Authors: Richard Holmes
It was probably well past midnight when the Prince of Orange, who had just received word of the action at Quatre Bras, appeared and whispered something in his ear. Wellington said that he had no fresh orders to give, but suggested that the Prince should go to bed. He then announced his own intention to retire, but quietly asked the Duke of Richmond if he had a good map. Richmond took him off to his dressing-room, where Wellington closed the door and declared: ‘Napoleon has humbugged me, (by G-d), he has gained twenty-four hours march on me.’ His host asked him what he planned to do. ‘I have ordered the army to concentrate at Quatre Bras,’ he said, ‘but we shall not stop him there, so I must fight him here’ and he traced the Waterloo position with his thumbnail on the map.
52
There are two problems with this account, one of the best-known Wellington anecdotes. Its source is secondhand, although its author, Captain George Bowles of the Coldstream Guards, emphasised that the conversation between Richmond and Wellington was repeated to him, two minutes after it occurred, by the former. The second is that Wellington had not yet issued orders for a concentration at Quatre Bras, and would no doubt have been much happier if he had. It was approaching two in the morning, and he now had the firmest indication yet that the greatest commander of his generation had broken the hinge between him and the Prussians, and was making straight for Brussels.
Wellington was probably not in bed until after two on the morning of the 16
th
, but rose at five-thirty, breakfasted on tea and toast, wrote some letters and left the city on horseback at about seven. His reserve was already on the move southwards, headed by the 5
th
Division, and citizens and visitors alike had already been awoken by the fifes and pipes. A lady’s maid saw him ride out, and told her mistress: ‘There he goes, God bless him, and he will not come back till he is King of France.’ It is twenty-two miles to Quatre Bras, and he reached the crossroads by about 10am, which is brisk riding. He found Prince Bernhard’s men still in possession, and there seemed no sign of an imminent attack. He had a few words with the Prince of Orange, and then wrote a letter to Blücher, giving the position of his army, and declaring that ‘I await news from Your Highness and the arrival of troops to decide my operations for the day.’ It concluded that ‘Nothing has appeared near Binche, nor on your right.’
This letter is no less controversial than the dispatches of the 15
th
. It places most of Wellington’s divisions further south-east than was in fact the case. He apparently relied on an inaccurate disposition supplied by De Lancey, and both this, and the letter arising from it, form part of the accusation of duplicity. But again the case is not clear-cut. By this stage Wellington was planning to fight at Quatre Bras, and his reserve was coming forward to support the Netherlanders: if the letter was an inaccurate representation of fact, it said much for his intent. Wellington followed the letter by riding across to see Blücher himself, taking the Roman road that crosses the main Brussels
chaussée
at Quatre Bras. The two commanders met at Bussy windmill near the village of Brye and exchanged information. Blücher now had three of his corps concentrated in front of Sombreffe around the village of Ligny, and could see that he would shortly be attacked. Most of those present recorded the conversation somewhat differently, but the upshot was clear: Wellington was to send substantial reinforcements to the Prussians that afternoon, though he added the rider ‘provided I am not attacked’. It is significant that Müffling, a Prussian officer, recorded this caveat in his own account of the meeting. In later life, Wellington claimed that he thought at the time that ‘if I were in Blücher’s place … I should withdraw all the columns I saw scattered about the front, and get more of the troops under the shelter of the rising ground’, and Henry Hardinge recalled him saying that ‘if they fight here they will be damnably mauled’.
53
And so they were. That afternoon Napoleon’s right wing attacked the Prussians at Ligny and beat them after a very bitter battle. Blücher, leading a cavalry charge in the gloaming at the end of the battle, was unhorsed and ridden over, but a devoted aide-de-camp, Count Nostitz, managed to get him away safely. His army was split, and in his absence Gneisenau, influenced by Wellington’s failure to support the Prussians that day, decided that the army should fall back on its line of communications, swinging away from Wellington. He told the king of Prussia that: ‘On the 16
th
of June in the morning the Duke of Wellington promised to be at Quatre Bras at 10am with 20,000 men … on the strength of these promises and arrangements we decided to fight the battle …’
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Given the fact that the Brye meeting did not take place until after 10.00 the factual foundation for this assertion is wobbly, but it does testify to the fact that honest men can have different views of traumatic events. Blücher eventually rejoined Gneisenau in a farmhouse, with wounded lying around and stragglers passing the door. The old field marshal insisted that the army should keep in touch with Wellington, and Major General Karl von Grolmann, the quartermaster-general, observed that a retreat on Wavre would enable it to do so and also to preserve its lines of communication if all else failed. Orders went out for a concentration on Wavre: the Prussians were still in the game.
Blücher was determined not to break his word: but had Wellington broken his? He returned to Quatre Bras to find that the situation had changed. Wellington was badly outnumbered – Ney had about 42,000 men, and Wellington only about 6,000 when the action began – but the long shadow of the Peninsula fell across the battlefield. French commanders knew how fond Wellington was of reverse slopes, and one of Ney’s subordinates was so forceful in his warnings that the attack was delayed by perhaps two hours. Ney’s men had begun to work their way forward, and Perponcher’s were being forced to give ground when Wellington returned. But Picton’s battalions were starting to come up, and the duke spent much of the day at the crossroads, sending units forward as they arrived, and checking the French attack. However, his situation looked unpromising: French skirmishers pecked away at his infantry, standing in the tall rye on the long slope south of the crossroads, and French artillery quickly asserted its superiority.
The battle became a race between Picton’s men, marching up the
chaussée
, battalion after battalion, in weather so hot that a soldier in the 95
th
Rifles ‘went raving mad, from excessive heat … cut a few extraordinary capers, and died in the course of a few minutes’, and Ney’s attackers, feeling their way with more caution. The Brunswick contingent arrived, and the Duke of Brunswick bravely led his cavalry in two charges, but was mortally wounded as he did so. Wellington, mounted on Copenhagen, was caught up in a swirl of charging horsemen as the French followed up the retreating Brunswickers and had to ride for his life. The nearest battalion was the 92
nd
Highlanders, and as he approached, with French
chasseurs
close behind, he yelled: ‘Lie down, 92
nd
!’ He jumped into their square, and the rolling volleys sent the French horsemen away with many an empty saddle.
But the next charge, this time by two regiments of lancers, was far more damaging, in part because of the cover provided by the standing crops, and in part because of confusion over the colour of the lancers’ uniforms – some British units had already fired on Netherlands cavalry in error that day. The 42
nd
Highlanders were caught with their square only half-formed, but, fighting mad, closed the square by main force and killed the horsemen inside. As the afternoon went on, a pattern became established of French charges swirling up the slope and eddying away, giving French gunners the opportunity to pound a line, which grew thinner. Some of the infantry who had arrived early were now running short of ammunition, and by late afternoon things were desperate. However, Colin Halkett’s brigade of Sir Charles Alten’s 3
rd
British Division arrived in the nick of time, with a Hanoverian brigade close behind, and Wellington sent them forward to buttress his position. Halkett’s battalions were ordered from square into line by the Prince of Orange, who could see no cavalry at that moment and thought that firepower was what was required. Halkett complied under protest, and was almost immediately charged by French
cuirassiers
who broke one of his battalions, the 69
th
, and forced the 73
rd
to take cover in a wood, and although the 33
rd
formed their square in time, when it did so, it was cruelly mauled by French artillery.
Yet again defeat stared Wellington in the face, but yet again fresh troops arrived, this time Cooke’s 1
st
British Division, with a battalion of 1
st
Guards leading the way. They went into action west of the road, and made remorseless progress through the wood which then stood there. On the other side of the
chaussée
, the 92
nd
had been in action all afternoon, but its commanding officer, the distinguished Peninsula veteran Lieutenant Colonel John Cameron of Fassiefern, was so eager to get to grips with the French infantry now coming up the slope that Wellington had to shout: ‘Take your time, Cameron, you’ll get your fill of it before night.’ When the moment came Wellington ordered ‘Now, 92
nd
, you must charge those two columns of infantry.’ The attack was successful – a two-storey redbrick house stormed by the Highlanders still stands beside the road – but Cameron was killed. By the time nightfall put an end to the fighting, Wellington was in possession of all the ground he had held at the start of the day, and had inflicted just over 4,000 casualties at the price of about the same. But in one respect the battle’s cost had been even higher. He had not been able to support the Prussians. It is clear that his failure to do so reflected his own urgent operational necessity, but that was not a reason easily grasped by a bitter Gneisenau, sitting on a pickle-barrel in a crowded farmhouse a dozen miles away.
We cannot be sure quite how much Wellington knew of what happened at Ligny. The two battlefields are three miles apart, and it is impossible, these days, to see one from the other. He maintained that he could see the battle – possibly by galloping westwards for a short distance – and he received several reports from Hardinge, one of them dictated after Hardinge lost a hand late in the afternoon. The duke left Quatre Bras at around 10pm, and rode back northwards three miles to Genappe, where he ate some supper and slept at the inn
Au Roi d’Espagne
. He was up again at 3am and returned to Quatre Bras, where he ordered his men to cook a meal. The morning was ‘cold, and rather inclined to rain’, and the duke joined the 92
nd
, saying ‘Ninety-second, I will be obliged to you for a little fire.’ They lit one by the door of a small shelter, improvised from branches, near the crossroads, and Wellington spent much of the morning in it, or pacing about outside it, ‘at the rate of three and a half to four miles in the hour’. He had sent out his senior aide-de-camp, Lieutenant Colonel the Hon. Sir Alexander Gordon, escorted by a troop of the 10
th
Hussars, to make contact with the Prussians, and Gordon had returned at about 7am with news that the Prussians were on their way back to Wavre. This induced Wellington to tell George Bowles, once again on hand where history was being made, that:
Old Blücher has had a damned good licking and gone back to Wavre, eighteen miles. As he has gone back we must go too. I suppose in England they will say that we have been licked. I can’t help it, but as they have gone back we must go too.
55
At 9am a Prussian officer who spoke both English and French rode over from Wavre, briefed Wellington and answered some questions. Wellington told Müffling that ‘he would accept a battle in the position of Mont Saint Jean. If the Field-Marshal were inclined to come to his assistance even with one corps only.’ By nam all the troops ordered to concentrate at Quatre Bras had arrived, and Wellington began to shift his army northwards, protected by a force left on the previous day’s battlefield. At around midday the last battalions slipped away, and he remarked: ‘Well, there’s the last of the infantry gone, and I don’t care now.’
Lord Uxbridge and the cavalry covered the retreat. The French were now close behind, and Captain Cavalié Mercer, whose troop of Royal Horse Artillery had been ordered to give the French a round from each gun as they crossed the crest, saw ‘a single horseman’, the emperor himself, at the head of the pursuers. A heavy thunderstorm helped the cavalry break clear, not without a brisk action between opposing horsemen in Genappe. Uxbridge was well pleased with the day’s work, calling it ‘the prettiest Field Day of Cavalry and Horse Artillery that I ever witnessed’.
Battlefields are named by the victor, and a well-founded suspicion that his countrymen would never get their tongues around Mont Saint Jean induced Wellington to call this one Waterloo. In fact the small town of that name stands well behind the ridge that rolls away from the farm complex of Mont Saint Jean. The ridge was much shallower than many of Wellington’s Peninsula positions, and there were re-entrants that slashed up into it and offered reasonable approaches. Wellington’s left was protected by the boggy valleys of the Dyle and the Lasne, but his right was more open. The substantial farm of Hougoumont lay in front of his right centre; a similar group of buildings, La Haye Sainte, stood beside the
chaussée
in his centre; and a larger grouping, around the hamlet of Smohain, was on his left. It was not an ideal position, but it was the best to be found south of Brussels. Wellington arranged his men in it as they arrived on the 17
th
, though he found time for a catnap by the roadside with a copy of the
Sun
newspaper over his face.