Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles. Bernard Cornwell
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an untested army. The Prussians had experienced defeat, occupation, reorganization and, after Napoleon’s abdication in 1814, demobilization. There were good, experienced troops in Blücher’s ranks, but not enough, and so the numbers were made up by volunteers and by the Landwehr, the militia. The call to arms was answered enthusiastically in 1815. Franz Lieber was just seventeen years old when he heard that call, so he and his brother went to Berlin, where they discovered:
a table was placed in the centre of a square … at which several officers were enlisting those who offered themselves. The crowd was so great that we had to wait from ten until one o’clock before we could get a chance to have our names taken.
He reported to his regiment at the beginning of May, had one month’s training and then was marched into the Low Country to join Blücher’s forces. Lieber was intrigued to discover that one sergeant in his regiment was a woman who had so distinguished herself in combat that she had been awarded three gallantry medals. So by the summer of 1815 Blücher led at least one woman and 121,000 men, a formidable army on paper, but as Peter Hofschröer, an historian very sympathetic to the Prussians, writes, ‘a substantial part of Blücher’s forces consisted of raw levies capable of two basic manoeuvres: going forwards in a state of disorder, or going backwards in a state of chaos.’ That is witty and, as things turned out, those raw levies proved capable of fighting too, but it remained to be seen whether Gneisenau would overcome his Anglophobia and cooperate with the army gathering on the Prussian right.
That was the British–Dutch army led by the Duke of Wellington, who, famously, described it as ‘an infamous army’. And so it was when he first arrived in Brussels. It was under-strength, many of the Dutch regiments were from the French-speaking province of Belgium, and the Duke was wary of those troops because so many of them were veterans of Napoleon’s armies. The French-speaking Belgians were unhappy that their land had been given to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and the Emperor knew of that dissatisfaction. Pamphlets were being smuggled across the French border and distributed among the Belgian troops in the Duke’s army. ‘To the brave soldiers’, the pamphlets read, ‘who have conquered under the French Eagles, the Eagles which have led us so often to victory have reappeared! Their cry is always the same, glory and liberty!’ The Duke doubted the reliability of those regiments and took the precaution of separating them, brigading them with battalions whose loyalties were unquestioned.
Those loyal battalions were either British troops or the 6,000 men of the King’s German Legion (KGL), a unit which had fought brilliantly for the Duke during the long Peninsular War. The Legion had been raised in Hanover, which of course shared a King with Great Britain, and in 1815 Hanover sent another 16,000 men to join Wellington’s army. Those 16,000 were untested and so, like the Dutch army, they were split up and brigaded with either British or KGL battalions. It was not a popular decision. ‘It was a severe blow to our morale,’ Captain Carl Jacobi of the 1st Hanoverian Brigade complained:
The English generals were totally unfamiliar with the traditions of the Hanoverians … In their eyes, everything was imperfect, even open to criticism if it did not conform to English concerns and institutions. There was no camaraderie among the allied troops, not even among the officers. The ignorance of the other’s language, on both sides, the major difference in pay and the resulting great difference in life styles prevented any closer companionship. Even our compatriots in the King’s German Legion did not associate with us; the fifteen year old ensign with the red sash looked down on the older Hanoverian officer.
By summer, when the war began, Wellington had some 16,000 Hanoverians and just under 6,000 men from the King’s German Legion. The Dutch army, which was part of his ‘infamous’ army, numbered almost 40,000, of whom half were in regiments that were French-speaking and so of doubtful reliability. The rest of his army, some 30,000 men, were British, and the Duke wished he had more of them.
But Britain had just fought a war with the United States, and many of the best regiments, veterans of Wellington’s victories, were still across the Atlantic. They were returning, and some battalions found themselves travelling straight from America to the Netherlands. The Duke would have been far more confident if he had possessed his Peninsular army, which had been one of the best that ever fought under British colours. A few weeks before Waterloo he was walking in a Brussels park with Thomas Creevey, a British parliamentarian, who rather anxiously asked the Duke about the expected campaign. A red-coated British infantryman was staring at the park’s statues and the Duke pointed at the man. ‘There,’ he said, ‘there. It all depends upon that article whether we do the business or not. Give me enough of it, and I am sure.’
In the end there was just enough of it. A little over 20,000 British infantry were to fight at Waterloo, and they were to bear the brunt of the Emperor’s attacks. Napoleon’s generals warned him of those red-coated soldiers, saying how staunch they were. General Reille annoyed Napoleon by saying that British infantry were inexpugnable, impregnable, while Soult told the Emperor that ‘In a straight fight the English infantry are the very devil.’ And so they were. The Emperor had never fought against them and he dismissed the warnings, but Wellington knew their worth, and the similar worth of the King’s German Legion. Four years after the battle, walking the field of Waterloo, the Duke remarked, ‘I had only about 35,000 men on whom I could thoroughly rely; the remainder were but too likely to run away.’
The Duke had twenty-two British battalions, of whom fifteen had fought with him in Spain or Portugal. It was just enough. Yet even those experienced battalions were, like the Prussian regiments, filled with new recruits. The largest and one of the best battalions at Waterloo was the 52nd, the Oxfordshire Light Infantry, which had been in more or less continuous combat from 1806 until Napoleon’s first abdication. At Waterloo the battalion numbered 1,079 men, but of those 558 had joined since its last battle. The Guards Division was the same. Ensign Robert Batty of the 1st Foot Guards said the division was filled with ‘young soldiers and volunteers from the militia who had never been exposed to the fire of an enemy’.
Yet the old hands, the veterans, were full of confidence. Frederick Mainwaring was a Lieutenant in the 51st, a Yorkshire battalion that had fought at Corunna, Fuentes d’Onoro, Salamanca, Vitoria and in the battles of the Pyrenees and southern France. It was stationed at Portsmouth when the news of Napoleon’s return reached Britain. Mainwaring recalled:
I was seated with two or three others at breakfast in the mess-room, the Bugle-Major came in with the letters and as usual laid the newspaper on the mess-table. Someone opened it and glanced his eyes carelessly over its contents when suddenly his countenance brightened up, and flinging the newspaper into the air like a madman, he shouted out ‘Glorious news! Nap’s landed again in France, Hurrah!’ In an instant we were all wild … ‘Nap’s in France again’ spread like wildfire through the barracks … the men turned out and cheered … our joy was unbounded!
Captain Cavalié Mercer commanded a troop of Royal Horse Artillery at Colchester when the news arrived and tells the same story as Lieutenant Mainwaring. The order to march was ‘received with unfeigned joy by officers and men, all eager to plunge into danger and bloodshed, all hoping to obtain glory and distinction’.
The French and Prussians were no different. Eager volunteers had flocked to the Prussian colours, and in France most soldiers were overjoyed at the Emperor’s return. Many had been prisoners-of-war in the dreadful British prisons, either on Dartmoor or in the pestilential hulks that were great dismasted ships that lay at permanent anchor, and those men wanted revenge. They wanted glory. Captain Pierre Cardron, an infantry officer, recorded a scene that happened again and again across France. His regiment had sworn loyalty to the King, but after Napoleon’s return the Colonel summoned all the officers. They stood in two ranks ‘asking one another what was going on? What was there? In the end we were filled with worry,’ Cardron remembered, but then their Colonel appeared:
holding in his hands, what? You would not guess in a hundred years … Our eagle, under which we had marched so many times to victory and which the brave Colonel had hidden inside the mattress of his bed … At the sight of the cherished standard cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ could be heard; soldiers and officers, all overwhelmed, wanted