Napoleon later told Las Cases that he reconnoitred with Bertrand at 1 a.m. to check that Wellington’s army was still there, which (despite there being no corroboration of it) he might have done. He was woken at 2 a.m. to receive a message from Grouchy, written four hours earlier, in which he reported being in contact with the Prussians near Wavre. Grouchy thought it might be the main Prussian force, whereas in fact it was only Blücher’s rearguard. Napoleon didn’t reply for another ten hours, despite knowing by then that Wellington was going to defend Mont Saint-Jean later that morning. It was an extraordinary error not to have brought Grouchy back to the battlefield immediately, to fall on Wellington’s left flank.
‘Ah! Mon Dieu!’ Napoleon told General Gourgaud the next year, ‘perhaps the rain on the seventeenth of June had more to do than is supposed with the loss of Waterloo. If I had not been so weary, I should have been on horseback all night. Events that seem very small often have very great results.’89 He felt strongly that his thorough reconnoitring of battlefields such as Eggmühl had led to victory, but the real significance of the rain was that his artillery commander, General Drouot, suggested waiting for the ground to dry before starting the battle the next day, so that he could get his guns into place more easily and the cannonballs would bounce further when fired. It was advice Drouot was to regret for the rest of his life, for neither he nor the Emperor knew that, having eluded Grouchy, Blücher had reiterated his promise to Wellington that same morning that at least three Prussian corps would arrive on the battlefield that afternoon. Indeed, Wellington decided to fight there only on the understanding that this would happen.
Had Napoleon started his attack at sunrise, 3.48 a.m. on Sunday, June 18, instead of after 11 a.m., he would have had more than seven extra hours to break Wellington’s line before Bülow’s corps erupted onto his right flank.90* Although Napoleon ordered Ney to have the men properly fed and their equipment checked ‘so that at nine o’clock precisely each of them is ready and there can be a battle’, it was to be another two hours before the fighting started.91 By then Napoleon had held a breakfast conference of senior officers in the dining room next to his bedroom at Le Caillou. When several of the generals who had fought Wellington in Spain, such as Soult, Reille and Foy, suggested that he should not rely on being able to break through the British infantry with ease, Napoleon replied, ‘Because you’ve been beaten by Wellington you consider him to be a good general. I say that he’s a bad general and that the English are bad troops. It will be a lunchtime affair!’ A clearly unconvinced Soult could only say, ‘I hope so!’92 These seemingly hubristic remarks completely contradicted his real and oft-stated views about Wellington and the British, and must be ascribed to his need to encourage his lieutenants just hours away from a major battle.
At the breakfast conference, Jérôme told Napoleon that the waiter at the King of Spain inn at Genappes where Wellington had dined on June 16 had overheard an aide-de-camp saying that the Prussians would join them in front of the Forest of Soignes, which was directly behind Mont Saint-Jean. In response to this (ultimately devastatingly accurate) information, Napoleon said, ‘The Prussians and the English cannot possibly link up for another two days after such a battle as Fleurus [that is, Ligny], and given the fact that they are being pursued by a considerable body of troops.’ He then added, ‘The battle that is coming will save France and will be celebrated in the annals of the world. I shall have my artillery fire and my cavalry charge, so as to force the enemy to disclose his positions, and when I am quite certain which positions the English troops have taken up, I shall march straight at them with my Old Guard.’93 Napoleon could be forgiven for not altering his entire strategy on the basis of a waiter’s report of the conversation of an over-loquacious aide-de-camp, but even his own explanation of the tactics he was about to adopt betrays their total lack of sophistication. Wellington expected Napoleon to adopt a wide flanking manoeuvre of the French left – and deployed 17,500 men at Hal to guard against it – but his plan turned out to be no more imaginative than those he had employed at Eylau, Borodino or Lâon.
At 9.30 a.m. Napoleon left Le Caillou, in his orderly Jardin Ainé’s recollection, ‘to take up his stand half a league in advance on a hill where he could discern the movements of the British army. There he dismounted, and with his field-glass endeavoured to discover all the movements in the enemy’s line.’94 He chose a small knoll near the La Belle Alliance inn, where he spread his maps on the table while his horses stood saddled nearby.95 ‘I saw him through my glass,’ recalled Foy, ‘walking up and down, wearing his grey overcoat, and frequently leaning over the little table on which his map was placed.’96 The night’s rain had given way to a cloudy but dry day. Soult suggested an early attack, but Napoleon replied that they ‘must wait’, almost certainly to allow the Grand Battery to negotiate the mud more easily. Colonel Comte de Turenne and Monthion recalled Napoleon’s tiredness in the two hours before the battle started; the Emperor ‘remained a long time seated before a table . . . and . . . they frequently saw his head, overcome by sleep, sink down upon the map spread out before his heavy eyes’.97
Napoleon wrote to Grouchy at noon and again at 1 p.m. ordering him to rejoin him immediately. But by then it was too late.98 (One of his messages didn’t even reach Grouchy until 6 p.m.) Napoleon later claimed that he had commanded Grouchy to return earlier, but no such order has been found and Grouchy vociferously denied it.99 A bulging file in the war ministry archives at Vincennes bears witness to the controversy between Grouchy and Gérard as to whether, without Napoleon’s direct orders, Grouchy ought in any case to have marched towards the sound of the Grand Battery when it opened up in the late morning, rather than pressing on to engage the Prussian rearguard at Wavre.100
• • •
In the Peninsular War, Wellington had conducted several defensive battles, including Vimeiro in 1808, Talavera in 1809 and Bussaco in 1810, and was confident of holding his ground. A tough, no-nonsense Anglo-Irish aristocrat and stern, unbending Tory, he admired Napoleon as ‘the first man of the day on a field of battle’ but otherwise despised him as a political upstart. ‘His policy was mere bullying,’ Wellington said after Waterloo, ‘and, military matters apart, he was a Jonathan Wild.’ (Wild was a notorious criminal hanged at Tyburn in 1725.)101 Wellington’s choice of ground, with his right flank protected by Hougoumont, his left by a forest, and his centre on a lateral sunken road a few hundred yards behind the fortified La Haie Sainte, severely limited Napoleon’s tactical options.* But with the Forest of Soignes behind him, Wellington took a tremendous risk in choosing this ground. If Napoleon had forced him back from the road, an orderly retreat would have been impossible.
The battle of Waterloo started around 11 a.m. with the guns of Reille’s corps preparing the way for the diversionary attack on Hougoumont by Jérôme’s division, followed by Foy’s. The attack on the farmhouse failed, and was to draw in more and more French troops as the day progressed. For some unknown reason they did not try to smash in the farmhouse’s front gates with horse artillery. Wellington reinforced it during the day and Hougoumont, like La Haie Sainte, became an invaluable breakwater that disrupted and funnelled the French advances. Jérôme fought bravely, and when his division was reduced to a mere two battalions Napoleon summoned him and said: ‘My brother, I regret to have known you so late.’102 This, Jérôme later recalled, was balm to the ‘many repressed pains in his heart’.
At 1 p.m. an initial bombardment by Napoleon’s eighty-three-gun Grand Battery against Wellington’s line did less damage than it might have due to Wellington’s orders that his men lie down behind the brow of the ridge. Napoleon unleashed his major infantry attack at 1.30 p.m. when d’Erlon’s corps assaulted Wellington’s centre-left through muddy fields of breast-high rye, marching past La Haie Sainte on their left in the hope of smashing through and then rolling up each side of Wellington’s line, rather as they had the Austro-Russians at Austerlitz. It was the correct pla
ce to attack, the weakest part of Wellington’s position, but the execution was faulty.
D’Erlon launched his entire corps with all the battalions deployed in several lines 250 men wide at the start of his assault, presumably to increase the firepower on contact with the enemy, but violating all the established French models of manoeuvring in column before deploying into line. This left the whole formation unwieldy, difficult to control and extremely vulnerable. Captain Pierre Duthilt of General de Marcognet’s division recalled that it was ‘a strange formation and one which was to cost us dear, since we were unable to form square as a defence against cavalry attacks, while the enemy’s artillery could plough our formations to a depth of twenty ranks’.103 No one knew whose idea this formation was, but ultimately d’Erlon must be responsible for so important a tactical decision as the formation in which his corps launched the vital front-fixing assault.* Another of Napoleon’s maxims was that ‘Infantry, cavalry and artillery are nothing without each other’, but on this occasion d’Erlon’s infantry attack was inadequately protected by the other arms, and was repulsed having failed to fix Wellington’s front in place.104 Instead the Union and Household brigades of British cavalry charged the corps and sent it fleeing back to the French lines with the loss of two eagles out of twelve. At 3 p.m., once the British cavalry had been driven away from the Grand Battery in the wake of d’Erlon’s retreat, Napoleon joined General Jean-Jacques Desvaux de Saint-Maurice, commander of the Guard artillery, for a closer look at the battlefield. With the Emperor riding beside him, Desvaux was cut in half by a cannonball.105
At about 1.30 p.m. the first of three Prussian corps started to appear on Napoleon’s right flank. He had been warned that this might happen by a Prussian hussar who had been captured by a squadron of French chasseurs between Wavre and Plancenoit, and had been moving men off to the right flank for the better part of half an hour. He now ordered that the army be told the dark-coated bodies of men on the horizon were Grouchy’s corps arriving to win the battle. As time wore on this falsehood was gradually revealed, with a corresponding drop in morale. During the afternoon Napoleon was forced to divert steadily increasing numbers to his right flank to confront the Prussians, and by 4 p.m. Bülow’s 30,000 Prussians were attacking Lobau’s 7,000 French infantry and cavalry between Frischermont and Plancenoit.106 The advantage that Napoleon had enjoyed in the morning of 72,000 men and 236 guns over Wellington’s 68,000 men and 136 guns was turned into a significant disadvantage once the Allies could together deploy over 100,000 men and more than 200 guns.
A series of massive cavalry charges totalling 10,000 men, the largest since Murat’s charge at Eylau, was launched under Ney against Wellington’s centre-right at around 4 p.m., although it is still unclear quite who – if anyone – had ordered it, since both Napoleon and Ney denied it afterwards.107 ‘There is Ney hazarding the battle which was almost won,’ Napoleon told Flahaut when he saw what was happening, ‘but he must be supported now, for that is our only chance.’108 Despite thinking the charge ‘premature and ill-timed’, Napoleon told Flahaut to ‘order all the cavalry [he] could find to assist the troops which Ney had thrown at the enemy across the ravine’.109 (Today one can see at the Gordon Monument how deep the road was, but it is no ravine.) ‘In war there are sometimes mistakes which can only be repaired by persevering in the same line of action,’ Flahaut later said philosophically.110 Unfortunately for Napoleon, this was not one of them.
Wellington’s infantry now formed thirteen hollow squares (in fact they were rectangular in shape) to receive the cavalry. A horse’s natural unwillingness to charge into a wall of bristling bayonets made them near-impregnable to cavalry, though Ney had broken the squares of the 42nd and 69th Foot at Quatre Bras and French cavalry had broken squares of Russians at Hof in 1807 and of Austrians at Dresden in 1813. Squares were particularly vulnerable to artillery and infantry formed in line, but this cavalry attack was unsupported by either, confirming the suspicion that it had started as an accident rather than from a deliberate order by Napoleon or Ney. Not one of the thirteen squares broke. ‘It was the good discipline of the English that gained the day,’ Napoleon conceded on St Helena, after which he blamed General Guyot, who commanded the Heavy Cavalry, for charging without orders. This was unfounded as Guyot only rode in the second wave.111
The mystery of the battle of Waterloo is why a collection of fine and experienced French combat generals of all three arms repeatedly failed to co-ordinate their efforts, as they had done successfully on so many previous battlefields.* This was particularly true of Napoleon’s favourite arm, the artillery, which consistently missed giving close support to the infantry at various important stages throughout the battle. With much of the French cavalry exhausted, its horses blown, and the Prussians arriving in force after 4.15 p.m., Napoleon would have been wise to withdraw as best he could.112 Instead, sometime after 6 p.m., Ney succeeded in capturing La Haie Sainte and the nearby excavation area known as the Sandpit in the centre of the battlefield, and brought up a battery of horse artillery at 300 yards’ range, allowing him to pound Wellington’s centre with musketry and cannon, to the extent that the 27th Inniskilling Regiment of Foot, formed in square, took 90 per cent casualties. This was the crisis point of the battle, the best chance the French had of breaking through before the sheer weight of Prussian numbers crushed them. Yet when Ney sent his aide-de-camp Octave Levasseur to beg Napoleon for more troops to exploit the situation, the Emperor, his cavalry exhausted and his own headquarters now within range of Prussian artillery, refused. ‘Troops?’ he said sarcastically to Levasseur. ‘Where would you like me to find them? Would you like me to make them?’113 In fact at that point he had fourteen unused Guards battalions. By the time he had changed his mind half an hour later, Wellington had plugged the dangerous gaps in his centre with Brunswickers, Hanoverians and a Dutch–Belgian division.
It wasn’t until around 7 p.m., once he had ridden right along the battlefront, that Napoleon sent the Middle Guard up the main road towards Brussels in a column of squares. The Imperial Guard’s attack in the latter stages of Waterloo was undertaken by only about one-third of its total battlefield strength, the rest being used either to recover Plancenoit from the Prussians or to cover the retreat. Napoleon ordered Ney to support it, but when the Guard was brought up, one infantry division had not been drawn out of the wood of Hougoumont, nor had a cavalry brigade been called over from the Nivelles road.114 So the Guard ascended the slope towards Wellington’s line, now well-defended once more, without a regiment of cavalry protecting its flanks and with only a few troops from Reille’s corps in support. Only twelve guns took part in the attack, out of the total of ninety-six available to the Guard artillery.
The forlorn nature of this attack might be judged from the fact that the Guard took no eagles with it, although 150 bandsmen marched at its head, playing triumphant parade-ground marches.115 Napoleon placed himself in the dead ground south-west of La Haie Sainte, at the foot of the long slope heading up towards the ridge, as the Guard marched past him cheering ‘Vive l’Empereur!’116 They started off with eight battalions, probably fewer than 4,000 men in all, escorted by some horse artillery, but dropped off three battalions along the way as a reserve. The harder ground was better for Wellington’s artillery and soon, as Levasseur recalled, ‘Bullets and grapeshot left the road strewn with dead and wounded.’ The sheer concentration of firepower – both musketry and grapeshot – that Wellington was able to bring to bear broke the will of the Imperial Guard, and it fell back, demoralized. The cry ‘La Garde recule!’ had not been heard on any battlefield since its formation as the Consular Guard in 1799. It was the signal for a general disintegration of the French army across the entire front. Although Ney was to deny having heard it when he made a speech about Waterloo in the Chamber of Peers a few days later, the cry ‘Sauve qui peut!’ went up at about 8 p.m., as men threw down their muskets and tried to escape before darkness fell. When it was clear what was ha
ppening, Napoleon took an unnamed general by the arm and said: ‘Come, general, the affair is over – we have lost the day – let us be off.’117
Two squares of the Old Guard on either side of the Charleroi–Brussels road covered the army’s pell-mell retreat. General Petit commanded the square of the 1st Battalion of the 1st Grenadiers à Pied some 300 yards south of La Belle Alliance, among which Napoleon took refuge.* ‘The whole army was in the most appalling disorder,’ Petit recalled. ‘Infantry, cavalry, artillery – everybody was fleeing in all directions.’ As the square retreated steadily, the Emperor ordered Petit to sound the stirring drumroll known as the grenadière to rally guardsmen ‘caught up in the torrent of fugitives. The enemy was close at our heels, and, fearing that he might penetrate the squares, we were obliged to fire at the men who were being pursued . . . It was now almost dark.’118
Somewhere beyond Rossomme, Napoleon, Flahaut, Corbineau, Napoleon’s orderly Jardin Ainé, some officers and the duty squadron of Chasseurs à Cheval left the square to ride down the main road. Napoleon transferred into his carriage at Le Caillou but he found the road at Genappes completely blocked by fleeing soldiers. Abandoning the carriage he mounted his horse for the flight through Quatre Bras and Charleroi.* Flahaut recalled that, as they rode off towards Charleroi, they were unable to go at much more than walking pace because of the sheer crush. ‘Of personal fear there was not the slightest trace, although the state of affairs was such as to cause him the greatest uneasiness,’ he wrote of Napoleon. ‘He was, however, so overcome by fatigue and the exertion of the preceding days that several times he was unable to resist the sleepiness which overcame him, and if I had not been there to uphold him, he would have fallen from his horse.’119 Getting beyond Charleroi after 5 a.m., Ainé recorded that the Emperor ‘found in a little meadow on the right a small fire made by some soldiers. He stopped by it to warm himself and said to General Corbineau: “Eh bien monsieur, we have done a fine thing.”’ Even then, Napoleon was able to make a joke, however grim. Ainé remembered that Napoleon ‘was at this time extremely pale and haggard and much changed. He took a small glass of wine and a morsel of bread which one of his equerries had in his pocket, and some moments later mounted, asking if the horse galloped well.’120
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