Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles. Bernard Cornwell
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the crests was 1,000 metres, or just over half a mile. It was a half-mile of good farmland, and when the Duke saw the valley in the summer of 1814, he would have seen tall crops of rye growing either side of the road, which was heavily used by wagons carrying coal from the mines around Charleroi to the fireplaces of Brussels.
The Duke saw a lot more than that. The road was one of the main routes from France to Brussels, so if war was to break out again this was a possible invasion route. A French army coming north on the road would cross the southern crest by the tavern and see the wide valley ahead. And they would see the northern ridge. Ridge is really too strong a word; they would have seen the straight road dropping gently into the valley and then rising, just as gently, to the long swell of farmland, the northern ridge. Think of that ridge as a wall, and now give the wall three bastions. To the east was a village of stone houses huddled about a church. If those buildings and the village’s outlying farms were occupied by troops it would be the devil’s own job to get them out. Beyond those stone houses the land became more rugged, the hills steeper and valleys deeper, no place for troops to manoeuvre, so the village stood like a fortress at the eastern end of the ridge. In the centre of the ridge, and standing halfway down the far slope, was a farm called La Haie Sainte. It was a substantial building, made of stone, and its house, barns and yard were surrounded by a high stone wall. La Haie Sainte blocked an attack straight up the road, while off to the west was a great house with a walled garden, the Château Hougoumont. So the northern ridge is an obstacle with three outlying bastions, the village, the farm and the château. Suppose an army came out of France and suppose that army wanted to capture Brussels, then that ridge and those bastions were blocking their advance. The enemy would either have to capture those bastions or else ignore them, but if he ignored them his troops would be squeezed between them as they attacked the northern ridge, vulnerable to crossfire.
The invaders would see the ridge and its bastions, yet just as important was what they could not see. They could not see what lay beyond the crest of the northern ridge. They would have seen treetops in the country beyond, but the ground to the north was hidden, and if that French army decided to attack troops on that northern ridge they would never know what happened on that far hidden slope. Were the defenders moving reinforcements from one flank to the other? Was an attack assembling there? Was cavalry waiting out of sight? The ridge, even though it was low and its slopes were gentle, was deceptive. It offered a defender enormous advantages. Of course an enemy might not be obliging and make a simple frontal assault. He might try to march around the western flank of the ridge where the countryside was flatter, but nevertheless the Duke made a mental note of the place. Why? So far as he knew, indeed so far as all Europe knew, the wars were over. Napoleon was exiled, the diplomats were codifying the peace in Vienna, yet still the Duke made a point of remembering this place where an invading army, marching from France towards Brussels, would find life horribly difficult. It was not the only route an invading army might follow, and not the only defensive position the Duke noted in his two weeks of reconnaissance, but the ridge and its bastions stood athwart one of the possible invasion routes a French army might follow.
The Duke rode on, passing La Haie Sainte, to find a crossroads at the top of the ridge and, just beyond, a small village. If the Duke had asked what the place was called they would have said Mont St Jean, which was mildly amusing because the mountain of Saint John was nothing but that gentle swell in the wide fields of rye, wheat and barley. North of the village the road was swallowed into the great forest of Soignes and a couple of miles up that road there was a small town, another unremarkable place, though it possessed a handsomely domed church and a large number of inns for thirsty and tired travellers. In 1814 fewer than two thousand people lived in the town, though they had lost at least twenty young men to the long wars, all of them fighting for France, because this was the French-speaking area of the province of Belgium.
We do not know whether the Duke stopped in the small town in the summer of 1814. We do know he had taken notice of Mont St Jean, but the nearby country town with its fine church and lavish inns? Did he remember that place?
In time he would never forget it.
It was called Waterloo.
Glorious news! Nap’s landed again in France, Hurrah!
‘MY ISLAND IS NONE TOO BIG!’ Napoleon declared when he found himself ruler of Elba, the tiny island that lies between Corsica and Italy. He had been Emperor of France and ruler of 44 million people, yet now, in 1814, he governed just 86 square miles and 11,000 subjects. Yet he was determined to be a good ruler, and no sooner had he arrived than he began issuing a string of decrees that would reform the island’s mining industry and its agriculture. Little escaped his attention; ‘Inform the intendant’, he wrote, ‘of my dissatisfaction at the dirty state of the streets.’
His plans extended far beyond street-cleaning. He wanted to build a new hospital, new schools and new roads, but there was never enough money. The restored monarchy in France had agreed to pay Napoleon a subsidy of 2 million francs a year, but it soon became apparent that the money would never be paid, and without money there could be no new hospitals, schools or roads. Frustrated by this failure, the Emperor retired into a sulk, passing the days by playing cards with his attendants, and all the while aware of the British and French warships that guarded Elba’s coast to make certain he did not leave his Lilliputian kingdom.
The Emperor was bored. He missed his wife and son. He missed Josephine too and he was inconsolable when the news of her death reached Elba. Poor Josephine, with her black teeth, languid manner and lissom body, a woman who was adored by every man who met her, who was unfaithful to Napoleon, yet was always forgiven. He loved her even though, for dynastic reasons, he had divorced her. ‘I have not passed a day without loving you,’ he wrote to her after her death as though she still lived, ‘I have not spent a night without clasping you in my arms … no woman was ever loved with such devotion!’
He was bored and he was angry. He was angry at Louis XVIII, who was not paying the agreed subsidy, and furious at Talleyrand, once his own Foreign Minister, who now negotiated for the French monarchy at the Congress of Vienna. Talleyrand, sly, clever and duplicitous, was warning the other European envoys that Napoleon could never be kept safe on a small Mediterranean island so close to France. He wanted the Emperor sent far away to some remote place like the Azores, or better still to a West Indian island where the yellow fever raged, or perhaps to some speck in a distant ocean like Saint Helena.
Talleyrand was right while the British Commissioner, sent to Elba to keep a watchful eye on the Emperor, was wrong. Sir Neil Campbell believed that Napoleon had accepted his fate and wrote as much to Lord Castlereagh, Britain’s Foreign Minister. ‘I begin to think’, he reported, ‘that he is quite resigned to his retreat.’
The Emperor was anything but resigned. He followed the news from France and noted the dissatisfaction with the restored monarchy. There was widespread unemployment, the price of bread was high, and people who had greeted the Emperor’s abdication with relief now looked back on his regime with regret. And so he began to make plans. He had been allowed a puny navy, nothing large enough to threaten the French and British ships that guarded him, and in mid-February 1815, he ordered the Inconstant, the largest of his brigs, brought into port; ‘have its copper bottom overhauled,’ he commanded, ‘its leaks stopped and … have it painted like the English brigs. I want it in the bay and ready by the 24th or 25th of this month.’ He ordered two other large ships to be chartered. He had been allowed to take 1,000 soldiers to Elba, including 400 veterans of his old Imperial Guard and a battalion of Polish lancers, and with those troops he would attempt to invade France.
And Sir Neil Campbell suspected nothing. Sir Neil was a decent man, thirty-nine years old in 1815, with a