Читать книгу Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 7

IN THE SUMMER OF 1814 His Grace the Duke of Wellington was on his way from London to Paris to take up his appointment as British ambassador to the new regime of Louis XVIII. He might have been expected to take the short route from Dover to Calais, but instead a Royal Navy brig, HMS Griffon, carried him across the North Sea to Bergen-op-Zoom. He was visiting the newly created Kingdom of the Netherlands, an awkward invention, half French, half Dutch, half Catholic and half Protestant, which lay to the north of France. British troops had been posted in the new nation as guarantors of its existence, and the Duke had been asked to inspect the defences along the French border. He was accompanied by ‘Slender Billy’, also known as the ‘Young Frog’, the 23-year-old Prince William, who was Crown Prince of the new kingdom and who, because he had served on the Duke’s staff in the Peninsular War, believed himself to possess military talent. The Duke spent a fortnight touring the borderlands and suggested restoring the fortifications of a handful of towns, but it is hard to believe he took the prospect of a renewed French war too seriously.

Napoleon, after all, was defeated and had been exiled to the Mediterranean island of Elba. France was a monarchy again. The wars were over, and in Vienna the diplomats were forging the treaty that would remake the boundaries of Europe to ensure that another war did not ravage the continent.

And Europe had been ravaged. Napoleon’s abdication had ended twenty-one years of warfare that had begun in the wake of the French Revolution. The old regimes of Europe, the monarchies, had been horrified by the events in France and shocked by the executions of Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette. Fearing that the ideas of the Revolution would spread to their own countries, they had gone to war.

They had expected a swift victory over the ragged armies of Revolutionary France, but instead they sparked a world war which saw both Washington and Moscow burned. There had been fighting in India, Palestine, the West Indies, Egypt and South America, but Europe had suffered the worst. France had survived the initial onslaught, and from the chaos of revolution there emerged a genius, a warlord, an Emperor. Napoleon’s armies had shattered the Prussians, the Austrians and the Russians, they had marched from the Baltic to the southern shores of Spain, and the Emperor’s feckless brothers had been placed on half the thrones of Europe. Millions had died, but after two decades it was all over. The warlord was caged.

Napoleon had dominated Europe, but there was one enemy he had never met and whom he had never defeated, and that was the Duke of Wellington, whose military reputation was second only to Napoleon’s. He had been born Arthur Wesley, the fourth son of the Earl and Countess of Mornington. The Wesley family were part of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy and Arthur spent most of his youth in Ireland, the country of his birth, though most of his education was at Eton, where he was not happy. His mother, Anne, despaired of him. ‘I don’t know what I shall do with my awkward son Arthur,’ she complained, but the answer, as for so many younger sons of the nobility, was to arrange a commission in the army. And so began an extraordinary career as the awkward Arthur discovered a talent for soldiering. The army recognized that talent and rewarded it. He first commanded an army in India, where he won a series of astonishing victories, then he was recalled to Britain and entrusted with the small expeditionary army that was trying to keep the French from occupying Portugal. That small army had grown into the mighty force that liberated Portugal and Spain and invaded southern France. It had won victory after victory. Arthur Wellesley (the family had changed the surname from Wesley) had become the Duke of Wellington and was recognized as one of the two greatest soldiers of the age. Alexander I, the Czar of Russia, was to call him ‘Le vainqueur du vainqueur du monde’, the conqueror of the world’s conqueror, and the world’s conqueror was, of course, Napoleon. And in twenty-one years of war the Duke and the Emperor had never fought each other.

The Duke was constantly being compared to Napoleon, but when in 1814 he was asked whether he regretted that he had never fought the Emperor in battle, he replied, ‘No, and I am very glad.’ He despised Napoleon the man, but admired Napoleon the soldier, reckoning the Emperor’s presence on a battlefield was worth 40,000 men. And the Duke of Wellington, unlike Napoleon, had never lost a battle, but facing the Emperor might well mean losing that extraordinary record.

Yet in the summer of 1814 the Duke could be forgiven for thinking that his fighting days were over. He knew he was good at warfare, but, unlike Napoleon, he had never taken delight in battle. War was a regrettable necessity. If it was to be fought then it should be fought efficiently and well, but the object of war was peace. He was a diplomat now, not a general, yet old habits die hard and as his entourage travelled across the Kingdom of the Netherlands the Duke found many places which, as he noted, were ‘good positions for an army’. One of those good positions was a valley which, to most people’s eyes, was merely an unremarkable stretch of farmland. He had always possessed a keen eye for ground, for judging how slopes and valleys, streams and woodland might help or hinder a man commanding troops, and something about that valley south of Brussels caught his attention.

It was a wide valley, its slopes not particularly pronounced. A small roadside tavern called La Belle Alliance, ‘the beautiful friendship’, stood on the ridge marking the valley’s southern side, which was mostly higher than the crest of the northern ridge that rose about 30 metres above the valley floor, say 100 feet, though the slope was never steep. The two ridges were not quite parallel. In some places they were fairly close together, though where the road ran northwards from ridge to ridge the distance between the crests was 1,000 metres, or just over half a mile. It was a half-mile of good farmland, and when the Duke saw the valley in the summer of 1814, he would have seen tall crops of rye growing either side of the road, which was heavily used by wagons carrying coal from the mines around Charleroi to the fireplaces of Brussels.

The Duke saw a lot more than that. The road was one of the main routes from France to Brussels, so if war was to break out again this was a possible invasion route. A French army coming north on the road would cross the southern crest by the tavern and see the wide valley ahead. And they would see the northern ridge. Ridge is really too strong a word; they would have seen the straight road dropping gently into the valley and then rising, just as gently, to the long swell of farmland, the northern ridge. Think of that ridge as a wall, and now give the wall three bastions. To the east was a village of stone houses huddled about a church. If those buildings and the village’s outlying farms were occupied by troops it would be the devil’s own job to get them out. Beyond those stone houses the land became more rugged, the hills steeper and valleys deeper, no place for troops to manoeuvre, so the village stood like a fortress at the eastern end of the ridge. In the centre of the ridge, and standing halfway down the far slope, was a farm called La Haie Sainte. It was a substantial building, made of stone, and its house, barns and yard were surrounded by a high stone wall. La Haie Sainte blocked an attack straight up the road, while off to the west was a great house with a walled garden, the Château Hougoumont. So the northern ridge is an obstacle with three outlying bastions, the village, the farm and the château. Suppose an army came out of France and suppose that army wanted to capture Brussels, then that ridge and those bastions were blocking their advance. The enemy would either have to capture those bastions or else ignore them, but if he ignored them his troops would be squeezed between them as they attacked the northern ridge, vulnerable to crossfire.

The invaders would see the ridge and its bastions, yet just as important was what they could not see. They could not see what lay beyond the crest of the northern ridge. They would have seen treetops in the country beyond, but the ground to the north was hidden, and if that French army decided to attack troops on that northern ridge they would never know what happened on that far hidden slope. Were the defenders moving reinforcements from one flank to the other? Was an attack assembling there? Was cavalry waiting out of sight? The ridge, even though it was low and its slopes were gentle, was deceptive. It offered a defender enormous advantages. Of course an enemy might not be obliging and make a simple frontal assault. He might try to march around the western flank of the ridge where the countryside was flatter, but nevertheless the Duke made a mental note of the place. Why? So far as he knew, indeed so far as all Europe knew, the wars were over. Napoleon was exiled, the diplomats were codifying the peace in Vienna, yet still the Duke made a point of remembering this place where an invading army, marching from France towards Brussels, would find life horribly difficult. It was not the only route an invading army might follow, and not the only defensive position the Duke noted in his two weeks of reconnaissance, but the ridge and its bastions stood athwart one of the possible invasion routes a French army might follow.

The Duke rode on, passing La Haie Sainte, to find a crossroads at the top of the ridge and, just beyond, a small village. If the Duke had asked what the place was called they would have said Mont St Jean, which was mildly amusing because the mountain of Saint John was nothing but that gentle swell in the wide fields of rye, wheat and barley. North of the village the road was swallowed into the great forest of Soignes and a couple of miles up that road there was a small town, another unremarkable place, though it possessed a handsomely domed church and a large number of inns for thirsty and tired travellers. In 1814 fewer than two thousand people lived in the town, though they had lost at least twenty young men to the long wars, all of them fighting for France, because this was the French-speaking area of the province of Belgium.

We do not know whether the Duke stopped in the small town in the summer of 1814. We do know he had taken notice of Mont St Jean, but the nearby country town with its fine church and lavish inns? Did he remember that place?

In time he would never forget it.

It was called Waterloo.