Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles. Bernard Cornwell
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promised to die beneath our eagle for the country and Napoleon.
No wonder that one French general wrote home that his men were in a ‘frenzy’ for the Emperor. And in that frenetic atmosphere Napoleon decided on a pre-emptive blow against the British and the Prussians. He would attack them before the Austrian and Russian armies could reach the French frontier, and for his attack he had 125,000 men and 350 cannon. Facing him was Blücher with 120,000 men and 312 cannon and Wellington’s army of 92,000 men and 120 guns. The Emperor was outnumbered, but that was nothing new and he was a master of manoeuvre. His task now was to divide the allies then destroy them one by one. War, he had declared, was simple. ‘It’s like a boxing match, the more you punch the better it is.’
And in June of 1815 he set out to punch Blücher and Wellington into oblivion.
Franz Lieber was just seventeen years old when he heard the Prussian army’s call to arms, and he and his brother volunteered in Berlin. 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 Marshal Blücher’s forces. He would go on to have a distinguished career in America, emigrating in 1827, where he became Professor of Political Economics at South Carolina College. He moved to the north before the Civil War and taught at Columbia University, where he compiled the Lieber Code, credited as the first attempt to codify the rules of war. He lived till 1870.
‘The Duke of Wellington’, by Francisco Goya. When in 1814 the Duke was asked whether he regretted that he had never fought the Emperor in battle, he replied: ‘No, and I am very glad.’ He despised Napoleon the man, but admired Napoleon the soldier.
Portrait of the Empress Josephine, by Pierre-Paul Prud’hon.
‘Napoleon, Fontainebleau, 31 March 1814’, by Paul Delaroche – the handsome, slim young man was gone, replaced by a pot-bellied, short-haired figure with sallow skin.
Czar Alexander I of Russia, 1814, by Baron François Gérard: ‘It is up to you,’ he told the Duke of Wellington, ‘to save the world again.’
‘Clemens Lothar Wenzel, Prince Metternich, 1815’, by Sir Thomas Lawrence: ‘War’, Metternich recalled, ‘was decided in less than an hour.’
‘The Arrival of Napoleon at the Tuileries’: It was evening before Napoleon arrived at the palace. The waiting crowd could hear the cheering getting closer, then came the clatter of hoofs on the forecourt and finally the Emperor was there.
A souvenir made to mark Napoleon’s return to Paris in March 1815. The violet was Napoleon. His beloved Josephine had carried violets at their wedding, and he sent her a bouquet of the flowers on every anniversary.
Portrait of Louis XVIII of France with the coronation robe, by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin.
Napoleon has humbugged me, by God!
NAPOLEON WAS SURELY RIGHT when he claimed that the most difficult thing in war was ‘to guess the enemy’s plan’. And that was precisely the difficulty that Marshal Blücher and the Duke of Wellington faced. What was the Emperor planning?
The first question was whether the Emperor would attack at all, and if the answer was yes, then they needed to know where and when that attack would occur. Yet only three days before the storm burst the Duke of Wellington was persuaded that no onslaught was coming. He planned to give a ball in Brussels on 21 June, the anniversary of his great victory at Vitoria, and when the Duchess of Richmond asked whether it would be sensible for her to give a ball on 15 June he reassured her, ‘You may give your ball with the greatest safety without fear of interruption.’ On Tuesday, 13 June, he wrote to a friend in England:
There is nothing new here. We have reports of Buonaparte’s joining the army and attacking us, but I have accounts from Paris of the 10th, on which day he was still there; and I judge from his speech to the Legislature that his departure was not likely to be imminent. I think we are now too strong for him here.
That letter was written on Tuesday, and on the day before, Monday, 12 June, Napoleon had left Paris to join l’Armée du Nord in Flanders. On 14 June that army closed up to the frontier and the allies still suspected nothing. Blücher shared Wellington’s opinion. He had written to his wife, ‘Bonaparte will not attack us,’ but Bonaparte was poised to do just that. He had closed France’s borders – ‘Not a stage or carriage must pass,’ he ordered – while north of the frontier, in the province of Belgium, the British and Prussian armies were spread across a swathe of country over a hundred miles wide.
That dispersal was necessary for two reasons. The allies are in a defensive posture. They will not be ready to attack until they have overwhelming force, when the Austrians and Russians have reached the French frontier, so for the moment Wellington and Blücher are waiting and, of course, they know that the Emperor may attack them before they move against him. Wellington may have thought such an attack unlikely, but he still must guard against the possibility, and that means watching every route that the French might take. With hindsight it seems obvious that Napoleon would strike at the junction of the Prussian and British armies, to separate them, but that was not so obvious to either Blücher or to Wellington. Wellington’s fear was that Napoleon would choose a route further west, through Mons and so on to Brussels or even towards Ghent, where Louis XVIII had taken refuge. Such an attack would cut Wellington off from the coast, and so sever his supply lines. Whatever happened Wellington wanted to be certain that his army had a way to retreat to safety if it was outfought, and that safe retreat led west to Ostend, where ships could evacuate the army to Britain. Blücher had the same concern, only his retreat would be eastwards, towards Prussia.
So the two armies are spread wide because they need to guard against every possible French attack. The most westerly Prussian forces, General von Bülow’s Corps, are a hundred miles to the east of Wellington’s western flank. That dispersal was also necessary to feed the armies. The troops depended on buying local supplies and too many men and too many horses in a single place soon exhausted the available food.
So the allies were spread across a hundred miles of country, while Napoleon was concentrating his army south of the River Sambre on the main road which led through Charleroi to Brussels. So why did the allies not detect this? In Spain the Duke of Wellington had a superb intelligence service; indeed his problem had been that he received too much intelligence, but in Flanders, in 1815, he was virtually blinded. Before the frontier was closed he had received plenty of reports from travellers coming north out of France,