Читать книгу Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 13

NAPOLEON WAS SURELY RIGHT when he claimed that the most difficult thing in war was ‘to guess the enemy’s plan’. And that was precisely the difficulty that Marshal Blücher and the Duke of Wellington faced. What was the Emperor planning?

The first question was whether the Emperor would attack at all, and if the answer was yes, then they needed to know where and when that attack would occur. Yet only three days before the storm burst the Duke of Wellington was persuaded that no onslaught was coming. He planned to give a ball in Brussels on 21 June, the anniversary of his great victory at Vitoria, and when the Duchess of Richmond asked whether it would be sensible for her to give a ball on 15 June he reassured her, ‘You may give your ball with the greatest safety without fear of interruption.’ On Tuesday, 13 June, he wrote to a friend in England:

There is nothing new here. We have reports of Buonaparte’s joining the army and attacking us, but I have accounts from Paris of the 10th, on which day he was still there; and I judge from his speech to the Legislature that his departure was not likely to be imminent. I think we are now too strong for him here.

That letter was written on Tuesday, and on the day before, Monday, 12 June, Napoleon had left Paris to join l’Armée du Nord in Flanders. On 14 June that army closed up to the frontier and the allies still suspected nothing. Blücher shared Wellington’s opinion. He had written to his wife, ‘Bonaparte will not attack us,’ but Bonaparte was poised to do just that. He had closed France’s borders – ‘Not a stage or carriage must pass,’ he ordered – while north of the frontier, in the province of Belgium, the British and Prussian armies were spread across a swathe of country over a hundred miles wide.

That dispersal was necessary for two reasons. The allies are in a defensive posture. They will not be ready to attack until they have overwhelming force, when the Austrians and Russians have reached the French frontier, so for the moment Wellington and Blücher are waiting and, of course, they know that the Emperor may attack them before they move against him. Wellington may have thought such an attack unlikely, but he still must guard against the possibility, and that means watching every route that the French might take. With hindsight it seems obvious that Napoleon would strike at the junction of the Prussian and British armies, to separate them, but that was not so obvious to either Blücher or to Wellington. Wellington’s fear was that Napoleon would choose a route further west, through Mons and so on to Brussels or even towards Ghent, where Louis XVIII had taken refuge. Such an attack would cut Wellington off from the coast, and so sever his supply lines. Whatever happened Wellington wanted to be certain that his army had a way to retreat to safety if it was outfought, and that safe retreat led west to Ostend, where ships could evacuate the army to Britain. Blücher had the same concern, only his retreat would be eastwards, towards Prussia.

So the two armies are spread wide because they need to guard against every possible French attack. The most westerly Prussian forces, General von Bülow’s Corps, are a hundred miles to the east of Wellington’s western flank. That dispersal was also necessary to feed the armies. The troops depended on buying local supplies and too many men and too many horses in a single place soon exhausted the available food.

So the allies were spread across a hundred miles of country, while Napoleon was concentrating his army south of the River Sambre on the main road which led through Charleroi to Brussels. So why did the allies not detect this? In Spain the Duke of Wellington had a superb intelligence service; indeed his problem had been that he received too much intelligence, but in Flanders, in 1815, he was virtually blinded. Before the frontier was closed he had received plenty of reports from travellers coming north out of France, but most of those reports were fanciful and all were contradictory. He was also denied his favourite intelligence instrument, his Exploring Officers.

The Exploring Officers were reliable men who scouted enemy country and depended on their superb horses to escape French pursuit. They rode in full uniform, so they could not be accused of spying, and they were extremely effective. Chief among them was a Scotsman, Colquhoun Grant, and Wellington demanded Grant’s presence in Belgium as the head of his Intelligence Department. Grant arrived in Brussels on 12 May and immediately set about establishing a network of agents on the French frontier, in which activity he was severely disappointed because the local population, all French-speaking, was either sympathetic to Napoleon or sullenly apathetic. Nor could Grant send Exploring Officers south of the border because, officially, the allies were not at war with France, only with Bonaparte.

But Grant did have superb contacts in Paris. This was by accident, because in 1812 Grant had the misfortune to be captured by the French in Spain. The French, knowing his value to Wellington, refused to exchange or parole him, but sent him to France under close guard, though not close enough, because, once over the frontier in Bayonne, the Scotsman escaped and learned that General Joseph Souham, a French officer who had risen from the ranks, was staying in the town and planning to travel to Paris. In an act of superb bravado Grant introduced himself to Souham as an American officer and asked to travel in the General’s carriage. He was still wearing the red coat of the British 11th Regiment of Foot and no one thought to question it. What did Frenchmen know of American uniforms? Once in Paris the intrepid Grant found a source in the Ministry of War and contrived to send reports to the Duke in Spain. Grant eventually made his way back to England, but his source still existed in Paris and, once established as head of Wellington’s Intelligence Service, Grant managed to make contact again. The source gave him much valuable information about l’Armée du Nord, but not what he really wanted to know: was Napoleon going to attack? And if so, where? The French were not making it easy to guess; the earliest contacts between the armies were on the road to Mons where French cavalry patrols exchanged shots with allied picquets, suggesting that Napoleon was reconnoitring the direct route to Brussels.

The map here shows the allied positions. The Prussians occupy a spread of land to the east of the main road leading north from Charleroi, the British are widely spread to the west of that road. The British headquarters is in Brussels, while Marshal Blücher’s is almost 50 miles away in Namur, guarding the best routes the Prussians might need if they are forced to retreat. This is important. If Napoleon punches really hard and defeats both his enemies, then he shatters any chance they have of cooperating, because the Prussians will retreat eastwards and the British will withdraw westwards, both seeking the safety of their homelands. This, in essence, is Napoleon’s plan, to divide the allies and, once divided, to deal with them separately. And to achieve this, on 14 June, he concentrates his army just south of Charleroi. Now he is ready to launch his men like a spear into the heart of the widespread allied dispositions.

Napoleon attacked on Thursday, 15 June. He crosses the frontier and his troops march on Charleroi. The Prussian cavalry screen skirmishes with French horsemen and messengers gallop north with the news of the French advance, but when those messages reach Wellington he mistrusts them. The Duke fears that any French advance on that road is really a feint intended to distract him while the real attack is launched on his right wing. Hindsight condemns the Duke for his caution, claiming that Napoleon would never have attacked in the west because such an assault would have driven Wellington back onto Blücher’s army, but the Duke knows he must expect the unexpected from Napoleon. So the Duke remains cautious. In Brussels there is a rumour that the army will march on 25 June, but it is only one rumour among many. Edward Healey, an undergroom in the service of a British staff officer, noted the rumour in his diary, and added that officers were taking their swords to ironmongers’ shops to be ground and purchasing cloth from linen-drapers to make bandages, ‘but in a general way,’ he adds, ‘things were going on as if nothing was the matter.’

The Emperor marched close to the frontier on 14 June. Next night, the Duchess of Richmond gives a ball in Brussels. The Duke attends.

While everything to the south is going wrong for the allies.

* * *

Charlotte, Duchess of Richmond, was married to the fourth Duke, a not too successful soldier whose real passion was cricket. He was given command of a small reserve force that was posted in Brussels and his Scottish wife, herself the daughter of another duke, is one of society’s hostesses. She was forty-seven in 1815, the mother of seven sons and seven daughters. Wellington had assured the Duchess that her ball would not be interrupted by unwelcome news, though he had also advised her against throwing a lavish picnic in the countryside south of Brussels. There had been too many reports of French cavalry patrols, so it was better for the Duchess to entertain in Brussels itself.

The Duke and Duchess had rented a large mansion with a capacious coach-house which was transformed into a dazzling ballroom. The humble coach-house was decorated with great swathes of scarlet, gold and black fabric, while chandeliers hung between the pillars that were wreathed with foliage, flowers and still more fabric. The guest list glittered too, headed by the Prince of Orange, also known as Slender Billy or the Young Frog. He was twenty-three, Crown Prince of the newly created Kingdom of the Netherlands, and something of a thorn in the Duke’s side, though the Duke liked him personally. The problem was the Young Frog’s father, King William I, who insisted that his eldest son hold high command in the Anglo-Dutch army. Wellington was forced to cede this demand or else manage without the Dutch troops, which meant that a large part of the Duke’s army was under the command of a young man whose only qualification for such responsibility was the fortune of royal birth. He commanded the 1st Corps and, because of Wellington’s insistence that unreliable or inexperienced battalions were brigaded with loyal and veteran units, the Prince commanded some of the Duke’s best British and Hanoverian troops.

The Prince had been an aide-de-camp to the Duke for almost three years in Spain, an experience that had given him a highly exaggerated opinion of his own military talents. He was called Slender Billy because of his strangely long and thin neck, and the Young Frog because he had a high, receding hairline, a wide mouth and prominent eyes. He was supposedly engaged to Princess Charlotte, only daughter of Britain’s Prince Regent, but after she saw Slender Billy get drunk at the Ascot races she broke off the engagement. Slender Billy airily dismissed her rejection, believing, falsely, that she would change her mind. He had similarly dismissed his father’s French-speaking subjects, the Belgians, as ‘idiots’, and because he had been educated at Eton was much more at home among the British than among his compatriots. In the next few days he would be in command of almost a third of Wellington’s army, but fortunately the Young Frog was well served by capable staff officers who, the Duke must have prayed, would rein in his inexperience, self-regard and enthusiasm.

The guests at the ball were the cream of Brussels society, a beribboned throng of diplomats, soldiers and aristocrats, one of whom was General Don Miguel Ricardo de Álava y Esquivel, a soldier who had been appointed Spain’s ambassador to the Netherlands. He had begun his military career in the Spanish navy and had been present at the battle of Trafalgar as a combatant fighting against Nelson’s ships, but the exigencies of war had meant Spain becoming an ally of the British, and Álava, who had joined the Spanish army after Trafalgar, had been appointed as liaison officer to Wellington. Relations between the British and Spanish had been fraught with jealousies, difficulties and mutual misunderstandings, and would have been much worse had it not been for Álava’s cool-headed and sensible advice. A lifelong friendship sprang up between him and the Duke, and the Spaniard would be at the Duke’s side throughout the next few days. He had no business being at Waterloo, but friendship alone made him share the dangers, and Wellington was grateful. Álava has the rare distinction of being one of the very few men who were present at both Trafalgar and Waterloo, though a good number of French also had that distinction, because at least one battalion who fought at Waterloo had served as marines aboard Villeneuve’s doomed fleet.

Sir Thomas Picton was at the ball. He was newly arrived in Brussels, come to command the Duke’s Second Corps, and welcome he was, because Picton was a fighting general who had seen long and successful service in Portugal and Spain. ‘Come on, ye rascals,’ he had shouted as he led an attack at Vitoria, ‘come on, ye fighting villains!’ He was an irascible Welshman, burly and unkempt, but indubitably brave. ‘A rough, foul-mouthed devil,’ the Duke of Wellington described him, but by 1814 the rough, foul-mouthed devil was suffering from what we would know as combat stress reaction. He had written to the Duke begging to be sent home, ‘I must give up. I am grown so nervous, that when there is any service to be done it works upon my mind so that it is impossible for me to sleep at nights. I cannot possibly stand it.’

When Wellington took command of his ‘infamous army’ he sent for Picton. He needed every Peninsular veteran he could find, and the Welshman was a man he could trust to lead and inspire troops. Picton was still suffering. Before leaving Britain he lay down in a newly dug grave and remarked morbidly, ‘I think this would do for me.’ Despite that gloomy premonition he had come to Brussels, though somehow he had managed to mislay his luggage with his uniform, so that he went to battle in a shabby greatcoat and a mouldy brown hat. He must have cut a strange figure among the dazzling uniforms at the ball, amidst all the lace and gold thread, epaulettes and aiguillettes, not to mention the low-cut dresses of the ladies, many of them young English women like the 22-year-old Lady Frances Wedderburn-Webster, who, though married and pregnant, had been seen meeting the Duke of Wellington in a Brussels park just a few days before. A British staff officer had seen the Duke strolling alone in the park, then an open carriage had stopped and Lady Frances stepped out and the couple, the officer wrote, ‘descended into a hollow, where the trees completely screened them’. In time a London newspaper, the St James’s Chronicle, would spread rumours of their affair, claiming that Lady Frances’s husband was threatening a divorce, a report that led to a libel case and severe damages against the Chronicle, but it is interesting, if not significant, that the Duke found time both on the eve of Waterloo and on the day immediately following the battle, to write to Lady Frances.

Wellington liked the company of women, except for his wife, whom he detested. In that taste he was quite unlike Napoleon, who once remarked, ‘We have ruined everything by treating women too well, we have committed the great mistake of putting them almost on a level with ourselves. Nature created them to be our slaves.’ Wellington was more at ease with women, especially clever women, than with men, and he liked it even more if the women were young, pretty and aristocratic. There was gossip in Brussels: the Duke ‘makes a point of asking all the Ladies of Loose character’ complained Lady Caroline Capel, sister to Wellington’s second in command, Lord Uxbridge, who had himself run off with Wellington’s sister-in-law. The Duke was pointedly warned against one such ‘loose’ woman, Lady John Campbell; her character, he was told, was ‘more than Suspicious’. ‘Is it, by God!’ he responded. ‘Then I will go and ask her myself!’, whereupon ‘he immediately took his hat and went out for the purpose’. There were no suspicious rumours about the seventeen-year-old Lady Georgiana Lennox, daughter of the Duchess of Richmond, who dined next to Wellington at her mother’s ball. She asked if the rumours were true and that the French were marching and he nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘they are true, we are off tomorrow.’

It was that imminence of battle which gives the Duchess of Richmond’s ball such piquancy. On the night of 15 June there was a throng of beautifully uniformed officers dancing by candlelight, and within twenty-four hours some would be dead, still wearing their silk stockings and dancing shoes. Wellington’s critics, naturally, carp that he had no business attending a ball when he knew that the French were marching, but the Duke, as ever, had his reasons.

In the first place he did not want to display panic. He had been taken by surprise, and by the time he arrived at the ball, at 10 p.m., he knew he had been wrong-footed by Napoleon, but this was no time to show alarm. He knew he was being observed, so it was necessary to display confidence. The second reason was eminently practical. The Duke needed to issue urgent orders, and virtually every senior officer in his army was at the ball, making it easy for him to find and direct them. The ball, in truth, served as an orders group, and it would have been foolish of the Duke to pass up such an opportunity. Lady Hamilton-Dalrymple, who shared a sofa with him for part of the evening, recollected that ‘frequently in the middle of a sentence he stopped abruptly and called to some officer, giving him instructions’.

So what had happened to invest the ball with such threat?

Hell had broken loose on the road from Charleroi.

* * *

One of Napoleon’s difficulties was self-inflicted. He had ordered the main roads north out of France to be destroyed. The roads were made from a layer of compacted gravel over a bed of larger stones, and for some miles south of the frontier the roads had been hacked and trenched to make it difficult for an enemy army to advance into France. It made it equally difficult for the French to travel the other way. The broken roads were no obstacle for infantry or cavalry, they were used to marching in the fields either side of any road, but it was a nuisance for all the wheeled vehicles: the supply wagons and the guns.

Once Napoleon decided to attack he moved fast, concentrating his army just south of the River Sambre. Crews repaired the roads, letting the guns and wagons travel north, but the infantry and cavalry had to use the fields which, for the most part, were planted with rye. The rye grew taller in the early nineteenth century, so the advancing army was faced with thick, close-set, fibrous stalks as tall as a man. The crop was trampled flat, but one cavalryman recalled how the horses stumbled on the tangled mess underfoot, and that inconvenient rye will play a small part in the unfolding events.

Yet despite the stumbling horses and the road-repairs, Napoleon’s army closed on the frontier, so that, by nightfall on 14 June, the day before the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, l’Armée du Nord was bivouacked a few miles south of Charleroi. The Emperor ordered them to attempt concealment by camping behind hills, yet still their cooking fires lit up the night. That glow in the sky should have been the first signal to the allies that something ominous was brewing south of the frontier, but though it was noticed it did not provoke any particular alarm.

The 15th of June dawned fine, and French soldiers were on the march by daybreak. Their first task was to cross the River Sambre, which lay just to the north of the frontier, and three columns approached the river from the south. The central column marched to Charleroi, where the bridge was barricaded, and there was a delay until sufficient infantry had arrived to storm the barrier. The Prussian defenders were few in number, really nothing more than an advanced picquet, and they withdrew northwards as the French occupied the town. By now it was afternoon and Napoleon’s army was crossing into Belgium, where strong cavalry patrols fanned out to discover where the allied armies lay.

This was not the only French activity. Much further west other cavalry patrols were probing north towards Mons. That morning the 2nd Battalion of the 95th Rifles encountered a patrol of French lancers on the frontier close to Mons. Richard Cocks Eyre, a Second Lieutenant (a rank in the Rifles equivalent to an Ensign in the rest of the army), described the encounter as ‘play’, but for the Duke of Wellington such reports were deadly serious. They could be evidence of an enemy advance that would cut him off from the North Sea ports. He also heard reports of French activity around Charleroi, but his first instinct was to protect his right flank, and so he ordered the army’s reserve, which he commanded himself, to remain in Brussels, and the rest of the army to stay in their cantonments to the west. This could have been disastrous. Napoleon was thrusting men across the river and slowly pushing the Prussians back, but Wellington, instead of sending his men towards the danger point, was watching the roads leading to Ostend where most of his troops, guns and supplies were shipped from Britain. Napoleon could not have wished for anything better.

The story of 15 June, the day of the famous ball, is one of mystery. The fog of war is a cliché, yet it applies to that day. Napoleon commits his army to an attack across the Sambre, beginning at dawn, the Prussians retreat slowly and stubbornly, and Wellington, despite messages from his allies, does nothing decisive; indeed he does something frivolous, he goes to a dance. He has been accused of deliberately ignoring the Prussian messages, though why he should do that is also a mystery. He first hears of the French advance at about 3 p.m. The messages have taken a long time to reach him and the Duke’s critics contend that as soon as he heard he should have issued orders that would have taken his troops east towards the fighting, but instead he waits. Baron von Müffling was his Prussian liaison officer and it was Müffling who brought Wellington the news:

When General von Zieten was attacked before Charleroi on the 15th of June, an event which opened the war, he despatched an officer to me, who arrived at Brussels at three o’clock. The Duke of Wellington, to whom I immediately communicated the news, had received no intelligence from the advanced post at Mons.

Two things are interesting about Müffling’s account. We know that the first clash between Napoleon’s army and the Prussians occurred around 5 a.m., yet Müffling, who has no reason to lie about the matter, is certain that the news does not reach Brussels until 3 p.m., ten hours later. Charleroi lies 32 miles south of Brussels and a despatch rider could easily make the journey in under four hours. Yet it took ten. We do not know why, though Wellington once suggested that ‘the fattest officer in the Prussian army’ was chosen as the courier.

The Prussians insist that General von Zieten, whose troops were being pushed back by the French, sent a message to Wellington early on that morning, but proof that the message was sent is not proof that it was received. A huge amount of ink, temper and recrimination has been spilled over this dispute. Gneisenau later said that the Duke was slow in assembling his army and added snidely, ‘I still do not know why.’ Of course he knew, but his dislike of the Duke would not let him admit that there was a reasonable explanation. The sad thing about this animosity is that Gneisenau and Wellington shared much in common: they were both highly intelligent, hard-working, painstaking, disciplined, intolerant of either foolishness or carelessness, and both were committed to the same goal, the utter destruction of Napoleon’s power, yet Gneisenau insisted Wellington was untrustworthy. And trust is important to the story of Waterloo. The allied campaign was predicated on trust, that Blücher would come to Wellington’s aid and Wellington to Blücher’s, because both commanders knew that their individual armies could not defeat Napoleon’s veterans single-handed. They had to combine their forces to win, and if they could not combine they would not fight.

So why, on that fateful Thursday, did Wellington not concentrate his army? Because he still was not sure where he would have to fight. He received news that French forces were seen close to Thuin, their presence near that town, though close to Charleroi, could have indicated a general advance towards Mons, and there had been that clash between British riflemen and French lancers on the Mons road itself. Wellington’s fear was that Napoleon would attack in the west, and that was why he waited to hear more from his troops at Mons. He is specific about this. When Müffling presses him, urging the Duke to concentrate his forces closer to the Prussians, Wellington explains his reluctance.

If all is as General von Zieten supposes, I will concentrate on my left wing … Should, however, a portion of the enemy’s army come by Mons, I must concentrate more to my centre. For this reason I must positively wait for news from Mons before I fix the rendezvous.

That seems clear enough. Far from betraying his allies or treating their warnings with disdain, the Duke was being cautious because, so far, he had no conclusive evidence that the French attack through Charleroi was the main effort. It could have been a ruse designed to draw his men eastwards while the real attack was launched to his right. So he waited. He had said before the campaign that ‘one false movement’ could open him to a devastating attack from Napoleon, and it seemed preferable to make no movement at all. More messages arrived from Blücher in the early evening, and still the Duke waited because he still feared that attack up the road to Mons. It was not till late at night, while the Duke was in the gaudy ballroom, that he heard from Mons that all was quiet there, and he became convinced that Blücher had been right all along and that the French were making their attack on the Charleroi road. News was arriving thick and fast that evening, and one of the crucial messages came from the Baron Jean-Victor Constant-Rebecque, who was Slender Billy’s Chief of Staff and a good man. He reported that the French had advanced north from Charleroi as far as a crossroads called Quatre-Bras and that he had sent troops to oppose them.

What followed is one of the most famous incidents in the Duke’s life. It was after midnight and the Duke was leaving the ball, and as he was escorted through the hall he turned to the Duke of Richmond and whispered, ‘Have you a good map in the house?’

Richmond took Wellington into his study, where a map was spread on the table. The Duke studied it by candlelight, then exclaimed, ‘Napoleon has humbugged me, by God! He has gained twenty-four hours march on me!’

Napoleon’s troops were poised to separate the allies. The Emperor’s plans were working.

* * *

The wonderfully named Hyacinthe-Hippolyte de Mauduit was a Sergeant in Napoleon’s Imperial Guard. That made him crème de la crème. He was in the Old Guard, part of the second battalion of the first regiment of Grenadiers. The Imperial Guard was Napoleon’s favourite unit, the shock troops of the French empire. Every man was a veteran, they received privileges, wore a distinctive uniform and were fiercely loyal to the Emperor they guarded. Benjamin Haydon, a spendthrift British painter, caught a glimpse of the Guard just after Napoleon’s first abdication and wrote:

More dreadful-looking fellows than Napoleon’s Guard I had never seen. They had the look of thoroughbred, veteran, disciplined banditti. Depravity, indifference and bloodthirstiness were burnt in their faces; black moustachios, gigantic caps, a slouching carriage and a ferocious expression were their characteristics. If such fellows had governed the world, what would have become of it?

Sergeant Hippolyte de Mauduit was one of these banditti and, while the Duke of Wellington was at the ball, the Sergeant was settling into the courtyard of an ironmaster’s house in Charleroi which was Napoleon’s temporary headquarters.

We busied ourselves cooking food for a morning meal as well as for an evening meal because we had been on the march for nearly eighteen hours without being able to even unhook our cooking pots and everything indicated it would be the same next day … Aides-de-camp and staff officers came and went constantly and in the course of rushing around they often knocked over our piles of muskets.

The soldiers of the Guard had no real idea what was happening. They had marched all day, heard the sound of firing, marched again, and now, like the veterans they were, they were making certain they had food in their knapsacks. But one of the guardsmen had an old map of Flanders and Hippolyte recalls how they crowded round and worked out from the map what the Emperor’s plan might be.

Did Napoleon even have a plan? He had said, often enough, that the best plan was to make contact with the enemy and only then make the crucial decisions. That day, 15 June, the French had made contact with the Prussians. The first fighting had been south of Charleroi, but resistance stiffened once the French crossed the Sambre and pushed north, and what Hippolyte de Mauduit and his companions would have seen on their map was the main road to Brussels running north out of Charleroi. Just a couple of miles out of town that main road crossed a second road, an old Roman highway, and the Prussians, it seemed, were using that second road for their fighting retreat. They were going eastwards, towards distant Prussia, and no one, it appeared, was defending the main road north to Brussels.

The Waterloo campaign is all about roads. Roads and crossroads. The armies needed the roads. Cavalry and infantry could advance across country without roads, though their progress would be painfully slow, but guns and supply wagons had to have roads. To understand the road map north of Charleroi is to comprehend the problems that the three commanding generals faced, and on the night of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball the problems were almost all on the allied side. Napoleon had grasped the situation, and his strategy of dividing the allies was working. Indeed, Wellington’s caution was making it even easier for the Emperor.

The Prussians are not retreating far. On the night of 15 to 16 June, while the Emperor is in Charleroi and the Duke of Wellington is dancing, the Prussians halt at a small village called Sombreffe. There they will make a stand. Why Sombreffe? Because here another road is important, a road which crosses the Roman road and leads westwards, and the British–Dutch army is off to the west. That minor road, usually known as the Nivelles road, crosses the Charleroi-to-Brussels highway at an insignificant hamlet called Quatre-Bras. So if the Prussians retreat any farther east then they risk losing contact with Wellington’s forces. The Nivelles road is the last connecting road which will let the British come to the aid of the Prussians, so Blücher orders a stand there.

There is a problem, though. The Duke of Wellington waited too long and the British–Dutch army is assembling late. The Emperor has stolen a march, and the vital crossroads of Quatre-Bras, the place where the British–Dutch must assemble if they are to help Blücher, is virtually undefended. Seize that crossroads and the Duke of Wellington’s army cannot march to help the Prussians.

And at dawn on 16 June the Emperor sends Marshal Ney to capture Quatre-Bras.

It is a hot day, a sweltering summer’s day in Belgium. The Imperial Guard leave Charleroi late, at around 9 a.m., and follow the Emperor’s main forces towards Sombreffe. The Emperor has found the enemy and he knows exactly what he must do. Marshal Ney will capture the vital crossroads at Quatre-Bras, thus keeping Wellington away from the battle the Emperor will fight at the village of Ligny, which is close to Sombreffe. That battle will be between France and Prussia. If Napoleon wins that battle then the Prussians can be driven away east towards their homeland, and the Emperor can turn on the British.

Hippolyte and his fellow guardsmen march behind their regimental band. They pass the unburied corpses of the men killed in the previous day’s skirmishes between the Prussian rearguard and the advancing French. Hippolyte recalls that he more or less understood the Emperor’s plan, the map helped him understand it, but in truth that plan is not his business. All he needs to know is that his beloved Emperor has chosen to fight, that the enemy is in disarray, and that if the battle becomes desperate then the Imperial Guard will be thrown into the fight. That is their purpose, to win battles, and their boast is that they are undefeated. They are the Emperor’s picked men, the bravest soldiers of France, the indomitable Guard.

The Imperial Guard would doubtless have liked to call themselves ‘the bravest of the brave’, except that soubriquet belonged to Marshal Michel Ney, who only joined the army that hot morning of June 16th. ‘Ney,’ the Emperor greeted him, ‘I am glad to see you,’ and while Hippolyte and the rest of the army marched east to deal with the Prussians, Ney was given 9,600 infantry, 4,600 cavalry and 34 cannon and ordered to seize the crossroads at Quatre-Bras. It was, truly, the simplest of tasks, and Ney possessed an overwhelming force with which to achieve it.

Capture Quatre-Bras and the Prussians are almost certainly doomed.

Capture Quatre-Bras and the British will be Napoleon’s next victims.

It has all started so well for the Emperor. Then a Dutchman decided to be disobedient.

* * *

Major-General Baron Jean-Victor Constant-Rebecque was born in Switzerland and was to die in what is now Poland. His first military service was with the French, but after the Revolution he joined the Dutch army. He was forty-three in 1815 and knew the British well because when Slender Billy, the Crown Prince, had been made an aide-de-camp to Wellington in the Peninsula, Rebecque had accompanied the young man. Now he was Chief of Staff to Slender Billy.

Rebecque was a level-headed, intelligent man. On 15 June he had received orders to assemble the 1st Corps, which was commanded by the Crown Prince, at Nivelles, a town which lies to the west of the Charleroi-to-Brussels highroad. The orders had come late because the Duke of Wellington had hesitated all day, still fearing that French attack through Mons, but at last the Anglo-Dutch army was moving.

And Rebecque decided it was moving to the wrong place.

Nivelles was not a bad place for part of Wellington’s army to assemble. A road went eastwards from the town, the Nivelles road, and led to where Blücher had decided to make his stand. Except between Nivelles and Sombreffe was that insignificant crossroads called Quatre-Bras. Napoleon had grasped the importance of that crossroads and ordered Marshal Ney to capture it. If the French held Quatre-Bras then they had come between Nivelles and Sombreffe, between Wellington and Blücher. Capture Quatre-Bras and Napoleon’s aim of dividing the allies was achieved.

And Rebecque understood that.

So despite the orders to assemble at Nivelles, Rebecque sent troops to Quatre-Bras. They were not many, just over 4,000 men of the Dutch army, but they were at the crossroads and, even while Wellington was dressing for the ball, they fought off the advancing French. Those Frenchmen were patrolling and, just south of Quatre-Bras, came under fire from Dutch artillery and infantry. The French did not press their attack. They probed, discovered the Dutch forces, and then retreated. It was late, the sun was almost down, and the attack on the crossroads could wait till morning. The Dutch troops who repelled the French probes were actually Germans from Nassau. They were in Dutch service because, in the same manner that the ruler of Hanover had become the King of England in Europe’s game of musical thrones, so the Prince of Nassau had become King William I of the Netherlands. The men who fought off the first French attacks were under the command of a 23-year-old Colonel, Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, and that night, as the chandeliers were being lit for the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, the young Colonel sent a report of the day’s action to his immediate superior. He reported that he had repelled French cavalry and infantry, but was worried because he had no contact with any other allied troops. He was quite alone, in the dark, without any supporting allies. There was worse:

I need to confess to Your Excellency that I am too weak to hold here long. The Second Battalion of Orange Nassau still have French muskets and are down to 10 cartridges per man … every man is likewise down to 10 cartridges. I will defend the post entrusted to me as long as possible. I expect to be attacked at daybreak.

So as night fell on Belgium the Emperor’s plan seemed to be working. His army had crossed the Sambre and pushed northwards. The Prussians had retreated north and east, but had stopped close to the village of Ligny, where they planned to make a fight of it. Blücher was depending on Wellington coming to his aid, but the British had been slow in concentrating their forces, and were still a long way from their Prussian allies. They could still reach Ligny, but only if the Nivelles road was open, and that meant holding the crossroads at Quatre-Bras where a small force of Germans in Dutch service was now isolated and almost out of ammunition. Those 4,000 Germans expected to be attacked in the morning, and that attack would come from Marshal Ney, ‘bravest of the brave’.

Thus as the sun rose early on 16 June the allies could expect two battles, one at Ligny and the other at the vital crossroads of Quatre-Bras. And Napoleon understood the importance of that crossroads. Capture Quatre-Bras and he would have divided his enemies. Yet the fog of war was thickening. While Wellington danced the Emperor was under the illusion that Ney had already captured Quatre-Bras. On the morning of the 16th he sent even more troops to reinforce Ney, who would now command over 40,000 men. Those extra troops were not sent to help Ney capture the crossroads, so far as Napoleon was aware Ney had already done that; instead their task was to hold the crossroads and so stop Wellington’s troops from joining Blücher’s. There was more: ‘You will march for Brussels this evening, arriving there at seven o’clock tomorrow morning. I shall support you with the Imperial Guard.’

So Napoleon believed he could shove the Prussians further away, then switch his attack to the British. It was all going to plan and the Emperor would take breakfast in Brussels’s Laeken Palace on Saturday morning.

Except Ney had still not captured Quatre-Bras.

‘The Duchess of Richmond’s Ball, 15 June 1815’, by Robert Alexander Hillingford. Virtually every senior officer in his army was at the ball, making it easy for Wellington to find and direct them – the ball, in truth, served as an orders group.

Major-General Baron Jean-Victor Constant-Rebecque, by J. B. Van Der Hulst: ‘Then a Dutchman decided to be disobedient.’

Field-Marshal August Neidhart, Count of Gneisenau, by George Dawe. Gneisenau complained that Wellington was slow in assembling his army and added snidely: ‘I still do not know why’.

The formidable 71-year-old Prince Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher – nicknamed ‘Marschall Vorwärts’ … Marshal Forwards. Wood engraving after a drawing by Adolph Menzel.