Authors: Richard Holmes
He was no more in favour of a history of Waterloo than he had been of a history of Talavera. It is impossible to assess the degree to which this reflected a desire to preserve his own reputation but, given his experience with the press, he would have been less than human were this not, at least in part, the case. He was certainly capable of changing his view of events with the passage of time. For instance, when he first heard news of Napoleon’s escape from Elba, he suspected that he would head for Italy, but later maintained that he always knew that he would go to Paris. Although he famously admitted that Napoleon stole a march on him at the beginning of the Waterloo campaign, he grew to dislike suggestions that he had been surprised. By the end of the battle, he was heard hoping that night or the Prussians would come, but when Sir Thomas Lawrence painted him in 1824 with a watch in his hand he objected: ‘That will never do. I was
not
waiting for the arrival of the Prussians at Waterloo. Put a telescope in my hand if you please.’
Wellington and Blücher met at Tirlemont on 3 May, but it is hard to be certain of precisely what was agreed. They certainly decided that the old Roman road from Bavay (just west of Maubeuge) to Maastricht would form the ‘strategic line of demarkation’ with Wellington to the west and Blücher to the east. They probably agreed that if the French advanced through Charleroi or Mons to threaten the two armies at their point of junction, the Prussians would concentrate at Sombreffe and the allies at Nivelles. Liaison staff were exchanged, Colonel Henry Hardinge (of Albuera fame) representing Wellington at Blücher’s headquarters and Major General Baron Friedrich Karl Ferdinand von Müffling accompanying Wellington.
Both sides strove to gain intelligence, but this was not easy because, as Wellington put it when writing to the Prince of Orange on 11 May, they were ‘neither at war nor at peace, unable on that account to patrole up to the enemy and ascertain his position by view’.
41
Lieutenant Colonel Colquhoun Grant, one of Wellington’s intelligence officers from the Peninsula (known as Grant El Bueno to distinguish him from a less popular homonym, who commanded a cavalry brigade) ran an intelligence network inside France, and Major General Sir William Dörnberg, with his cavalry brigade forward at Mons, collected reports and forwarded them to headquarters. Unfortunately Dörnberg was unaware of Grant’s mission or the weight Wellington attached to the information he provided, and on 14 June he failed to forward a message from Grant which would have given Wellington news of the time and place of French concentration.
The picture that emerged was, not surprisingly, an incomplete one. Wellington knew that Napoleon was raising troops better than he had expected, and was (unusually) visibly downcast when he heard of an enthusiastic
Champ de Mai
review in Paris. By the beginning of the campaign Napoleon had assembled around 124,000 men and 344 guns, divided into the Imperial Guard and five corps. The emperor commanded in person, with Marshal Soult as his chief of staff. This was not Soult’s natural
métier
, for he was more of a field commander, but Marshal Berthier, for so long the emperor’s trusted amanuensis, had not joined Napoleon; having sworn allegiance to King Louis, he died after falling from a window on 1 June. Like Wellington’s, Napoleon’s army was heterogeneous, with veterans rubbing shoulders with untried conscripts, and enthusiastic Bonapartists marching alongside resentful royalists. It lacked the innate cohesion and staying power of the armies that Napoleon had once commanded.
Napoleon himself was arguably not at his best, although historians are unable to agree quite what was wrong with him. Some have suggested a tumour on the pituitary gland, others a bladder infection, and still others a painful bout of prolapsed haemorrhoids. However, an aide-de-camp later paid tribute to his ‘energy, authority [and] … capacity as a leader of men’ during the campaign, and Andrew Roberts surmises that most explanations of failing health ‘hint at apologists’
ex post facto
rationalisations for his defeat, employed largely to keep their hero’s military reputation intact.’
42
Yet there were to be unaccountable fits of torpor, notably on the morning of 17 June, and his orders to Marshal Grouchy, detached with a large force to keep the Prussians from joining the British, are a masterpiece of unclarity. It is difficult to be sure whether there was a physiological cause for these lapses or whether Napoleon was simply off a game he had played so well for so long. The distinguished Napoleonic scholar David Chandler sees him as ‘obstinate, arrogant and overconfident’, and although he too believes that ‘the decline in his mental and physical powers have been overrated,’ he continues ‘there are yet some undeniable indications of deterioration in his overall ability.’
43
Wellington had little regard for Napoleon as a man, regarding him as a mountebank who had risen through sheer opportunism, but had immense respect for his military ability. In 1814 someone had pointed out that Wellington was never opposed to Napoleon in person, and he replied: ‘No, and I am very glad I never was. I would at any time rather have heard that a reinforcement of forty thousand men had joined the French army than he had arrived to take command.’
44
The duke had studied Napoleon’s masterly 1814 campaign, when he had kept defeat at bay by jabbing hard at each allied opponent in turn, like an agile fencer lunging at clumsy opponents. At the Congress of Vienna he had discussed Napoleon with the Bavarian Field Marshal Wrede, who had served under Napoleon from 1805 to 1814 and who been told by
le tondu
himself that he never had a plan of campaign. Wellington believed himself to be up against a man who was as much of a master opportunist in the military sphere as he was in his political life, and who had to be treated very seriously.
Yet it is evident that, for all his defensive precautions, just before the campaign opened, he had no real inkling that he was about to be attacked. He gave Lieutenant General Sir Galbraith Lowry Cole, Kitty’s old suitor and now a divisional commander, permission to get married in England on 15 June. On 13 June, he wrote to Thomas Graham, his old Peninsula comrade-in-arms, now Lord Lynedoch, that:
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 10
th
, 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.
45
Yet this strength was dangerously dissipated. In May, Wellington had warned that ‘we should not extend ourselves further than is absolutely necessary to facilitate the subsistence of the troops’.
46
It was partly to ensure adequate food for men and fodder for horses that his force was widely spread, with 1
st
Corps forward on his left, with its headquarters at Braine le Comte, the 2
nd
Corps forward on his right, with its headquarters at Ath, and the duke’s own reserve back around Brussels. This deployment also gave him a chance of meeting any of Napoleon’s three most likely offensive options: a thrust through Tournai, aimed at cutting British communications; a jab to Brussels via Bavay and Mons, the most direct route; or a stab through Charleroi at the junction between the allies and the Prussians.
On Thursday 15 June 1815 Wellington rose early. He spent the day hard at work,
inter alia
writing to Sir Henry Clinton about renumbering the British divisions, and penning a long letter, in French, to the Tsar of Russia. According to FitzRoy Somerset he was having dinner at about five o’clock when he received a message from the Prince of Orange, saying ‘that the French had attacked the Prussian advanced posts on the Sambre’. When he received the first message, Wellington told De Lancey to order the units under his immediate command, the reserve, to assemble at the headquarters of their respective divisions and to be ready to move at short notice. FitzRoy Somerset, who had gone back to his own quarters, returned to headquarters as soon as he heard what was happening, and:
found the Duke in the Park giving necessary orders to those around him. He wished everything to be in readiness to move on an instant; but was waiting for further information before he made a decided movement with any part of his army, it being of the utmost consequence first to ascertain the point to which Bonaparte directed his operations.
47
At about 10pm Somerset remarked: ‘No doubt we shall be able to manage those fellows [the French].’ Wellington replied that ‘there was little doubt about it provided he did not make a false movement’.
48
Two salient points emerge. The first is that at the very least, in Wellington’s own words, ‘there was certainly something out of order in the communication between the two armies in the middle of June’.
49
Communications between the allied and Prussian armies were not helped by the fact that French was their common language, which meant that all messages had to be translated, and by practical difficulties in carrying messages and ensuring that they reached the right person. Peter Hofschröer is amongst those detecting conspiracy rather than cock-up, arguing that news of the attack on the Prussians reached Wellington very much earlier, but he did nothing in response, letting down his allies and putting the campaign in doubt, then twisting the evidence to conceal the fact. Wellington’s supporters maintain that ‘Wellington’s whole life and character argue against it. Besides, it is not logical; he would have reacted immediately if he had known that the French had begun an attack anywhere.’
50
Readers with a deep interest in this issue should compare Hofschröer and Hussey, and they will see just how hard it is to reconcile accounts. But if the duke did wilfully suppress news of a Prussian message reaching him in the morning, it was a conspiracy which must have included not only FitzRoy Somerset, but also Madeleine De Lancey, who reported her husband’s sudden and extraordinary agitation late that afternoon, and his warning that he would be working all night. It must also have swept up Major General Sir Hussey Vivian, who recalled that he heard the news after he had dined with Lord Anglesey, as well as an unnamed officer of Picton’s division, who wrote that he was having dinner with several other officers at about 3pm when the news came in, and saw Prussian messengers at about 6pm. There is no doubt that both Blücher and Lieutenant General von Zieten, commanding his II corps, sent Wellington messages, but the balance of probabilities (and it can be no more than that), suggests that Wellington did not receive them till mid-afternoon, shortly after he had received word of the French advance from the Prince of Orange.
Secondly, when Wellington warned FitzRoy Somerset of the risk of making a false movement, he meant exactly that. He needed to be sure of the real direction of the French advance, for if he concentrated to meet a feint, he would be off-balance, unable to meet the real attack. Yet if premature concentration was dangerous, late reaction was scarcely less so, and Wellington’s primary problem on the 15
th
and 16
th
was to ensure that he swung his bat to meet the oncoming ball neither too early nor too late.
Even now Wellington was in worse trouble than he knew. Leading elements of Napoleon’s army had crossed the frontier at 3.30 on the morning of the 15
th
. Napoleon too had his share of difficulties: a messenger to General Vandamme lay in a ditch all night with a broken leg sustained when his horse rolled on him, and a traffic-jam ensued; also a pro-royalist divisional commander deserted to the Prussians, taking the plans with him. Yet by midday Napoleon’s troops had taken Charleroi in the face of stiff resistance and were soon pouring across the Sambre. That afternoon he ordered Marshal Ney to take two corps and a substantial force of cavalry to push the enemy down the Brussels road as far as the crossroads at Quatre Bras. This was more easily said than done, for Ney was unsure precisely where the corps were and was not privy to Napoleon’s ideas. Napoleon gave the newly-promoted Marshal Grouchy command of his right wing, telling him to push the Prussians on to Sombreffe. Blücher began to concentrate to meet the attack, telling Wellington what was afoot and expecting that he would, as they had agreed at Tirlemont, move to join him.
Unfortunately, as we have seen, his first dispatches probably arrived late, and Wellington went to the Duchess of Richmond’s ball that night, with his army at a high degree of readiness, but not yet moving to meet the French because, as he told Müffling, he was still unsure of their precise direction.
That evening word came in from Dörnberg that there were now few French troops in front of him, for most seemed to have swung off towards Charleroi. At 10pm the duke sent off a second set of orders, modifying his first instructions but still not allowing for a concentration further east than Nivelles. What he did not know, as he dressed for the ball, probably shaving for the second time that day, was that Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, commanding a brigade of Perponcher’s Netherlands Division, was heavily engaged at Quatre Bras. The fact that he was there at all spoke much for the ‘intelligent disobedience’ of Major General Baron Constant Rebecq, Orange’s chief of staff, who had ordered a concentration there rather than at Nivelles.
Wellington was never one to turn down a good party, but there was more than mere hedonism to his attendance to the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, held in a coachbuilder’s large workshop in the rue de la Blanchisserie. It was important to preserve calm in the city, and a sudden cancellation of the ball, or the disappearance of many of its leading guests, would give precisely the wrong impression. Moreover, most of his senior officers would be there, and it would be no bad thing to have them close at hand if news arrived. Some would have cause to regret the decision, as they found themselves going off to war in silk stockings and dancing-pumps. Wellington arrived at about 10.30pm and seemed at the peak of his form, although those who knew him well could see tension behind the mask. Lady Hamilton-Dalrymple, who sat beside him on a sofa, thought that: ‘Although the Duke affected great gaiety and cheerfulness, it struck me that I had never seen him have such an expression of care and anxiety on his countenance.’
51
Some officers had begun to slip away before supper, although the duke himself went in, with Lady Charlotte Greville on his arm.