by Tim Clayton
37
Losing the Scent
Grouchy’s wing, 17 June, 3 a.m.–10 p.m.
Not long after Thielmann’s Prussians left their lines in front of his outposts east of Sombreffe, Lieutenant-General Claude Pajol set off in pursuit. It appears that he was the only French cavalryman to be awake, alert and conscious of what needed doing at three that morning. To the west, the Prussians commanded by Ziethen and Pirch escaped undetected from Vandamme’s sector of the battlefield. He should have followed their rearguard with his cavalry, but he showed no initiative, nor did Gérard, whose cavalry should also have been in motion, and nor did Marshal Grouchy, who was in overall charge. He later claimed that the Emperor left the field without giving him orders and that when he went to Fleurus to find Napoleon he was told he would receive instructions in the morning.1
According to several witnesses, Napoleon had been taken ill that night, although this was not one of the many excuses for the day’s disappointments that he later gave to Gourgaud at Saint Helena. Possibly, he was simply exhausted by a long, tense day, not being as fit as he had once been.2 That indeed was something he did later admit: ‘If I had not been so worn out, I should have been in the saddle all night! What seem very small events often have the greatest consequences,’ he lamented.3 He may have expected the Prussians to remain on the battlefield in order to join Wellington next day and not anticipated that they would retreat, but he had become more reliant on others: Grouchy was supposed to be a gifted cavalry general and should have appreciated the importance of shadowing the Prussians, whether he had orders or not.
Hippolyte de Mauduit of the Guard later attributed Vandamme’s inertia to jealousy of Grouchy, and there is evidence of mutual ill-feeling and distrust, but much of the confusion may have resulted from uncertainty about the command structure.4 It is possible that Grouchy was not sure whether he was still in charge of a wing and still had direct authority over Vandamme and Gérard, since the Emperor had effectively superseded him the previous day. He did not know his officers, was not sure what troops he had, and did not have sufficient staff to help him exert control and communicate with headquarters.
He should have discovered and compensated for the fact that the two French light cavalry divisions concerned – those of Vandamme and Gérard – were both temporarily leaderless: Antoine Maurin of Gérard’s division had been shot in the chest and seriously wounded at the end of the day, and Jean-Siméon Domon of Vandamme’s had also been wounded. Either of these men might have followed Pajol’s example had they been fit; as it was, their incapacity at this crucial moment contributed to an uncharacteristic lethargy in the French cavalry arm that night which was to prove disastrous.5
Whatever the reasons, the only initiative came from Pajol, who had just two regiments of cavalry, for Subervie’s division had been taken from him, and the 1st Hussars, detached on 15 June, had still not returned from Frasnes. Pajol turned east towards Namur. It is not clear whether he had been ordered to go in that direction – according to his aide-de-camp Hubert-François Biot he had tried and failed to obtain orders – or whether he followed troops retreating that way, or rode towards Namur simply because everyone hoped and expected the enemy would retreat eastward. But the fact that he sent an aide to tell Grouchy what he had done implies that he had acted on his own.
The 5th Hussars led the way, accompanied by Biot, and Pajol followed with the 4th Hussars.6 Towards Mazy they caught up with a Prussian horse battery which had become stuck in a traffic jam of fugitives. A squadron of Prussian lancers that tried to defend the guns was brushed aside; killing or driving off the gunners the French captured all eight guns, as well as a large quantity of provisions in a column of baggage wagons from which the horses had already been stolen by fugitives.
Having sent back a report, Pajol rode eastward for seven miles, becoming increasingly uneasy about the apparent absence of large Prussian formations, before he stopped and threw out patrols to scout. Napoleon sent an infantry division from Lobau’s corps to support him, but at midday Pajol reported to Grouchy that the Prussians were moving supplies from Namur north-west towards Louvain and that enemy units were cutting north towards Gembloux, both indications that the Prussians were retreating not east, but north.7 Pajol intended that night to ride northward to cut the road from Namur to Louvain, but requested orders.
Hubert Biot with the 5th Hussars had already ridden north and run into Prussian outposts in a wood just south of Gembloux. Beyond the trees, Biot said, his French scouts saw a huge enemy artillery park stretched out on the plain. It was enormously tempting to attack, but they felt it unwise to cross the forest without infantry support, and so Biot went back to fetch the infantry at Mazy.8 He returned too late, for the wagons soon moved off. This was another huge missed opportunity, indicating what might have been achieved had the French mounted the vigorous pursuit that Gneisenau feared. In the afternoon Pajol lost confidence; receiving no instructions and knowing that the enemy at Gembloux was behind him, he returned to Mazy, although Grouchy assumed that he was astride the road from Namur to Louvain, where he had said he would be. It was yet one more fatal misunderstanding.
Before daybreak on 17 June Grouchy tardily ordered some of his divisions to send out scouts. Patrols of his dragoons also discovered the presence of enemy troops around Gembloux, approaching the town about nine o’clock, in time to see masses of Prussian troops to the north. Joining his patrols, General Exelmans wrote to Grouchy that the enemy army was at Gembloux.9 But Grouchy still did not order Vandamme to send out patrols, while Vandamme did nothing on his own initiative. Falsely assuming that they were with the rest, the French appear in fact to have had no idea where the Pussians on the western half of the battlefield had gone. This was a serious mistake, one that caused Napoleon to miss completely the existence of the column led by Gneisenau and Blücher, and so to mistake the direction of the Prussian retreat when he gave Grouchy his orders to follow the Prussians and shield him from them.
Once Napoleon had sent him to Gembloux, Grouchy should have realised that with Domon and Subervie’s divisions both removed he was short of light cavalry to carry out his tracking mission and should have ordered Pajol to join him at Gembloux; it was evening, however, before he discovered that Pajol was not in front of him to the north-east but behind him at Mazy. Rémy Exelmans was already moaning that his dragoons were exhausted and ill suited to a light cavalry task.10 The only other light cavalry at Grouchy’s disposal were the two light regiments in Maurin’s division, but they were covering the army’s right flank, when in fact most Prussians were not to their east but to their west. But Grouchy failed to deploy any cavalry to scout in that direction or to establish the westward chain of communication with Napoleon’s army that the Emperor had demanded.
Meanwhile it took some time for Vandamme to get moving. Probably this was because he had to wait for ammunition, but by starting off late the French had to march through the worst of the weather. Gérard, whose camp at Ligny was nearer, could have gone ahead, but followed because Vandamme was senior. Vandamme marched from Saint-Amand through Brye and Sombreffe to the crossroads at Point du Jour, just over four miles south-west of Gembloux, reaching there at about three in the afternoon. By that time it was pouring with rain. The road to Gembloux was bad and in boggy areas the heavily laden men were soon thigh-deep in cloying mud. Vandamme reached the town at about 5.30, while Gérard did not get there until ten at night because of the atrocious weather and the increasingly muddy roads.
In the early evening Grouchy wrote from Gembloux to Exelmans – who was at Sauvenières, where Thielmann had spent the late morning – instructing him to send patrols north to Sart-à-Walhain in the direction of Wavre and Brussels, and north-east to Perwez in the direction of Maastricht. But when reporting to Napoleon that night, he remained uncertain about what was going on:
It appears from all reports, that at Sauvenières the Prussians split into two columns: one took the route for Wavre passing through Sart-�
�-Walhain, the other column seems to be heading for Perwez.
One might perhaps infer that a portion is going to join Wellington and that the rest, which is Blücher’s army, is falling back on Liège, another column, with some of the artillery, having retreated via Namur.
General Exelmans has been ordered to push six squadrons this evening towards Sart-à-Walhain and three towards Perwez. When I get his reports, if the main mass of Prussians is retiring on Wavre, I will follow them in that direction so that they can’t reach Brussels and to cut them off from Wellington.
He reported that Thielmann and Bülow had left Gembloux about 10 a.m. (with a lead, therefore, of some twelve hours). The inhabitants told him that the Prussians had admitted to losing about 20,000 men the previous day and Prussian officers had asked them (cunningly intending to mislead pursuers, since the places were all in different directions) the distances to Wavre, Perwez and Hannut.
It is not clear, however, why he thought a Prussian column had gone north-east: perhaps he had misread Pajol’s earlier report, perhaps civilians had deceived him. But it was this phantom column that he chased with his cavalry, ordering both Maurin’s division and Pajol’s to take that direction next day.11 He sent these orders at the same time as he sent the report to Napoleon. On the other hand he ordered his slower troops, the main body of artillery and infantry, led by the dragoons, to march to Sart-à-Walhain on the track of the more westerly Prussians. Having promised Exelmans earlier in the evening that he would have Vandamme on the march at the ‘petit point du jour’, the first hint of light, in fact Grouchy ordered Vandamme to march at a leisurely 6 a.m. and Gérard two hours later.
It was dawning on Grouchy that the Prussians were not going east, as the Emperor had hoped, but north-west. Yet he was slow to grasp the implications. He followed instructions in looking east, but he failed to look west, where he would soon have heard rumours of far more Prussians.
Grouchy’s chief of staff claimed that they had no orders to block Prussian interference with Napoleon’s operations, but Grouchy’s own report of 10 p.m. demonstrated his awareness that he was supposed to prevent the Prussians from joining Wellington.12 As soon as it became clear that Prussians were heading for Wavre, common sense dictated that he should get some cavalry into the space between Wavre and the Emperor’s location. It should also have been clear that in order to do this he had to get a move on. The quality of ‘zeal’, characteristic of the British Royal Navy of the day, was singularly lacking in Grouchy.
Looking back on the campaign with hindsight, Napoleon regretted his appointments, and he was right to do so.13 Had he made Gérard a marshal in April instead of Grouchy, or had he, as he afterwards thought he should have done, given the job to Marshal Suchet, things might have developed differently:
When one looks at results one can commonly perceive what one ought to have done … I ought not to have employed Vandamme. I ought to have given Suchet the command I gave to Grouchy. More vigour and promptness were needed than Grouchy had as a general; he was only good at a splendid charge of cavalry; while Suchet had more fire and knew better my way of making war.
Ultimately, for the French this campaign was to turn on the drive and initiative shown by key subordinates, and in choosing such men the Emperor’s judgement of personality had let him down.
38
Morning at Quatre Bras
17 June, dawn–2 p.m.
Wellington’s army had slept close to its final positions on the battlefield, while new arrivals encamped by regiment beside the roads along which they had approached, all prepared to renew the combat next day. It was a night punctuated by disturbances. Private Clay and a fellow Guardsman, on outpost duty, were surrounded by wounded men crying out for water; being desperately thirsty themselves, Clay’s comrade suggested that he keep watch while Clay went to look for water:
I groped my way about among the sufferers and placed them in as easy a position as I could. Many had fallen in very uneasy postures, and the fact that they were altogether helpless increased their sufferings. Some had fallen with their legs doubled underneath them, others lay with the weight of the dead upon them. Having afforded them all the ease that lay in my power, and as all was quiet around us, I took a camp kettle from off the knapsack of a dead man, wended my way a short distance to the rear of our posts where I had observed the appearance of water when advancing after the enemy on the previous afternoon, and I found a narrow channel of water in a ditch which I traced into the wood. It was from here that our brave comrades of the 1st Guards had driven the enemy in the evening. There was a pond from which I filled my kettle and drank freely from its contents, enjoying it much, whilst in the dark I found my way back to my post where my comrade and the poor sufferers from wounds gladly partook of the contents of the same.
Soon afterwards some movement provoked an outbreak of musketry among the pickets and one of Clay’s company was killed. Just before dawn, when all was quiet, he went off again for water:
On arriving at the pond the light of day just enabled me to see that in and around lay the bodies of those who had fallen in the combat of the evening previous, and the liquid we had partaken of was dyed with their blood. I do not remember whether I returned with a further supply, although I am quite aware that I lost all relish for any more of it.1
About 3 a.m. Wellington rode back from the Roi d’Espagne in Genappe to Quatre Bras. He still had no news of how things stood with Blücher at Ligny. Sir Hussey Vivian, whose hussars had been on outpost duty, had seen no sign of Prussians, so Wellington sent off his aide Sir Alexander Gordon with a further escort of hussars, to find out where they were. Meanwhile, some Gordon Highlanders made Wellington a fire in a hut and after giving orders to make a probing attack on the enemy outposts, he took a short nap.2 Gordon spotted French lookouts on the height above Marbais, which suggested that the road to Sombreffe was held by the enemy, but a peasant directed his patrol along a road he said the Prussians had taken and near Mellery they were challenged by an outpost of the Prussian cavalry rearguard.3
At daybreak fighting broke out between rival pickets around Piraumont. In a fierce skirmish between German light troops and British riflemen and the veteran captain André Ravard’s 13th Light, backed by the 17th Regiment, the French lost 5 killed and 120 wounded, while the allies lost at least 11 killed, 117 wounded and 23 captured. This confirmed to Wellington that the French were still present and moreover determined to hold their ground, but he waited for Gordon to return with news of Blücher’s situation.4
Costello, in the farmhouse of Haute Cense with the wounded, found that ‘the balls kept patting through the doors and windows as we lay there. Such as were able to walk soon started for Brussels; but several of the severely wounded were obliged to be left behind for want of conveyances.’ Those who could carried on walking towards the Brussels road, partly shielded from fire from the skirmish by a hedge, until one of them ‘heard the cries of a child on the other side; on looking over he espied a fine boy, about two or three years of age, by the side of its dead mother, who was still bleeding copiously from a wound in the head, occasioned, most likely, by a random shot from the enemy.’ They took turns to carry the child to Genappe ‘where we found a number of women of our division, one of whom recognised the little fellow, I think she said, as belonging to a soldier of the First Royals.’
Indeed, several accounts indicate that many women followed the army to Quatre Bras. One rifleman married a woman who was badly burned there in the explosion of an ammunition caisson. Meanwhile, although the Guards had supposedly parted from their women near Nivelles, that morning Matthew Clay admired ‘the heroism of the wife of a soldier of the Coldstream Light Company who fearlessly passed over the bodies of the dead, bringing a supply of provisions for her husband and companions in defence of the wood’, and when the baggage train of the 69th was captured later in the day, their women were plundered by the French before being freed.5
Once it was light, search parties began to tr
y to find the dead, beginning with the officers. The early morning ‘was occupied in burying the officers who had been killed and the men made the best use of their time in fitting themselves out with a good kit’ by looting the dead.6 No doubt some of the women were engaged on a similar mission, making the best of the time before the more timid Belgian peasants moved in.
The battlefield had a distinctive, sweet smell, ‘sickening to a degree which can scarcely be imagined. It is a combined effluvium arising from the bodies and from the crushed grass.’ And the sight of it was equally stomach-turning: ‘Many of the slain were shockingly mangled, some of their innards torn out and scattered all over the ground, others with their heads severed from their bodies, the heads lying, a shapeless mass, covered with blood and brains.’ Near Quatre Bras the dead were lying in piles, and cartloads of wounded were setting off for Brussels and Nivelles. A Dutch militiaman watched one such load completed by a Brunswicker who had lost both legs and lay there singing ‘Unser alter Stadtverwalter’. Walking back to his bivouac, he slipped over on another dead Brunswicker’s bowels, which had oozed out of a bullet wound in his stomach.7
Some of the British wounded were lucky enough to be transported from Quatre Bras to Brussels in one of the forty-eight spring carriages of the Royal Waggon Train, directed by a colossus of a man known in the army as ‘Magna Carta’. However, the spring wagons only had capacity for four hundred, so most were piled in carts which frequently broke down through overloading. A unit of the Royal Dragoons, among other cavalry squadrons, was ‘ordered to the inn of Quatre Bras to assist in conveying as many of the wounded men to the rear as were able to bear the motion of a horse, and a considerable number were removed in this manner to the rear of the position at Waterloo, although several that were severely wounded were necessarily left behind.’ The treatment of wounded prisoners was usually generous and humane, at least between the British and the French; both sides recognised that seriously wounded men stood a better chance of surviving treatment by an enemy surgeon than of surviving twenty miles in a cart.8