How the French Won Waterloo (or Think They Did) (8 page)

Of course, even among the French, conditions got better the higher you rose in the ranks, as General Victor-Albert Dessales found out to his cost: ‘It rained abundantly during the night, and I had to give up my billet to the comte d’Erlon [his superior officer]. I therefore spent the night in a bivouac. By morning I was soaking wet, and if I hadn’t found a carriage in the park, I wouldn’t have been able to change, which would have been most disagreeable.’

Napoleon himself spent the night in a charming farmhouse a few kilometres south of the next day’s battlefield. Today, Le Caillou (‘The Pebble’) is a museum containing, among other artefacts, one of the
Empereur
’s camp beds, and the actual table where he breakfasted on 18 June with his chiefs of staff.

Maintaining the religious theme of the whole campaign, a plaque on the farmhouse wall states (in French) that ‘Le Caillou was saved and converted into a place of pilgrimage by the historian Lucien Laudy’.
^fn4
And Napoleon himself attracts large numbers of pilgrims to the farm where, on the night of 17 June, he took shelter in a tiny room – Damamme specifies that his bedroom on the ground floor measured only 6.20 metres by 4.65, though he fails to mention the rather grand fireplace that must have kept the place cosy on that stormy night. There, Damamme says, Napoleon lay on his camp bed and ate a meal off the farmer’s humble plates – his crockery wagon had not made it through the mud. The farmer’s plates have been preserved in the museum, and aren’t all that humble at all. They are white and very sturdy, less refined than Napoleon’s usual monogrammed porcelain or silver plate but as good as anything outside a chateau of the times.

Despite his lack of sleep – this was Saturday and Napoleon had been on the road, travelling or fighting, since three a.m. on Monday – the novelist/historian Max Gallo claims that the Emperor could not lie down. He depicts Napoleon pacing around the house, suffering under the weight of responsibility, gazing fondly on the French officers bedded down in the rest of the house and the barn. Being a man of the people, he also goes to the door and looks out at his soldiers tramping past in the rain, ‘their uniforms soaked, their weapons wet, their bodies slumped in exhaustion’. And according to most French histories of the battle, Napoleon himself was not exactly feeling full of
haricots
himself.

It wasn’t just sleep deprivation that was causing Napoleon’s physical problems, we are told. During the night, Gallo has him trembling and ‘breathing badly, as though his chest were being crushed’. Most Bonapartist historians who try to explain away the events of the next day point to some sickness or other that was diminishing Napoleon’s normally superhuman stocks of energy and inventiveness.

The most popular theory is that Napoleon suffered from piles. This sounds like a rumour invented to amuse the toilet-obsessed Brits, but French commentators seem to confirm the stories. In
Les Misérables
, Victor Hugo coyly refers to the Emperor’s haemorrhoids as ‘local pains’, and in his book
Histoire de la Campagne de 1815 – Waterloo
, the nineteenth-century military historian Jean-Baptiste-Adolphe Charras describes them as ‘atrocious pains on the day of Waterloo’. Napoleon’s brother Jérôme, who fought at Waterloo, mentions the piles explicitly in his memoirs, and the Emperor’s surgeon, Barron Larrey, is known to have treated the imperial backside with hot wet cloths just after the Battle of Ligny. It seems certain that on the 18th, the Emperor was at the very least feeling some posterior tenderness.

Strange, then, to read so many accounts of Napoleon riding around the battlefield for much of the day, going out on his horse to get a closer look at troop movements, even galloping when it was necessary. This would have been agony for a man with acute haemorrhoids, especially because there is never any mention of a customised soft saddle.

The conclusions are obvious: either Napoleon was not suffering from serious piles and therefore had one less excuse for losing the battle, or – the version offered up by Bonapartist historians – he heroically ignored the agony and soldiered on.

Max Gallo’s biographical novel is full of scenes in which Napoleon has to think of the nation and overcome his personal pain. Gallo also makes the clearest, and most gruesome, reference to piles. He imagines Napoleon in his carriage on the way to Belgium, in agony: ‘A sharp pain ripped through his stomach. Then it felt as though thick black blood, heavy and burning-hot, were flowing through his lower body, swelling the veins until they were fit to burst. He had the humiliating, exhausting obsession that, instead of urine and shit, he was going to start spouting blood.’ Ouch indeed.

And piles are by no means the only physical affliction blamed for hampering Napoleon’s performance at Waterloo. Some say he was suffering from acromegaly, an imbalance of the pituitary gland which can cause lethargic over-confidence (much like the condition that seems to inflict England footballers during any major international tournament). Others have diagnosed a ‘dysuric problem’ – in other words, trouble urinating. Jean-Baptiste-Adolphe Charras goes further, suggesting that the
Empereur
might have been suffering from syphilis, or as Charras euphemistically puts it, ‘an accidental disease that gave Napoleon great discomfort … Napoleon had contracted the sickness that killed King François I’.
^fn5

Whatever the actual source of Napoleon’s aches and pains on 18 June 1815, he seems to have forgotten about them during the fighting. The sound and smell of cannon fire, and the prospect of a violent death or – even worse – humiliation and dishonour seem to have enlivened him. At the height of the battle, sitting calmly on his horse, with cannonballs and grapeshot falling all around him, he famously told one of his young aides-de-camp, who was ducking his head and moving around, ‘Stay still, my friend, a gunshot will kill you just as easily from behind as from in front – and cause a much uglier wound.’

The real problem for Napoleon, according to his admirers, was that the other commanders of his army were by no means as sharply focused on the job in hand.

As a rain-free dawn broke on the morning of the Battle of Waterloo, most ordinary French soldiers seem to have been looking forward to a fight. At least a few explosions might warm things up a bit. Many of them were annoyed to discover that their cartridges were wet – they were carrying large stocks of ammunition in their backpacks because Napoleon had rightly feared that the supply wagons would not keep up. Now, though, the men were apparently afraid that they would run out of dry powder during the fighting. However, the situation must have been very similar over on the other side of the front line, and this ‘damp cartridge’ problem is reminiscent of the frequently repeated French claim about Agincourt – that their crossbowmen couldn’t reply to the English archers because their crossbow strings were wet.

Meanwhile, the rain-sodden, mud-encrusted young Lieutenant Jacques-François Martin and his men were apparently in astonishing good humour. Martin wrote jokingly that ‘Next morning, bright and early, we jumped out of bed’ – he had slept in the mud, remember – ‘and after preening ourselves, the well-rested soldiers went off in search of everything we needed. Soon we were able to light a fire and grill some beef cutlets that were delicious. And we drank plenty – water was not exactly lacking. Thus refreshed, our weapons cleaned, we waited impatiently for the order to move.’

Of course the order didn’t come, thanks to the mud. Napoleon – who by all accounts had managed to grab some sleep in his camp bed – had decided that the Prussians would not arrive on the battlefield until 4.30 p.m. He had time to beat the English first. At dawn, around 4.30 a.m., he gave orders for his army to be ready to attack at nine. As he recalled in his memoirs, ‘I saw the weak rays of the sun which, before it went down again, would highlight the defeat of the English army.’ Sadly though, the sun had not yet dried out the fields and his cannons couldn’t be moved.

Neither, throughout the day to come, could several of his commanders. Their inactivity and lack of decisiveness, or sudden bursts of badly directed energy, are usually given by Bonapartist historians – including Napoleon himself – as the main reason for losing at Waterloo.

At the re-enactment of the Battle of Brienne le Château in May 2014, I witnessed a scene that illustrates French feeling on this delicate matter. At one of the many bookstalls devoted to French literature on Napoleon and his campaigns, a man was selling a glossy new picture book that contained reproductions of all the paintings depicting the
Empereur
’s famous battles. It was a very tall, very thick book. Two old ladies were leafing through, and suddenly stopped.

‘Oh, le voilà!’ one of them exclaimed – there he is.

The bookseller sidled over to ask whom they had spotted. The women closed the book and one of them explained, just loud enough for an attentive eavesdropper to overhear, that they were sisters, and were descended from one of Napoleon’s marshals, ‘but we don’t like to say his name out loud because he’s not very popular’. The bookseller leaned in close and encouraged them to confide, to no avail. But it occurred to me that it didn’t really matter – almost none of the French commanders came out of Waterloo covered in glory.

The problems at the top had started even before the battle. At dawn on 15 June, General Louis-Auguste Bourmont deserted to the enemy with his general staff. He wrote a letter to Napoleon explaining that he did not ‘want to play a part in establishing bloody despotism in France’. The only consolation for Bonapartists is that Blücher refused to talk to Bourmont, even though he had donned the white royalist cockade to avoid getting shot at as he approached enemy lines. Blücher is said to have explained his snub in delightful soldierly language: ‘Hundsfott bleibt Hundsfott!’ – literally ‘once a dog’s vagina, always a dog’s vagina’.

Napoleon would probably have agreed, though perhaps he ought to have had his doubts about Bourmont’s loyalty much earlier. The man was a royalist who had fought against the Revolution and served as an envoy to the King-in-exile Louis XVIII. Bourmont had also been imprisoned for plotting against Napoleon at the start of his reign. He had then been reinstated as a soldier and served in Italy, but without a command of his own. Napoleon had even written a letter to the Minister of War asking ‘what would our troops think about being commanded by such a man?’ Despite all this, Napoleon made Bourmont a general, and here he was defecting instead of leading his troops into battle.

Napoleon ought to have had similar doubts about Ney, but the man who wanted to put the Emperor in a cage was recalled to duty just a few days before Waterloo. This had immediate consequences, as Ney’s new aide-de-camp Colonel Heymès remembered: ‘The troops were exhausted after a 20-hour march. The marshal [Ney] didn’t know the names of his generals or colonels. He didn’t even know how many men were in each regiment.’

Michel Ney was a grand figure in 1815, a tall, forty-six-year-old red-headed cavalry officer who had risen through the ranks because of his fearlessness, and earned the affectionate nickname ‘tomato head’. He had distinguished himself in Austria, Prussia and Russia, and survived being hit in the neck by a Russian bullet. But he was hot-tempered, and had fallen out so badly with his fellow marshals during the Spanish campaign that Napoleon had brought him back to Paris to train troops.

Ney was the first marshal to defect to the royalists in 1814, but had returned to Napoleon’s camp even before Louis XVIII fled France in March 1815. There was no doubting his courage or his patriotism, but by June 1815 he was a battle-weary and politically confused man who had apparently warned Napoleon face to face not to ‘play the tyrant’. Not exactly a reliable brother-in-arms.

One of the men Ney had fallen out with in Spain was Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult. The two were the same age, but never got on. Soult had fought under Napoleon to win the great victory at Austerlitz in 1805 but, like Ney, quickly turned royalist in 1814. He then called Napoleon a ‘usurper and opportunist’ and became Louis XVIII’s Minister of War, during which time he actually implemented a policy to reduce numbers in the army. Not a natural Bonapartist, it would seem. Even so, Napoleon appointed him chief of staff of his army, one of his closest advisers and aides-de-camp.

Meanwhile, in preparation for Waterloo, Napoleon entrusted the job of keeping the Prussians at bay in the east to Emmanuel de Grouchy, a marshal about whom almost all French historians are scathing. One of his subordinates, a certain Colonel Chapuis, is often quoted as saying: ‘It was clear that providence had condemned us, and chosen Marshal Grouchy to punish us.’

The story about Grouchy that has gone down in French legend is the tale of his carefree strawberry breakfast on 18 June: while he should have been scouring the countryside in an attempt to pinpoint Blücher’s exact position, he broke camp at eight a.m. (several hours after the usual wake-up call of Napoleonic commanders) and enjoyed a leisurely meal of fresh fruit with a local solicitor, Maître Hollert, who was a veteran of the French Revolutionary army. It’s a breakfast that Napoleonic historians have never been able to digest.
^fn6
Grouchy was by all accounts an excellent sword-fighter and a brave cavalryman, very obedient when given precise orders, but when left to his own devices, he was lost. He had previously commanded cavalry units, but never a whole army. According to Dominique de Villepin, Grouchy ‘lacked instinct, initiative and experience’. And yet here he was, sent off to face Blücher, a bloodthirsty warrior with fifty years of battle experience.

However, as all Bonapartist historians will tell you, this choice of unreliable commanders was less a case of bad judgement on Napoleon’s part than a need to bow to circumstances. His most faithful officers were all dead. His young aide-de-camp Jean-Baptiste Muiron had died in Italy, taking a bullet that was meant for Napoleon. Louis Charles Desaix had fallen at the Battle of Marengo in 1800, shot through the heart while leading the victory charge. Louis-Alexandre Berthier, Napoleon’s chief of staff, had died on 1 June, falling (or throwing himself) out of the window of his chateau, perhaps mortified for having become a royalist like all the others in 1814, and for refusing Napoleon’s invitation to join him again.