At three in the morning, in his room in the Waterloo inn, the Duke of Wellington was awake, too. He had gotten out of bed a little while before, ordered candles brought to his table, and begun writing many letters. Their tone proves that the duke was well aware of the risks he was running by accepting battle at Waterloo, and that he hadn’t yet received the reassuring note in which Blücher promised to join him in force the next day. Wellington wrote a long letter in French to the Duc de Berry, brother of King Louis XVIII, who was still in exile in Ghent. The duke advised his correspondent that the French court would do well to go to Antwerp and take refuge in the citadel; that way, should the Allied army be forced to evacuate Belgium, the royal party would be able to board an English ship. Wellington wrote to the governor of Antwerp, ordering him to prepare his fortress for a state of siege and to deny access to everyone but the Bourbons and civilians fleeing from the enemy. He wrote to Sir Charles Stuart, the British ambassador in Brussels, recommending that he see to the maintenance of calm among the numerous English who were in the city: “Let them all prepare to move, but neither in a hurry nor a fright, as all will yet turn out well.” Finally, the duke wrote a note to Lady Frances Webster, a young woman in whose intimate company he had spent time during the preceding weeks in Brussels.
Exactly how far their intimacy went has remained a matter of debate ever since. Lady Frances was a charming twenty-two-year-old, married to an officer in the Hussars who publicly betrayed her, and she had quickly learned to avenge herself for her husband’s infidelities; on the other hand, she was in the eighth month of a pregnancy, a fact that the duke’s biographers have found sufficient to clear him of all suspicion. However, their Victorian zeal seems excessive when one considers that the preceding year, in Paris, Wellington had conducted one love affair with Giuseppina Grassini, a singer at the Opéra, and another with Mademoiselle Georges, the most famous actress at the Comédie Française, both of whom had already passed through Napoleon’s bed.
Whether or not they formed a liaison, the addressee of the last letter Wellington wrote before he called for his horse and set off to rejoin his troops in the pouring rain was Lady Frances Webster: “As I am sending a messenger to Bruxelles, I write to you one line to tell you that I think you ought to make preparations, as should Lord Mountnorris,4 to remove from Bruxelles. We fought a desperate battle on Friday, in which I was successful, though I had but few troops. The Prussians were very roughly handled, and retired in the night, which obliged me to do the same to this place yesterday. The course of the operations may oblige me to uncover Bruxelles for a moment, and may expose that town to the enemy; for which reason I recommend that you and your family should be prepared to move to Antwerp at a moment’s notice.” It is not at all clear from this letter whether the duke had really made a final, definite decision to give battle, or whether an inner voice was warning him that he would do better to get his army out of there before it was too late.
The sky began to lighten around four o’clock. Napoleon was still at Le Caillou, his fear that the enemy would evacuate his position under cover of night unfounded; several officers sent to reconnoiter, as well as a few spies who had got close to the enemy’s bivouacs, confirmed that the English had not moved. The emperor’s chief concern was that the bad weather might continue, thus preventing him from pressing his advantage and destroying the army that had been so incautious as to stop and wait for him. But when he saw, low on the horizon, the red disk of the sun beginning to peek through the clouds between one squall and the next, the emperor grew calm, convinced that this dawn heralded a great day. “Tonight,” he said, “we shall sleep in Brussels.”
Among the dispatches that arrived during the night was one written at ten the previous evening, from Marshal Grouchy. He had been charged with pursuing the defeated Prussians and had taken with him most of the troops that had fought at Ligny. The emperor’s instincts told him that the Prussians were retreating eastward after their rout, intent on sheltering in the fortresses of Liège and Namur, and that for at least a couple of days they would not be heard from again. But Grouchy’s dispatch forced Napoleon to consider a problem he had already decided not to waste time on, for the marshal informed the emperor of his cavalry’s reports that at least one of the two Prussian columns had headed north, in the direction of Wavre. To the southeast, however, on the road to Namur, Grouchy’s cavalry had also surprised some retreating Prussians and captured wagons and guns. So the marshal was, for the moment, unable to say in what direction the bulk of the Prussian army was marching, but he had no doubt that this information would soon be his. In any case, should it turn out that the forces marching toward Wavre were of any considerable size, Grouchy pledged himself to follow hard on their heels and prevent them from joining Wellington.
The dispatch was dated from Gembloux, a small town northeast of Ligny. In itself, the fact of the marshal’s presence there was not at all strange, given that Napoleon himself had ordered him to pursue the Prussians in that direction. Nevertheless, it is unclear how Grouchy thought he could start from Gembloux and be able to stop enemy columns that were marching in the direction of Wavre, since they were necessarily closer than he was to the battlefield at Waterloo. Had Napoleon accorded any importance to those columns and studied the situation on his map, he would have felt some uneasiness. But the emperor was convinced that Blücher, after his defeat at Ligny, would be careful not to risk his already battered army a second time, and he believed that the mere appearance of Grouchy’s vanguard in pursuit of the Prussians on the road to Wavre would cause them to accelerate their retreat. Napoleon therefore concluded that there was no need to worry on that score and, serenely confident, did not even bother to send Grouchy a reply.
In the dawning light, Napoleon began to feel weary; too many hours on horseback the previous day, followed by a bad night, were taking their toll. One of his staff officers, Colonel Pétiet, had already noticed that the emperor was unable to spend as much time in the saddle as he used to in the past: “As soon as he dismounted from his horse to study maps or listen to reports or send messages, his staff people would set up a crude little wooden table, accompanied by a chair in the same style, and he would remain seated there for long periods of time.” It’s impossible to know with certainty if at Waterloo Napoleon was suffering from bladder pains, or perhaps from hemorrhoids, as many have hypothesized; but the emperor’s physical movements had been a source of alarm to Pétiet from the moment he saw him after his return from Elba: “His corpulence, his dull, pallid complexion, and his stiff gait made him seem quite different from the General Bonaparte I had known at the beginning of my career.” While day was breaking outside, Napoleon warmed himself by the crackling fire in his room, called for the latest ministerial dispatches from Paris, and grew absorbed in reading them, almost as if by doing so he might drive away all thoughts of the work awaiting him.
The Duke of Wellington had just mounted his horse and was riding out of the village of Waterloo with his entourage when a Prussian officer approached him with a message from Blücher. Wellington asked Baron von Müffling to assist him, and together they deciphered the dispatch, in which Blücher promised to come to the duke’s aid with twice as many troops as he had requested. The previous collaboration of the two commands had left much to be desired, and Wellington was inclined to blame the Prussians’ slowness for the late warning he’d received of Napoleon’s advance. “Blücher picked the fattest man in his army to ride with an express to me, and he took thirty hours to go thirty miles,” Wellington remarked. With the latest dispatch, however, the duke had written confirmation that his allies had no intention of abandoning him. Had he doubts about the advisability of giving battle at Waterloo, they must have fallen away at that moment; nevertheless, it remained to be seen whether Blücher would manage to keep his promise, and to keep it within a reasonable amount of time, because the arrival of his reinforcements would mean the difference between victory and defeat.
PART TWO
“It Will Be as Easy as Having Breakfast”
TWELVE
“VERY FEW OF US WILL LIVE TO SEE THE CLOSE OF THIS DAY”
The day was just beginning to dawn. Inside a radius of a few kilometers, almost 150,000 men—blue with cold, bristling with several days’ growth of beard, dressed in wet uniforms whose colors were already starting to fade, and encrusted with mud from head to foot—were bustling around the remains of their bonfires, trying to revive the embers doused by the rain. All the wood, straw, and water that could be found in the area, in the villages and at the farms, had already been conveyed to the bivouacs; fences had been torn down, doors and windows burned, stables and haylofts emptied. Slowly, blood began to flow back into extremities, and even men who had awakened stiff with cold and unable to move gradually got back on their feet. The men dried and cleaned the barrels and flintlocks of their muskets, then fired them to be certain they were back in working order; the rattle of isolated gunfire that rang out everywhere reminded the more seasoned warriors of a skirmish between outposts. Hygienic conditions must have been frightful, and yet we know that many soldiers—perhaps more than would be the case today—took the opportunity of those first hours of light to shave and perhaps even to put on a fresh shirt, “because soldiers,” as a French officer said, “don’t like to fight when they’re dirty.”
Captain Verner of the Seventh Hussars had spent the whole night in the saddle, as had all the members of his squadron, sitting astride their horses in a field of rye so tall they almost disappeared in it; from this advanced position, the captain and his comrades were charged with covering the right wing of the Allied army. This order had mightily displeased the captain when he received it the previous evening, because his men had been severely engaged during the retreat from Quatre Bras. Naturally, however, he’d obeyed without a word and followed the regiment’s sergeant major in the pitch dark to the place where the picket would take up its position. After having remained there all night, on horses sinking up to their knees in mud and with rainwater running into their boots, the Hussars were glad of the dawn, but then it revealed to them that their position was, in fact, only a few meters from their own front line and so their all-night vigil had been perfectly useless. Verner declared that he had never seen his men so weary and depressed, not even during the hardest moments of the war in Spain.
In the center of Wellington’s deployment, the regiments of Sir Colin Halkett’s brigade were trying to shake off their nocturnal torpor. The men of the Thirtieth Regiment had eaten no warm food for three days. The day before, they had started to cook their rations during a halt in the retreat, but almost at once the march began again in great haste, and they had poured out the soup and meat in the fields. Since then, no supply wagon had caught up with them, and so they had been compelled to face the night without anything to eat, except for whatever remained of the three and a third pounds of bread issued to each of them two days before. In the morning, the regiment’s officers realized that their men—most of whom had been under fire for the first time at Quatre Bras—were “almost petrified with cold, many could not stand, and some were quite stupefied.”
Farther left, the men of Sir Denis Pack’s brigade—also known as the Scottish Brigade—were no better off. “Men and officers, with their dirty clothes, and chins unshorn, had rather a disconsolate look in the morning,” reported one. Many officers who had been wounded two days before at Quatre Bras but had refused to abandon their men “were unable to hold out any longer, and were persuaded to go to Brussels about eight o’clock in the morning.” In case they should not survive the battle, those who remained wrote their last wills in pencil on slips of paper and entrusted them to their wounded comrades. “Kempt’s and Pack’s brigades had got such a mauling on the 16th, that they thought it as well to have all straight. The wounded officers shook hands, and departed for Brussels.”
General Desales, the I Corps artillery commander, had yielded his lodgings to his superior officer, Count d’Erlon, and had therefore spent the night in bivouac drenched to the skin. Eager to change his clothes and put on dry linen, the general wandered among the artillery wagons until he found an open, abandoned coach, climbed in immediately, disrobed, and put on whatever dry items he could find in his bags. Desales was famous for having constructed bridges over the Danube in record time during Napoleon’s Wagram campaign. As a result of his service, he was raised to the rank of baron and granted an estate worth four thousand francs a year. Like many other French officers, Desales had adapted fairly well to the return of the Bourbons in 1814; he had, after all, been born at Versailles, the son of a former servant of the royal family. (“I sucked in love for the Bourbons with my mother’s milk, and besides, when I was a child, I saw them every day.”) Napoleon’s unexpected return and Louis XVIII’s precipitous flight had convinced Desales that he should present himself to the emperor and ask to reenter his service on condition that he be allowed to keep the general’s rank to which he had been promoted after the emperor’s abdication. Napoleon, who very much needed technical experts, recognized Desales’s rank, and the general commanded the forty-six guns of I Corps’s artillery.
On the ridge behind the Papelotte farm at the extreme left of the Allied line, the three Hussar regiments of Sir Hussey Vivian’s brigade were laboriously getting themselves back in order after a disastrous night, during which their horses, frightened by the thunderclaps and the lightning, had prevented everyone from catching as much as a wink of sleep. The officers of the Tenth Hussars took refuge in a small farmhouse, lit a fire in the chimney, and stood about naked as their uniforms dried. The prince regent was the honorary colonel of this cavalry regiment, which was at the time quite fashionable and known to London gossips as “the Prince’s Dolls”; its select company included the Duke of Rutland’s son, the Earl of Carlisle’s son, and the grandsons of four other lords. But all the officers were new to the regiment, and so they hardly knew one another. The previous year, Colonel George Quentin, commander of the Tenth, had appeared before a court-martial, accused of cowardice in the face of the enemy. All the officers in the regiment at the time backed up this accusation; nevertheless, Quentin was acquitted, and afterward the officers were transferred en masse. But the colonel wasn’t exactly popular among his new officers, either. When they were putting their clothes back on, one of them, Captain Wood, noticed with satisfaction that “Old Quentin” had burned the soles of his boots and was having great trouble getting them on his feet again.
At the château of Hougoumont, abandoned the previous day by proprietor and peasant alike, Private Matthew Clay of the Third Foot Guards began searching through the empty buildings, looking for something to eat. He found a piece of stale bread and a boiling-pot with a pig’s head in it, but the meat wasn’t completely cooked, and Clay found it too revolting even to taste. After consuming the bread, he decided to adjust his clothing. Like all his comrades, he was soaking wet, but the previous day he’d come across the corpse of a German soldier and had had the foresight to remove the dead man’s underwear, so now he could at least put on something dry. He changed his undershirt and underpants, slipped back into his still-damp red coat, and went looking for a bit of dry straw to sit on while he waited for his orders.
The men of the Eighty-fifth Ligne5 had spent the night in the mud, with no shelter from the rain. Because it had been formed in the Normandy port towns of Granville and Cherbourg, the Eighty-fifth included a great many former prisoners of war, men who had been captured in Spain and subsequently released from the hellish pontoons, the prison-barges where the British segregated enemy captives. In the opinion of Captain Chapuis, none of these veterans could wait to come to grips with the Inglisman and pay them back for the mistreatment suffered at their hands; the men of the 85th Ligne, Chapuis thought, would sooner die than be taken prisoner a second time. As he looked around that morning, however, the captain could discern little of the combative spirit that had animated the troops when they set out for the war. At roll c
all, the gloomy silence in the ranks was a sign that the miserable night had left the men exhausted and that they would need a few hours of genuine rest before they could march against the enemy.
Sir Augustus Frazer, commander of the Allied horse artillery, slept under a roof in the village of Waterloo and arose feeling fairly well rested. At the first light of dawn, he sat down and wrote a long letter to his wife, in which he gave her an account of what had happened at Quatre Bras and tried to imagine what would take place later that day. Occasionally, his distress at the losses recently suffered by his troops broke through his confiding, serene tone: “Our own wounded we brought off on cavalry horses, except such as could not be found in the standing corn, poor fellows! In these scenes, not in the actual rencontre, one sees the miseries of war. I saw Henry Macleod last night, free from fever and pain, and doing well. He has three pike stabs in the side, a graze in the head, and a contusion on the shoulder. Poor Cameron I hear is dead, but I am unwilling to believe it.—Adieu. In all these strange scenes, my mind is with you, but it is tranquil and composed, nor is there reason why it should be otherwise. All will be very well. God bless you.”
In Captain Mercer’s troop, a corporal sent in search of ammunition returned instead with a cart full of food and drink. After distributing and consuming the rum on the spot, the gunners put some oatmeal on the boil and improvised a porridge they called “stirabout.” When Mercer saw that the cart contained meat as well, he refused to eat the gunners’ pap and gave orders to prepare a soup. As Mercer’s officers waited for their meal, they too speculated about what would happen that morning. No one could exclude the possibility that the Allied troops would continue their retreat in a little while, heading north along the main road to Brussels just as they had done the previous day, with the French hard on their heels. Since he had nothing to do, Mercer took a walk around the cavalry bivouacs, listening to the soldiers’ chatter: “Some thought the French were afraid to attack us, others that they would do so soon, others that the Duke would not wait for it, others that he would, as he certainly would not allow them to go to Brussels.” After a while, the captain returned to his battery, hoping that the soup would be ready, only to learn that the order to stand to arms had been given and the soldiers had thrown everything away.
The Battle Page 6