Curious bicentenary

Two hundred years ago on Monday of this week, 15 June 1815, which back then happened to be a Thursday, the Duchess of Richmond held a ball in Brussels.

As well as guests of other nationalities, many elegant British visitors to that city attended. They had come to the Low Countries in the wake of the Duke of Wellington’s army, or they had fled there from Paris, where they had been celebrating the fall of his nemesis, Napoleon, the previous year – right up to the time that the Emperor had reappeared in France and effortlessly eased his way back into power, less than three months earlier.

The ball was a glittering affair, but with a painful ending. When disturbing news reached Wellington, he asked the Duke of Richmond whether he had a map. Soon after, Wellington, staring at the map, exclaimed “Napoleon has humbugged me, by God; he has gained twenty-four hours' march on me.”

One of the guests at the ball, Katherine Arden, wrote that “on our arrival at the ball we were told that the troops had orders to march at three in the morning, and that every officer must join his regiment by that time, as the French were advancing… Those who had brothers and sons to be engaged openly gave way to their grief, as the last parting of many took place at this most terrible ball.”

Napoleon had sent forces to a crossroads, appropriately named Quatre Bras (four arms). Control of the crossroads meant he could move either east towards the Prussian forces under Marshall Blücher, or towards the Anglo-Allied forces under Wellington. The latter, still trying to protect his right wing, had made no move to defend the crossroads, but fortunately some of his Dutch troops had taken it on themselves to take up positions there.

As a result, when Napoleon’s Marshall Ney reached the crossroads he found them held, however lightly, and decided to postpone an attack until the morning. But the allied side reinforced their position overnight.

As a result, when day broke on the Friday, two hundred years ago from Tuesday 16 June of this year, the first fighting was more nearly balanced than might have been expected. Technically, the day was a victory for the allies, since the French left the field. However, Wellington realised that the position was untenable and pulled back to positions he’d scouted previously, along the ridge of Mont St Jean, not far from the town of Waterloo.

British infantry at Quatre Bras
in the “square” defensive formation against cavalry

In the meantime, Napoleon had engaged Blücher and his Prussians at Ligny. This time the victory was technically French, since the Prussians withdrew from the field, one of the reasons Wellington felt obliged to retreat from Quatre Bras. But the Prussians retreated in good order, more than ready to fight again. One of the strengths of the Prussians was the training of their staff officers. It made the Prussian Army devastatingly efficient, the main reason why, despite its defeat, it could reorganise and move towards Waterloo within 48 hours.

By contrast, poor French staff work sent Napoleon’s marshall Grouchy, to “follow” the Prussians, whatever “following” meant.

Two hundred years ago from our Wednesday 17 June, the Saturday of that week, Wellington prepared his positions at Waterloo. He complained that he had “an infamous army, very weak and ill-equipped, and a very inexperienced Staff.” But, in the small hours of the next day – he was up at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. – he sent a crucial letter to Blücher, assuring him that if he could send one army corps in support, he, Wellington, would stand and fight at Waterloo.

Blücher’s number 2, Gneisenau, was far from convinced that they should trust Wellington. But Blücher insisted they send three corps.

Two hundred years ago from Thursday 18 June, the Sunday of that week – there was no respect for the Sabbath – Wellington commanded 68,000 men, only 25,000 of them British (many of them actually Irish), 20,000 from the King’s possessions in Germany (the British King was also Elector of Hannover), a further 6000 Germans in the King’s German Legion (exiles fighting in the British Army) and 17,000 Dutch-Belgians.

Facing them were 73,000 French commanded by Napoleon himself. He took a leisurely approach to the day, breakfasting well, assuring his officers that the Prussians would need at least two days to reorganise, and once more ordering Grouchy to keep pressing them from the rear.

The ground at Waterloo was sodden, and Napoleon waited some hours for it to dry under the sun. Oddly, no one seems to know exactly when the battle began. The first shots were probably fired at the end of the morning or soon after noon. But the battle made up in ferocity for the delay in its start, and within a few hours Wellington was under acute pressure: at about 4:30, a farm at the centre of his line, la Haye Sainte, fell to the French and his position was fatally weakened.

He desperately needed the Prussians to arrive, but as he told the story, “the time they occupied in approaching seemed interminable. Both they and my watch seemed to have stuck fast.”

However, at much the same time as la Haye Sainte fell, the Prussians were already joining the action. The small numerical advantage of the French was wiped out by the arrival of these 50,000 fresh men. And Grouchy, trying to follow his orders, never showed up with his 33,000.

Prussian troops investing the village of Plancenoit
Just in time, from Wellington's point of view

Less than a week later, Napoleon abdicated for the second and final time. Reactionary regimes were established in France, Prussia, Russia and Austria. The fall of Napoleon is strangely ambivalent: he was a military dictator who had undone whatever gains the French revolution had made, and even went so far as to try to reintroduce slavery; on the other hand, with him out of the way, the cause of social progress in Europe was set back for decades, including in Britain. 

Militarily, Britain pulled off a brilliant piece of spin, painting Waterloo as a national victory, although only just over one in five soldiers on the allied side was British and the majority were German.

Britain became the pre-eminent world power for the best part of a century, but that disguised a much more dangerous truth shown by Waterloo: the rise of Germany, under Prussian leadership, as far and away the most effective military force in Europe.

Waterloo. Quite a day. With strange and complex results.

Enjoy the bicentenary!

True Glory

In among all the talk about war, or possibly no war, between Syria and the West in recent weeks, I’ve taken to thinking again about what it is that truly gives a nation its glory. And, quite frankly, I have to conclude that whatever it may be do in the arts, the sciences, the law or government, what really matters is its achievements in war. A victory or two give a country the fillip it needs, however badly it may be failing elsewhere.

That’s a factor not to be discounted in all the debate about firing cruise missiles.

No nation is immune to this kind of thinking, and least of all my own, Britain. Oh yes, our fine military tradition is the backbone of our sense of ourselves. And in among all our great successes on the battlefield, none is so glorious, none puts such a spring in our step, as the great, historic victory Britain won at Waterloo.

Wellington, glorious leader leading a glorious action.
Or was he?

‘The tale is in every Englishman’s mouth,’ writes William Thackeray in that superb novel Vanity Fair, and points out that we ‘are never tired of hearing and recounting the history of that famous action.’

Of course. It was such an unambiguous victory, and so unambiguously British.

Though, to be fair, there are some who are a little less sure of that than others. 

‘There was a bit of a German element, too, wasn’t there?’ these wet blankets point out.

Ah, yes. The Prussians. But they were just johnny-come-lately’s, showing up at the end of the day, when the best of the fighting was all but over. They made sure of a victory that the British Army had already won.

Well, up to a point. The French had wasting several hours trying to capture the forward position Wellington had established at the chateau of Hougoumont, on the right of his line. That position did indeed hold out against sustained infantry assault, and then a terrible series of cavalry attacks. It never fell.

See? Heroic work by the glorious British under the genius Wellington.

Again, up to a point. The French got a bit smarter late in the afternoon. They pulled their infantry and cavalry together and launched them, not at Wellington’s right, but at his centre, another defended forward position in the farm at La Haye Sainte. And this time they succeeded: the farm fell and with that French gain, Wellington’s hold on the middle of his line became precarious.

Wellington had been in touch with the Prussian marshal Blücher since the small hours of the morning, and was expecting him to arrive on his left. So he’d only sparsely manned that part of the line. With his right heavily committed around Hougoumont he now had little force with which to shore up his centre.

In the end it didn’t matter much. By the early evening, the Prussians were fairly pouring onto the field, and Napoleon had to detach forces to deal with them. Wellington got out of jail free. 

Maybe that’s why the British general described the battle as ‘the nearest run thing you ever saw...’

Even so, he’d done well up to that point. And that was an unequivocally British success. Wasn’t it?

Perhaps not unequivocally, exactly. 

The idea of coalitions to fight wars isn’t new. Wellington headed one. Waterloo being in Belgium, then part of a combined Dutch-Belgian kingdom, Wellington’s 68,000-strong army included 17,000 – a quarter – from the Low Countries.

Still, that leaves 51,000 Brits, doesn’t it?

The King of Britain was at that time also Elector of Hanover. In Germany. 11,000 soldiers under Wellington were Hanoverian. And, as it happened, 6000 more were from Brunswick, along with 3000 from Nassau. Also both in Germany.

So actually only 31,000 of the soldiers were from the British Army. And, funnily enough, during the long years of Napoleonic occupation of Germany, other Hanoverians had escaped and made it to England, where they formed the King’s German Legion, 6000 of whom were in the specifically British contingent of Wellington’s army.

So even on Wellington’s side, only 25,000 soldiers were actually British. Slightly more, 26,000, were German. Which along with the 50,000 Prussians who rather turned the tide on the day, meant there were 76,000 Germans fighting the French – just over three times as many as there were British.

Still, we all need something to put a spring in our step. And if Waterloo does it for us Brits, why not?

Though personally, to be honest, I prefer to take something else from that epoch-making event, summed up in two other comments of Wellington’s. 

The first summed up his reaction to the dead strewn over the field of Waterloo: ‘nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.’ 

A dismal place, a battlefield. 

There’s talk today about negotiations starting at last between the two sides in the Syrian civil war. That's nothing like as exciting as a missile strike, nothing like as dramatic in outcome, nothing like certain of success. But perhaps by killing fewer people, it might be marginally less miserable than yet another battlefield, lost or won.

And Wellington’s other comment? 

‘I hope to God I have fought my last battle.’

There’s little hope that we have fired our last cruise missile. But maybe we ought to take heed of the sentiment behind the glorious general’s heartfelt wish, and be slightly less inclined to reach for the missile as a first resort rather than a last.

That would be a different kind of glory. But it might have more substance to it.

A curious question, but irrelevant. Or perhaps not?

It may not be a burning issue of our times, but I’ve often wondered who won the Battle of Waterloo. 

Now, don’t get me wrong: I subscribe to the consensus view that Napoleon lost it. The question is whether it was won by the Duke of Wellington’s British and Allied army, a view much favoured in this country, or by Marshal Blücher and his Prussians, a view which is of course merely vile, self-serving propaganda.

Meeting of the victors: but which of them clinched it?

Putting it another way, ‘could Wellington have won without Blücher or did the Prussians make all the difference?’

It’s been interesting to read Andrew Roberts’ book Napoleon and Wellington and get a new insight on the question.

Here’s the sequence of events.

On 16 June 1815 the French fought Wellington’s forces at Quatre Bras (indecisive) and the Prussians at Ligny (French victory on points). 

Funnily enough, at Ligny Napoleon revealed the problem that was to beset him throughout this, his last, campaign: a series of monumental errors of judgement. In this instance he sent one of his generals, d’Erlon, marching with his infantry between Quatre Bras and Ligny and then back again, with the result that in the end those forces took no part in either battle. The presence of d’Erlon at Ligny might have made Napoleon’s victory decisive, knocking Blücher’s army right out of the campaign; as it was the Prussians were able to retreat and regroup.

In the course of the battle, Blücher himself was unhorsed and then ridden down by French cavalry, leaving him concussed. This was crucial: Blücher, who was a little mad, was a staunch Anglophile and committed to supporting Wellington, but while he was out of action, command devolved onto his number 2, Gneisenau, who was an Anglophobe and, oddly enough, not mad at all. Gneisenau regarded the British – strictly the English – as disloyal schemers, a view it’s hard to believe anyone could hold of my fine people.

Now what surprises me is that Gneisenau didn’t take the opportunity to get well out of the way, retreating eastward towards Prussia. Instead, he went North which meant he could stay in contact with Wellington. When Blücher came round he fully endorsed Gneisenau’s line of retreat and again assured Wellington that he could count on Prussian support. 

Wellington, in the meantime, had pulled back to an area known as Mont St Jean. Later, after it had taken place, he gave the battle he fought there the name of the nearby village of Waterloo. 

He’d already reconnoitred the place and decided that if he was going to have to fight, he'd want to fight there. There are dips in the ground where he could adopt his favourite tactic, of having the bulk of his men lie down on the ‘reverse slope’, i.e. behind the ridge of a hill, where they were relatively safe from cannon fire. They would suddenly emerge just as attacking enemy troops were approaching the top. This meant that having spent an unbearably tense time charging uphill at an apparently empty line, they would find themselves faced at the last moment by a lot of men with guns. I imagine that must have been dispiriting.

Wellington had also obeyed his other ruling principle: he’d made sure that he had clear lines of retreat towards the coast. That had always been his style: he would sometimes retreat even after victories, preferring to protect his men than expose them unnecessarily, not out of any particular love of them (he often called them the scum of the Earth) but because he knew Britain would be parsimonious about sending him many more.

The fact that he took such care over his lines of retreat was one of the reasons Gneisenau trusted him so little. He expected him to decamp for the Channel ports and England if ever things turned bad, and he was probably right, though Wellington was probably not being disloyal so much as judicious. 

So when the 17^th of June dawned, Wellington was in position on Mont Saint Jean, with his retreat to the coast fully planned and ready to go at a moment’s notice. But he didn’t retreat. He stayed in place all day and didn’t budge. That in turn meant that on the 18^th, he was ready for Napoleon. 

The battle started at 11:30 and by 1:30 the Prussians were already arriving on the field, drawing away Napoleon’s reserves to the point that, though he could give Wellington a very bad time for four hours, he was never able to land a decisive blow. At 5:30, the battle swung against the French. At 7:00 the British-Allied forces began their advance; already being squeezed by the Prussians, the French Army broke and fled. The rest, as they say, is history.

Now the interesting point is that Wellington stayed put on the 17^th when he could have gone. Roberts argues, and I’m sure he’s right, that he did that precisely because he knew that the Prussians would turn up. Had they cleared off, so would he. But because he knew they were coming, he stayed put, ready to fight the battle. 

In other words, the question ‘could he have won without the Prussians’ is irrelevant. Because he wouldn’t have fought the battle at all without the Prussians. A prudent general, it was only the absolute certainty of being able to count on them that made him take on Napoleon at all. 

Interesting if, like me, you’ve been irked at not knowing who won the battle. Of course, you might say that's hardly a key question for today, and I admitted as much myself at the start.  

But then again, is it really so completely irrelevant? We Europeans do after all face another burning issue today, the saving of the Euro. The French and the British seem to be at each other’s throats again. And, once more, it all turns on whether the Germans are going to throw their considerable weight into the fray on time.