How the French Won Waterloo (or Think They Did) (10 page)

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 turned 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.’

The reason for this deathwish becomes clear when you hear what he told another marshal, Jean-Baptiste d’Erlon, during the battle: ‘You and I have to perish here, because if the English grapeshot doesn’t do for us, we’re going to be hanged.’

As it happened, both would survive the battle. Erlon escaped to Germany, and opened a brasserie near Munich. But Ney foretold his own future more accurately. Charged with treason by Louis XVIII’s victorious government, he was shot by firing squad in Paris in December 1815. Typically, he refused a blindfold and ordered the firing squad to ‘fire, my comrades, and aim well’. Despite his bad performance at Waterloo, he died a hero in French eyes, but only because he went on to become a victim of Louis XVIII’s royalists, who are regarded by almost every French historian, even those who blame Ney for the defeat at Waterloo, as some of the biggest villains in their country’s history.

Even then, Ney doesn’t get
all
of the blame for this waste of cavalrymen and horses. According to Victor Hugo, the terrain chosen by Wellington had one last secret to reveal. As the brave French horsemen rode towards the English lines, they suddenly discovered a hidden line of natural defence – a sunken lane blocking their way like some huge inhuman obstacle at the Grand National. Hugo describes the charging cavalry suddenly being tipped headlong into a ditch that soon turned into a mass grave: ‘Riders and horses rolled over, crushing one another, turning the chasm into a mass of flesh, and when the ditch was full of survivors, others trod on them … This began the end of the battle.’

This ‘ravine of death’ looms large in the 1970 film
Waterloo
, directed by the Russian Sergei Bondarchuk, in which Rod Steiger plays Napoleon, Christopher Plummer Wellington and Orson Welles a hideous Louis XVIII. The film shows French horses tumbling into a hole that is more like a small quarry than a country lane. It’s so deep that nowadays, the film scene – like most of Bondarchuk’s footage of horses falling – would be banned for cruelty to animals.

But in fact the sunken lane seems to have been an invention, or an elaboration, on Hugo’s part, because the charging British cavalry had crossed it easily, and early visitors to the battlefield described little more than a depression with relatively shallow sides and no hedges to hide it from advancing horses. Hugo seems to have needed his ‘ravine of death’ to underline his central point: with both Ney and God in league to ensure poor Napoleon’s defeat, what hope did he have?

Another enemy now appeared in Napoleon’s telescope as he turned it to the east. What he had originally taken for Grouchy’s French troops finally arriving to support him turned out to be Prussians.

Napoleon’s fears about Grouchy were proving to be grounded. After his strawberry breakfast, the marshal had gone off on a riding tour of eastern Belgium – what one French historian called ‘une promenade militaire’, vainly searching for Prussians and ignoring the pleas of his subalterns to obey the first rule of Napoleonic battle and ‘march to the cannon’ – that is, go to Napoleon’s aid as soon as they heard the battle starting over at Waterloo.

When they heard the first artillery barrage, some of Grouchy’s officers reminded him of this rule. They were about four hours’ march away, so there was still time to be useful (Napoleon calculated that one of his battles usually lasted about six hours). French historians have noted the words used to Grouchy by Etienne-Maurice Gérard, a veteran of Austerlitz, who had distinguished himself at Ligny: ‘Monsieur le Maréchal, our duty is to march to the cannon. When Wellington is beaten, we will still have time to sort out Blücher.’ Grouchy reportedly got irritated and objected that they would march too slowly because of the bad conditions underfoot, at which point Gérard lost his temper: ‘
Sacré nom de Dieu!
Events command you to advance and you’re not moving faster than a mussel.’
^fn4
Offended, Grouchy ordered them to march the men further away from Waterloo, towards Wavre, and into the arms of French historians who delight in rubbishing his reputation. The nineteenth-century writer Achille Tenaille de Vaulabelle is withering about Grouchy: ‘With more decision and action, and with a keener appreciation of warfare and his position as an army commander, Marshal Grouchy could have transformed the disaster of Waterloo into a great victory. It was his duty to do so. He did not do it.’

Napoleon himself poured all the irony he could muster on Grouchy when discussing the battle with his companion on Saint Helena, Emmanuel de Las Cases: ‘Marshal Grouchy, with 34,000 men and 108 cannons, managed to find the secret, which seemed impossible to find, of how to avoid being either on the battlefield at Mont Saint Jean, or at Wavre on the 18th.’

Napoleon was all the more furious, both on the day and in hindsight, because he had dictated an order to Grouchy at six in the morning on the 18th: ‘You must manoeuvre in our direction and try to join our army before any Prussian troops move between us.’ Marshal Soult had added his own message to the order: ‘Don’t waste a moment before moving towards us.’

However, this is where Soult takes flak from Bonapartist historians. He had just one job – to make sure Napoleon’s orders were delivered – and he messed it up by entrusting the order to Grouchy to only two messengers. One of them got lost, and the other vanished without trace, probably after stumbling across some Prussians. When Grouchy failed to appear at Waterloo, Napoleon asked Soult how many messengers he had sent, and, hearing the answer, groaned, ‘Berthier would have sent a hundred!’ Berthier was, of course, his recently deceased former chief of staff.

At about 5.30 p.m. Napoleon was able to remind Ney that his original orders that morning had not been to charge blindly at cannons; his mission had been to capture a farm in front of the British centre, at La Haye Sainte (‘the sacred hedge’).

Infantrymen, furious at being left behind while the cavalry got massacred – the veterans knew that Napoleon’s plans usually involved a mass attack of cavalry supported by infantry – were sent in and overran the farm quickly. Ney realised that from the protection of the farmyard walls, French artillery could rake the English front line with deadly cannon fire. (French accounts of this realisation have a strong undertone of ‘duh!’.) Ney began to do just that, and the English centre suddenly started to weaken, as Napoleon had known it would.

This is supposedly when Wellington saw what was happening and uttered his prayer ‘give me night or give me Blücher’. Though other accounts have him predicting simply that ‘either night or Blücher will come’, implying that he never doubted victory, or at the very least expected a stalemate.

The French infantry captain Jean Baptiste Lemonnier-Delafosse described Wellington’s despair at around 5.30 p.m. In his
Souvenirs Militaires
, the fervent Bonapartist quoted a letter that he received a few years after the battle from one of Wellington’s aides-de-camp, identified only as Monsieur Hamilton,
^fn5
in what reads like a decidedly un-Iron Duke-like state of panic: ‘Lord Wellington, bare-headed, was leaning against a tree, motionlessly watching his defeated army … They were fleeing all around him … I saw tears in his eyes … The poor lord was a pitiful sight – he was no longer a man. Plunged in despairing thoughts, he was a statue of stupor. Suddenly, we heard cannon fire on our left, from the direction of Wavre. He lifted his head, listened, and cried: “The Prussian cannons. We’re saved!” And the man, the general, re-emerged. He rallied, etc. And you know what happened after that …’

Lemonnier-Delafosse added that ‘Monsieur Hamilton’s pen was restrained by patriotism, but saying that much is enough to show that Wellington was beaten before the Prussians arrived.’ The French captain concluded that Wellington’s success ‘in Belgium’ (Lemonnier-Delafosse finds it hard to pronounce the name ‘Waterloo’, and calls the battle ‘Mont Saint Jean’) was due to ‘the elements first of all, and to Marshal Ney’s unthinking bravery. Moreover, no strategist has ever approved of the English army’s position.’