by Tim Clayton
Ludwig Nagel of Lützow’s Freikorps became a poet and author and was director of the Gymnasium at Cleves. The European liberals who had fought to overturn Bonaparte’s tyranny were bitterly disappointed by the reactionary policies of the regimes that took power after Waterloo. The hopes of Freikorps intellectuals for German unity and a more liberal society were dashed by measures suppressing the freedom of the press and banning demonstrations. Their black, red and gold uniform was adopted for the flag of federal Germany but it was many years before their dreams were realised. On returning to Berlin, volunteer rifleman Franz Lieber joined a student union opposed to the Prussian monarchy and was refused admission to Berlin University. He studied at Jena until his identity was discovered, and then fought in the Greek war of independence, but on returning to Prussia was imprisoned. He fled to England and then to America where, after a spell in Carolina, he became a professor of history and political science at Columbia University. He was influential in formulating Republican Party ideology before the American Civil War and his Lieber Code of legal guidelines for the Union army formed the basis for the first laws of war.
Major Georg Bäring transferred from the Legion to the Hanoverian army, where he rose to the rank of lieutenant-general and was made a Freiherr by William IV, King of Britain and Hanover, on the seventeenth anniversary of the battle. Friedrich Lindau was awarded the Guelphic Medal for his courage at La Haye Sainte; this carried a pension and he got another for the wound he had suffered at Vitoria in 1813. He returned to Hamelin, his home town, married twice and had nine children. He resumed his career as a shoemaker but did not prosper and was struggling when his reminiscences were published in 1846.
The young Nassau officer, Heinrich von Gagern, studied law at Heidelberg, Göttingen and Jena, and began a legal career in Hesse, but as a liberal he opposed the unconstitutional nature of the state and was ejected from state service in 1833. He was propelled back into power by the revolution of 1848, when he was elected president of the German National Assembly, thus becoming the first Reichspräsident, though the Assembly’s attempt to create a united Germany failed and Gagern resigned after a year in office.
The Prince of Orange married the youngest sister of the Emperor Alexander, got an heir in 1817, but was blackmailed over ‘unnatural and shameful lusts’ in 1819. When trouble brewed up in Belgium in 1830, the Prince, who, being affable and conciliatory, was relatively popular there, tried to broker an agreement but his deal was rejected by his father and his army was defeated in the campaign of 1831 that won Belgium independence. He succeeded his father as King William II in 1840 and produced a liberal constitution that staved off revolution in 1848.
In defiance of the terms of the capitulation negotiated by Marshal Davout, twenty Bonapartists were accused of treason and about forty others, including Queen Hortense, were ordered to leave France. Wellington argued that the terms agreed with the British and Prussian generals were not binding on the new royalist government, but this convenient interpretation does not bear close scrutiny. Charles de la Bédoyère, who on 23 June 1815 had pleaded for the succession of Napoleon’s son, was one of those excepted from the amnesty. In advance of fleeing to Switzerland, he tried to visit his wife and child in Paris but was captured, arrested and shot on 19 August. His grave at Père Lachaise cemetery became a Bonapartist shrine. Behind the hedge of foreign bayonets the Bourbons sought revenge through the ‘White Terror’. In Provence and elsewhere supporters of Napoleon were hunted down in a campaign initially supervised by Joseph Fouché, still Minister of Police.
Marshal Ney was arrested on 3 August. After what had happened to La Bédoyère he demanded a trial before his fellow peers, but they were no more sympathetic than a court martial. He was tried on 4 December, condemned for treason, and shot on 7 December. Count Lavalette, Napoleon’s postmaster, was also condemned to death but escaped from prison in his wife’s clothes, thanks to her bravery, and was spirited out of the country by three Britons who were then tried for treason.22 General Antoine Drouot gave himself up in August but did not face trial until April 1816. His defence turned on his being a subject of Napoleon as ruler of Elba, not of the French king, having advised Bonaparte against leaving the island, and having persuaded the Guard to surrender peaceably, as well as a glowing character reference from Marshal Macdonald, one of Napoleon’s soldiers who during the Hundred Days had stayed loyal to the king. Acquitted by the narrowest margin, he went into retirement. General Cambronne, who had been captured at Waterloo, was tried after Drouot and got off by a clear majority on the same grounds.
Many Bonapartists fled to the United States, where Simon Bernard designed a number of forts and waterways. Dominique Vandamme went to Philadelphia, returning in 1819, and Charles Lefèbvre-Desnouëttes set up a shrine to Bonaparte in his log cabin. Marshal Grouchy fled to the United States and spent the rest of his life defending his conduct. Rumours that he had been bribed abounded among Bonapartists in America, and there was, indeed, a tradition in the family of William Wood, confidential servant to the diplomat Sir Charles Stuart, that Wood had delivered the bribe, but this was probably a fabrication.23 Grouchy returned to France in 1821 and was given back his marshal’s baton in 1830. Georges Mouton was exiled to Belgium but allowed back in 1818, much honoured after 1830 and died in the Louvre in 1838. Maurice Gérard also went to the Netherlands, but returned to France in 1817 and commanded the French army that drove the Prince of Orange out of Belgium in 1831.
The adaptable soldier Jean-de-Dieu Soult returned from exile in 1819 and turned fervent royalist until 1830 when he became a Bonapartist again, and was Prime Minister 1832–4, 1839–40 and 1840–7. In 1848 he became a republican, but he died in 1851. The Bourbons dispensed with Joseph Fouché’s services in 1816 and he died four years later in exile in Trieste.
The veteran Captain André Ravard, still splitting blood from his wound at Waterloo, escaped the pursuit and rejoined his family near Angoulême, married, had a son and farmed his five hectares, but died young in 1828. Lieutenant Jacques Martin did not rejoin the army but took refuge in Cambrai, eventually becoming a Protestant minister in his native Geneva. Corporal Louis Canler joined the Bourbon Restoration police force and rose to become head of the Sûreté, retiring without fortune after thirty years. He then wrote a colourful memoir packed with the vices and crimes of Parisian society, high and low, that went through seven editions before being suppressed by the French authorities and translated into English. Sergeant Hippolyte de Mauduit was promoted to captain in the 5th Regiment of the Royal Guard. He became a military historian and pamphleteer, dedicating himself to the wellbeing of soldiers, and author of De l’Armée française en 1832, L’Ami du Soldat in 1834 and founder and editor of the military journal Sentinelle de l’Armée. In 1847–8 he published a well-informed account of the campaigns of 1814 and 1815, Derniers jours de la Grande Armée.
Napoleon left Malmaison for the coast on 29 June 1815, having been allowed a frigate by Fouché in which to quit France.
Most Frenchmen were heartily sick of Bonaparte after Waterloo – an attitude expressed vividly in a print published in August, Le nec plus ultra du cannibalisme (The Ultimate in Cannibalism). In this parody of the coronation portrait by Ingres, Napoleon bears a flag with the motto ‘In the name of liberty I hold them in chains’. He holds both a sabre of despotism and a revolutionary axe, while his eagle darts lightning and thunderbolts at anything that resists. His robe is embroidered with ‘Cunning, bluster, charlatanism, exile, proscriptions and firing squads’, together with allusions to various specific crimes. He is enthroned on the corpses of victims sacrificed in the campaigns in Spain and Russia and supported on the throne by a leopard (then known as a ‘tiger’), symbolic of deceit and cruelty behind an appearance of beauty. He has his foot on religion. In the background to one side are towns reduced to ashes, on the other Mont Saint-Jean – the French name for the battle of Waterloo. In the foreground is a river of blood.24
Napoleon hoped to find refuge with
his friends in the United States. On 8 July he embarked at Rochefort for America in the frigate La Saale, and reached the Isle of Aix, but with characteristic duplicity Fouché had alerted the British navy to his intended point of departure and HMS Bellerophon, a seventy-four-gun Trafalgar veteran, barred his way. On 13 July Napoleon decided that England would not be such a bad place to retire to and wrote to the Prince Regent:
A victim to the factions which distract my country, and to the enmity of the greatest powers of Europe, I have terminated my political career, and I come, like Themistocles, to throw myself upon the hospitality of the British people. I put myself under the protection of their laws; which I claim from your Royal Highness, as the most powerful, the most constant, and the most generous of my enemies. Napoleon.
On 15 July Napoleon went on board Bellerophon and surrendered to her captain. Unfortunately for the former Emperor, neither the generosity of the Prince Regent, nor the hospitality of the British people proved equal to that of the Persian Empire. He was not allowed to land in England but kept on board Bellerophon in Plymouth Sound for eight days until the decision had been reached to send him to the island of Saint Helena, isolated in a vast space of ocean between Africa and South America. He sailed for Saint Helena from Torbay on 9 August with a small group of companions and passed five and a half miserable years of dull isolation on the barren island, where he died on 5 May 1821 of stomach cancer.
The only Frenchmen allowed to step ashore in England were the prisoners captured at Waterloo. Around the beginning of July they were shipped to Portsmouth and Plymouth and taken to inland towns for six months of captivity. Having heard much of the prison hulks, the French were dreading worse. Captain Heuillet of the 2nd Chasseurs of the Old Guard had been a hero of the fighting at Plancenoit, where in the evening he had been wounded in the leg and captured by the Prussians. He was sent to Brussels and there met colonels Jean Genty of the 105th and Jean-Nicolas Carré of the 21st Line, both wounded victims of the charge of the Union Brigade. As they were embarking on a barge for Ostend, Heuillet was greeted by General Pierre Cambronne. ‘Hello Heuillet,’ he said. ‘You are a prisoner? I am very sorry; still, in our position, it is good to meet up with old friends.’ They were shipped to Plymouth and then sent to Ashburton. One day they read the newspaper account of Cambronne’s defiant words, ‘The Guard dies. It does not surrender.’ Since they ate their meals together, they were able to congratulate Cambronne on these glorious words which immortalised his memory and shed lustre on the whole Imperial Guard.
‘I am very sorry,’ he replied, ‘but I did not say the words attributed to me; I replied with something else, and not with what is reported.’25 After painstaking research into alternative theories, Henry Houssaye, the leading French historian at the time of the hundredth anniversary of Waterloo, concluded that Cambronne’s true response to the summons to surrender was ‘Merde!’26
Napoleon with his marshals
‘I swear it smells of violets’: Marshal Ney deserts King Louis and joins Napoleon
The rapid departure of Louis XVIII and the unexpected return of Napoleon: March 1815
Napoleon presents eagles to his soldiers at the Champ de Mai of 1815
The Duke of Wellington, ‘the great war hero’, riding Copenhagen and dressed as he was at Waterloo
Private Collection / Photo © Mark Fiennes / The Bridgeman Art Library
The Prince of Orange, Wellington’s former aide, riding Waxy and dressed for battle
Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2014 / The Bridgeman Art Library
Prince Blücher, ‘Old Forwards’, at the Katzbach in 1813, his first victory over the French
General Gneisenau: ‘Blücher’s brain’
Apsley House, The Wellington Museum, London, UK / © English Heritage Photo Library / The Bridgeman Art Library
Hans Ziethen, commander of I Corps
Volunteers of Lützow’s Freikorps on outpost duty. Auf Vorposten (1815) by Georg Friedrich Kersting, who fought with the Freikorps, shows three of his comrades, the painters Friedrich Friesen and Ferdinand Hartmann and the writer Theodor Körner
Maurice Gérard, who led the assault on Ligny © Bildarchiv Preussicher Kulturbesitz
Franz Lieber, the Prussian volunteer rifleman who became Professor of History and Political Science at Columbia University and drafted the code of conduct for Union troops during the American Civil War
© Library of Congress
Burned-out ruins of Ligny, drawn soon after the battle from close to the quarry
Ligny castle with Blücher’s windmill and Brye church in the distance on the left, Sombreffe on the right
Quatre Bras from the west with the farm left, the alehouse centre and naked bodies and La Bergerie right, sketched by Thomas Stoney on 21 June 1815
Quatre Bras from the east; above, the alehouse with the Bois de Bossu behind it; below, the farm and the crossroads
Thomas Picton (left) and the Duke of Brunswick (right), heroes of Quatre Bras
Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2014 / The Bridgeman Art Library / Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, Germany / © DHM / The Bridgeman Art Library
Marshal Grouchy, scapegoat for defeat; Marshal Ney, ‘brave des braves’ or battle-fatigued and brainless?; below, the Earl of Uxbridge, dashing commander of Wellington’s cavalry © Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, France / The Bridgeman Art Library / Roger-Viollet, Paris / The Bridgeman Art Library. Bottom image: Royal Collection Trust © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2014 / The Bridgeman Art Library
Breastplate of a carabinier killed by a roundshot recovered from the battlefield of Waterloo
Prussian cavalrymen of 1815: a Silesian uhlan wearing the iron cross, a cuirassier and a trumpeter of dragoons
‘Et moi aussi je viens de l’Isle d’Elbe!’, one of Napoleons braves, symbol of French military might
North gate of Hougoumont from the north with the dovecote and burned-out château
South gate of Hougoumont from the south with the garden wall right, sketched on 20 June
Ruins of Hougoumont from the west with the sunken lane left and the wood right. Matthew Clay was initially stationed on this side of the farm. The château itself has been destroyed
La Haye Sainte looking north towards Wellington’s position by Thomas Stoney, 21 June. Note that the banks either side of the cutting are taller than the wagon passing through it
View looking south-east from the valley with La Haye Sainte left and La Belle Alliance centre. The sketch gives an idea of the height of the wheat
Life Guards defeating cuirassiers
Cuirassiers charging British infantry squares
Fighting between the Prussians and the French Old Guard in Plancenoit
© Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany / The Bridgeman Art Library
The arrival of Ziethen’s corps with the French army in rout
Dominique Larrey, chief surgeon to the Imperial Guard: Napoleon said he was ‘the most virtuous man that I have known’
© Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Topfoto
John Haddy James, assistant surgeon to the 1st Life Guards © Wellcome Library, London
The field of Waterloo covered with dead and wounded: the density of killing was greater than at the Somme in 1916
Drawings by the surgeon Charles Bell of wounded men in the hospitals at Brussels:
Voltz of the German Legion, an amputee who survived tetanus © The RAMC Muniment Collection in the care of the Wellcome Library
Dominique Modere of the 1st Line lay for three days in a field near Hougoumont with a bullet in his brain but survived
© The RAMC Muniment Collection in the care of the Wellcome Library
Peltier of the 3rd Lancers, stabbed in the stomach by a British dragoon
© The RAMC Muniment Collection in the care of the Wellcome Library
The Nec plus ultra of cannibalism; this caricature, published in August 1815, is a hostile Frenc
h view of Napoleon after his defeat: ‘In the name of liberty I hold them in chains,’ proclaims his banner, and behind him is a view of the battle of Waterloo along with towns burned to ashes
The Present State of France Exemplified shows Louis XVIII with Talleyrand and Fouché, supported by bayonets; in the background his supporters take vengeance on Bonapartists, while Prussians, sitting on large bags of gold, pay the starving people to shout, ‘Vive les Bourbons!’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I first refought the battle of Waterloo as a schoolboy aged about twelve and using Airfix soldiers on a huge table set up for exhibition on a school open day. I owe this latest opportunity to refight the battle chiefly to Phil Craig, my friend and collaborator, whose idea it was, but who took up a post as head of factual television with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation which prevented him from carrying the project through. Many a schoolboy military enthusiast dreams of the chance to write up Waterloo and I seized it with enthusiasm – too much enthusiasm, perhaps, since the project has taken much longer and is rather bulkier than either I or my publishers intended. The result is so different from what Phil originally envisaged that perhaps he still has the chance to write a book on the battle his way! I hope he will forgive me. I am grateful, therefore, for the indulgence and support of my publishers, especially Richard Beswick and Iain Hunt who have been very supportive. Jane Greenwood and David Andress read the manuscript at various stages and made many very helpful criticisms. Steve Gove did an excellent copy edit; John Gilkes showed great patience in producing fine maps; and Linda Silverman produced the original paintings behind my monochrome prints.