Napoleon

by Paul Johnson

  All the same, at dawn on 18 June, the odds still favored Bonaparte. There had been intermittent thunderstorms over the preceding few days. The ground, chiefly cornfields, was wet. The men on both sides were tired and damp, though mostly in good heart, given the circumstances. Wellington had felt obliged to dispatch a quarter of his force, 17,000 men, to a position eight miles to his right (that is, to the west) to prevent a French encircling movement on that flank. In retrospect it seems a mistake, especially since this force included an entire British division. But it is quite possible that, if the duke had not taken this precaution, Bonaparte might have changed his plan and done exactly what Wellington feared. What made Bonaparte such a dangerous opponent was his ability to seize upon a gap in his enemy’s defenses with extraordinary alertness, and respond to it with an aggressive move at high speed. Detaching this force left Wellington with 30,000 British or King’s German Legion troops, who could be depended on, and a mixed bag of 36,000 Dutch, Belgians, and others. Some of these soldiers fought gallantly, but some did not, and Wellington must have begun the day with some apprehension—indeed, we know he did. He had 156 cannon, half British. Bonaparte’s army consisted of 74,000 men, all French, and 246 guns. It was drawn up in full view of the British at a distance of 1,300 yards. It was in three lines, the Guard forming the third.

  Blücher was marching toward the outnumbered Wellington, but for reasons not his fault, his progress was slow. That gave Bonaparte the chance to attack and destroy Wellington before the Prussians arrived. Indeed, he sent orders to Grouchy to do everything to delay the Prussians still further. Grouchy never carried out these orders, partly because he misread them but mainly because he did not know where he was in relation to all the other forces, French, Prussian, and British. The only explanation for Grouchy’s getting himself lost was that he could not read a map. That seems an extraordinary lack in a man given a key command by Bonaparte, the greatest military cartographer of all time. But war is full of such mysteries. Whatever the reason for Grouchy’s inactivity, he and his men played no further part in the campaign, and for all the help he gave to his master, he might just as well have been in barracks in Paris.

  The failure to halt the Prussians’ return to the main battle might not have mattered if Bonaparte had thrust forward with his customary speed. He should have attacked at dawn or at latest 6 A.M. Instead he inspected the field and found it too wet. The start was delayed first till 9 A.M., then till 11:30, to permit the ground to dry. It is, to be sure, not easy for a large mass of cavalry and infantry to advance over sodden ground, on a slightly upward slope. But the loss of five or six hours in ordering the attack, in circumstances where the enemy was being reinforced (for units were still reaching Wellington from his own rear, leaving aside the marching Prussians), was a mistake and went against all Bonaparte’s principles of seizing the moment and taking risks for the sake of speed.

  The delay suggests that Bonaparte was overconfident about the British. He ignored the advice of his marshals, who had had the experience of facing British infantry, that they were extraordinarily obstinate in holding a defensive position. He also underrated Wellington as a tactical commander in battle. When Soult praised the duke, Bonaparte replied: “That’s because he has beaten you.” Wellington did not make a comparable mistake in underrating Bonaparte. He thought him worth an extra 40,000 men, which almost doubled the numerical odds against the Allies. But Wellington was a confident man himself. He had fought twenty pitched battles against good French troops and won them all. What surprised him, as he later said, was Bonaparte’s declining to maneuver much. He said: “The French came on in the same old way and we drove them off in the same old way.” What Wellington meant by this was that Bonaparte began with an artillery barrage from eighty guns, followed by massive cavalry attacks, and then put in his infantry. The barrage failed because Wellington’s reverse-slope tactic reduced the casualties to a minimum and kept his men in good heart. The subsequent cavalry assault by a total of eighty French squadrons was a formidable business, but the British had time to form squares and beat them off. Only the most determined cavalry, backed up at close range by infantry, could break well-ordered squares, and this was where Murat’s absence was felt. The cavalry lacked persistence and the infantry were a long way behind. So many of the best horsemen in France—including the heavy dragoons of the Old Guard—died in vain. It is true that one of the Dutch-Belgian brigades ran for its life, and two brigades of Uxbridge’s cavalry launched an unauthorized attack on the French infantry, achieved an initial success, then got out of control (as was usual) and were badly mauled by the French cavalry. But Wellington expected both mishaps and just carried on, making good the gaps with composure. In short, Bonaparte gained very little during the first three strokes of the battle.

  There was now, on his part, a need to destroy Wellington’s army as quickly as possible and at whatever cost, for already at 1 P.M. he had got his first glimpse of a Prussian corps on the horizon, marching fast toward the battlefield. So he gave Ney an imperative order to take La Haye Saint, a heavily defended farmhouse right in the center of Wellington’s position, without delay. The place was held by the King’s German Legion, but they had run out of ammunition and could not immediately be resupplied. Ney attacked them with his customary zeal, and after fierce bayonet fighting they withdrew. But this reverse did not break the Allied line, for Wellington merely reformed and tightened it. By now it was after six in the evening, and the first units of Blücher’s army were coming into contact with the French right flank. Their arrival allowed Wellington to weaken his left flank by putting two cavalry brigades behind his battered center, thus ruling out a French breakthrough.

  Bonaparte had already recognized the seriousness of his position by sending two battalions of the Old Guard, his weapon of last resource, to block the path of the Prussians at the point of the bayonet. He now, about 7:30, launched his entire line to attack the British position, and threw in the whole of the Old Guard, less five battalions. The attack was vigorous but so was the defense, and the terrible cry went up in the French army: “La Garde recule!” (the Guard is falling back). That dismal sound had never been heard before in a battle with Bonaparte in command. Indeed, the retreat of the Old Guard, orderly but nonetheless definitive, gave Wellington the opportunity to wave his hat and call out: “Stand up, Guards, and move forward.” After a desperate day on the defensive, the British and their allies now themselves attacked, closely followed by their guns, which pounded into the retreating French formations. At the same time, the Prussians, in growing numbers, were rolling up the right of the French position. Two battalions of the French Old Guard, from the first regiment of grenadiers, refused to move and had to be blown to pieces by cannon at point-blank range. But the rest of the army became a hunted rabble, scattering in all directions.

  By 9 P.M. it was all over, and Wellington and Blücher met fifteen minutes later at another battered farmhouse, La Belle Alliance. Blücher said to the duke: “Mon dieu, quelle affaire!” It was almost the only French he knew, but it summed up well a dreadful day. The fighting had taken place almost entirely in a narrow area of less than three square miles, and this sodden field was now covered with dead and dying men and horses. There had been spectacular heroism on all sides. Ney had fought like a lion, surviving as half a dozen horses were killed under him, and finally leading his men directly at the English guards on foot. His last observed act on the battlefield was to vent his frustration on his sword, which he struck and broke against the barrel of an abandoned cannon. He wanted to die in action because he knew that his life would be exacted for his blatant desertion of his king, as indeed it was.

  When Bonaparte had broken the news to his mother that he was leaving Elba to fight again, she had said to him: “Good. Better to die with your sword in hand than waste the rest of your life in exile.” But Bonaparte took no opportunity to involve himself in the mêlée. He was probably afraid not of death but of capture. Indeed, if he had fallen in
to the hands of the Prussians, Blücher would probably have shot him. Wellington said he never saw Bonaparte during the smoky inferno of the battle, though Soult, whom he had seen before, he recognized without difficulty, as he issued orders. As darkness finally fell on the long, horrifying day, Bonaparte took to his coach, protected by a screen of cavalry. But the mud soon forced him to get onto a horse and ride as hard as he could to safety. He made no comment on the scale of the French losses, which were 40,000 on the field of Waterloo alone. Blücher had lost 7,000 men during the final hours of the day. Wellington had lost 15,000, including some of his best generals and officers and many personal friends. He was untouched, like Bonaparte himself, but Uxbridge had lost a leg to cannon shot in the closing minutes of the battle, while he and Wellington were in conversation. The duke was visibly shaken by the carnage and kept repeating to Thomas Creevey, a Whig MP: “It was a close-run thing, a damn close-run thing. I do not think it would have done if I had not been there.” The harrowing experience of Waterloo gave rise to one of his most earnest remarks: “There is nothing in life worse than a battle won, except a battle lost.” His final verdict on Bonaparte’s conduct was that he would have been infinitely wiser to have fought a defensive campaign, which would have raised great, possibly insuperable, problems for the Allies. “But then he was always too impatient for that.”

  Waterloo was one of the decisive battles of history and brought to an end the entire Revolutionary and Napoleonic period. On 20 June, Bonaparte handed over command of what was left of the army to Soult. The French armed forces were by no means finished—about 150,000 men were operating in various formations and 175,000 conscripts were in training—but the French elites had had enough. Fouché, who wanted a powerful role for himself under the Bourbons, persuaded the so-called representative institutions, the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, to call for Bonaparte’s abdication, and he obliged on 21 June. He was not sure what he ought or wanted to do next. He had some vague project for going to America, probably the United States. Latin America was now in full revolt against Spanish rule, and Bonaparte was not the only one to see a future for himself there: Byron was considering fitting out a force to join in the struggle. Frustrated in Europe, Bonaparte was later to talk of a scheme to create an enormous nation in the Americas of 100 million people. But he had first to get there. He headed for the port of Rochefort, hoping to take ship for New York or Boston. But when he arrived, on 3 July, he found the British navy had forestalled him. After five more days of hesitation, he decided that his best course was to give himself up to the British, whom he described, in an appeal for refuge to the prince regent, as “the most powerful, the most unwavering and the most generous of [my] foes.” He climbed aboard a frigate that took him to the Île d’Aix, where he was transferred to HMS Bellerophon, a captured French battleship now known in the British fleet as the “Billy Ruffian.” His flattery got him nowhere. He was taken to Plymouth, where he remained for three weeks, an object of great interest to the local population, who were taken out by the boatload to see him. Bonaparte obliged by parading at the entry port, in full uniform, at the same time every day. But the grim truth became daily more obvious to him. He was not to be given his freedom, and the delay was occasioned only by the need for consultation among the Allies about where he was to be sent and held. The dread words “Saint Helena,” first uttered the previous year as an alternative to Elba, now took irrevocable shape. Despite an attempt by his Whig friends to have a writ of habeas corpus served on the warship’s commander, Bonaparte remained under custody and was transferred to HMS Northumberland; the ship sailed for the prison-island just before the end of the month, arriving there on 17 October 1815. Bonaparte was forty-five. Had these events occurred at the beginning of the present century, there can be little doubt that Bonaparte would have been obliged to face a war crimes tribunal, with an inevitable verdict of “guilty” and a sentence of death or life imprisonment. The evidence then produced would have determined, forever, in the minds of reasonable people, the degree of guilt he bore for events that had cost four or five million lives and immense loss of property. In his day, however, no precedents for such a procedure and no machinery existed; he went to his captivity untried, by an act of state on the part of the British government, with, to be sure, the agreement of all the other European governments and the tacit approval of the French. The consequence was another example of Popper’s law of unintended effect—the birth of the Napoleonic legend.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Long Good-bye

  THE DECISION to confine Bonaparte on Saint Helena was taken at the Vienna Congress, confirmed at the Conference of Aix-la-Chapelle, and made lawful in the English courts by an act of Parliament that designated him as a prisoner of war under the name of General Bonaparte. Saint Helena was a volcanic island, twenty-eight miles in circumference, in the South Atlantic, used as a watering station on the route to India. It had a typical oceanic climate, with frequent showers and occasional mist, and those living there tended to suffer from amoebic dysentery. Otherwise it was reasonably healthy. As the island was a frequent port of call for naval and mercantile ships on a major trade route, it combined accessibility with great distance from any sympathizers likely to attempt a rescue, and in fact during the six years Bonaparte lived on the island no serious effort was made to organize his escape. Distance was reinforced by a squadron of frigates kept on permanent station around the island, an inshore patrol of brigs, and a garrison of 2,250 men. The number of cannon emplaced to resist assault was raised to 500. The cost to the British taxpayer was nearly half a million gold napoleons a year.

  Bonaparte was permitted to take with him a group of courtiers and a dozen servants—his Mamluk bodyguard, a butler, a cook, three valets, three footmen, an accountant, a pantryman, and a lamp cleaner. The servants gave no trouble. Indeed, Louis Marchand, the young head body servant, refuted the axiom that no great man is a hero to his valet: he worshiped the fallen emperor. The courtiers were a different matter. One, the marquis Charles de Montholon, was probably chosen because he had a pretty wife, Albine, who (it is generally supposed) became Bonaparte’s last mistress, but she also took one of the English officers as a lover and departed under a cloud. Another, General Gaspar Gourgaud, was an excitable man, perhaps a homosexual (he sometimes referred to Bonaparte as “she”), who was jealous of Montholon and his wife and challenged the marquis to a duel. He, too, left under a cloud. There was also a civilian lawyer, Count Joseph de Las Cases, and his son Emmanuel. But Las Cases was deported for breaking the rules of the imprisonment, by smuggling out letters. The senior member of the entourage was General Count Henri Bertrand, who had been Bonaparte’s palace marshal and was almost his age. Unfortunately his wife, Fanny, was a royalist, who had tried to drown herself when told she must accompany her husband into exile, and Bonaparte compounded her antipathy, after the departure of Albine, by making a pass at her, which was violently rebuffed. Various other people joined the court during the exile. There were priests, sent by Madame Mère and Bonaparte’s uncle Cardinal Fesch, who made little impact on the highly secular prisoner, and doctors, of whom Dr. Barry O’Meara, a surgeon from the Bellerophon, was the most significant. There were between twelve and sixteen courtiers in all.

  History shows, not least in our own times, that all courts, especially when they are small and in exile, are seething circles of jealousy and intrigue, and Bonaparte’s was a characteristic example of this unlovable phenomenon. At times the hatred was almost palpable and accusations of betrayal flew around. At one stage Bonaparte expressed the view that he should have taken with him only servants, and one cannot help agreeing with him. The significance of the courtiers was that they took down Bonaparte’s own rambling reminiscences, and six of them, plus one of the valets, also produced memoirs of their own, which became the basis of the huge Napoleon literature industry that began to develop from 1816 onward and continues relentlessly to this day. These memoirs, like everything else concerning Bonaparte
’s life, disagree markedly, often on plain matters of fact, and reflect the tensions and antipathies of the exile, which was as dramatic in its own way as any other period of his life.

  The chief source of the drama, other than the ex-emperor himself, was the dull, obstinate, dutiful, meticulous, well-meaning, honest, nervous, and overscrupulous Hudson Lowe, who had been appointed governor and jailer in chief of the prisoner. No one of any pull or importance in England wanted the job, and Lowe, who was not a gentleman by birth, was glad to get it. It meant affluence to him—£12,000 a year plus perks—and included a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (he had already been knighted) and the local rank of lieutenant general. Lowe’s father had been a regimental surgeon. Lowe was born into the army en poste, joined it at the age of twelve, and served it all his life, throughout the empire and the European theater. Bonaparte sneered at him for never having heard a shot fired in anger, but this was totally untrue. Lowe was present at thirty-one battles (against Bonaparte’s fifty), being witness both to Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign and to his defeat at Leipzig. Lowe fought in Italy, Germany, Greece, Spain, and France itself, being presented with a testimonial from the citizens of Marseilles for saving them from pillage. He spoke a number of languages and became a specialist, first, in raising and training local corps—such as the Corsican Rangers, the Malta Regiment, the Neapolitan irregulars, and the Russo-German Legion, all financed by the British government—and second, in liaising with Allied armies, especially the Prussians; thus he acted as aide-de-camp to Blücher in thirteen battles. He was a versatile and experienced man, officially cited as “never having been absent from his duty a single day since the beginning of the war in 1793.” The duke of Wellington, who had had him as quartermaster general, thought him far from clever but a conscientious and scrupulously honest officer, who had been the victim of a scandalous campaign of abuse.