The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles

By Bernard Cornwell

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Yet the Duke of Wellington was surely right when he said that a man might as well tell the history of a ball, meaning a dance, as write the story of a battle. Everyone who attends a ball has a different memory of the event, some happy, some disappointing, and how, in the swirl of music and ball gowns and flirtations, could anyone hope to make a coherent account of exactly what happened and when and to whom? Yet Waterloo was the deciding event at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and ever since men and women have tried to provide that coherent account. 

(Cornwell 2015, 5)

…in brief, the hierarchy was Army, Corps, Division, Brigade, Battalion, Company. 

(Cornwell 2015, 7)

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, whole military reputation was second only to Napoleon’s. He had been born Arthur Wesley, the fourth son of the Earl and Countess of Mornington. 

(Cornwell 2015, 9)

When Metternich, the clever Austrian Foreign Minister, offered Napoleon honourable pease terms in 1813 and reminded the Emperor of the human cost of refusal, he received the scornful answer that Napoleon would happily sacrifice a million men to gain his ambitions. Napoleon was careless with the lives of his troops, yet his soldiers adored him because he had the common touch. He knew how to speak to them, how to jest with them and how to inspire them. His soldiers might adore him, but his generals feared him. Marshal Augereay, a foul-mouthed disciplinarian, said, “This little bastard of a general actually scares me!”, and General Vandamme, a hard man, said he ‘trembled like a child’ when he approached Napoleon. Yet Napoleon led them all to glory. That was his drug, la Gloire! And in search of it he broke peace treaty after peace treaty, and his armies marched beneath their Eagle standards from Madrid to Moscow, from the Baltic to the Red Sea. He astonished Europe with victories like Austerlitz and Friedland, but he also led his Grande Armee to disaster in the Russian snow. Even his defeats were on a gargantuan scale. 

(Cornwell 2015, 20-21)

[Napoleon’s] skill was manoeuvre. In 1814 he had faced overwhelming odds as the Prussians, Austrians and Russians approached Paris from the north and east, and he had dazzled them with the speed of his marches and the suddenness of his attacks. To military professionals that campaign was Napoleon’s finest, even though it did end in defeat, and the Duke of Wellington took care to study it. Napoleon himself claimed: 

The art of war does not need complicated manoeuvre; the simplest are the best, and common sense is fundamental. From which one might wonder why generals make blunders; it is because they try to be clever. The most difficult thing is to guess the enemy’s plan, to find the truth from all the reports. The rest merely requires common sense; it is like a boxing match, the more you punch the better it is. 

(Cornwell 2015, 25)

The basic fighting deployment of infantry was in line, which is simple enough to understand. A battalion made a straight line of, in the French and Prussian armies, three ranks, which faced towards the enemy. The British preferred a line of two ranks. 

The line is an efficient way of utilizing a battalion’s firepower, but it is an extremely fragile formation. Attempting to march a line forward across anything except the smoothest parade ground led to disorder. Men straggled, stumbled, wavered, and the line would soon lose all cohesion. Worse, a line was very vulnerable to cavalry attack, especially if the enemy horsemen could attack from either end. 

So the preferred method of advancing men across open country was to form a column. That is a slightly misleading term, suggesting a long thin block of men advancing like a spear shaft towards the enemy line. In fact the column was short and squat. 

(Cornwell 2015, 69)

That is another “if” of history, what might have happened if Wellington had brought troops to Blucher’s aid. He had promised to do so, ‘provided I am not attacked myself’, but while Blucher was engaged in his desperate struggle at Ligny another battle was being fought just five miles away. 

The battle of Quatre-Bras. 

(Cornwell 2015, 76)

Skirmishers play a large part in the story of Waterloo. Essentially they are specialist infantrymen who fight neither in line nor in column (though they could and often did do both), but fought ahead of a line or column. They formed a skirmish line, a scatter of troops spread wide, whose job was to snipe at the enemy’s formation. 

(Cornwell 2015, 84)

Brunswick was a German state which had fallen to the French, and in revenge the Duke of Brunswick had raised a regiment which had joined Wellington in Spain. They wore black uniforms and were known as the Black Legion, and were led at Quatre-Bras by their young Duke, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Brunswickers, though they had been allies at the British in Spain, were not popular, mainly because of their taste for dog meat. 

(Cornwell 2015, 86)

Lines and squares. British infantry made a line two ranks deep, though if there was cavalry around they would sometimes double the line and so make four ranks. If a battalion was in four ranks then usually only the first two ranks fired, while the men behind reloaded the muskets and handed them forward. A British line invariably defeated a French column, even one containing three, four or five times its number, simply because every British musket could fire and only the outer ranks of the French could return the musketry, but the line was horribly vulnerable to cavalry. If horsemen managed to reach the open flank of the line they would swiftly reduce it to a panicked mob, but if the battalion had formed square then it was the cavalry who became vulnerable. It is a deadly game of paper, scissors and stone. 

A square (which was often an oblong) had four ranks. The front rank was kneeling and did not fire their muskets; instead they rammed the butts of their muskets into the ground and held them out with fixed bayonets to make a hedge of blades, augmented by the second rank which crouched with fixed bayonets. The two inner ranks could fire over the heads of the men holding bayonets. Horseman thus faced a formidable and usually insurmountable obstacle. There was no open flank to attack, instead they had to charge into a wall of steel from which bullets were flying. 

(Cornwell 2015, 93)

The road was difficult, the weather appalling and the troops miserable, but then they encountered Marshal Blucher on the roadside and the mood changed instantly owing to the:

Cheerful spirit and freshness of our seventy-four year old Field Marshal. He had his bruised limbs bathed in brandy, and had helped himself to a very large schnapps and now, though riding must have been very painful, he rode alongside the troops exchanging jokes and banter with them and his humour spread like wildfire down the column. I only glimpsed the old hero, though I should dearly have liked to express to him my pleasure at his escape. 

It is hard to imagine the Duke of Wellington exchanging ‘jokes and banter’ with his men. It was not his style. More than once he stopped men from cheering him because, he said, if you let them cheer you today then tomorrow they will jeer at you. He was not loved as Blucher was, nor worshipped like Napoleon, but he was respected. He could be sharply witty; long after the wars were over some French officers pointedly turned their bacs on him in Paris, for which rudeness a woman apologized. ‘Don’t worry, Madame,’ the Duke said, ‘I’ve seen their backs before.’ He had learned to hide his emotions, though he would openly weep for the casualties his battles caused, and he possessed an explosive temper which he had also learned to control. His men might see the temper, rarely the emotions, but if he was cold towards them he also had confidence in them, and they in him. 

(Cornwell 2015, 107-108)

The first duty of the day for the British was to rescue their wounded, many of whom had lain all night where they fell. Cavalrymen placed injured men on horses, and those too weak to stay in the saddle were carried away on blankets. Doubtless some French wounded were rescued too, though priority was given to the British and Dutch, who were carried back to Brussels on wagons and, doubtless, in agony.

The French tended their wounded far better than their enemies, or at least attempted to, mainly through the influence of Dominique Jean Larrey, Chief Surgeon to the Imperial Guard. Larrey realized that treating men as soon as possible after they were wounded produced far better results than leaving them to suffer, and so he invented the ‘flying ambulance’, a lightweight vehicle, well-sprung, with a swivelling front axle to make it manoeuvrable on a battlefield crowded with corpses and wreckage, and with a floor which could be rolled out of the rear to make an operating table or to help load the wounded. He often performed surgery on the battlefield, but preferred to establish a central casualty station to which his ambulances would bring the wounded, while the British, in contrast, used their bandsmen to carry men to the rear where surgeons in blood-soaked aprons waited with saws, knives and probes. A skilled surgeon, and Larrey was very skilled, could amputate a leg in less than a minute. There was no anaesthetic, apart from the dulling effects of alcohol, and no antiseptics other than vinegar or spirits of turpentine. Larrey preferred operating while the patient was still in shock, and he had discovered that the recovery rate of men thus treated was much higher, though men with abdominal wounds stood very little chance of survival no matter how soon they received surgery. Most British casualties had to wait a long time before they received medical help, and many of the men wounded at Quatre-Bras were not to see a surgeon until they had reached distant Brussels, while Larrey was operating very close to the battlefield. Napoleon said of him that ‘he was the most honest man and the best friend to the soldier I ever knew.’

(Cornwell 2015, 109-110)

The British had decided to make a stand and the pursuit was over. Ahead of the French was the Duke of Wellington and his army.

Offering battle at a place called Mont St. Jean.

Four hundred years before, near a village called Azincourt, an English army had waited to do battle with the French, and on that October night it had rained and rained and the sky had echoed with thunder. It had been a drenching rain and next morning, as the rain at last ended, the field where the English offered battle was a quagmire of mud. It was that mud, more than the English arrows or English valour, which defeated the French men-at-arms who, laden with fifty or sixty pounds of plate amour, had to wade through knee-deep mud to reach their opponents. The thick mud tired them so that when they reached Henry V’s line they were hacked down in a merciless display of butchery.

And on Sunday, 18 June 1815, the ground in the valley south of Waterloo would be muddy. It was an omen. 

The Emperor either did not know the history, or else decided that rain on the eve of a battle was no omen at all. He had made mistakes over the last two days, but he was still supremely confident. 

(Cornwell 2015, 118-119)

There were Land Pattern muskets, India Pattern muskets and New Land Pattern muskets, all carrying the nickname of Brown Bess. The basic musket was developed during the early years of the eighteenth century, a hundred years before Waterloo, and a soldier of Marlborough’s army would have had no trouble using a New Land Pattern musket made in the early nineteenth century. The muskets were heavy, weighing a little over 10 lbs, and cumbersome, with a barrel length of either 39 inches or 42 inches, firing a ball three-quarters of an inch in diameter. It was possible to fire five shots in a minute, but that was exceptional, and the normal rate of fire was between two and three shots a minute, and even that was optimistic. As a battle progressed the touch-holes became fouled with burned powder and the barrels caked with powder residue, and the flints chipped and needed replacing. Nevertheless a British battalion of 500 men could expect to fire between 1,000 and 1,500 shots a minute. If fired at too great a range, say anything over 100 yards, most of those shots would miss because the smoothbore musket was notoriously inaccurate. Much of the inaccuracy was acaused by ‘windage’, which is the difference between the barrel’s interior width and the musket ball’s width. This was usually about a twentieth of an inch, which made the ball easier (and thus quicker) to load, but the ball literally bounced as it sped down the barrel and the last bounce would dictate the direction of the flight. There were various tests made of a musket’s accuracy, and a typical one was conducted by the Prussians, who discovered that a battalion firing at a target 100 feet wide and 6 feet high scored 60 per cent hits at 75 yards, 40 per cent at 150 yards and 25 per cent at 225 yards. Colonel George Hanger, who was an expert marksman, wrote in his book To All Sportsmen, published in 1814:

A soldier’s musket, if not exceedingly ill-bored (as many are), will strike the figure of a man at 80 yards; it may even at a hundred; but a soldier must be very unfortunate indeed who shall be wounded by a common musket at 150 yards, provided his antagonist aims at him; and as to firing at a man at 200 yards with a common musket, you may as well fire at the moon. 

Estimates were made during the Napoleonic Wars of the musket’s efficiency. At the battle of Talavera it was reckoned that in half an hour 1,300 French were either killed or wounded, but it had taken 30,000 musket balls to achieve that! 3,675,000 rounds were fired by Wellington’s army at Vitoria and caused 8,000 casualties, which is one hit in every 459! At close range the results were much better, and the British especially were trained to wait until the enemy was very close before opening fire.

The French too were clearing their muskets. Their weapon, the Charleville musket, was about a pound lighter than the Brown Bess, and just as inaccurate. The bore was smaller, and this meant that French infantry could not use British cartridges which they might find on their dead or wounded enemies, while British troops could, and did, use scavenged French ammunition. French powder was of significantly worse quality than British, which led to quicker fouling of the barrel and touch-hole. The normal way to rid a barrel of caked powder was to swill it out with hot water, but urine was almost as effective. 

(Cornwell 2015, 141-143)

The heaviest British guns were 9-pounders, but they were supplemented by 6-pounders and by howitzers. The British tended to use their howitzers as cannon, firing on a fairly flat trajectory, while the French often elevated a barrel as much as 30°. At Waterloo the british howitzers were not needed to lob shells over obstacles because the French did not use Wellington’s reverse-slope tactic, so the howitzers were firing directly at the infantry beyond the swirling clouds of smoke. The British guns were firing a mix shells, roundshot, and Britain’s ‘secret’ weapon, the spherical case-shot.

The French knew all about spherical case, but never managed to duplicate it. It was the invention of Henry Shrapnel, a Royal Artillery officer, and was simply a shell designed to explode above the enemy and shower him with musket balls. When it was good it was very good, but when it was bad it was horrible. In 1813, in the Peninsula, a single shrapnel round killed every horse and man of a French gun crew, but the friction between the musket balls and the powder inside the case was sometimes so intense that the case-shot exploded inside the gun barrel. That problem was not to be solved for half a century, but fortunately for the gunners it did not happen frequently and Shrapnel’s spherical case-shot was reliable enough. It was only effective if the gunner cut the fuse to the right length, a skill that also applied to shells. A shell was simply a round iron ball filled with gunpowder that was ignited by a fuse. The fuse was a length of cord which protruded from the shell and was lit by the gun’s firing. Cut a fuse too short and the shell would explode in mid-air, doing no damage; cut it too long and the shell would land with its fuse spitting sparks, and a brave man could extinguish it. Cut to the right length, and that length depended on the distance of the target from the gun, the shell would explode and scatter fragments of its casing for up to twenty yards. All the gunners at Waterloo were experts a cutting fuses, but many men on both sides reported that the shells were rendered less effective because of the mud.

(Cornwell 2015, 171)

Perhaps the most famous painting of Waterloo is Lady Butler’s magnificent picture showing the charge of the Royal Scots Greys. The painting is called Scotland Forever! And now hangs in Leeds Art Gallery, but the picture, splendid though it is, is entirely misleading. It was painted sixty-six years after the battle and Lady Butler used her husband’s army connections to arrange for the regiment to charge at her while she sat at her easel. The big grey horses are at full gallop, led by an officer brandishing his sword, and the mass of men come straight towards the eye. It is the enemy’s view, and it is terrifying.

So was the real charge, but where Lady Butler shows the horsemen galloping on flat ground, the British heavy cavalry had to negotiate the sunken road, the hedges and the redcoats before they could close with the enemy. 

(Cornwell 2015, 193-194)

It seems probable that there were two French incursions into Hougoumont, both of which were defeated, just as it seems likely that the garrison was composed of both British and Dutch troops, though to read the eyewitness accounts is to risk confusion. The problem stems from patriotism. British accounts stress British achievements and rarely offer credit to allies other than the King’s German Legion, while Dutch, Hanoverian or Nassauer accounts carry a similar bias in favour of their own exploits. 

(Cornwell 2015, 209)

‘Great battles are won by artillery’, Napoleon once said, though he said so many things that it is difficult to know when he was being serious. He liked making flat, declaratory statements that contained a grain of truth, presumably to provoke an argument that he could win, but he did love his artillery, and now the big guns are firing all along the line, bombarding the whole British ridge with roundshot and shell. 

(Cornwell 2015, 216)

Marshal Ney’s cavalry assault had been brave and hopeless, hurling horses and men against immovable squares.

Those squares could have been broken by artillery if Ney had managed to bring more guns close to the line, or he could have destroyed them with infantry. That was the scissors, paper and stone reality of Napoleonic warfare. If you could force an enemy to form square then you could bring a line of infantry against it and overwhelm it with musket fire, and very late in the afternoon Marshal Ney at last tried that tactic, ordering 8,000 infantry to attack the British squares. 

(Cornwell 2015, 250-251)

It is strange that this climactic clash between the Imperial Guard and Wellington’s infantry is still wrapped in mystery. There is disagreement about what formation the Imperial Guard used. Was it in column or did they advance in square? And why did the original formation divide into two? We do not know. The fight that ensued is one of history’s most famous passages of arms, we have eyewitness accounts, thousands of men took part and many retold their experiences, yet still we do not know exactly what happened. There is even disagreement about who should take the victor’s honours, yet perhaps none of that is surprising. No one on either side was taking notes. The survivors disagreed about what time the clash occurred, though probably the Guard was ordered to advance soon after 7:30 p.m. and it was all over by 8:30 p.m. And the men who were there, the men who made history, could only see a few yards around them, and what they saw was obscured by thick smoke, and their ears were assailed by the buzz of musket balls, the crash of cannons firing, the cries of the wounded, the clamour of officers and sergeants shouting, the explosions of shells, the incessant hammering of musket volleys, the pounding of more distant guns, the drums beating and trumpets screaming. It was noise without relief, deafening. One British officer recalled that he shouted orders and even the man standing next to him could not hear his words. How was a man to make sense of what happened when all he could see was smoke, blood and flame, and he was deafened, and life itself depended on doing your duty despite the fear that clawed at the heart? That was the purpose of training and discipline, that at the moment when destiny hangs in the balance, when chaos rules, when death is leering close, then a man does his duty. The instinct is to flee such horror, but discipline offers another way through.

(Cornwell 2015, 290-291)

“I am endeavouring to do an impossibility,’ [Ensign] Macready had written to his father, ‘to describe a battle.’ 

(Cornwell 2015, 296)

There is a natural tendency to make order out of disorder, to describe a battle in the simplest terms to make chaos comprehensible. In most accounts of Waterloo the charge of the Imperial Guard is the climactic moment, an isolated event that decides the day, but though it was decisive, it was not isolated. 

(Cornwell 2015, 299)

Napoleon raged against his fate, then accepted it. Paris surrendered to the allies on 4 July, though their forces did not enter the city till the 7th. By then Napoleon had abdicated. He was at Malmaison, Josephine’s house, and he flirted with the idea of emigrating to the United States. He ordered books on America, then travelled to Rochefort, where he hoped to find ships that would carry him to the New World, but instead found a British naval blockade. He gave himself up to Captain Maitland of HMS Bellerophon, the Billy Ruffian of Trafalgar fame, and so began his journey to Saint Helena. 

(Cornwell 2015, 317)

On a minor point Blucher wished to call the events of 18 June the battle of La Belle Alliance, under which name it is still known in Germany, but Wellington preferred Waterloo. The French usually term in the battle of Mount St Jean. And when the allies occupied Paris the Prussians decided to blow up the Pont d’Iena, the bridge across the Seine which celebrated Napoleon’s great victory over the Prussians at Jena in 1806. To Wellington this was a nonsense. A bridge was useful! What point was there in destroying it? Lady Shelley tells us that the Duke saved the bridge:

by the simple device of posting an English sentry upon it … the Prussians tried hard to get rid of the sentry, for they were determined to blow up the bridge. But the sentry would not leave his post. ‘You may blow up the bridge if you like,’ said he, ‘but I don’t stir from here.’ He kept his word and the bridge was saved!

(Cornwell 2015, 319)

The battle was over, but controversy does not die. 

Who won the battle? That might seem a ridiculous question, but it has generated much hot air and anger over the years and still does. But at least one theory can be dismissed. Victor Hugo, in his great novel Les Miserables, wrote passionately about Waterloo, but in the process he established various myths that are still believed in France. ‘The cuirassiers’, he claimed, ‘annihilated seven squares out of thirteen, took or spiked sixty pieces of ordnance, and captured from the English regiments six flags, which three cuirassiers and three chasseurs of the Guard bore to the Emperor’. No, they did not. Not one square was broken, not one cannon was spiked by the French, nor was any British colour lost. 

(Cornwell 2015, 325)

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References

Cornwell, Bernard. 2015. Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies, and Three Battles. N.p.: HarperCollins.

ISBN 978-0-06-231205-1