The reason for this deathwish becomes clear when you hear what he told another marshal, Jean-Baptiste d’Erlon, during the battle: ‘You and I have to perish here, because if the English grapeshot doesn’t do for us, we’re going to be hanged.’
As it happened, both would survive the battle. Erlon escaped to Germany, and opened a brasserie near Munich. But Ney foretold his own future more accurately. Charged with treason by Louis XVIII’s victorious government, he was shot by firing squad in Paris in December 1815. Typically, he refused a blindfold and ordered the firing squad to ‘fire, my comrades, and aim well’. Despite his bad performance at Waterloo, he died a hero in French eyes, but only because he went on to become a victim of Louis XVIII’s royalists, who are regarded by almost every French historian, even those who blame Ney for the defeat at Waterloo, as some of the biggest villains in their country’s history.
Even then, Ney doesn’t get all of the blame for this waste of cavalrymen and horses. According to Victor Hugo, the terrain chosen by Wellington had one last secret to reveal. As the brave French horsemen rode towards the English lines, they suddenly discovered a hidden line of natural defence – a sunken lane blocking their way like some huge inhuman obstacle at the Grand National. Hugo describes the charging cavalry suddenly being tipped headlong into a ditch that soon turned into a mass grave: ‘Riders and horses rolled over, crushing one another, turning the chasm into a mass of flesh, and when the ditch was full of survivors, others trod on them … This began the end of the battle.’
This ‘ravine of death’ looms large in the 1970 film Waterloo, directed by the Russian Sergei Bondarchuk, in which Rod Steiger plays Napoleon, Christopher Plummer Wellington and Orson Welles a hideous Louis XVIII. The film shows French horses tumbling into a hole that is more like a small quarry than a country lane. It’s so deep that nowadays, the film scene – like most of Bondarchuk’s footage of horses falling – would be banned for cruelty to animals.
But in fact the sunken lane seems to have been an invention, or an elaboration, on Hugo’s part, because the charging British cavalry had crossed it easily, and early visitors to the battlefield described little more than a depression with relatively shallow sides and no hedges to hide it from advancing horses. Hugo seems to have needed his ‘ravine of death’ to underline his central point: with both Ney and God in league to ensure poor Napoleon’s defeat, what hope did he have?
III
Another enemy now appeared in Napoleon’s telescope as he turned it to the east. What he had originally taken for Grouchy’s French troops finally arriving to support him turned out to be Prussians.
Napoleon’s fears about Grouchy were proving to be grounded. After his strawberry breakfast, the marshal had gone off on a riding tour of eastern Belgium – what one French historian called ‘une promenade militaire’, vainly searching for Prussians and ignoring the pleas of his subalterns to obey the first rule of Napoleonic battle and ‘march to the cannon’ – that is, go to Napoleon’s aid as soon as they heard the battle starting over at Waterloo.
When they heard the first artillery barrage, some of Grouchy’s officers reminded him of this rule. They were about four hours’ march away, so there was still time to be useful (Napoleon calculated that one of his battles usually lasted about six hours). French historians have noted the words used to Grouchy by Etienne-Maurice Gérard, a veteran of Austerlitz, who had distinguished himself at Ligny: ‘Monsieur le Maréchal, our duty is to march to the cannon. When Wellington is beaten, we will still have time to sort out Blücher.’ Grouchy reportedly got irritated and objected that they would march too slowly because of the bad conditions underfoot, at which point Gérard lost his temper: ‘Sacré nom de Dieu! Events command you to advance and you’re not moving faster than a mussel.’fn4 Offended, Grouchy ordered them to march the men further away from Waterloo, towards Wavre, and into the arms of French historians who delight in rubbishing his reputation. The nineteenth-century writer Achille Tenaille de Vaulabelle is withering about Grouchy: ‘With more decision and action, and with a keener appreciation of warfare and his position as an army commander, Marshal Grouchy could have transformed the disaster of Waterloo into a great victory. It was his duty to do so. He did not do it.’
Napoleon himself poured all the irony he could muster on Grouchy when discussing the battle with his companion on Saint Helena, Emmanuel de Las Cases: ‘Marshal Grouchy, with 34,000 men and 108 cannons, managed to find the secret, which seemed impossible to find, of how to avoid being either on the battlefield at Mont Saint Jean, or at Wavre on the 18th.’
Napoleon was all the more furious, both on the day and in hindsight, because he had dictated an order to Grouchy at six in the morning on the 18th: ‘You must manoeuvre in our direction and try to join our army before any Prussian troops move between us.’ Marshal Soult had added his own message to the order: ‘Don’t waste a moment before moving towards us.’
However, this is where Soult takes flak from Bonapartist historians. He had just one job – to make sure Napoleon’s orders were delivered – and he messed it up by entrusting the order to Grouchy to only two messengers. One of them got lost, and the other vanished without trace, probably after stumbling across some Prussians. When Grouchy failed to appear at Waterloo, Napoleon asked Soult how many messengers he had sent, and, hearing the answer, groaned, ‘Berthier would have sent a hundred!’ Berthier was, of course, his recently deceased former chief of staff.
At about 5.30 p.m. Napoleon was able to remind Ney that his original orders that morning had not been to charge blindly at cannons; his mission had been to capture a farm in front of the British centre, at La Haye Sainte (‘the sacred hedge’).
Infantrymen, furious at being left behind while the cavalry got massacred – the veterans knew that Napoleon’s plans usually involved a mass attack of cavalry supported by infantry – were sent in and overran the farm quickly. Ney realised that from the protection of the farmyard walls, French artillery could rake the English front line with deadly cannon fire. (French accounts of this realisation have a strong undertone of ‘duh!’.) Ney began to do just that, and the English centre suddenly started to weaken, as Napoleon had known it would.
This is supposedly when Wellington saw what was happening and uttered his prayer ‘give me night or give me Blücher’. Though other accounts have him predicting simply that ‘either night or Blücher will come’, implying that he never doubted victory, or at the very least expected a stalemate.
The French infantry captain Jean Baptiste Lemonnier-Delafosse described Wellington’s despair at around 5.30 p.m. In his Souvenirs Militaires, the fervent Bonapartist quoted a letter that he received a few years after the battle from one of Wellington’s aides-de-camp, identified only as Monsieur Hamilton,fn5 in what reads like a decidedly un-Iron Duke-like state of panic: ‘Lord Wellington, bare-headed, was leaning against a tree, motionlessly watching his defeated army … They were fleeing all around him … I saw tears in his eyes … The poor lord was a pitiful sight – he was no longer a man. Plunged in despairing thoughts, he was a statue of stupor. Suddenly, we heard cannon fire on our left, from the direction of Wavre. He lifted his head, listened, and cried: “The Prussian cannons. We’re saved!” And the man, the general, re-emerged. He rallied, etc. And you know what happened after that …’
Lemonnier-Delafosse added that ‘Monsieur Hamilton’s pen was restrained by patriotism, but saying that much is enough to show that Wellington was beaten before the Prussians arrived.’ The French captain concluded that Wellington’s success ‘in Belgium’ (Lemonnier-Delafosse finds it hard to pronounce the name ‘Waterloo’, and calls the battle ‘Mont Saint Jean’) was due to ‘the elements first of all, and to Marshal Ney’s unthinking bravery. Moreover, no strategist has ever approved of the English army’s position.’
The words ‘sour grapeshot’ come to mind.
IV
Meanwhile, with the British reeling, Ney spotted another opportunity to show what Lemonnier-Delafoss
e diplomatically called his ‘unthinking bravery’. Chomping at the bit to launch another assault, Ney sent his aide-de-camp, Colonel Heymès, to Napoleon for more troops, apparently having forgotten already that he himself had sent thousands of them to a wasteful, senseless death.
Predictably, Napoleon was incensed: ‘Troops? Where do you want me to get them? Do you want me to create them?’ He did still have one card up his sleeve (or rather in his waistcoat), but it was his most precious one, the ace that he never liked to play unless it was sure to win – his Garde Impériale.
In past battle reports, Napoleon had often written that ‘la Garde a donné’ – ‘the Guards performed’, a succinct phrase indicating that his elite troops had swiftly and efficiently finished the job of routing the enemy. Now, though, it would be more of a desperate move. The enemy line was shaken, but not yet on the verge of breaking. Sending in the Garde would not be the coup de grâce that it usually was. It would be his final trump, and he would have to hope that Wellington had no riposte.
But with Blücher’s Prussians beginning to arrive in increasing numbers, Napoleon had no choice. He had to wipe out the effects of Grouchy’s inactivity and Ney’s madness by sending in his coolest, best-trained troops.
Napoleon rode his horse over to the 5,000-strong Vieille Garde, who were, as usual, stationed close to his command post.
‘My friends,’ he told them, ‘you are at the moment suprême. Your job is not to shoot. You must engage the enemy in hand-to-hand combat, and, at the point of your bayonet, throw him back into the ravine from where he came, and from where he threatens France and the Empire.’
This was all in a day’s work for the Old Guard, who naturally replied with hearty shouts of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’
But yet again, Napoleon was let down. A traitor, named and shamed by French historians as Capitaine du Barrail, rode towards English lines, shouting ‘Vive le Roi!’ so that he wouldn’t be shot, and informed the enemy that the Garde Impériale were about to attack, led by Napoleon himself. The British knew that this would be the final, all-or-nothing French charge, and had time to brace themselves for one last onslaught. Accordingly, Wellington closed up his line and positioned cavalry at the point where the Garde were expected. Yet again, the Brits and their treacherous friends were cheating.
After a forty-five-minute cannon barrage, the first wave of the Garde saluted Napoleon and set off – 2,900 men in three tight lines, marching slowly, impassively, as if on parade, grouped around their eagle standards, their muskets on their shoulders, red plumes proudly fluttering from their tall busbies.
French accounts of the Garde’s march towards the English lines – effectively the last great French attack of the Napoleonic Wars – ooze with tragic hindsight. Dominique de Villepin calls it a ‘terrible moment where action became sublime thanks to the sacrifice of the immortals’. Victor Hugo declared that ‘history has nothing more moving than these last death throes’. Jean-Claude Damamme reminds us that these men had been ‘the victors of Europe’.
Unfortunately for these ‘immortal’ heroes, they were being led into battle by a mortal with a deathwish – Ney. When his horse was again shot from under him, he simply continued on foot. As he and his troops came closer to the top of the ridge, the drumbeat quickened and the Garde marched faster, while maintaining their impassive, machine-like advance.
Then came the British welcome. Cannons ripped into the Garde from front and side. Men fell in whole rows, sending muskets, busbies and limbs flying everywhere. About 500 were killed by the first salvo, but they simply closed ranks and marched on. Suddenly, Wellington unleashed his secret weapon: 2,000 Guardsmen lying down in four rows, hidden in a wheatfield. He gave his famous order: ‘Up, Guards! Make ready! Fire!’ And the British did just that, at a range of twenty paces. Even with primitive muskets, no one could miss.
This shock, coupled with a sudden English charge with fixed bayonets and the emergence of Hanoverian troops from Hougoumont who began firing at the Garde’s rear, was enough, and at this point some French historians face up to the painful task of admitting the inadmissible. Dominique de Villepin recognises that ‘the impossible happened: the Garde retreated’. (Note that they didn’t turn and run, they just retreated.)
Others refuse to countenance this national tragedy. General Antoine Drouot later claimed that ‘The large number of wounded men who left the battlefield made people believe that the Garde had been routed.’ Another veteran, Captain Duthilt, agreed, stressing that ‘Except for the Old Guard, everyone began to run.’
In an instant, with the Garde (apparently) doing the unthinkable, the French will to fight suddenly broke. General Drouot explained that ‘a panicking terror transmitted itself to the adjacent groups of men who hurriedly began to flee’.
By all accounts, once they decided they had had enough, the majority of French soldiers didn’t hang around to explain why. Shouting ‘Sauve qui peut!’ (‘Every man for himself!’), they began to disappear at speed into the deepening gloom, abandoning weapons, baggage, and the few officers who tried to rally them.
Sensing victory, Wellington appeared on the ridge and waved his hat, the order for the whole front line to advance and fulfil the role that Napoleon’s Garde had always performed.
As Jean-Claude Damamme describes the victorious troops charging down the ridge, he tries to minimise Wellington’s great moment by stressing that his soldiers weren’t all British. Everyone was ganging up on Napoleon, he says: ‘English, Scots, Irish, Belgians, Dutch, Brunswickians, Nassauers, Hanoverians, Westphalians, Prussians, all combining their weapons and their flags. It was a fight to the death of the multitude against just one nation. Just one man.’ Anything to dampen the flames of British triumphalism.
Napoleon saw what was happening, but all French sources maintain that he stood his ground, even though he was dangerously close to the fighting. He personally took command of the artillery, and continued to pound the British lines. When the rout became unstoppable, he tried to join the Garde to make a stand. His officers had to drag him away, one of them, Captain Coignet, asking, ‘What are you doing? Isn’t a victory enough for them?’
Meanwhile, Marshal Ney was still out there, trying to commit suicide. On foot, his sword broken, his uniform torn and bloodied, he came across a group of 800 infantrymen who had been held in reserve, and were still in good order, hoping to join up with the rest of the French army and regroup, or to dig in and protect the retreat. Their commander, General Durutte, went off to reconnoitre, at which point Ney ordered the men to charge the British lines. They naturally obeyed, only to run into a force of English cavalry who cut the isolated Frenchmen to pieces.
In Les Misérables, Hugo describes the scene, with Ney ‘sweating, fire in his eyes, froth on his lips, his jacket unbuttoned, one of his epaulettes half-severed by a Horse Guard’s sabre, his eagle badge dented by a bullet, bloody, muddy, magnificent, a broken sword in his fist, he was saying: “Come and see how a Marshal of France dies on the battlefield!” But in vain. He didn’t die.’
It really wasn’t Ney’s day.
V
At least some of the Garde had held fast and were withdrawing in tight formation. One battalion of 550 men has gone down in legend thanks to their last stand. Refusing to join the general flight, they formed into a square, and resisted the attacks of the British troops swarming around them. When a hundred of them were killed by a single cannon salvo, they simply closed ranks and continued to fight.
Their commander was General Pierre Cambronne, who had been the head of Napoleon’s personal guard during the exile on Elba. Called on to surrender, Cambronne famously answered, ‘The Garde dies but never surrenders.’ His brave retort was reported in the Journal Général de France on 24 June 1815, and widely re-quoted throughout the country.
When the British tried to persuade him that the battle was over, Cambronne defiantly shouted ‘Merde!’ – a moment in French history so famous that merde is euphemistically known as le mot de Camb
ronne, or ‘Cambronne’s word’.
Faced with such courage, the British sportingly withdrew the line of cannons pointed at the Garde, and left them to claim that they, at least, had won a corner of a foreign field that would forever be French. Well, no of course they didn’t do that at all – the British cannons opened fire at point-blank range and allowed the Garde to keep its word, and die.
Cambronne himself was only wounded, and survived to deny at least part of the story about him. According to Jean-Claude Carrière’s Dictionnaire des Révélations Historiques et Contemporaines, Cambronne later quipped, ‘I couldn’t have said “the Garde dies but never surrenders” because I’m not dead and I didn’t surrender.’
Despite the heroism of a few hundred Gardes, the defeat was total, and as darkness fell, this part of Belgium was overrun by French soldiers fleeing for their lives. Lemonnier-Delafosse, Marshal Foy’s aide-de-camp, called the scene a ‘hideous spectacle. A torrent pouring down a mountainside, uprooting everything before it, is a weak image to describe the mass of men, horses and carriages crushing each other.’
In his diaries, Captain Coignet remembered the chaotic scenes in Genappe, 7 kilometres south of the battlefield: ‘Soldiers of every regiment … were marching with no order at all, confused, knocking into each other, squeezing through the streets of this small town, fleeing the Prussian cavalry. Nothing could calm them … they would listen to no one. Cavalrymen were blowing their horse’s brains out, infantrymen were blowing out their own so as not to fall into enemy hands.’
How the French Won Waterloo - or Think They Did Page 8