Wellington had over 30,000 men and 70 guns at Quatre-Bras and needed to withdraw them the 8 miles to the ridge at Mont St Jean. He considered halting his army closer to Quatre-Bras, at a low ridge just north of Genappe, but he decided the ground at Mont St Jean was more favourable for defence. He knew he could be attacked at any moment. There was already desultory fighting as the advance picquets of both armies fired at each other, and that crackle of muskets and rifles could quickly grow into the full-throated roar of battle. And the Duke had to withdraw along a single road, the chaussée, which must carry all his guns and wagons. Infantry might be able to march through the fields on either side of the road, but they would be obstructed by thick crops, hedges, ditches, walls and thickets. In short this withdrawal would be a difficult and dangerous manoeuvre, but it had to be done and, once the wounded had left, the army got under way. The infantry and most of the artillery went first, while the cavalry and the lighter artillery stayed behind as the rearguard. Wellington wanted the retreat done calmly and, as if to demonstrate his unconcern, he lay down in a pasture and put a newspaper over his face and pretended to sleep. Yet he must have been concerned, because every moment meant there were fewer and fewer men at Quatre-Bras, and those who remained were increasingly vulnerable to an enemy attack.
Except none came.
Astonishingly, Marshal Ney did nothing. His troops were bivouacked around the village of Frasnes, less than three miles south of the crossroads, yet they were given no orders to assault the dwindling forces to their north, not even to scout the fields where they had fought so grimly the day before. There was some skirmishing as the advanced French picquets fought against their opposite numbers, but Ney ordered no general attack. It was during this sporadic exchange of fire in the dawn of Saturday, 17 June that Edward Costello, the Rifleman, recorded a sad moment as the 95th withdrew from the positions they had held through the previous day. Not all the women who accompanied the army had stayed in Brussels and many, like Martha Deacon, had accompanied their men. Costello’s company retreated along a pathway to the Nivelles road. The track, he said:
was partially protected by a hedge from the enemy’s fire, when one of my companions heard the cries of a child on the other side; on looking over he espied a fine boy, about two or three years of age, by the side of its dead mother, who was still bleeding copiously from a wound in the head, occasioned, most likely, by a random shot from the enemy. We carried the motherless, and perhaps orphan child by turns to Genappe, where we found a number of women of our division, one of whom recognised the little fellow, I think she said as belonging to a soldier of the First Royals.
Yet though the picquets on either side exchanged fire, the French seemed oblivious to Wellington’s withdrawal. Marshal Ney somehow thought this Saturday would be a day to rest his troops and so, under towering black clouds that slowly came from the north to cover the sky, the British and Dutch slipped away until, by 2 p.m., only the rearguard of cavalry and horse artillery was left.
Ney’s inactivity was unforgivable. His task that morning had been to make Wellington’s life difficult by attacking again, because Wellington would then have been forced to leave troops at Quatre-Bras to fight off the French attacks, and those troops would have been threatened by an attack coming from Ligny. In truth Wellington was in a very precarious position, exposed to his south and east, and with only the single road as his means of escape northwards. He could, of course, have withdrawn to Nivelles, but that would have taken him further from the Prussians, and the Duke was not thinking about abandoning their joint campaign. So Ney had a prime opportunity to trap Wellington, but instead he did nothing. Napoleon, when he discovered the British withdrawal, publicly shamed Ney by saying in front of him and others, ‘On a perdu la France!’ – You’ve lost France! – but the Emperor’s own behaviour on that Saturday morning was scarcely better.
Napoleon slept late and woke in an affable mood. He insisted on touring the Ligny battlefield, as if luxuriating in the victory he had won the previous day. He assumed Wellington, like Blücher, was in retreat, and he was in no evident hurry to pursue either army. He did send cavalry patrols eastwards to find the Prussians, and those horsemen sent back reports that Blücher’s men were fleeing east in disorder. In fact those disordered troops on the road to Namur were Rhinelanders who had deserted the Prussian army. Blücher was not on the Namur road, he was going north, travelling to Wavre.
Then Napoleon heard that Wellington’s army, far from retreating, was still at Quatre-Bras. The report astonished him. Could Wellington really be that stupid? But he saw his opportunity and sent orders for Ney to hold Wellington in place while the Emperor brought 69,000 men to fall on the Duke’s exposed left flank. Meanwhile Napoleon detached a quarter of his army, 33,000 men under Marshal Grouchy, and ordered them to pursue the Prussians.
This was the morning when Napoleon could have won the campaign. He had Ney’s men close to Wellington and the rest of his army within an hour’s march of the British–Dutch forces. If Napoleon had attacked at dawn Wellington would surely have been doomed, but the Emperor had let the morning go to waste, and when he did reach Quatre-Bras in the early afternoon he found the last units of the British–Dutch army just leaving, undisturbed by Ney’s troops, who were cooking meals in their bivouacs. ‘On a perdu la France!’ he had snarled at Ney, but the Emperor had been almost as lackadaisical as the Marshal. The French, on that Saturday morning, should have pursued Blücher’s Prussians and attacked Wellington without delay, but they did neither. Worse, they still did not know where the Prussians were, and they had given Wellington time to retreat in safety.
Napoleon ordered a pursuit, sending cavalry and horse artillery to chase Wellington’s men, but now nature intervened. The heavens opened. Those dark clouds rumbled with thunder, were split by lightning and down came the rain. Such rain! This was the storm Wellington reckoned worse than any he had experienced in monsoon India, a sustained cloudburst that turned the fields to mud and ran the red dye in the coats of the British infantry, leaking it onto their white trousers to turn them pink. But those infantry were well on their way to Mont St Jean. It was the cavalry and the horse artillery who had to hold the French pursuit at bay.
It is time to meet Cavalié Mercer again, the gunner officer whose troops received the news of Napoleon’s escape from Elba ‘with unfeigned joy … all eager to plunge into danger and bloodshed, all hoping to obtain glory and distinction’. Mercer left one of the best and most famous accounts of the Waterloo campaign, and his troop of horse artillery was one of those that had to hold off the French pursuit. Just before the rain came, though, he had his first glimpse of Napoleon:
I had often longed to see Napoleon, that mighty man of war, that astonishing genius who had filled the world with his renown. Now I saw him and there was a degree of sublimity in the interview rarely equalled. The sky had become overcast since that morning, and at this moment presented a most extraordinary appearance. Large isolated masses of thundercloud, of the deepest, almost inky black, their lower edges hard and strongly defined, lagging down, as if momentarily about to burst, hung over us … while the distant hill lately occupied by the French army still lay bathed in brilliant sunshine … when a single horseman, immediately followed by several others, mounted the plateau.
Mercer had glimpsed the Emperor, who was riding his white mare, Désirée. Napoleon, seeing the British rearguard escape, threw his cavalry forward. The fiercest of the fighting was around Genappe, the village just three miles north of Quatre-Bras. The French lancers pursued British hussars and were counter-charged by the Life Guards. Mercer’s troop, like the other gunners, found vantage points from which to fire shells at the enemy cavalry before limbering up and galloping on. One of the artillery units was a rocket troop, a new weapon that Wellington thought only good for frightening horses. He had first encountered rockets in India, where they had been used by the enemy, and then again in Spain, where Colonel William Congreve’s rockets were first deploye
d, and Captain Mercer was fascinated by his first sight of the new-fangled weapon:
The rocketeers had placed a little iron triangle in the road with a rocket lying on it. The order to fire is given, portfire applied; the fidgety missile begins to sputter out sparks and wriggle its tail for a second or so, and then darts forth straight up the chaussée. A gun stands right in its way, between the wheels of which the shell in the head of the rocket bursts; the gunners fall right and left; and those of the other guns, taking to their heels, the battery is deserted in an instant. Strange; but so it was.
It was strange, possibly, because that first rocket was accurate; thereafter every rocket flew wild, some even turning in their flight to threaten the British. The Duke would happily have rid himself of the rocket troop, but they had the patronage of the Prince Regent and so he was stuck with them.
The rain dampened the pursuit. Once the army was through the cramped streets of Genappe, where a narrow bridge carried the highway across the River Dyle, they left the French behind, though Captain Mercer had a close shave in the village. Lord Uxbridge, second in command to Wellington and the commander of all the British–Dutch cavalry, demanded that Mercer and his guns follow him down a narrow side alley only just wide enough to let the guns pass. Mercer was at a loss to know what Uxbridge wanted, but obeyed, then suddenly, as they emerged into the fields beyond the village, enemy cavalry appeared just 50 yards ahead:
The whole transaction appears to me so wild and confused that at times I can hardly believe it to have been more than a confused dream, yet true it was; the general-in-chief of the cavalry exposing himself amongst the skirmishers of his rear-guard, and literally doing the duty of a cornet! ‘By God, we’re all prisoners’ (or some such words), exclaimed Lord Uxbridge, dashing his horse at one of the garden banks, which he cleared, and away he went, leaving us to get out of the scrape as best we could.
There was no room for the horses dragging the guns to wheel around, so Mercer had to unlimber his guns and turn them by hand. Miraculously the enemy cavalry did not interfere with this laborious process and Mercer led his battery back to the village centre, where he discovered Lord Uxbridge assembling a rescue party.
And on they went in the pouring rain. The artillery and the wagons used the road, the cavalry retreated through the fields to the east of the highway and the infantry to the west. A Nassauer officer, Captain Friedrich Weiz, reckoned the staff work was ‘exemplary’, the retreat was done efficiently, despite the weather and the French pursuit. The British were to lose fewer than a hundred men during the journey to Mont St Jean, the French probably about the same. One of the French casualties was Colonel Jean Baptiste Sourd, who commanded a battalion of lancers. Sourd had risen from the ranks, been made a Baron of the Empire, and Napoleon had just offered the Colonel another promotion, an offer Sourd had not yet answered. Now, at Genappe, the forty-year-old Colonel Sourd was badly cut up, probably by the Life Guards, and had to go back to the casualty station where Larrey, the Chief Surgeon, decided that his right arm had to be amputated. Sourd lay on the table, and while Larrey cut and sawed and tied off arteries and sewed a flap of skin over the stump, the Colonel dictated a letter to the Emperor:
The greatest favour you can do me is to leave me in command of the regiment I hope to lead to victory. I refuse the rank of general if the great Napoleon will forgive me, because the rank of Colonel is sufficient.
Then Sourd signed the letter with his left hand before remounting his horse and galloping after his men, who still followed the British rearguard. His wound healed and Sourd was to survive until 1849. The Colonel had been injured in the cavalry fight which occurred in Genappe, a fight which left a deep impression on many British observers. The British cavalry was armed with swords or sabres, but the French had lancers. Those lancers filled the road between the small town’s houses, presenting an almost impenetrable hedge of blades with no open flank that could be attacked. Britain’s 7th Hussars were ordered to charge the French, who were now too close to the retreating British–Dutch forces for comfort. Sergeant Major Cotton remembered that the lancers were ‘awkward customers to deal with’:
When our charge first commenced, their lances were erect, but upon our coming within two or three horse’s lengths of them, they lowered the points and waved the flags, which made some of our horses shy.
The flags he speaks of were pennants attached just behind the lance’s slender steel blade. The attack by the 7th Hussars failed. They suffered badly, then suffered again when they tried a second assault, and the survivors were then pursued by a mixed group of lancers and cuirassiers, which was only stopped by a charge of the Life Guards, heavier cavalry, who got past the long lance blades and hacked at the French with their big swords. The lance was an effective weapon, especially in pursuit, but its weakness was that if an enemy managed to dodge the blade then the lancer was effectively defenceless. Nevertheless the British were so impressed by the performance of the French lancers that, after the wars, they formed their own lancer regiments.
The Life Guards stopped the immediate pursuit, but the pouring rain did most to help Wellington’s men escape. ‘The tracks were so deep in mud’, Hippolyte de Mauduit, the Imperial Guardsman, remembered, ‘that we found it impossible to maintain any order in our columns.’ Lieutenant Jacques Martin, a French infantry officer, described the chaos:
A storm, such as I had never seen, suddenly unleashed itself on us … in a few minutes the road and the plain were nothing more than a swamp which became ever more impassable because the storm persisted for the rest of the day and the whole night. Men and horses sank into the mud up to their knees. The growing darkness stopped troops from seeing each other, battalions mingled and every soldier marched as best as he could and where he could. We were no longer an army, but a crowd.
The French pursuit turned into a struggle against weather and mud. Most of the infantry marched through the fields, leaving the paved road for the gunners, and men found their own paths, trying to avoid the trampled mud of the men who went before, and they spread out so much that some men did not rejoin their units till morning. And still it rained. Then, as evening fell, the leading French cavalrymen breasted a small rise in the highway and were met by sudden shell fire. It was dusk, the sky unnaturally dark with heavy clouds, the rain pelting down, and there, in the gloom, were sudden flashes of fire and over the wide wet valley came the shells, leaving tiny traces of smoke from their fuses, and the muzzle flashes showed all along a ridge to the north. The shells exploded, doing little damage, and some did not explode at all because the soaking wet ground extinguished their burning fuses, and then the gunfire ended as suddenly as it had begun.
Till now the British guns had fired from close to the highway, but the leading French cavalry had seen these new flashes all along a ridge which was now wreathed in smoke that drifted through the heavy rain. They knew what that smoke meant. It meant the guns had left the road and were emplaced along a ridge the enemy intended to defend. The British had decided to make a stand and the pursuit was over. Ahead of the French was the Duke of Wellington and his army.
Offering battle at a place called Mont St Jean.
* * *
Four hundred years before, near a village called Azincourt, an English army had waited to do battle with the French, and on that October night it had rained and rained and the sky had echoed with thunder. It had been a drenching rain and next morning, as the rain at last ended, the field where the English offered battle was a quagmire of mud. It was that mud, more than the English arrows or English valour, which defeated the French men-at-arms who, laden with fifty or sixty pounds of plate armour, had to wade through knee-deep mud to reach their opponents. The thick mud tired them so that when they reached Henry V’s line they were hacked down in a merciless display of butchery.
And on Sunday, 18 June 1815, the ground in the valley south of Waterloo would be muddy. It was an omen.
The Emperor either did not know the history, or else decided
that rain on the eve of a battle was no omen at all. He had made mistakes over the last two days, but he was still supremely confident. General Foy remembered Napoleon’s prediction:
The Prussians and English cannot possibly join each other for another two days after such a battle as Fleurus [Ligny] and given the fact that they’re being pursued by a considerable number of troops. We shall be only too glad if the English decide to stay because the battle that is coming will save France and be celebrated in world history!
That is quite a change from ‘On a perdu la France!’, but that savage remark had been made in a fit of anger when Napoleon realized how Ney had let slip an opportunity. Yet despite that missed chance, Napoleon still had good reason to be confident. So far as he knew the Prussians were retreating eastwards, pursued by Marshal Grouchy, while Wellington had foolishly offered battle.
I shall have my artillery fire and my cavalry charge, so as to force the enemy to disclose his positions, and when I am quite certain which positions the English troops have taken up, I shall march straight at them with my Old Guard.
Napoleon was rather prone to making such dismissive statements, and his tactics on Sunday, 18 June would not be quite so simple as he predicted, but they would still be indicative of confidence. The French had good sources of intelligence from among the French-speaking Belgians, and the Emperor must have known that Wellington’s army was a fragile coalition, while his own army was full of battle-tested veterans. Napoleon’s fear, that night, was that Wellington would slip away in the darkness and so deprive France of a great victory. ‘The rain fell in torrents,’ Napoleon recalled in his memoirs: