by Tim Clayton
While some 10,000 of the less enthusiastic conscripts had taken the opportunity to run away during the night, the hard core of the Prussian troops were just about as resolute as their commander. ‘Towards daybreak everything was again in movement and after covering several miles, all the troops bivouacked near the town of Wavre, where Blücher had his main headquarters,’ wrote Ludwig Nagel of the Freikorps. ‘We were defeated, we knew that; but far from looking upon ourselves as beaten, all of us were filled with a steadfast spirit, full of unshaken confidence in ourselves and the coming day, and we spoke a good deal with each other.’8 Blücher reached Wavre before the rain started and spent the afternoon resting on a couch at his headquarters in an inn in the marketplace. On the way he had ridden with his men on the horse he had borrowed from the lancer, asking them, ‘Are you tired yet?’ When they answered ‘No!’ he responded ‘Will you fight the French tomorrow?’ To which the men roared ‘Yes! Hurrah!’9 Ziethen’s corps had taken particularly terrible losses – more than a third of them dead, wounded or missing, and some of the Rhineland militia had melted away – but the men that remained were obstinately determined.10
Two regiments of hussars and a battery of horse artillery acted as rearguard, taking position about three miles north of the battlefield, to the east of the village of Mellery, and sending out patrols in all directions. A trustworthy member of the general staff remained with them equipped with a telescope to send back frequent reports on French movements for, to his surprise, they had not been pursued.11
In the morning General Thielmann received orders from Gneisenau to take his corps to a village just beyond Wavre, and Thielmann was able to give reassurances that he at least had his artillery park and ammunition with him and that his corps was still in fighting trim. Thielmann concerted his movement with Bülow so that he left Gembloux around ten and moved slightly north-east to a better defensive position, north of the river Orneau and just south of Bülow’s camp on the Roman road. He left there at 1 p.m., following Bülow north and then taking a different route. III Corps thereby overtook IV Corps, which became the rearguard. The Prussians had thus achieved a managed withdrawal which would enable them to re-enter the struggle.
Nevertheless, the disappearance of the artillery park was a serious issue. Each brigade had a column which carried spare ammunition not only for the artillery, but also for the infantry and cavalry, in twenty to thirty wagons. In each infantry brigade column at full strength there would be six caissons of 6-pounder ammunition, six of 7-pounder howitzer shells, twelve small arms ammunition wagons, two supply wagons and one containing tools and spare parts. Thus, there were huge numbers of these wagons – about 200 for each corps – and they were commanded by inexperienced junior officers, who might well have panicked. During the battle the wagon train had been grouped in a large park north of Sombreffe and Mazy, but they had moved off early and nobody knew where they had gone. If all of it had been captured, two of their four corps would be unable to fight.
36
No Time to Lose
Napoleon and Ney’s wing, 17 June, 8 a.m.–1 p.m.
As darkness fell, Ney wrote a brief report to Napoleon. It told the Emperor that the departure of d’Erlon’s corps had robbed Ney of victory, although it revealed remarkably little about how many enemy troops he had been fighting and what the current situation was. Then he settled down to supper. Charles de Forbin-Janson of Soult’s staff was invited to join Ney, Prince Jérôme and his aide, who were seated around a table consisting of planks resting on empty barrels, lit by candles stuck in the necks of bottles, feasting on black bread and saucisson.1
Ney’s men were also hungry, as their provision wagons had fled in the panic caused by the flight of Kellermann’s cuirassiers and rations arrived very late. So the soldiers went off marauding and some, like Lieutenant Jacques Martin, did well. The 45th bivouacked near a village and his grenadiers brought in sheep, pigs, calves and even bullocks ‘until in the end it was more like a fair-ground than a camp; we made them drive most of them back’. Corporal Louis Canler, a future chief of police, was less fortunate, and his squad found that every house or barn to which they went had already been ransacked.2 The French army then slept, occupying the houses and barns of Frasnes and the wood of Delhutte, while the fresh troops of d’Erlon’s corps provided outposts and sentries.
Napoleon later complained that he had known little about what happened at Quatre Bras until Count Flahaut reported to him in the early morning, but he was probably lying. It was certainly the case that neither Ney’s report nor Reille’s, which Ney sent on, said anything about the strength and disposition of Wellington’s army, which was careless, but it seems that Soult was not kept entirely in ignorance of Ney’s predicament: Forbin-Janson claimed to have reported at 3 a.m. that Ney faced Wellington’s entire army and that it would attack him in the morning and, what is more, the terms in which Soult wrote to Ney at 8 a.m. confirm that he had indeed considered such a report. He did not act on it instantly because neither he nor Napoleon believed it.
Napoleon still thought that Ney was exaggerating the threat he faced at Quatre Bras, and that if Wellington really had been there he would have retreated during the night after hearing of Blücher’s defeat. He never dreamed that Wellington’s own communications might have failed and that the Prussian retreat might have left the other allied army exposed.
Ney in his turn was also to complain that he had not been told what had happened at Ligny. At 8 a.m., which was already far too late in the day, Soult wrote to Ney claiming that he believed he had already told him that the Emperor had defeated the Prussians. Soult announced that the English could not possibly act against Ney since the Emperor was on the Namur–Quatre Bras road. If there really was an English army in front of him he was to tell Napoleon immediately and Napoleon would attack them from the east while Ney attacked from in front. If he merely faced an English rearguard he was to attack it and take position at Quatre Bras. If there was nobody there to attack, he was to occupy the crossroads and replenish ammunition, reorganise his troops and rest his men.3
Napoleon has received much criticism for wasting time on the morning of 17 June and his staff certainly took far too long to establish what was going on. However, most of his troops were in no condition to fight instantly. Like the Prussians, they had expended their ammunition, and the artillery train had been at Charleroi the previous day. Vandamme and Gérard’s infantry and artillery could do little without more ammunition, and the same was true of Reille’s corps whose baggage drivers had fled.
While waiting for information to come in and ammunition wagons to arrive, Napoleon rode off to inspect the battlefield, leaving Soult at headquarters. The battlefield at Ligny was shocking. Among the smouldering ruins of the villages bodies were piled high, with wounded men trapped among them, some burned, some trampled or mangled by artillery wheels. Napoleon had to wait a quarter of an hour for enough corpses to be shifted to clear a path into Saint-Amand, and he was deeply moved by the carnage he saw in the villages; Forbin-Janson, who accompanied him, wrote that in the narrow lanes their horses had to trample over the bodies. Napoleon was an emotional man and genuinely pitied those broken in pursuit of glory. It was something for which he liked to be noted – his compassion on the battlefield was the subject of a famous painting by Antoine Gros, showing the Emperor in the aftermath of the bloody battle of Eylau fought in the snow in 1807 – and he felt it important to make a great show of his appreciation of the sacrifice made by his brave troops.
Hippolyte Mauduit of the Old Guard had explored the battlefield in the early morning as sunshine broke through the mist. In Ligny clusters of troops, their faces still black with powder, were camped among the dead; fearful villagers, who had hidden in their cellars, began to creep out. Four thousand bodies were heaped up in an area barely bigger than the familiar gardens of Napoleon’s Tuileries palace. The castle and the houses round it were smoking ruins, while every intact house was full of wounded from both sid
es. The scene at Saint-Amand and La Haye was no better, the cemetery choked with dead bodies, the 82nd Regiment practically wiped out. Mauduit noticed the priest from one of the villages helping carry the wounded to the ambulances, the vivandières giving drinks to the desperately thirsty.4
The French medical services were better organised than those of other armies, but they were not equipped for this. Hector Daure, the Intendant Général, chief of administration and procurement, reported to War Minister Davout that the walking wounded were marching over the border to hospitals in France, but the existing facilities were insufficient, given that more fighting was imminent. If the wet weather continued there would be fever cases, and they needed the hospitals of the nearest military districts expanded immediately and many more surgeons brought in. At headquarters there were only fifteen surgeons, and consequently many of the wounded were not yet bandaged. He wanted 100 surgeons as soon as possible and more hospital staff. He told Soult that he did not yet know the number of wounded, but 1600 had been treated at headquarters and 800 sent on to Charleroi which was now clear and ready for more patients. Seven to eight hundred were waiting for treatment at headquarters, but more were arriving all the time and the carriages were in the field sorting the living from the dead.5
Some of these ‘carriages’ were surgeon Dominique Larrey’s famous ‘flying ambulances’, practical, light covered wagons with a detachable floor that could be used as a stretcher. The word ‘ambulance’ until now had normally signified a field hospital. It was Larrey who revolutionised its meaning to turn the ambulance into the modern fast-moving vehicle equipped to give first aid in the field and then to evacuate victims. Larrey recognised the medical importance of rapid treatment, especially in cases requiring amputation: ‘When a limb is carried away by a ball, by the burst of a grenade, or a bomb, the most prompt amputation is necessary. The least delay endangers the life of the wounded.’ His flying ambulances facilitated rapid treatment, and Larrey tried to introduce a standard whereby amputation took place within twenty-four hours.6
Napoleon had spotted Larrey’s talent and demanded his services for his own army in 1797. In 1801 he appointed him Surgeon General of his Guard, which soon became the Imperial Guard, and he had been with the Emperor ever since. In 1812 he had been in charge of the whole army but when in 1815 Napoleon gave that job to Pierre-François Percy, another remarkable doctor, Larrey felt slighted. ‘I must have Larrey for the Guard and the General Headquarters,’ the Emperor exclaimed. ‘He sulks because he has been replaced by Percy. Go and tell him that he is indispensable and that I count on him.’7 Larrey’s legions of medics and flying ambulances belonged to the Guard, but Percy, surgeon-in-chief, did his best for the rest of the army until at Ligny he fell ill with heart disease. There were ambulances at corps and division level and each regiment had an ambulance caisson with medical supplies. Five field hospitals were established around Fleurus and they were all working furiously.
Meanwhile, the Provost General, Etienne Radet, a policeman who in 1809 had arrested the Pope, had been up all night trying to prevent marauding. He reported persistent pillaging, chiefly by soldiers of the Imperial Guard, who were a law unto themselves. Doors and windows had been broken and things stolen from those caring for the wounded and freely giving food and help to French troops, as well as from locked, isolated houses from which the owners had fled. Radet’s overstretched gendarmerie had been out all night and had arrested numerous Guardsmen, who were all then sprung from prison by force. Radet’s gendarmes had been insulted, threatened and beaten and two of their horses had been stolen. Nevertheless, six patrols of gendarmes were now in the field pursuing another of their duties, rounding up wounded men, prisoners and discarded arms and burying the dead.8
The Prussians were nowhere to be seen when the morning mist cleared and, while medics and gendarmes began to clear the battlefield, the French staff pondered their next move. Receiving a report from General Pajol, who was following a force of Prussians eastward and had captured a battery of enemy guns, Napoleon got the impression that, as he had hoped, the Prussians were in retreat towards Namur.9 Then another message from Ney arrived, having crossed in transit Soult’s order to him:
The enemy presents several columns of infantry and cavalry which seem to be disposed to take the offensive. I shall hold out with the infantry of Count d’Erlon and the cavalry of General Roussel to the last extremity and I hope even to be able to hold the enemy off until his majesty tells me what he intends to do. I shall place Count Reille in a position between us.10
Wellington really was still at Quatre Bras and his army could be crushed! There was no time to lose.
The message had been sent to headquarters at Fleurus, so more time had already been lost before it reached Napoleon as he prowled the field. As soon as he received it, however, the Emperor prepared to attack Wellington. Kicking himself for not having acted earlier, he ordered Grouchy to release Vandamme’s cavalry division under Domon and one of Pajol’s divisions, Subervie’s, to join VI Corps and to send General Milhaud’s corps of cuirassiers to Marbais. He ordered these troops, Lobau’s two fresh infantry divisions and the Imperial Guard to march immediately towards Quatre Bras.
After receiving reports of Prussians around Gembloux as well as on the Namur road, Napoleon gave Marshal Grouchy his marching orders. Leaving behind what little remained of the mortally wounded General Girard’s division to help the hospital staff and the gendarmerie to clear the battlefield, he was to take all of the 30,000 remaining men commanded by Vandamme, Gérard, Exelmans and Pajol to Gembloux. From there he was to scout east towards Namur and north-east towards Maastricht, but to pursue the enemy in order to discover the direction Blücher was really taking, so that the Emperor could work out what the Prussians intended to do. Napoleon emphasised that he wanted to know whether the Prussians were separating from the British, or whether they were trying to reunite with them to fight another battle. He told Grouchy to keep his infantry united and to send cavalry detachments in Napoleon’s direction so as to keep communication easy and open.11
According to Charles de Flahaut, Napoleon’s final words to Grouchy were etched in his memory: ‘Now then, Grouchy, follow up those Prussians, give them a touch of cold steel in their hinder parts, but be sure to keep in communication with me by your left flank.’ Another witness, Prince Jérôme, said that Grouchy objected to his mission until Napoleon concluded angrily, ‘That’s enough! Obey me by being my shield against the Prussians and don’t worry yourself about the English.’12
By taking away much of Grouchy’s cavalry Napoleon had reduced his marshal’s ability to locate, pursue and harass the Prussian army. Presumably, he was gambling on destroying Wellington’s army before the Prussians recovered sufficiently to help him, and Grouchy’s force, composed chiefly of infantry, was designed merely to protect him from the Prussians while he did so. The orders were essentially in accordance with Napoleon’s original plan to place a blocking force at Gembloux and Sombreffe, but with the huge flaw that in reality the direction of the Prussian retreat was not east but north. It should be noted that Napoleon had taken into his calculations the strong possibility that the Prussians might be trying to reunite with Wellington’s army. He was not single-mindedly fixed on the over-optimistic delusion that the Prussians were in full retreat, but he hoped that was the case, and certainly did not expect them to be capable of fighting again in the near future.
As Napoleon waited impatiently for the sound of cannon from Quatre Bras, the heat built up to thirty degrees Celsius and the day became oppressively humid, still and sultry. By noon Napoleon’s vanguard was three miles from Quatre Bras. Soult reiterated his order to Ney to attack Wellington’s army, telling him that Napoleon was ready to support him with an infantry corps and the Guard:
Monsieur le maréchal, the emperor has just placed a corps of infantry and the Imperial Guard your side of Marbais; His Majesty charges me to tell you that it is his intention that you should attack the enemy at
Quatre Bras, to shift them from their position, and that the body at Marbais will support your operations. His Majesty is on his way to Marbais and awaits your reports with impatience.13
The Emperor sent Forbin-Janson off with the message, cracking the joke that the colonel must by now be familiar with the route. When Forbin-Janson reached Frasnes, only about four miles away, he was mobbed by people who wanted to hear about the Emperor’s great victory. He recalled that Ney’s officers suddenly became elated, thinking the conquest of Belgium assured. But Ney still did not launch an attack. His guns remained silent. Lieutenant Jacques Martin of the 45th Regiment wrote that they spent the entire morning in full view of Wellington’s troops, who didn’t fire a single cannon at them; only the skirmishers occasionally exchanged shots. Martin was in constant expectation of the order to advance, but nothing happened.14
Around Marbais, Napoleon’s patrols skirmished with both British and Prussian outposts, and there had been an unfortunate incident in which the Red Lancers of the Guard and d’Erlon’s 7th Hussars mistook each other for the enemy.15 An hour later, a distinctly angry Napoleon, waiting very impatiently to hear some sign of activity from Ney before he launched his own attack, wrote again: ‘I am surprised at your great delay in executing my orders. There is no more time to lose; attack with the greatest impetuosity everything that stands before you. The fate of the patrie is in your hands.’ Without waiting any longer for Ney, the Emperor rode for Quatre Bras at the head of 10,000 horsemen with infantry marching behind.