Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles. Bernard Cornwell
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left flank of the French army and so give the allies a famous victory.
Wellington, meanwhile, just hoped to hold Quatre-Bras. He was fully aware of Blücher’s hopes and doubtless wished he could join the battle that was to develop at Ligny, but his first priority was to keep the French from capturing the vital crossroads. He arrived at Quatre-Bras at about ten in the morning to discover that the enemy was inexplicably supine. The French were in force to the south of the crossroads, but showed no signs of attacking, and so Wellington rode three miles west to meet Blücher at a windmill in the village of Brye, which is close to Ligny.
Blücher explained that he meant to fight, and requested that Wellington send him troops. Wellington, meanwhile, was inspecting the Prussian deployment and, perhaps tactlessly, criticized it. Many of Blücher’s men were arrayed on open ground, dangerously exposed to artillery fire. ‘I said that if I were in Blücher’s place,’ the Duke of Wellington recalled, ‘I should withdraw all the columns I saw scattered about the front, and get more of the troops under shelter of the rising ground.’ In other words to use the reverse slopes of the gently undulating fields that lay between the villages. The advice was not welcome, ‘they seemed to think they knew best, so I came away very shortly.’
The Prussians asked that he bring his army to their aid, but to do that Wellington needed to hold Quatre-Bras and he knew that, despite Ney’s somnolence, the crossroads must soon be under severe attack. ‘Well,’ he told them, ‘I will come, provided I am not attacked myself.’
Much has been made of this meeting. The Duke of Wellington’s critics claim that he made a solemn promise to come to the aid of the Prussians, and that he broke the promise. It has even been suggested that the Duke deliberately lied about his intentions because he wanted the Prussians to fight and so give him time to concentrate his army, though there is not the slightest evidence to back up that contention. Wellington certainly did not want the Prussians to be routed, because then his smaller army would have to face Napoleon’s larger army alone, so why would he risk a Prussian disaster? The evidence suggests that he was being realistic. He could not march to Ligny until he had fought off the expected French attack at Quatre-Bras. If there was no attack, then he would send men, but if he was defending the crossroads against Ney’s considerable force then he would probably have no men to spare.
Which meant the Prussians would almost certainly have to face Napoleon on their own, but by early afternoon Blücher had assembled 76,000 infantry, 8,000 cavalry and 224 guns to oppose the Emperor’s 58,000 infantry, 12,500 cavalry and 210 cannon.
Napoleon had not reckoned on facing such a large force. He had thought the Prussians were still retreating and would leave around 40,000 men as a rearguard, but he was not dismayed at the disparity of numbers. In the first place the Prussians had decided against using the ‘tired old dodge’ of sheltering their troops, and that refusal left many of Blücher’s regiments vulnerable to Napoleon’s efficient artillery. More importantly, the Emperor had troops in reserve, primarily a very strong Corps of 22,000 men under the command of Count d’Erlon, who, in expectation that the Prussians would assemble a much smaller force, had been sent to reinforce Ney. Napoleon also fully expected that Ney’s massive force would fall like a hammer blow on the Prussian right. So although the Emperor would begin the battle with inferior numbers, he was confident that by nightfall his army would be reunited and the Prussians defeated. At 2 p.m. that afternoon the Emperor sent Ney more instructions:
It is His Majesty’s intention that you attack whatever force is presently in front of you and after driving it vigorously back you will turn in our direction in order to bring about the encirclement of these enemy troops, though if the latter are defeated first then His Majesty will manoeuvre in your direction to assist you.
In brief, Ney is to hurl the defenders away from Quatre-Bras and march to attack the Prussian right, though if Napoleon has already defeated the Prussians then the Emperor would march to join in the fight against the British–Dutch.
The hostilities at Ligny began in the early afternoon, and the Emperor found he had a much stiffer fight on his hands than he had anticipated. His artillery, as the Duke of Wellington had forecast, did grim work with the exposed Prussian infantry. A French officer recalled that the Emperor’s guns ‘played havoc with the Prussian columns which presented themselves without cover and received all the shot fired by the numerous batteries along our line’. The slaughter those guns made was horrific. Hippolyte de Mauduit, the Sergeant in the Imperial Guard, had seen many battlefields, but after the fight at Ligny he was appalled by what he saw on the long, exposed slopes where the Prussian infantry had waited for the French attack:
A vast number of corpses, both men and horses, were scattered about, horribly mutilated by shells and cannon balls. The scene was different from the valley where almost all the dead preserved a human appearance because canister, musket balls and bayonets were practically the only instruments of destruction used there. Here, as a contrast, it was limbs and scattered body parts, detached heads, ripped out entrails and disembowelled horses.
That was why Wellington used the ‘tired old dodge’ of sheltering his troops on the reverse slope. A brook ran along the valley that Sergeant de Mauduit mentioned, and it was a considerable obstacle to the French, because in that shallow valley was a chain of small villages that served as fortresses for the Prussians. Most of the fighting was in Saint-Amand and in Ligny, the village that was to give the battle its name. An anonymous Prussian officer described Ligny in bucolic terms: ‘a village built of stone and thatched with straw, on a small stream which flows through flat meadows’.
The day’s bright sunshine disappeared as heavy clouds rolled across the sky. Artillery smoke billowed and lingered, and out of that smoke emerged the first French columns marching to attack the battered Prussians. Those columns were greeted with a storm of cannon fire from the Prussian artillery. Their cannon were firing roundshot and shells, their targets the densely packed attack columns of blue-coated French infantry that needed to capture the villages if they were to drive Blücher back. The Prussians defended the villages staunchly and Napoleon, realizing that he needed more troops, sent another message to Ney, commanding him to come at once and fall on the Prussian rear. ‘Do not lose a moment,’ the Emperor wrote to Ney, because Blücher’s army ‘is lost if you act quickly! The fate of France is in your hands!’
The fate of France might be in Ney’s hands, but Quatre-Bras was not. The Emperor still believed that the crossroads had been captured, but Ney could not march to Napoleon’s aid because he was still dithering.
Yet there was other help available. Count d’Erlon commanded those 22,000 men who were still marching to assist Ney. D’Erlon could not, of course, march on the straight road which led from Quatre-Bras to Ligny because both ends were in enemy hands, so instead of that simple five-mile march he was forced to go twice as far on lesser roads, first southwards, then north-westwards. D’Erlon was summoned back to Napoleon’s army, and his men, who had almost reached Ney’s forces, turned round and retraced their steps.
Meanwhile the Prussians and French were in desperate battle. Napoleon’s plan was to hold the Prussian left with assaults from Grouchy’s Corps while his main effort was hurled against the centre of Blücher’s line where the villages were so stoutly defended. Grouchy’s attacks would stop the Prussians from reinforcing their centre with men from their left flank, but the right flank would be left unengaged, thus tempting Blücher to weaken it by drawing reinforcements from that part of his defensive line. Then, when the Prussian right wing was weakened Ney or, more likely, d’Erlon would attack from the west.
But while d’Erlon marched back the rest of Napoleon’s army was thrown against the Prussian defences. Charles François was a Captain in the 30th Regiment of the Line, which was ordered to assault the village of Ligny. ‘Within two hundred yards of the hedges which hid thousands of Prussian sharpshooters,’ he wrote, ‘the regiment took up battle order while still on the march.’ What François means by that is that his battalion went from column into line, and they did it without halting. That showed a fine discipline. The terms ‘line’ and ‘column’ will make frequent appearances in the story of the Waterloo campaign, and deserve some explanation. The basic fighting deployment