The Battle (47 page)

SEVENTY

"I NEVER WISH TO SEE

ANOTHER BATTLE"

The table was set exactly as it had been the previous evening, with a place for each of his aides; but there was only one who was able to sit down with him. This was General Don Miguel de Alava, the envoy of the king of Spain, who had been attached to Wellington's staff for years and was a perfectly integrated part of it. The duke ate little and in silence. Whenever someone entered, Wellington turned toward the door, hoping to be able to add a name to the list of those who were still alive. He drank one toast during the entire dinner, lifting a glass with Alava to the memory of the war in Spain. This behavior was in stark contrast to the numerous, enthusiastic toasts that always concluded a British dinner, particularly in such triumphant circumstances as these appeared to be. Before going to bed, the duke spread out his arms and spoke a sentence that was destined to be repeated ad infinitum, by others as well as himself: "The hand of Almighty God has been upon me this day." Then he wrapped himself in his coat and lay down on a camp bed that had been hastily prepared for him.

After sleeping for perhaps two hours, he was awakened because the quartermaster general, the officer responsible for the provisioning and lodging of the troops, needed orders; since the duke was already awake, his personal physician, Dr. Hume, gave him the news that Sir Alexander Gordon had died. Hume next read aloud the casualty list that he had managed to put together thus far, and at a certain point in his reading, he realized that the duke, incredibly, was weeping. Wellington brusquely dried his tears with his hand, and the doctor saw that his face was soiled with sweat and dust; he had not yet had time to wash. Then the duke uttered another of the statements that would become part of his lasting fame: "Well, thank God, I don't know what it is to lose a battle; but certainly nothing can be more painful than to gain one with the loss of so many of one's friends."

There was too much work for Wellington to go back to sleep. Having washed and shaved, he sat down to write the official dispatch in which he announced his victory to the government. In the June 22 issue of the
London Times,
this dispatch occupied four columns, and it certainly must have taken him several hours to write, especially considering the continual interruptions. It is a precise, dispassionate account, in the duke's style, which some found admirable for its understatement and others judged unbearably cold. As was necessary in a document of this kind, Wellington made sure to mention all those officers who had distinguished themselves in combat. The duke was a politician, and he may have gone too far in parceling out his citations, reserving perhaps too respectful an eye for influential generals well introduced at court and important foreign representatives, while forgetting to mention, for example, Sir John Colborne; in any case, the publication of the official dispatch aroused, in some quarters, long-lasting resentment. (The duke himself, many years later, when asked if there were anything in his life which he regretted and could have done better, replied, "Yes, I should have given more praise.")

At dawn, carrying the dispatch he intended to post, the duke got back on his horse and left for Brussels, from where he could communicate more rapidly with England. After having sealed the official dispatch—which was immediately sent to London, together with the two Eagles captured during the battle—Wellington spent a large part of the day writing private letters, which give clear evidence of the emotional shock that had been so carefully masked in the dispatch for the government. One of the first letters, dated at eight-thirty in the morning, was for Lady Frances Webster. "My loss is immense. Lord Uxbridge, Lord FitzRoy Somerset, General Cooke, General Barnes, and Colonel Berkeley are wounded: Colonel De Lancey, Canning, Gordon, General Picton killed. The finger of Providence was upon me, and I escaped unhurt." The deaths of his friends removed all triumphalism from his feeling of having been protected by Providence; on the contrary, they transformed that feeling into something resembling a sense of guilt. He wrote to Viscount Gordon of Aberdeen to inform him of the death of his brother, Sir Alexander Gordon: "I cannot express to you the regret and sorrow with which I look round me, and contemplate the loss which I have sustained, particularly in your brother. The glory resulting from such actions, so dearly bought, is no consolation to me." To the Duke of Beaufort, informing him that his brother, Lord Fitzroy Somerset, had lost an arm, Wellington wrote, "The losses I have sustained, have quite broken me down; and I have no feeling for the advantages we have acquired."

A certain rhetoric of grief informs these sorrowful letters, and not everything Wellington wrote can be taken literally; but there can be no doubt that he was in a state of deep distress. In the most sincere letter of all, written to his brother William, another theme emerged, one destined to surface again and again: the awareness that his great victory had been within a hair of turning into a catastrophe. "It was the most desperate business I ever was in. I never took so much trouble about any Battle, & never was so near being beat. Our loss is immense particularly in that best of all Instruments, British Infantry, I never saw the Infantry behave so well."
⁴⁴
Recognizing the English member of Parliament, Mr. Creevey, among the crowd gathered under the windows of his inn, the duke invited him upstairs and said the same things to him, although this time colored by a tinge of personal satisfaction. "It has been a damned serious business," the duke declared. "It has been a damned nice thing—the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life. By God! I don't think it would have done if I had not been there."

The knowledge that he had been extremely close to losing the battle remained alive in the duke for some time, before the triumphant welcome he received in England began to blur that aspect of his memory. One month after the battle, one of his trusted retainers, Thomas Sydenham, who had not been at Waterloo but joined the duke in Paris a short time afterward, wrote a letter to his brother, recounting his long talks with the "Padrone," as they called him, about that memorable day. The duke continued to hold a low opinion of Bonaparte as a general and persisted in describing him by means of unflattering pugilistic metaphors: "He said that he always thought him a great glutton, fighting very hard to carry a particular point, but showing no recourse if his main attack failed." And nevertheless, Sydenham continued, "I observed that in talking about the Battle of Waterloo he invariable
[sic]
mentioned it with some expression of horror, such as, 'it was a tremendous affair,' 'it was a terrible battle,' or, 'it was a dreadful day,' holding up his arms above his head and shaking his hands. He repeatedly said he never had taken so much pains about a battle, that no battle had ever cost him so much terrible anxiety." Among the young officers of Wellington's staff, whose admiration for the great man was tempered by a touch of irreverence, it was no secret that the Padrone had come close to defeat in the Battle of Waterloo. After talking with some of them, Captain Jackson reported them "all agreeing that the Duke had never before been so severely pressed; or had so much difficulty to maintain his position."

By the time Wellington had a conversation with Lady Shelley a few weeks later, the horror of warfare had taken on a new form in his mind: "I hope to God that I have fought my last battle. It is a bad thing to be always fighting." Even on that first night, at the bedside of Sir William De Lancey—who seemed likely to survive his injuries but instead died a few days later—the duke had said that "he never wished to see another battle; this had been so shocking. It had been too much to see such brave men, so equally matched, cutting each other to pieces as they did." Lord Fitzroy Somerset, who was present, repeated to others what the duke had said, and Wellington's words circulated among the officers, winning the approval of many. Some reported the remarks to Sir Augustus Frazer; the duke, they told him, had declared that he had never seen such a battle and hoped never to see another one. Frazer thought there was only one fitting comment: "To this hope we will all say: Amen."

EPILOGUE

O
n Waterloo Day, nearly 200,000 men confronted one another on a scrap of land barely four kilometers (2.5 miles) square; never, either before or after, have such a great number of soldiers been massed on so circumscribed a battlefield. (By way of comparison: More than 250,000 men of Paulus's Sixth Army were surrounded and trapped by the Soviets at Stalingrad at the end of 1942, but the trap had a diameter more than thirty-five miles long.) It is natural to ask how many of the men gathered to fight at Waterloo died there, but limited statistics prevent a certain answer to that question. The most reliable data for Wellington's army list its losses as 3,500 dead, 3,300 missing, and 10,200 wounded, a shocking one-quarter of his troops. Of the missing British soldiers, a good half of them later returned to their regiments, while the others were officially declared dead. But until someone examines, regiment by regiment, all the data preserved in the Public Record Office, it will be impossible to establish the number of wounded soldiers who did not survive their injuries, although by comparing existing samples we can propose an estimate of between 1,000 and 2,000.

The Prussian losses, according to the available statistics, amounted to 1,200 dead, 1,400 missing, and 4,400 wounded, but no data have been published concerning the number of missing who returned or the number of wounded who died of their wounds, and no such data will likely be published in the future, given the destruction of the Prussian military archives during the bombardments of the Second World War. As for the French, their losses are impossible to calculate, because no one thought about bringing the regimental rolls up to date in the days immediately following the catastrophe. On June 22, at Laon, when the great flight of the French army finally came to an end, Soult, d'Erlon, and Reille succeeded in gathering 30,000 troops who were still disciplined and capable of combat, together with around fifty guns. Some 40,000 men, therefore, were missing, but how many of them had died in battle, how many had been wounded or taken prisoner, and how many had simply gone home is unknowable. Nevertheless, in the years immediately following Waterloo, the French press estimated the emperor's losses at 24,000-26,000 men, including 6,000-7,000 prisoners, and these figures seem not at all unlikely—in addition to which another 15,000 men, a third of the survivors, deserted the ranks at the end of the battle and in the following days, broken by their army's defeat and the pitiless Prussian pursuit.

Many historians propose a higher number for the French dead and wounded, arguing that the losses suffered by the defeated army at Waterloo must have been decisively superior to those of its adversaries; however, the only available data, which relate to the officers, would lead one to question this argument. During the Battle of Waterloo, a total of 207 French officers died or went missing, and another 66 died later as a consequence of their wounds. The statistics for the Allied armies are more numerous and sometimes contradictory, partly because they cover several armies that were, administratively speaking, completely distinct from one another; collating them, we find that a minimum of 218 officers were dead or missing from Wellington's army and 61 from that of the Prussians. With rare exceptions, the wounded men who died after the battle do not seem to have been included in these totals, nor have any reliable data on the subject been published, except in regard to the British army. Consequently, if these are excluded, at Waterloo on June 18, during the day, statistics suggest that 207 French officers died or went missing, as opposed to a total of 279 for their adversaries. Therefore, based on traditional ratios of officers to enlisted men, it seems legitimate to wonder whether the losses suffered by Napoleon's army in the course of the battle might even have been inferior to those of his enemy.

In short, contrary to general belief, the Armee du Nord was not entirely destroyed at Waterloo; but its will to resist had been broken forever. "The men are disappearing in all directions at the first opportunity," Soult wrote to the emperor four days after the battle. "The cavalry show more discipline and is in better shape. The infantry is totally demoralized, and the men are saying the most incredible things." By that time, the emperor was no longer with the army.

Three days after the battle, Napoleon was back in Paris, trying to galvanize the country and put together a parliamentary majority in order to continue the fight. His army, or what was left of it, retreated for some days to the interior of France, where its generals discovered that fewer than half of those who had been mustered at Waterloo were still in the ranks. The Prussians were hard on their heels, while Wellington's army followed in a much more leisurely way. On June 22 Napoleon, finding himself politically isolated and facing a rebellious Chamber and despondent Marshals, abdicated; on June 29 he left Paris, after a provisional government had refused his offer to take command of the army and to lead the war against the invaders as General Bonaparte. He planned to sail to America, but British ships blocked the French ports, and on July 15, after some days of frantic negotiations, he embarked on HMS
Bellerophon,
believing she would take him to an honorable retirement in England. Instead he was taken to his life confinement on the tiny volcanic island of St. Helena, lost in the southern Atlantic some 1,250 miles from the coast of Africa, and more than 600 miles from the nearest island: the place farthest from any other place on Earth. Here he would die, probably of cancer, six years later.

As Napoleon left Paris, some units of the French army, resenting the brutality of the Prussian invasion, had put up a stiff resistance on the outskirts of Paris and Versailles; but theirs was a lost cause. On July 3, the French provisional government capitulated, and the following day the Allies entered Paris. On July 8, King Louis XVIII returned to his palace at the Tuileries, less than four months after he had hurriedly left it.

Although everyone recognized its momentous importance, determining how to designate the battle that had taken place on June 18 took a little time. Tradition has it that Blucher, struck by the prophetic nature of the name La Belle Alliance, proposed it that very evening as the name of the battle. The Prussians tried hard for a long time to accredit this appellation: One of the most important public squares in Berlin was rechristened "Belle-Alliance-Platz" (now Mehringplatz), and until the First World War German historians usually invoked the
"Schlacht
bei Belle-Alliance."
The French, at least in the beginning, were uncertain. During the battle, Marshal Soult dated his one o'clock dispatch to Grouchy
"Du champ de
bataille de Waterloo,"
but sometime afterward, Colonel Combes-Brassard was still calling it the
"bataille de Soignies,"
and the publications that appeared in Paris in the years immediately following the great event mostly referred to it as
"lajournee
de Mont-Saint-fean."
But Wellington preferred to use the name of the village of Waterloo, from which he dated his victory dispatch, and which had the advantage of being decidedly more pronounceable for an English tongue. British hegemony in Europe and in the world, which Waterloo itself had confirmed, caused this to become in the end the accepted name for the battle.

And thus the Battle of Waterloo entered into history, and into legend. For every generation in Europe from 1815 to the First World War, the struggle at Waterloo was the decisive turning point that had changed world history. For many, the battle marked the opening of a period of astonishing peace, prosperity, and progress; Lieutenant Pattison, for example, writing his memoirs in 1868 as a souvenir for his grandchildren, spoke of the Waterloo campaign as having "dethroned Napoleon, and secured an uninterrupted peace for more than forty years. During all the interval we have been reaping the fruits of it." For others, less satisfied to live in a world dominated by British commerce and guarded by His Majesty's gunboats, the name Waterloo had a sinister ring; to Victor Hugo, it was the
"morne plaine,"
the "dismal plain," where the Eagle had wound up in the mud and the generous dream of the greatest man who ever lived had been shattered. Most, however, would have agreed with the French writer's statement: "On that day, the perspective of the human race was altered. Waterloo is the hinge of the Nineteenth Century."

Later, the twentieth century swept away the illusions of unlimited progress and perpetual peace that had become widespread after Waterloo. The great celebrations planned for the hundredth anniversary of the battle in 1915 had to be canceled with Europe inflamed by the First World War. Since then, other men have stepped before the footlights of history, men capable of climbing up out of nothing and plunging back into it headlong, spilling much more blood along the way than Napoleon ever did. At the same time, modern historical scholarship, with its ever-increasing attention to the workings of underlying causes, to economic conditions, to structural factors, and to the long term, has accustomed us to the belief that no single event, no matter how memorable, can reverse the evolution of human history.

If I had to write one of those amusements called "What-ifs" and imagine what would have happened had Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo, I would be tempted to propose a different history only for the years immediately following 1815. Liberal ideas would have been less marginalized and persecuted than was actually the case during the time of the Holy Alliance (1815-23), and there probably would have been no revolution in France in 1830. But after this date, the differences reduce themselves to simple details, such as a different political career for the Duke of Wellington. The economic, and therefore political, hegemony of Great Britain would have been imposed on the world all the same; a half century after the battle, Prussia would still have pushed its candidacy for the leadership of a united Germany; and in France, sooner or later, no matter what, Napoleon III would have mounted the throne. One might further suppose that the history of the world after approximately 1850 would have been perfectly identical with the one we know today.

But these are the musings of a historian, who has the luxury of the long view and can make decades fly past his fingertips. For the men who fought on the battlefield at Waterloo, and for the majority of their contemporaries, life would have been altered had the battle ended differently. At the time, everyone in western Europe who heard the news and comprehended its significance felt intense emotion, which they were not long in attributing to a powerful symbolic force. Once great events are incised so deeply in the collective memory, they take on a life of their own, despite the changes wrought by time; this is the reason that today, nearly two centuries later, and without even knowing exactly why, we all continue to be fascinated by the name Waterloo.