Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles

CHAPTER ONE

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 successful military career which almost ended in 1814 when he was appointed Military Attaché to the Russian army invading France. He had survived battles in Spain, but at Fère-Champenoise he was mistaken by an over-enthusiastic Cossack for a French officer and savagely wounded.

He survived his wounds and was appointed British Commissioner to His Highness the Emperor Napoleon, ruler of Elba. Lord Castlereagh stressed that Sir Neil was not the Emperor’s jailer, but of course part of his job was to keep a close eye on Napoleon. Yet Sir Neil had been lulled, and in February 1815, while the Inconstant was being disguised as a British ship, he told the Emperor that he needed to sail to Italy to consult with his doctor. That may well have been true, but it is also true that Signora Bartoli, Sir Neil’s mistress, lived in Leghorn, and that is where he sailed.

The Emperor wished Sir Neil well and hoped he would return by the end of the month because the Princess Borghese was giving a ball, and Sir Neil promised he would do his best to attend. The Princess Borghese was Napoleon’s beguiling sister, the lovely Pauline, who had joined her brother in exile. Penury had forced the sale of her lavish house in Paris, which had been purchased by the British government for use as their embassy. That meant that for five months it had been home to the Duke of Wellington, who had been appointed Britain’s ambassador to the court of Louis XVIII. The house, on the rue du Faubourg St-Honoré, is a jewel, and is still Britain’s embassy.

Sir Neil sailed to Leghorn in the Royal Navy brig Partridge, which usually blockaded Elba’s main harbour. With the Partridge flown the Emperor could put his plans into effect and on 26 February his small fleet sailed for France with just 1,026 troops, 40 horses and 2 cannon. The voyage lasted two days and on 28 February the Emperor landed in France again. He led a puny army, but Napoleon was nothing if not confident. ‘I will arrive in Paris’, he told his troops, ‘without firing a shot!’

The peace was over, struck by a thunderbolt.

* * *

During the winter of 1814 to 1815 many women in Paris wore violet-coloured dresses. It was not just fashion, but rather a code which suggested that the violet would return in the spring. 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. Before his exile to Elba he had said he would be modest, like the violet. Everyone in Paris knew what the colour violet represented, and if at first the French had been relieved that the Emperor was dethroned and that the long destructive wars were over, they soon found much to dislike in the Emperor’s replacement. The restored monarchy, under the grossly obese Louis XVIII, proved rapacious and unpopular.

Then the violet returned. Most people expected that the Royalist army would swiftly defeat Napoleon’s risible little force, but instead the King’s troops deserted in droves to the returned Emperor and within days French newspapers were printing a witty description of his triumphant journey. There are various versions, but this one is typical:

The Tiger has left his den.

The Ogre has been three days at sea.

The Wretch has landed at Fréjus.

The Buzzard has reached Antibes.

The Invader has arrived at Grenoble.

The Tyrant has entered Lyon.

The Usurper has been glimpsed fifty miles from Paris.

Tomorrow Napoleon will be at our gates!

The Emperor will proceed to the Tuileries today.

His Imperial Majesty will address his loyal subjects tomorrow.

His Imperial Majesty, Napoleon Bonaparte, was forty-six years old as he entered the Tuileries Palace in Paris, where an excited crowd awaited his arrival. They had been gathered for hours. The King, fat Louis XVIII, had fled Paris, going to Ghent in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and the carpet of his abandoned throne room was tufted with embroidered crowns. Someone in the waiting crowd gave one of the crowns a dismissive kick and so loosened it to reveal that the royal tuft hid a woven bee. The honey-bee was another of Napoleon’s symbols, and the excited crowd went to its knees to tear off the crowns, thus restoring the carpet to its old imperial splendour.

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, being carried shoulder-high up the stairs to the audience chamber. An eyewitness said ‘his eyes were closed, his hands reaching forward like a blind man’s, his happiness betrayed only by his smile’.

What a journey it had been! Not just from Elba, but from Napoleon’s unpromising birth in 1769 (the same year as the Duke of Wellington’s birth). He was christened Nabulion Buonaparte, a name that betrays his Corsican origin. His family, which claimed noble lineage, was impoverished and the young Nabulion flirted with those Corsicans who plotted for independence from France and even thought of joining Britain’s Royal Navy, France’s most formidable foe. Instead he emigrated to France, frenchified his name and joined the army. In 1792 he was a Lieutenant, a year later, aged twenty-four, a Brigadier-General.

There is a famous painting of the young Napoleon crossing the St Bernard Pass on his way to the Italian campaign which rocketed him to fame. Louis David’s canvas shows him on a rearing horse, and everything about the painting is motion; the horse rears, its mouth open and eyes wide, its mane is wind-whipped, the sky is stormy and the General’s cloak is a lavish swirl of gale-driven colour. Yet in the centre of that frenzied paint is Napoleon’s calm face. He looks sullen and unsmiling, but above all, calm. That was what he demanded of the painter, and David delivered a picture of a man at home amidst chaos.

The man who was carried up the Tuileries staircase was much changed from the young hero who had possessed rock-star good looks. By 1814 the handsome, slim young man was gone, replaced by a pot-bellied, short-haired figure with sallow skin and very small hands and feet. He was not tall, a little over five foot seven inches, but he was still hypnotic. This was the man who had risen to dominate all Europe, a man who had conquered and lost an empire, who had redrawn the maps, remade the constitution and rewritten the laws of France. He was supremely intelligent, quick-witted, easily bored, but rarely vengeful. The world would not see his like again until the twentieth century, but unlike Mao or Hitler or Stalin, Napoleon was not a murderous tyrant, although like them he was a man who changed history.

He was a superb administrator, but that was not how he wanted to be remembered. Above all, he was a warlord. His idol was Alexander the Great. In the middle of the nineteenth century, in the American Civil War, Robert E. Lee, the great Confederate General, watched his troops executing a brilliant and battle-winning manoeuvre and said, memorably, ‘It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.’ Napoleon had grown too fond of it, he loved war. Perhaps it was his first love, because it combined the excitement of supreme risk with the joy of victory. He had the incisive mind of a great strategist, yet when the marching was done and the enemy was outflanked he still demanded enormous sacrifices of his men. After Austerlitz, when one of his generals lamented the French lying dead on that frozen battlefield, the Emperor retorted that ‘the women of Paris can replace those men in one night’. When Metternich, the clever Austrian Foreign Minister, offered Napoleon honourable peace terms in 1813 and reminded the Emperor of the human cost of refusal, he received the scornful answer that Napoleon would happily sacrifice a million men to gain his ambitions. Napoleon was careless with the lives of his troops, yet his soldiers adored him because he had the common touch. He knew how to speak to them, how to jest with them and how to inspire them. His soldiers might adore him, but his generals feared him. Marshal Augereau, a foul-mouthed disciplinarian, said, ‘This little bastard of a general actually scares me!’, and General Vandamme, a hard man, said he ‘trembled like a child’ when he approached Napoleon. Yet Napoleon led them all to glory. That was his drug, la Gloire! And in search of it he broke peace treaty after peace treaty, and his armies marched beneath their Eagle standards from Madrid to Moscow, from the Baltic to the Red Sea. He astonished Europe with victories like Austerlitz and Friedland, but he also led his Grande Armée to disaster in the Russian snow. Even his defeats were on a gargantuan scale.

Now he must march again, and he knew it. He sent peace feelers to the other European powers, saying that he had returned to France in response to the public will, that he meant no aggression, and that if they accepted his return then he would live in peace, but he must have known those overtures would be rejected.

So the Eagles would fly again.

* * *

The Duke of Wellington’s life was in danger. Appointing him as Ambassador to France was not, perhaps, the most tactful move the British government made, and Paris was filled with rumours about impending assassination attempts. The government in London wanted the Duke to leave Paris, but he refused because such a move would look like cowardice. Then came the perfect excuse. Lord Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary and the chief British negotiator at the Congress in Vienna, was urgently needed in London and the Duke was appointed as his replacement. No one could depict that move as a fearful flight from danger because it was plainly a promotion, and so the Duke joined the diplomats who laboriously attempted to redraw the maps of Europe.

And while they talked Napoleon escaped.

Count Metternich, the cold, clever, handsome Foreign Minister of Austria, was perhaps the most influential diplomat in Vienna. He had gone to bed very late on the night of 6 March 1815 because a meeting of the most important plenipotentiaries had lasted until 3 a.m. He was tired, and so he instructed his valet that he was not to be disturbed, but the man woke the Count anyway at 6 a.m. because a courier had arrived with an express despatch marked ‘URGENT’. The envelope bore the inscription ‘From the Imperial and Royal Consulate at Genoa’, and the Count, perhaps thinking that nothing vital would be communicated from such a minor consulate, put it on his bedside table and tried to go to sleep again. Finally, at around 7.30 in the morning, he broke the seal and read the despatch. It was very short:

The English commissioner Campbell has just entered the harbour asking whether anyone has seen Napoleon at Genoa, in view of the fact that he had disappeared from the island of Elba. The answer being in the negative, the English frigate put to sea without further delay.

It might seem strange that Sir Neil Campbell had sailed to Italy in search of the missing Napoleon rather than looking for the errant Emperor in France, but there was a widely held assumption that Napoleon, if he landed in France, would be swiftly captured by Royalist forces. ‘None would hear of France,’ the Duke of Wellington recalled, ‘all were sure that in France he would be massacred by the people when he appeared there. I remember Talleyrand’s words so well, “Pour la France? Non!”’ A landing in Italy seemed far more likely, especially as his brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, was King of Naples. Murat, who owed his throne to Napoleon’s generosity, had made his peace with the Austrians, but realized the Congress in Vienna would almost certainly strip him of his petty kingdom. As soon as he heard of Napoleon’s escape he changed sides again, attacking the Austrians, an adventure that failed utterly and led eventually to a firing squad.

Napoleon, of course, did go to France, but for days the diplomats in Vienna had no idea where he was, only that he was on the loose. The Congress, which had dithered and dallied and danced and debated, suddenly became decisive. ‘War’, Metternich recalled, ‘was decided in less than an hour.’ That swiftness was made possible because almost everyone that mattered, the decision-makers, were present at Vienna. The King of Prussia, the Emperor of Austria, the Czar of Russia, all were there, and Napoleon’s reappearance galvanized them. They did not declare war on France, because so far as the powers at Vienna were concerned France was still a monarchy ruled by Louis XVIII; instead they declared war on one man, Napoleon.

Four countries, Russia, Prussia, Austria and Great Britain, each agreed to raise an army of 150,000 men. Those armies would converge on France. Great Britain was unable to raise such a large army, so she agreed to pay subsidies to the other three instead. By now couriers were criss-crossing Europe, and one of them brought a letter to the Duke of Wellington from Lord Castlereagh: ‘Your Grace can judge where your personal presence is likely to be of the most use to the public service … either to remain at Vienna or to put yourself at the head of the army in Flanders.’

The Czar of Russia, Alexander I, had no doubt what the Duke’s choice would be. ‘It is up to you’, he told the Duke, ‘to save the world again.’

The Duke was doubtless flattered, but probably rather suspicious of such high-flown sentiments. Nor did he have any difficulty in deciding where he was likely to be of the most use to the public service. He replied to the government in London, ‘I am going into the Low Countries to take command of the army.’ He left Vienna at the end of March and was in Brussels by 6 April.

History rarely provides such a striking confrontation. The two greatest soldiers of the era, two men who had never fought against each other, were now gathering armies just 160 miles apart. The world’s conqueror was in Paris while the conqueror of the world’s conqueror was in Brussels.

Did Napoleon know that Wellington had been described as his conqueror? Diplomats are rarely discreet about such things, and it is more than possible, even likely, that the Emperor was told of that derisory remark. It would have angered him. He had something to prove.

And so the armies gathered.

* * *

There was confusion in France when Napoleon returned. Who ruled? Who should rule? For a few days no one could be sure what was happening. Colonel Girod de l’Ain was typical of many of the officers who had fought under Napoleon. With the return of the monarchy he had been forced to retire on half-pay and, though he was newly married, he wanted to rejoin the Emperor as soon as he could. He was living in the French Alps, but decided he should go to Paris:

The whole country was in turmoil. I travelled in uniform, but I took the precaution of providing myself with two cockades, one white and the other a tricolour, and depending on which colour flag I saw flying from the bell-towers of any town or village we passed through, I quickly decorated my hat with the appropriate cockade.

Colonel de l’Ain reached Paris and discovered his old regimental commander had already declared for Napoleon, as did almost the whole of the royal army, despite the oaths of loyalty they had sworn to Louis XVIII. Their officers might stay loyal to their royal oath, but the men had different ideas. Count Alfred-Armand de Saint-Chamans commanded the 7th Chasseurs, and as soon as he heard of Napoleon’s return he told his regiment to be ready to campaign, ‘because I believed we were going to fight the ex-Emperor’. His battalion, though, had a quite different objective:

Someone told me that several officers had gathered in the café and were determined to take their troops to join the Light Infantry of the Guard to support the Emperor, that others were having tricolour flags made which they planned to give to the men and so provoke a mutiny … I began to see the true state of affairs and to feel the misery of my position. What could I do? Any hopes I had of giving the King a fine loyal regiment to support the throne at this fateful hour were dashed to the ground.

The loyalty of the French army to Louis XVIII melted in a moment, giving Napoleon 200,000 troops. Thousands of veterans, like Colonel de l’Ain, were also volunteering, but Napoleon knew he needed an even larger army to defend against the attack that would surely come. One of Louis XVIII’s few popular measures had been the abolition of conscription, and Napoleon hesitated to reintroduce it, knowing how much people hated it, but he had no option, and that would raise another 100,000 men, though all would need training and equipping before they were ready to march, so the Emperor decreed that the National Guard, a local-based militia, would give him 150,000 troops. It was still not enough. The allies, he knew, would bring over half a million men to attack him.

France, in those first weeks, was frantic with preparations. Horses were requisitioned, uniforms made and weapons repaired. It was a compelling display of Napoleon’s administrative genius because, by early summer, he had one army ready to march and others placed to defend France’s frontiers. He still had too few men to resist the onslaught he knew was coming, and he needed yet more troops to suppress Royalist unrest in the Vendée, a region in the west of France which had always been Catholic and Monarchist, but by early summer Napoleon had a total force of 360,000 trained men, the best of whom were destined to assemble in northern France, where 125,000 experienced soldiers would form l’Armée du Nord, the army of the north.

Napoleon could have remained on the defensive that summer, stationing most of his men behind massive fortifications and hoping that the allied armies would batter themselves to destruction. That was not appealing. Such a war would be fought on French soil and Napoleon had never been a passive general. His skill was manoeuvre. In 1814 he had faced overwhelming odds as the Prussians, Austrians and Russians approached Paris from the north and east, and he had dazzled them with the speed of his marches and the suddenness of his attacks. To military professionals that campaign was Napoleon’s finest, even though it did end in defeat, and the Duke of Wellington took care to study it. Napoleon himself claimed:

The art of war does not need complicated manoeuvre; the simplest are the best, and common sense is fundamental. From which one might wonder why generals make blunders; it is because they try to be clever. The most difficult thing is to guess the enemy’s plan, to find the truth from all the reports. The rest merely requires common sense; it is like a boxing match, the more you punch the better it is.

The Emperor was being disingenuous. War was never quite that simple, but in essence his strategy was simple. It was to divide his enemies, then pin one down while the other was attacked hard and, like a boxing match, the harder he punched the quicker the result. Then, once one enemy was destroyed, he would turn on the next. The best defence for Napoleon in 1815 was attack, and the obvious enemy to attack was the closest.

It would take time for the massive Russian army to cross Europe and reach the French frontier, and the Austrians were still not ready in May. But just to the north of France, in the old province of Belgium that was now part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, two armies were gathering: the British and the Prussian. Napoleon calculated that if he could beat those two armies then the other allies would lose heart. If he defeated Wellington and drove the British back to the sea, there could even be a change of government in London which might bring a Whig administration inclined to let him stay as ruler of France. The enemy alliance would then fall apart. It was a gamble, of course, but all war is a gamble. He could have waited to raise and train more men until the French army almost matched the allies in number, but those two armies north of the border were too tempting. If they could be divided then they could be beaten, and if they could be beaten then the enemy coalition might collapse. It had happened before, so why not now?

The army he would take north was a good one, filled with experienced troops. If it had a weakness it was in the high command. Napoleon had always depended on his Marshals, but of the twenty Marshals still living four remained loyal to Louis XVIII, four more defected to the allies and two simply lay low. One of those two was Marshal Berthier, who had been Napoleon’s Chief of Staff and had a genius for organization. He fled to Bavaria, where on 1 June he fell to his death from a third-floor window of Bamberg Castle. Some suspect murder, but the most likely explanation is that he simply leaned too far out to watch some Russian cavalry pass through the square beneath. He was replaced by Nicolas Jean de Dieu Soult, a hugely experienced soldier who had risen from the ranks. Napoleon once called him ‘the greatest manoeuvrer in Europe’, but when Soult commanded armies in Spain he found himself constantly outfought by Wellington. He was a difficult man, prickly and proud, and it remained to be seen whether he possessed Berthier’s administrative talents.

Two of the Emperor’s most brilliant Marshals, Davout and Suchet, did not accompany l’Armée du Nord. Davout, a grim and relentless fighter, was made Minister for War and stayed in Paris, while Suchet was appointed commander of the Army of the Alps, a grand name for a small and ill-equipped force. Napoleon, asked which were his greatest generals, named André Masséna and Louis-Gabriel Suchet, but the first was in ill health and Suchet was left behind to defend France’s eastern frontier against an Austrian attack.

Napoleon created one new Marshal for the coming campaign: Emmanuel, Marquis de Grouchy. Davout advised against the appointment, but Napoleon insisted. Grouchy was an aristocrat from the ancien régime and had been fortunate to survive the slaughters of the French Revolution. He had made his reputation as a cavalryman; now he would be given command of one third of l’Armée du Nord.

Then there was the Marshal who was called the ‘bravest of the brave’, the mercurial and fearsome Michel Ney, who, like Soult, had risen from the ranks. He was fiery, red-haired and passionate, the son of a barrel-maker. He was forty-six years old in 1815, the same age as Napoleon and Wellington, and he had made his reputation on some of the bloodiest battlefields of the long war. No one doubted his courage. He was a soldier’s soldier, a warrior who, when Napoleon landed from Elba, had famously promised Louis XVIII to bring the Emperor back to Paris in an iron cage. Instead he had defected with his troops. He was renowned for his extraordinary courage and inspiring leadership, but no one would ever call Ney cool-headed. And, ominously, Soult detested Ney, and Ney detested Soult, yet the two were expected to work together in that fateful summer.

The Marshals were important, and none more so than the Chief of Staff, because it was his job to translate the Emperor’s wishes into mundane orders of march. Berthier had been a brilliant administrator, foreseeing problems and sorting them efficiently, and it remained to be seen whether Marshal Soult had the same ability to organize over a hundred thousand men, to feed them, move them and bring them to battle according to his Emperor’s wishes. The other Marshals would have the heavy responsibility of independent command. If the Emperor’s tactic was to pin one enemy army and keep it in place while he defeated the other, then a Marshal would be the man doing the pinning. At the opening of hostilities it was Marshal Ney’s job to keep Wellington busy while Napoleon fought the Prussians, and two days later Marshal Grouchy had to divert the Prussians while Napoleon destroyed Wellington’s men. Those tasks were not done by just following orders, but by imaginative soldiering. A Marshal was expected to take the difficult decisions, and Napoleon was entrusting them to Grouchy, new to his high rank and nervous of failure, and to Ney, whose only mode of battle was to fight like the devil.

L’Armée du Nord would face two armies in Belgium, of which the largest was the Prussian. It was led by the 74-year-old Prince Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, who had first fought for Sweden against the Prussians, but after being captured was commissioned into the Prussian army by Frederick the Great. He was vastly experienced, a cavalryman with the nickname of Marschall Vorwärts, Marshal Forwards, because of his habit of shouting his men forward. He was popular, much loved by his troops and, famously, prone to bouts of mental illness during which he believed himself pregnant with an elephant fathered by a French infantryman. There was no trace of this madness during the summer of 1815; instead Blücher marched with a fanatical determination to defeat Napoleon. He was bluff, courageous, and if he was not the smartest general he had the sense to employ brilliant staff officers. In 1815 his Chief of Staff was August von Gneisenau, a man of vast ability and long experience, some of which had been gained fighting alongside the British during the American Revolution. That had soured his views of the British army, and Gneisenau was extremely suspicious of British abilities and intentions. When Baron von Müffling was appointed as the liaison officer to Wellington he was summoned by Gneisenau, who warned him: