Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles. Bernard Cornwell
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road which will let the British come to the aid of the Prussians, so Blücher orders a stand there.
There is a problem, though. The Duke of Wellington waited too long and the British–Dutch army is assembling late. The Emperor has stolen a march, and the vital crossroads of Quatre-Bras, the place where the British–Dutch must assemble if they are to help Blücher, is virtually undefended. Seize that crossroads and the Duke of Wellington’s army cannot march to help the Prussians.
And at dawn on 16 June the Emperor sends Marshal Ney to capture Quatre-Bras.
It is a hot day, a sweltering summer’s day in Belgium. The Imperial Guard leave Charleroi late, at around 9 a.m., and follow the Emperor’s main forces towards Sombreffe. The Emperor has found the enemy and he knows exactly what he must do. Marshal Ney will capture the vital crossroads at Quatre-Bras, thus keeping Wellington away from the battle the Emperor will fight at the village of Ligny, which is close to Sombreffe. That battle will be between France and Prussia. If Napoleon wins that battle then the Prussians can be driven away east towards their homeland, and the Emperor can turn on the British.
Hippolyte and his fellow guardsmen march behind their regimental band. They pass the unburied corpses of the men killed in the previous day’s skirmishes between the Prussian rearguard and the advancing French. Hippolyte recalls that he more or less understood the Emperor’s plan, the map helped him understand it, but in truth that plan is not his business. All he needs to know is that his beloved Emperor has chosen to fight, that the enemy is in disarray, and that if the battle becomes desperate then the Imperial Guard will be thrown into the fight. That is their purpose, to win battles, and their boast is that they are undefeated. They are the Emperor’s picked men, the bravest soldiers of France, the indomitable Guard.
The Imperial Guard would doubtless have liked to call themselves ‘the bravest of the brave’, except that soubriquet belonged to Marshal Michel Ney, who only joined the army that hot morning of June 16th. ‘Ney,’ the Emperor greeted him, ‘I am glad to see you,’ and while Hippolyte and the rest of the army marched east to deal with the Prussians, Ney was given 9,600 infantry, 4,600 cavalry and 34 cannon and ordered to seize the crossroads at Quatre-Bras. It was, truly, the simplest of tasks, and Ney possessed an overwhelming force with which to achieve it.
Capture Quatre-Bras and the Prussians are almost certainly doomed.
Capture Quatre-Bras and the British will be Napoleon’s next victims.
It has all started so well for the Emperor. Then a Dutchman decided to be disobedient.
* * *
Major-General Baron Jean-Victor Constant-Rebecque was born in Switzerland and was to die in what is now Poland. His first military service was with the French, but after the Revolution he joined the Dutch army. He was forty-three in 1815 and knew the British well because when Slender Billy, the Crown Prince, had been made an aide-de-camp to Wellington in the Peninsula, Rebecque had accompanied the young man. Now he was Chief of Staff to Slender Billy.
Rebecque was a level-headed, intelligent man. On 15 June he had received orders to assemble the 1st Corps, which was commanded by the Crown Prince, at Nivelles, a town which lies to the west of the Charleroi-to-Brussels highroad. The orders had come late because the Duke of Wellington had hesitated all day, still fearing that French attack through Mons, but at last the Anglo-Dutch army was moving.
And Rebecque decided it was moving to the wrong place.
Nivelles was not a bad place for part of Wellington’s army to assemble. A road went eastwards from the town, the Nivelles road, and led to where Blücher had decided to make his stand. Except between Nivelles and Sombreffe was that insignificant crossroads called Quatre-Bras. Napoleon had grasped the importance of that crossroads and ordered Marshal Ney to capture it. If the French held Quatre-Bras then they had come between Nivelles and Sombreffe, between Wellington and Blücher. Capture Quatre-Bras and Napoleon’s aim of dividing the allies was achieved.
And Rebecque understood that.
So despite the orders to assemble at Nivelles, Rebecque sent troops to Quatre-Bras. They were not many, just over 4,000 men of the Dutch army, but they were at the crossroads and, even while Wellington was dressing for the ball, they fought off the advancing French. Those Frenchmen were patrolling and, just south of Quatre-Bras, came under fire from Dutch artillery and infantry. The French did not press their attack. They probed, discovered the Dutch forces, and then retreated. It was late, the sun was almost down, and the attack on the crossroads could wait till morning. The Dutch troops who repelled the French probes were actually Germans from Nassau. They were in Dutch service because, in the same manner that the ruler of Hanover had become the King of England in Europe’s game of musical thrones, so the Prince of Nassau had become King William I of the Netherlands. The men who fought off the first French attacks were under the command of a 23-year-old Colonel, Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, and that night, as the chandeliers were being lit for the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, the young Colonel sent a report of the day’s action to his immediate superior. He reported that he had repelled French cavalry and infantry, but was worried because he had no contact with any other allied troops. He was quite alone, in the dark, without any supporting allies. There was worse:
I need to confess to Your Excellency that I am too weak to hold here long. The Second Battalion of Orange Nassau still have French muskets and are down to 10 cartridges per man … every man is likewise down to 10 cartridges. I will defend the post entrusted to me as long as possible. I expect to be attacked at daybreak.
So as night fell on Belgium the Emperor’s plan seemed to be working. His army had crossed the Sambre and pushed northwards. The Prussians had retreated north and east, but had stopped close to the village of Ligny, where they planned to make a fight of it. Blücher was depending on Wellington coming to his aid, but the British had been slow in concentrating their forces, and were still a long way from their Prussian allies. They could still reach Ligny, but only if the Nivelles road was open, and that meant holding the crossroads at Quatre-Bras where a small force of Germans in Dutch service was now isolated and almost out of ammunition. Those 4,000 Germans expected to be attacked in the morning, and that attack would come from Marshal Ney, ‘bravest of the brave’.
Thus as the sun rose early on 16 June the allies could expect two battles, one at Ligny and the other at the vital crossroads of Quatre-Bras. And Napoleon understood the importance of that crossroads. Capture Quatre-Bras and he would have divided his enemies. Yet the fog of war was thickening. While Wellington danced the Emperor was under the illusion that Ney had already captured Quatre-Bras. On the morning of the 16th he sent even more troops to reinforce Ney, who would now command over 40,000 men. Those extra troops were not sent to help Ney capture the crossroads, so far as Napoleon was aware Ney had already done that; instead their task was to hold the crossroads and so stop Wellington’s troops from joining Blücher’s. There was more: ‘You will march for Brussels this evening, arriving there at seven o’clock tomorrow morning. I shall support you with the Imperial Guard.’
So Napoleon believed he could shove the Prussians further away, then switch his attack to the British. It was all going to plan and the Emperor would take breakfast in Brussels’s Laeken Palace on Saturday morning.
Except Ney had still not captured Quatre-Bras.
‘The Duchess of Richmond’s Ball, 15 June 1815’, by Robert Alexander Hillingford. Virtually every senior officer in his army was at the ball, making it easy for Wellington to find and direct them – the ball, in truth, served as an orders group.
Major-General Baron Jean-Victor Constant-Rebecque, by J. B. Van Der Hulst: ‘Then a Dutchman decided to be disobedient.’
Field-Marshal August Neidhart, Count of Gneisenau, by George