Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles. Bernard Cornwell
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He was an irascible Welshman, burly and unkempt, but indubitably brave. ‘A rough, foul-mouthed devil,’ the Duke of Wellington described him, but by 1814 the rough, foul-mouthed devil was suffering from what we would know as combat stress reaction. He had written to the Duke begging to be sent home, ‘I must give up. I am grown so nervous, that when there is any service to be done it works upon my mind so that it is impossible for me to sleep at nights. I cannot possibly stand it.’
When Wellington took command of his ‘infamous army’ he sent for Picton. He needed every Peninsular veteran he could find, and the Welshman was a man he could trust to lead and inspire troops. Picton was still suffering. Before leaving Britain he lay down in a newly dug grave and remarked morbidly, ‘I think this would do for me.’ Despite that gloomy premonition he had come to Brussels, though somehow he had managed to mislay his luggage with his uniform, so that he went to battle in a shabby greatcoat and a mouldy brown hat. He must have cut a strange figure among the dazzling uniforms at the ball, amidst all the lace and gold thread, epaulettes and aiguillettes, not to mention the low-cut dresses of the ladies, many of them young English women like the 22-year-old Lady Frances Wedderburn-Webster, who, though married and pregnant, had been seen meeting the Duke of Wellington in a Brussels park just a few days before. A British staff officer had seen the Duke strolling alone in the park, then an open carriage had stopped and Lady Frances stepped out and the couple, the officer wrote, ‘descended into a hollow, where the trees completely screened them’. In time a London newspaper, the St James’s Chronicle, would spread rumours of their affair, claiming that Lady Frances’s husband was threatening a divorce, a report that led to a libel case and severe damages against the Chronicle, but it is interesting, if not significant, that the Duke found time both on the eve of Waterloo and on the day immediately following the battle, to write to Lady Frances.
Wellington liked the company of women, except for his wife, whom he detested. In that taste he was quite unlike Napoleon, who once remarked, ‘We have ruined everything by treating women too well, we have committed the great mistake of putting them almost on a level with ourselves. Nature created them to be our slaves.’ Wellington was more at ease with women, especially clever women, than with men, and he liked it even more if the women were young, pretty and aristocratic. There was gossip in Brussels: the Duke ‘makes a point of asking all the Ladies of Loose character’ complained Lady Caroline Capel, sister to Wellington’s second in command, Lord Uxbridge, who had himself run off with Wellington’s sister-in-law. The Duke was pointedly warned against one such ‘loose’ woman, Lady John Campbell; her character, he was told, was ‘more than Suspicious’. ‘Is it, by God!’ he responded. ‘Then I will go and ask her myself!’, whereupon ‘he immediately took his hat and went out for the purpose’. There were no suspicious rumours about the seventeen-year-old Lady Georgiana Lennox, daughter of the Duchess of Richmond, who dined next to Wellington at her mother’s ball. She asked if the rumours were true and that the French were marching and he nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘they are true, we are off tomorrow.’
It was that imminence of battle which gives the Duchess of Richmond’s ball such piquancy. On the night of 15 June there was a throng of beautifully uniformed officers dancing by candlelight, and within twenty-four hours some would be dead, still wearing their silk stockings and dancing shoes. Wellington’s critics, naturally, carp that he had no business attending a ball when he knew that the French were marching, but the Duke, as ever, had his reasons.
In the first place he did not want to display panic. He had been taken by surprise, and by the time he arrived at the ball, at 10 p.m., he knew he had been wrong-footed by Napoleon, but this was no time to show alarm. He knew he was being observed, so it was necessary to display confidence. The second reason was eminently practical. The Duke needed to issue urgent orders, and virtually every senior officer in his army was at the ball, making it easy for him to find and direct them. The ball, in truth, served as an orders group, and it would have been foolish of the Duke to pass up such an opportunity. Lady Hamilton-Dalrymple, who shared a sofa with him for part of the evening, recollected that ‘frequently in the middle of a sentence he stopped abruptly and called to some officer, giving him instructions’.
So what had happened to invest the ball with such threat?
Hell had broken loose on the road from Charleroi.
* * *
One of Napoleon’s difficulties was self-inflicted. He had ordered the main roads north out of France to be destroyed. The roads were made from a layer of compacted gravel over a bed of larger stones, and for some miles south of the frontier the roads had been hacked and trenched to make it difficult for an enemy army to advance into France. It made it equally difficult for the French to travel the other way. The broken roads were no obstacle for infantry or cavalry, they were used to marching in the fields either side of any road, but it was a nuisance for all the wheeled vehicles: the supply wagons and the guns.
Once Napoleon decided to attack he moved fast, concentrating his army just south of the River Sambre. Crews repaired the roads, letting the guns and wagons travel north, but the infantry and cavalry had to use the fields which, for the most part, were planted with rye. The rye grew taller in the early nineteenth century, so the advancing army was faced with thick, close-set, fibrous stalks as tall as a man. The crop was trampled flat, but one cavalryman recalled how the horses stumbled on the tangled mess underfoot, and that inconvenient rye will play a small part in the unfolding events.
Yet despite the stumbling horses and the road-repairs, Napoleon’s army closed on the frontier, so that, by nightfall on 14 June, the day before the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, l’Armée du Nord was bivouacked a few miles south of Charleroi. The Emperor ordered them to attempt concealment by camping behind hills, yet still their cooking fires lit up the night. That glow in the sky should have been the first signal to the allies that something ominous was brewing south of the frontier, but though it was noticed it did not provoke any particular alarm.
The 15th of June dawned fine, and French soldiers were on the march by daybreak. Their first task was to cross the River Sambre, which lay just to the north of the frontier, and three columns approached the river from the south. The central column marched to Charleroi, where the bridge was barricaded, and there was a delay until sufficient infantry had arrived to storm the barrier. The Prussian defenders were few in number, really nothing more than an advanced picquet, and they withdrew northwards as the French occupied the town. By now it was afternoon and Napoleon’s army was crossing into Belgium, where strong cavalry patrols fanned out to discover where the allied armies lay.
This was not the only French activity. Much further west other cavalry patrols were probing north towards Mons. That morning the 2nd Battalion of the 95th Rifles encountered a patrol of French lancers on the frontier close to Mons. Richard Cocks Eyre, a Second Lieutenant (a rank in the Rifles equivalent to an Ensign in the rest of the army), described the encounter as ‘play’, but for the Duke of Wellington such reports were deadly serious. They could be evidence of an enemy advance that would cut him off from the North Sea ports. He also heard reports of French activity around Charleroi, but his first instinct was to protect his right flank, and so he ordered the army’s reserve, which he commanded himself, to remain in Brussels, and the rest of the army to stay in their cantonments to the west. This could have been disastrous. Napoleon was thrusting men across the river and slowly pushing the Prussians back, but Wellington, instead of sending his men towards the danger point, was watching the roads leading to Ostend where most of his troops, guns and supplies were shipped from Britain. Napoleon could not have wished for anything better.
The story of 15 June, the day of the famous ball, is one of mystery. The fog of war is a cliché, yet it applies to that day. Napoleon commits his army to an attack across the Sambre, beginning at dawn, the Prussians retreat slowly and stubbornly, and Wellington, despite messages from his allies, does nothing decisive; indeed he does something frivolous, he goes to a dance. He has been accused of deliberately ignoring the Prussian messages, though why he should do that is also a mystery. He first hears of the French advance at about 3 p.m. The messages have taken a long time to reach him and the Duke’s critics contend that as soon as he heard he should have issued orders that would have taken his troops east towards the fighting, but instead he waits. Baron von Müffling