In the weeks preceding the battle, while he was still in Paris, Napoleon had increased the troops’ enthusiasm by a massive distribution of decorations. In one incident, the emperor asked the colonel of the Ninety-third Ligne for the names of twenty soldiers, to whom he would award the Legion of Honor when the Ninety-third passed in review in the Place du Carrousel. At the ceremony, noticing that the colonel had submitted twenty-five names, Napoleon refused to confer the decoration on the last men in line and irritably threw away the list. One of the soldiers who watched their ribbons evaporate this way later wrote about the experience: “I could see the piece of paper on the ground, carried away by the wind, like my young man’s dreams. I never in my life felt a sharper pain.” Perhaps such public relations errors as this explain why not everyone in his secret heart shared the widespread enthusiasm for the emperor; nevertheless, it cannot be denied that Napoleon, during the course of the Hundred Days, managed not only to raise an army but also to galvanize it sufficiently to face the tests that awaited it.
Along the ridge occupied by the Allies, all eyes were fastened on the extraordinary spectacle presented by the enemy troops as they took up positions in full view little more than a kilometer away, with banners flying in the wind and bayonets gleaming in the sun; successive roars of enthusiasm burst from the men as the emperor, on horseback, reviewed one regiment after another. To the eyes of Lieutenant Wheatley, one of the many British junior officers who had joined the King’s German Legion in the past few years, the vision of those dark masses of troops, outlined against the horizon and coming down toward him, “disjointing then contracting, like fields of animated clods, had a fairy look and border’d on the supernatural in appearance.” Corporal Farmer of the Eleventh Light Dragoons, one of the regiments in Vandeleur’s cavalry brigade, deployed on the extreme left of the Allied line, compared the descent of the seemingly endless columns to images seen in dreams. Ensign Macready of the Thirtieth Regiment, an extremely young officer who had been in the service for only a few months, realized that the sight of the French advance was giving him the shivers, and he thought that all the thousands of men crowded around him with their eyes fixed on the enemy must be feeling the same emotion.
In fact, some of them were feeling even stronger—and less honorable—emotions. In the Fortieth Regiment, a recruit who had never been in battle before approached Sergeant Lawrence, declaring that he had been taken ill and would have to fall out. “I could easily see the cause of his illness,” Lawrence later recalled. “So I pushed him into rank again, saying, ‘Why, Bartram, it’s the smell of this little powder that has caused your illness; there’s nothing else the matter with you’; but that physic would not content him at all, and he fell down and would not proceed another inch.” The sergeant chose to overlook this behavior, for otherwise he would have been obliged to shoot the young man; sometime later, however, when the soldier again reported to the regiment, Lawrence handed him over to a court-martial, which sentenced him to 300 lashes. One of the troopers in the Sixteenth Light Dragoons jumped off his horse and took to his heels. According to Captain Tomkinson, the man was “deranged. He was an old soldier, yet not the wisest, and had been shoemaker to the troop for many years. The men after the day was over did not resent his leaving them, knowing the kind of man and his weakness.” Another of Tomkinson’s dragoons failed to get off so easily: Having absented himself without leave before the battle—he was off thieving—he was reported to the captain and, the morning after the battle, “booted” by his comrades-in-arms.
Many strove to identify Napoleon, aware that they were about to measure themselves, for the first time in their lives, against the great man himself. Their emotions were divided between the hatred and contempt officially directed at “Buonaparte” by British public opinion and the admiration they felt for him in their hearts, almost in spite of themselves. Even the simplest soldiers were conscious of these contradictory sentiments; sometime previously, Sergeant Wheeler had written to his family at home, couching his letter in his peculiar orthography: “The Emperor will most assuredly command the French Army, and it will require a General of uncommon skill to withstand so powerful a genus.” There was all the more reason for officers to feel this way; Captain Mercer admitted that deep down he “had often longed to see Napoleon, that mighty man of war—that astonishing genius who had filled the world with his renown.” Naturally, at that distance it was difficult to know with any certainty whether one had really seen the emperor or not. An officer of the Royal Scots “saw a cloud of staff moving about, following some person of rank, who stopped occasionally, as if to address the French troops. I could almost fancy I could distinguish the redingote and ‘petit chapeau tricorne’ of our imperial Enemy.” Sir Hussey Vivian was positive he’d picked him out with his telescope before the attack began: “With a large suite of Officers, he rode amongst the Columns forming in the front of the British left, and was hailed with shouts of Vive l’Empereur. I fancied looking through my glass I could distinguish the little Hero, and, indeed, have little doubt of it.”
When the last troops had reached their positions, shouting themselves hoarse all the while, Napoleon ordered Marshal Ney to remain on the field and coordinate the action; as for himself, the emperor intended to oversee the whole battlefield, and therefore he had decided to establish his headquarters on high ground almost two kilometers to the rear, near the Rossomme Farm. From there it was possible with a telescope to survey the entire horizon, from Hougoumont on the left all the way to the forest known as the Bois de Paris (or Fichermont) and the heights of Chapelle-St. Lambert, which obstructed the horizon on the right. In accordance with a well-established procedure, the emperor’s aides set up a camp chair and a little table, on which they spread out his maps. Weary from so much riding, Napoleon sat down heavily and waited for the battle to begin. One of the young officers in his retinue noted, a little uneasily, that the emperor, in stark contrast with his enthusiastic troops, seemed all too listless.
EIGHTEEN
WHAT IS A BATTLE?
What exactly was a “battle” in 1815? The most acute description is given by Carl von Clausewitz in the fourth book of his treatise On War, published posthumously in 1832–5. In the following passage, the Prussian theoretician was not describing Waterloo in particular, but rather the general idea of a Napoleonic battle, which he knew well both from direct personal experience and from many hours spent in reflection. Clausewitz wrote:
What generally takes place in a major battle these days? Great masses of troops calmly position themselves in rank-and-file order. A relatively small proportion of the whole is sent forward, and these men are left to expend themselves in a firefight of several hours’ duration. Now and again, combat is interrupted and displaced a little this way or that by small, isolated blows: infantry attacks, bayonet assaults, cavalry charges. If the engaged troops gradually wear themselves down in this way and lose some part of their fighting spirit, then they are withdrawn, and other troops take their place.
Thus the battle burns on slowly, with moderated intensity, like wet gunpowder, and when night spreads its dark veil and all grows calm, because no one can see anymore and no one wants to entrust himself to blind chance, then the estimates and evaluations begin: how many usable forces (that is, how many masses of troops not yet collapsed like blasted volcanoes) remain to one side and the other, how much territory has been won or lost, how secure is the rear. The impressions of courage and cowardice, cleverness and stupidity that individual officers believe they have gathered, both from their own men and from the enemy, are assembled into a general impression and combined with the results of the foregoing evaluations to arrive at a decision: either to abandon the field, or to renew the fighting the following morning.
Although in the case of Waterloo a sense of defeat overcame the French army before reaching its commanders and the decision to abandon the battlefield was taken by the troops themselves, more spontaneously and chaotically than Napoleon would have wis
hed, Clausewitz’s sketch corresponds better than one might think to the events of June 18, 1815. In fact, an earlier version of the definition of battle given above can be found in the book Clausewitz wrote before On War, titled The Campaign of 1815 in France, which dealt specifically with the Waterloo campaign:
In every contemporary battle, the opposing forces are worn down during a long period of mutual destruction along the front line, where these forces are in contact. This phase of the conflict lasts for several hours, and the firefight results in minor oscillations, until one of the two sides finally receives a visible preponderance from its reserves—that is, from fresh troops—and thus is able to deal the decisive blow to the already wavering enemy.
A little farther on in the same book, Clausewitz wrote:
Our battles last between half a day and an entire day. For what is by far the major part of the entire struggle, there is a slow attrition, a slow destruction of the two armies, which are in contact at points all along the battle line and which, like two incompatible elements, destroy each other at those points of contact. Thus the battle keeps burning slowly, moderately, like wet powder; and it’s only when the major part of the forces on one side or the other has been consumed and rendered useless that a decision can be reached with the remaining troops.
Then chief of staff to Thielemann’s corps, Clausewitz had seen hard action at Ligny and found himself in Wavre that June 18 morning, where he would remain all day long. His analysis is indispensable to our understanding of the way in which Napoleon conducted the Battle of Waterloo.
NINETEEN
NAPOLEON’S ORDERS
Around eleven-thirty, or noon at the latest, Reille’s infantry began moving toward the wood at Hougoumont, seeking contact with the enemy; almost at once the artillery on both sides opened fire in that sector of the field. All along the front, officers pulled their watches out of their pockets and took note of the exact time when the battle began. The watches of the British, regulated in accordance with the observatory in Greenwich, were an hour behind those of the French, a fact that helps to explain the extreme discordance in the various eyewitness accounts. On the east side of the battlefield, d’Erlon’s infantry had not yet moved, and his artillerymen were still laboring to haul their guns through the mud and into their batteries, but it was clear that action would soon get under way there as well. The two generals, Reille and d’Erlon—respectively on the left and right of the French line and in charge of the II Corps and I Corps—were preparing to execute the emperor’s orders. The rest of the army, including the Imperial Guard, Mouton’s corps, and all the cavalry, remained in wait. But there has been debate over the exact instructions that the two commanders had received.
Napoleon’s general order had been dictated at eleven and addressed to Marshal Ney, who was charged with coordinating the French offensive. In this order, the emperor decreed that the attack would start around one o’clock, with the goal of seizing the village of Mont-Saint-Jean, “at the intersection of the Nivelles and Brussels roads.” The fact that the Allied troops, most of them invisible to the emperor, were actually deployed ahead of Mont-Saint-Jean, in the dead ground immediately behind the ridge, and the related possibility that Napoleon and his generals, striving to make their maps jibe with what they saw through their telescopes, confused La Haye Sainte farm with the village of Mont-Saint-Jean, are in the final analysis irrelevant, given that both places were on the main road to Brussels. To make a breakthrough in this sector, the emperor ordered the three reserve artillery batteries of the I, II, and VI Corps to mass their heavy 12-pounder guns and bombard the center of the enemy position. Immediately after the bombardment, the left-hand division in d’Erlon’s deployment was to advance, while his other divisions held themselves in readiness to support the attack; as to Reille’s II Corps, it was to advance at the same rate as I Corps. On the back of the sheet of paper, Marshal Ney scribbled in pencil, “Count d’Erlon will observe that the attack is to commence from the left, not the right. Communicate this new disposition to General Reille.”
This summarily formulated order from the emperor and Ney’s cryptic addendum to it have caused rivers of ink to flow, though Napoleon’s intentions seem clear. By sending forward both the I Corps and the II Corps, the emperor obviously planned to engage the enemy all along his front, searching for the point where his troops could break through. The order did not state where that point would be; since the emperor did not yet know where it would be found, he could not pinpoint it. His designation of Mont-Saint-Jean as the objective of his advance meant only that he planned no flanking maneuver to right or left, but rather a frontal assault. In any case, Reille and d’Erlon were not called upon to mount an immediate bayonet charge; they were to make gradual contact with the enemy and exert steadily mounting pressure upon his forces. This phase of the battle could go on for hours, while the conditions for a decisive thrust slowly emerged. Once combat was initiated, the enemy’s reactions, the conduct of his troops, and the movements of his reserves would reveal to the emperor the time and place for the final attack.
But remaining open to all possibilities is not the same as refusing to consider the probable outcome, and clearly Napoleon expected d’Erlon’s corps to be more completely engaged than Reille’s. The wording of the order demonstrates that the emperor had given rather detailed thought to the movements to be undertaken by I Corps, while the indications for II Corps seem much more generic; moreover, the village of Mont-Saint-Jean, which had been chosen as the focal point of the attack, lay on the line of d’Erlon’s advance, and there Napoleon ordered the massing of his 12-pounder batteries. Taking into account the little that he could foresee at that moment, the emperor apparently expected more decisive results from the advance of his right wing than from that of his left. In his memoirs, Napoleon claimed that he wanted to maneuver in such a way as to separate the English from the Prussians, cutting off Wellington’s retreat to Brussels and pushing his army toward the sea; although the emperor’s assertions cannot always be taken as the undiluted truth, in this case there is no apparent reason to disbelieve him.
Another fact demonstrates that Napoleon, while remaining ready for any eventuality, expected to break through Wellington’s left wing: At the last moment, he changed his dispositions for I Corps, modifying the verbal orders he had given to his generals over breakfast at Le Caillou. Originally, d’Erlon’s troops were to begin engaging the enemy on the right, around Papelotte, and the battle would then be extended gradually along the whole front, so that the final and probably decisive pressure would be exerted along the axis of the Brussels road, when the last of I Corps’s divisions entered into action in that sector. But at some point, Napoleon must have experienced one of those supernormal intuitions that had produced so many of his great victories in the past. Looking through his telescope at what little could be seen of the enemy positions behind the ridge, the emperor realized that Wellington’s left wing was the weak spot in his deployment, and resolved, therefore, to attempt a breakthrough there.
The proof of this lies in the note that Ney scribbled on the back of Napoleon’s order: “Count d’Erlon will observe that the attack is to commence on the left, not the right. Communicate this new disposition to General Reille.” The change evidently pertained to the order of advance that the four divisions of I Corps were to follow, and it could only have sprung from a decision to exert gradually increasing pressure against Wellington’s left wing, starting from the center and working out. Threatened on its right by Reille’s advance, pinned in the center by the offensive of d’Erlon’s First Division, the enemy army would be driven in farther to its left, exactly where it was the weakest, after which the remaining divisions of I Corps would make a ninety-degree turn to the left and attack Mont-Saint-Jean, cutting the Brussels road and trapping the bulk of Wellington’s forces.
The fact that the troops of Reille’s II Corps, and not d’Erlon’s, opened the battle, and did so an hour earlier than Napoleon had stipulated, has
raised questions over what orders were sent to Reille. The instructions for II Corps—to advance at the same rate as I Corps—appear to be laconic, but Napoleon had spoken at length to Reille and his other division commanders—among them his brother Jérome—that morning and obviously felt no need to modify the arrangements made at that time. Reille was to advance, coordinating his movements with those of the I Corps; since the Hougoumont wood was in his front, it seems entirely credible that he would have been ordered to occupy it, as both Prince Jérome and Reille himself later affirmed. Reille understood, and explained to his officers, that the main effort was going to be made by d’Erlon’s corps, and that their task was simply to occupy the woods as a cover for the advance of the French right wing. One of those officers, a chef de bataillon named Jolyet, confirmed that their orders were “to prevent the enemy from coming out on our left flank; for I had been well forewarned that the army was going to pivot on us, and consequently that it was imperative for us, at all costs, to hold our position,” that is, to retain possession of the Hougoumont wood. The emperor and his generals knew from their maps that the wood was an inhabited place, even though the Ferraris-Capitaine map was imprecise on this point and gave the impression that Hougoumont was nothing less than a village. The château and various buildings of Hougoumont, hidden as they were by the alders of the park, were invisible from the French positions. For most of the junior officers and their men, therefore, what they had in front of them was simply a wood that they had to occupy because the emperor’s plan required them to do so. Given that the emperor’s general order called for the commencement of combat shortly after one o’clock, the fact that Prince Jérome’s infantry started advancing toward the wood before noon, when d’Erlon’s men had not yet got under way and the artillery bombardment had not yet begun, may come as a surprise, but in the end the discrepancy seems unimportant. Reille stated that he received the order to advance into the wood at a quarter past eleven, and therefore the most probable explanation is that Napoleon had decided to accelerate the pace of events: If II Corps wanted to remain in alignment with I Corps when the latter moved forward in its turn, then II Corps would have to clear the Hougoumont wood. And perhaps their hope that the wood was not even defended caused Napoleon and his generals to consider this movement as a plain and simple adjustment of their line, not the beginning of a battle, only to change their minds when the infantry’s advance was greeted from the wood with a heavy barrage of musket fire.
The Battle Page 9