood.
The militiamen now gathered in a mass on the chaussée under fire from Gémioncourt. They defended themselves against successive squadrons of chasseurs-à-cheval, who then veered away towards the 7th line battalion, causing them to run back into the wood. When the cavalry fell back to reorganise, the Prince of Orange ordered a counter-attack, pushing his Jägers forward against Gémioncourt and ordering the 5th Militia back up the main road.
It was at this juncture that the Duke of Wellington returned to Quatre Bras, having had to detour northward from the road for the last mile in order to avoid snipers. He would later claim to have arrived before the fighting started, but it is difficult to see how his party could have ridden sufficiently fast. The scene was utterly different from when he left: a major French attack was in progress and he could see instantly that it threatened to overwhelm the young Netherlanders defending the crossroads, who were on the brink of disaster. Where was his army? Wellington looked anxiously north and was relieved to see that clouds of dust announced the imminent appearance of Sir Thomas Picton and his steady veterans.