The ordinary soldiers were itching to fight and avenge the defeats of 1814, Mauduit stressed: ‘The army itself was fully committed, everything about it suggested the greatest fighting spirit – at least among the soldiers and subalterns, because most of our generals and too many of our officers were tired of glory and no longer had the energy, the liveliness of mind and body, and the clear conscience that had earned them their brilliant military reputation.’
Napoleon was fully aware of this, but he somehow managed to convince himself that everything would be OK anyway. On the morning of 18 June he held a breakfast party in his lodgings at Le Caillou farm, using his own crockery, which had finally turned up on one of his personal luggage wagons – a favourable omen. He announced to his general staff that with Marshal Grouchy holding the Prussians at bay in the east, they would have plenty of time to beat the English.
Soult knew that Napoleon and Wellington had never met on the battlefield before, and that it might be dangerous to underestimate the Englishman who had chased the French army out of Spain. Soult himself had lost to Wellington in Toulouse in 1814, and expressed some scepticism about an easy victory at Waterloo – but this clearly wasn’t the right time for doubts.
‘Just because you have been defeated by Wellington, you think he is a great general,’ Napoleon snapped, ‘but I’m telling you he’s a bad general, that the British are bad soldiers, and that it will be a picnic.’
General Antoine Drouot, in charge of the artillery, chipped in with his own negative thoughts: ‘We can’t fight this morning. The artillery will get bogged down.’
Marshal Honoré Reille, an infantry general, compounded the depressing mood: ‘The English infantry is unbeatable because of its calm tenacity and superior accuracy. Before we can reach them with our bayonets, we must expect to lose half of our attacking soldiers.’
Napoleon’s own brother Jérôme, who had served in Russia but been demoted because he was such an incompetent commander, proved that it had been a bad idea to invite him along by pronouncing gloomily that ‘Here, we will find either our resurrection or our tomb.’fn8
In short, if Napoleon had hoped for a fluffy Belgian pancake type of breakfast with his commanders, he must quickly have realised that he was in a room full of soggy waffles.
Despite all this negativity, before battle began at 11.30 a.m. (signalled by three blank cannon rounds), the French army was at its most magnificent. Lieutenant Jacques-François Martin described the scene vividly: ‘The bayonets, helmets and breastplates were sparkling; the flags, the standards, the lancers’ pennants all rippled with the three colours in the wind. The drums beat, the trumpets sounded, and the regiment’s musicians gave us a rousing rendition of “Veillons au salut de l’Empire”.’fn9 In Les Misérables, Victor Hugo has Napoleon gazing at his army before Waterloo and exclaiming, ‘Magnifique, magnifique!’ To Hugo’s readers, who knew what was about to happen, it was a moment of perfect pathos, a tableau of tragic heroes marching fearlessly to their death like gladiators hailing l’Empereur and proclaiming that ‘we who are about to die salute you’.
General Etienne Lefol, who was struggling to get his cannons into place, was less poetic. He recalled in his memoirs the horror of moving guns around on the Belgian lanes where two battles had just been fought. The worst thing, he said, was ‘the sound of the wheels crushing the skulls of soldiers whose brains and tattered flesh spread hideously across the road’. Battles, he knew, produced as much gore as they did glory. Lefol was consoled to hear the sound of crushed bone being drowned out by the voices of the surviving troops who were bellowing out a French marching tune, ‘La Victoire est à nous’ – victory is ours.
On the morning of 18 June 1815, this was somewhat premature, but Bonapartist historians have been trying to make it ring true ever since.
* * *
fn1 Probably a reference to the bad British habit of selling Europe cheap cotton, cutlery, tea, coffee and sugar. Napoleon presumably hoped that his soldiers were opposed to the idea of low-cost beverages.
fn2 Since the Revolution, France has officially been an atheist country, but the French still look to God whenever they need someone to blame for something that has no obvious cause. That is, when they can’t blame the English, the Germans, the Americans or other French people.
fn3 Note that for good measure, Lemonnier-Delafosse demotes Wellington from a Duke to a Lord.
fn4 Laudy was a local historian and passionate defender of the Waterloo battle site against desecration by farmers and developers. He lived in Le Caillou farmhouse until his death in 1948, after which the farm was bought by La Société Belge des Etudes Napoléoniennes.
fn5 Generations of French history teachers have taught that François died of syphilis, but more recently it has been suggested that he was suffering from horrendously painful abscesses caused by urogenital tuberculosis.
fn6 Marcel Proust makes fun of Grouchy’s inactivity in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. In volume three, Le Côté de Guermantes, he has one of Grouchy’s descendants arrive late for a society dinner. His furious wife humiliates him by snapping, ‘I see that, even for minor things, being late is a tradition in your family.’ A Proustian putdown – the ultimate condemnation for a famous French name.
fn7 Duroc was such a close companion that Napoleon later used his name as an alias when escaping from France (see Chapter 6).
fn8 Jérôme’s morose mood was nothing new. On his way to Belgium, he had attended a country fête organised to whip up support for Napoleon, but had been unable to say anything positive or look anything but glum. A young French lieutenant called Le Sénécal noted in his memoirs that ‘I saw his downcast attitude as the prelude to our imminent ruin’.
fn9 This was Napoleon’s national anthem, and contained patriotic lines like ‘the well-being of the universe depends on the well-being of our homeland, and if ever we are enslaved, all nations will be in chains’. Napoleon did not believe in modesty.
3
NAPOLEON DIDN’T LOSE THE BATTLE (Everyone Else Did)
‘Bataille terrible où la victoire, au milieu des armées confondues, se trompa d’étendard.’
‘A terrible battle where, with all the armies intermingled, victory chose the wrong flag.’
– nineteenth-century French writer François-René de Chateaubriand
I
THINGS BEGAN TO go wrong for Napoleon almost immediately. His cannons started to pound the English lines, but instead of bouncing and inflicting havoc, many of the cannonballs plopped harmlessly into the mud and stayed there.
Meanwhile, he ordered an attack on a farm called Hougoumont, halfway between the French and English lines, on the extreme left flank of the French army. However, in giving his order, Napoleon was acting on incomplete information. Earlier, he had sent out General François-Nicolas Haxo to report on possible allied fortifications along their front line. Haxo had omitted to mention that Hougoumont was more of a fortress than a farmhouse, with high brick walls around the farmyard, a thick wooden gate and a tower that was a perfect vantage point for snipers. Not only that, it was protected by a dense woodland that would prevent artillerymen dragging even the lightest cannons anywhere near the walls.
The farm was heavily manned by 1,700 highly trained British Guards and 300 Germans from one of the Nassau regiments, ensuring that the 30 metres of open ground between the woods and the walls of Hougoumont would be a killing field for any Frenchman who set foot in it.
All this shouldn’t have mattered, though, because Napoleon’s orders were simply to send out skirmishers and keep the farm’s occupiers occupied, in the hope that they would call up reinforcements and weaken Wellington’s centre.
As it was merely a tactical diversion, the job was given to Napoleon’s brother Jérôme, who decided to launch an all-out attack. After his first assault had been repelled (almost killing Jérôme in the process, and mortally wounding another of Napoleon’s few trusted generals, Pierre-François Bauduin), Jérôme decided to e
ncircle the farm and even sent cavalry against the high brick walls. In all, throughout the day he would launch eight waves of men against the almost impregnable fortress, setting it alight and killing many of its defenders but wasting the lives of 8,000 Frenchmen in what was supposed to be a simple feint to distract Wellington.
Hougoumont did provide the French with some heroes, most notably Sous-lieutenant Legros (‘Fatman’), a huge former sergeant who had come out of retirement to join Napoleon, and who ran at the farm’s north gate with an axe and succeeded in forcing a breach, under furious fire from within. A few Frenchmen managed to get inside the farmyard full of firing, bayoneting Guardsmen, only to be massacred. The gate was re-closed, with Legros left lying just outside, the axe still in his hand.
Mostly, though, Hougoumont was about senseless slaughter. When British cannons joined the defence of the farm from afar, they began decimating the lines of Frenchmen waiting to attack. A young soldier called Larreguy de Civrieux was among them: ‘Soon our feet were soaked in blood. In less than half an hour our ranks were more than halved. We all stood stoically awaiting death or terrible injury … No mortally wounded man gave his dying breath without expressing his devotion to the Emperor.’ But they probably weren’t shouting ‘Vive Jérôme!’
Not that any of this was Napoleon’s fault, according to his French admirers. Lacking competent marshals, he had no choice but to trust his young brother, and after all he had given Jérôme a very simple task that should have been within even his limited capabilities.
In Les Misérables, Victor Hugo seems to excuse the waste of lives by suggesting that Hougoumont was a vital strategic point on the battlefield. He ironises about ‘a dung pit, a few hoes and spades, some carts, an old well with its iron wheel, a hopping foal, a jumping turkey … This is the farmyard that Napoleon dreamed of capturing … If he had managed to take this little patch of land, he might have won the world.’
The trouble was that there was a very large patch of land to the east that was still held by Wellington’s men, who showed no sign of wanting to leave.
II
These days it is generally agreed that sending massed ranks of infantrymen marching in full view towards a well-armed enemy is rather heartless. We have all read about World War One soldiers climbing out of their trenches and immediately falling in their thousands to withering machine-gun fire. Machine guns didn’t exist in 1815, but there were plenty of weapons deadly enough to wipe out whole lines of advancing men. The worst was probably the innocuous-sounding grapeshot,fn1 a mass of grape-sized lumps of metal that could be fired from a cannon in a scatter-pattern, killing or mutilating far more efficiently than a single cannonball. Grapeshot was often augmented with chains, nails and any odd bits of shrapnel that were handy – when firing hot metal at short range at an enemy, it was important to maim as many bodies as possible.
This deadly hailstorm, as well as straightforward cannonballs, was what Napoleon’s infantry now faced as he sent them marching towards the centre of Wellington’s line. And that was before they came in range of the muskets awaiting them on the top of the ridge.
There has been much criticism of Napoleon’s full-frontal assault, especially because the soldiers were made to advance in densely packed columns, 200 men wide and twenty-four rows deep, so that they were much easier to mow down with cannon and grapeshot than a wider line. Some French historians try to explain the attack by alleging that Napoleon’s orders were misinterpreted, but Napoleon himself had always shown that he saw no moral problem with sending large numbers of men to an almost certain death, if it meant winning the day. In 1813 he had warned the Austrian negotiator Metternich that he was willing to take huge casualties to defend France (and his own throne, of course): ‘A man like me cares little about the lives of a million men.’ Napoleon had also told parliament that ‘Any man who values his own life more than national glory and the esteem of his comrades has no place in the French army.’ In other words, you’re cannon fodder and you’d better enjoy it.
At about 1.30 p.m., Napoleon therefore sent about 16,000 men on a one-kilometre walk across the muddy fields of soaked rye, with English cannons scything through the ranks as if harvesting the cereals. The soldiers marched valiantly on, terrifying a front line of Belgo-Dutch troops, who scattered before them. Thinking they had broken the English defences, the French began to cheer, and charged forward. But there was a line of British troops on the ridge, and they unleashed a volley of musket fire at almost point-blank range. The surviving French infantrymen decided they had had enough and began to dash back towards their lines.
This was where Sir William Ponsonby and Lord Uxbridge famously led the British cavalry charging heroically downhill, trampling the fleeing infantrymen, and galloping so far forward that they ran into a superior force of better-armed French horsemen who cut them to shreds. Wellington’s infantry, on the other hand, stoically held their line at the top of the ridge, waiting for Napoleon’s next move.
Fortunately for Wellington’s infantry, and unfortunately for both Napoleon and Bonapartist historians, the next attack was led by Napoleon’s loosest cannon – Ney.
Ney saw a column of men moving away from the battlefield on the allied side, and for some reason decided that the British were retreating, even though the heavy fire coming from the ridge should have convinced him otherwise. Ney therefore ordered the French cavalry to charge. General Delort answered that he couldn’t attack without Napoleon’s direct order, but Ney overrode him (if that is not a bad cavalry-related pun), and 5,000 men and horses began their characteristic French trot towards the British infantry line that was still standing unbroken, formed into defensive squares, and defended by a battery of cannons.
The French cavalry were an impressive sight – a British artillery officer, Captain Alexander Cavalié Mercer, recalled with typical English restraint that ‘These grenadiers & cheval were very fine troops, clothed in blue uniforms without facings, cuffs, or collars. Broad, very broad buff belts, and huge muff caps, made them appear gigantic fellows.’ Not that this prevented Mercer and his comrades from trying to destroy the colourful tableau.
When the horses were little more than 50 yards away, the British cannons opened fire. Mercer remembered that ‘the discharge of every gun was followed by a fall of men and horses like that of grass before the mower’s scythe’. He saw Ney at the head of the charge: ‘An officer in a rich uniform, his breast covered with decorations, whose earnest gesticulations were strangely contrasted with the solemn demeanour of those to whom they were addressed.’
A few brave French horsemen broke through, but could only fire a pistol shot or throw a lance into the British squares. Some even leaped over the front line of troops,fn2 but their horses were disembowelled as they passed, and the unsaddled cavalrymen were mostly bayoneted as they lay helplessly on the ground, surrounded by English infantry. Men whose horses had been shot tried to run away on foot – a humiliating spectacle, as many were caught by light-footed skirmishers. It was Agincourt all over again – the flower of French knighthood slaughtered in the mud by nimble common soldiers.
As his men and their chargers fell, Ney himself had several horses shot from under him, but he urged the cavalry on to death or glory. Captain Mercer heard ‘the now loud and rapid vociferations of him who had led them on and remained unhurt’. At one point, Ney was seen slashing at an abandoned cannon with his broken sword, waiting for a new horse so that he could charge the English again. His own survival was little short of miraculous.
Perhaps it is because Ney survived the charge that French historians – including Napoleon – are so merciless with him. Most of them explain that Napoleon only gave general orders to his commanders, trusting them to deal with the details, so that he was horrified to see Ney sending cavalry forward without infantry or artillery support, and exclaimed that ‘he [Ney] is compromising the destiny of France’.
Ney’s recklessness forced Napoleon to follow suit, explaining to Soult that ‘Ney has turn
ed a sure thing into an uncertainty, but now the movement has begun, the only thing to do is support it.’ Napoleon felt obliged to launch another, even more massive, cavalry attack, one that at least had a chance of breaking through.
Ney continued to lead the charges with suicidal determination, and wave after wave of cavalry ran at the tightly packed British squares. Victor Hugo described the carnage poetically in Les Misérables: ‘Each square was like a volcano attacked by a cloud.’ And sure enough, the clouds were thinning fast.
All in all, Ney might as well have had the horses butchered and served up for lunch.fn3 The Bonapartist historian Jean-Claude Damamme heaps infamy on Ney by describing the animal abuse in bloody detail. He depicts a wounded chasseur begging a surgeon to look after his horse, which is standing nearby, its entrails hanging down into the mud. It is Bijou (‘Jewel’), the trusty mount that has seen the cavalryman through every campaign since the Battle of the Pyramids in 1798. As the surgeon looks on, another cannonball flashes by and finishes off Bijou. A brave veteran’s career has been ended by Ney.
Another man, a dragoon, makes it back to the French lines, having left behind the body of his horse, Cadet. Damamme lists its impressive military record – Prussia and Poland 1806–7, Spain 1808, Austria 1809, a return to Spain 1810–11, Russia 1812, Saxony 1813. The old horse was almost a living history of Napoleon’s expanding empire – the only thing old Cadet seems to have missed was the birth of the Emperor’s baby boy. And now it was tear-jerkingly dead.
Most people agree that Ney was suffering from a deathwish. He was a veteran of some seventy battles, he had been through the horrors of the Russian winter, turned traitor in 1814, taken up Napoleon’s cause again in 1815, and now saw that the whole epic story was coming to an end. Two days before Waterloo, he was heard saying, ‘Oh how I wish those English cannonballs could all hit me in the guts.’