Vienna, 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna (54 page)

D
ETERMINED TO WIN
before the Prussians arrived, Napoleon ordered Ney, about 3:30 p.m., to seize the strategic farm, La Haye-Sainte, on Wellington’s left, or eastern, flank that was vital to his center. As at Hougoumont, the result was another intense fight. Against great odds, the King’s German Legion on the inside, and the Ninety-fifth Rifles in the nearby gravel pit, held out for hours. But the KGL soon ran out of ammunition, and the standard reinforcements did not fit the Baker rifles used by the specialist sharpshooters. This proved to be another battle within a battle, ending just after six o’clock that evening, when the French captured the farm.

This was certainly a blow to Wellington and the Allies. This eastern flank was one of Wellington’s weaknesses—he had deliberately under-defended it because he expected the Prussians to arrive that day and cover his flank. Now that Napoleon had captured La Haye-Sainte, he could place his own artillery and sharpshooters closer in range and apply much more pressure on the Allies.

Soon Wellington was in serious trouble and the center was about to break. Wellington’s men were taking a beating, and more Allied regiments had already fled. Basil Jackson, a young staff officer, reported that the forests near the battlefield were full of defectors, entire companies with “fires blazing under cooking kettles, while the men lay about smoking.” Most famously, the Cumberland Hussars, a volunteer regiment of Hanoverian gentlemen in splendid uniforms, galloped straight from the battlefield to Brussels with the alarming news that defeat was imminent and the French would soon march through the capital in triumph.

Sensing an imminent Allied defeat, Marshal Ney pleaded with the emperor for more troops to deliver the knockout blow. As military historian David Chandler argued, the situation was critical for Wellington, and with fresh reinforcements, Ney probably would have shattered the Allied center. Napoleon, however, failed to seize the opportunity, answering only in frustration about the impossibility of sending more soldiers: “Where the devil do you expect me to find them! Do you want me to make them?”

Napoleon could have sent in six battalions of the Middle Guard and eight battalions of the Old Guard—the elite troops that he held in reserve. As Chandler further pointed out, had the emperor sent in half of them, Napoleon would probably have won the Battle of Waterloo. Wellington was taking a severe beating, and two brigades had already been destroyed. Others seemed on the verge of breaking.

Napoleon, of course, had no way of knowing just how close Wellington’s center was to collapsing—that is the advantage of hindsight. In fairness, too, Ney’s record thus far in the campaign could hardly have inclined the emperor to comply with the request. Again and again, Ney had made brave, though ultimately untimely and disorganized, attacks that had proved costly. It would have been easy to see this request in that light. Moreover, Napoleon never liked to use his reserves until the enemy had first committed his, and this was not the case yet.

So, rather than sending in some additional troops for Ney’s attack on Wellington’s center, Napoleon ordered some eleven battalions of the Guard to take Plancenoit, the largest village in the region, which would hold their position and lines of communication, in preparation for the Prussian arrival. Twenty minutes later, the French had succeeded here as well. Wellington was powerless to help. The British Fifth Division, defending, lost some 3,500 of 4,000 soldiers. “Let us pray to God,” Wellington allegedly said on hearing the news, “for the coming of night—or of Blücher.”

B
Y THE LATE
afternoon, the army in the distance was unmistakably drawing nearer, and Napoleon was racing against time. A small detachment of Prussians, under General Bülow, was already active on the eastern flank. The French were holding them off, but Blücher, commanding thirty thousand men, was quickly approaching from the east. Wellington, in the meantime, was shuffling troops quickly to shut the hole in his center.

A gambler by nature, Napoleon decided to risk everything, and the French attacks increased in intensity. Marshal Ney, leading charge after charge against the British infantry, had four horses shot from under him. As the vanguard of the Prussian army neared the battlefield, Napoleon told his French soldiers, untruthfully, that the army in the distance was actually Grouchy’s.

In the end, Napoleon, desperate, ordered his elite Imperial Guard, “Les Invincibles,” to attack. The feared veterans were never used unless the battle was almost over and victory secure, and they had never failed. So, to drums, “La Marseillaise,” and the famous cry
“Vive l’Empereur!”
they started marching. But this time, it was a suicide mission.

Napoleon personally took the lead of some twelve battalions and sixty-five hundred famous veterans of the Grande Armée (fifteen thousand total were in the assault) and marched off in what was to be the warlord’s final charge. About six hundred yards out, Napoleon turned aside, handing over responsibility for the attack to Marshal Ney. The Guards marched straight ahead, without any cavalry support, right into the fields where Wellington’s troops suddenly rose up from concealed positions and fired with devastating accuracy. Three hundred of Napoleon’s veterans died in a minute, according to Captain Siborne’s estimate.

Later that evening, when the sun shone brightly for the first time in days and now penetrated the clouds of smoke hovering over the plain, the French were in full retreat. Wellington, standing in his stirrups and waving his hat, urged his men forward to finish the victory. The French flight lost all sense of order. It was “a panic-stricken rabble,” as Napoleon called it.

The Prussian leader Blücher, said to have a personal grudge against the French, was determined to catch the French emperor himself. The Imperial Guard, having been repulsed for the first time, had regrouped and now covered the retreat of the French well. Napoleon himself was able to escape, riding away in his bulletproof carriage and then switching to his white charger, Marengo.

The Prussians followed in hot pursuit, continuing the chase long into the night. In the end, the Prussians nearly captured Napoleon himself. They had his carriage, still with his ceremonial sword, a bottle of rum, a bottle of old Malaga, a toothbrush, and a million francs’ worth of diamonds, which his sister had given him on Elba. Napoleon’s carriage was presented as a gift to the Prince Regent, who put it on show in London and later sold it to Madame Tussaud for her museum, where it remained until it was destroyed in the fire of 1925.

Napoleon himself blamed this defeat—“the horrible piece of bad luck”—on everything from the rain to the mistakes of his subordinates. Marshal Soult had struggled in his new position as chief of staff, sending too few messengers; as a result, many orders never reached their target or arrived too late. Marshal Ney, likewise, had made numerous errors, ranging from unfortunate delays at the opening of the campaign to reckless and untimely attacks that lost many lives. Still “in spite of all,” Napoleon added, “I should have won that battle.”

For a long time afterward, historians debated the actual causes of this Allied victory. Had Wellington essentially won the battle, or did the arrival of the Prussians prove decisive? Actually, the question is absurd, as the historian Andrew Roberts rightly remarked. Wellington would never have waited on the plain that day for a battle if he had not expected the Prussians to arrive and defend his left flank. At the same time, he would probably not have won without the timely assistance of the Prussians. Both armies deserve the credit.

Wellington’s tactics and strategic choice of terrain had been crucial. He had used his information sources effectively and had a sound knowledge of Napoleon’s strengths and movements through his spies, including in-depth reports from Napoleon’s treacherous minister of police, Joseph Fouché. Moreover, he knew of the Old Guard attack in advance from a defector. The English could also thank the formidable infantry, which withstood Napoleon’s increasingly desperate charges. The English, of course, had new weapons such as Congreve rockets, but they were far less important than the human factors.

Napoleon, for his part, had made a number of mistakes that day, some of them bizarre. Besides the large detachment he sent away on the eve of the battle to fight the Prussians, and which might have proven decisive, Napoleon had not used the talents of many of his marshals to the fullest. Davout, an excellent commander, was still in Paris as minister of war. Murat, the greatest cavalry leader of the day, was disdained and not allowed to fight. Another, Louis Gabriel Suchet, was placed in a secondary position defending the eastern approach to France. David Chandler wondered if Napoleon had deliberately “fielded a second team” to preserve the glory for himself.

Napoleon, further, broke many of his own military maxims. Some have claimed that the emperor was suffering from any number of ailments: acromegaly, inflammation of the bladder and urinary tract, or even hemorrhoids. At any rate, Napoleon was not at his best that day. “Everything failed me just when everything had succeeded,” he later said.

During that short campaign, there were confusing orders, vague, contradictory, and slow to arrive; personality clashes among his subordinates further hurt their efforts, as did some well-known examples of treachery, such as General Louis August Victor Bourmont’s defection to the Prussians. Significantly, too, Napoleon delayed his initial attack almost four hours in the morning to allow the wet ground to dry, a crucial fact that allowed Wellington to dry his weapons and the Prussians to arrive on the scene. And so on. There were countless “ifs” that might have tipped the balance.

The battle was over, and now it was time to name it. Blücher suggested that it should be called “the Battle of La Belle-Alliance,” punning on the name of an inn in the Forest of Soignies where the two victors met that evening after the battle. Wellington preferred Waterloo.

S
OMETIME AFTER MIDNIGHT
, Wellington started drafting the famous Waterloo dispatch. Finishing it the next day at Brussels, he folded it up into the small purple velvet sachet that he had received at the Duchess of Richmond ball and sent it off with a courier to his government back in London. “It is a glorious victory,” Wellington announced, though unfortunately “the loss of life had been fearful, and I have lost many friends.”

About 40,000 men had been killed that day, and many more wounded. Wellington suffered between 13,000 and 15,000 casualties, and Napoleon’s losses are usually estimated between 25,000 and 30,000. Blücher lost about 7,000 men. Total casualties of the four-day campaign were perhaps 115,000 (some 60,000 French and 55,000 Allies).

Nearby Brussels seemed one giant hospital. Carts of mangled, bloodied, and bandaged soldiers rattled through the streets and dropped off the wounded onto beds of straw around the city. Citizens cared for as many in their homes as possible, and carried water to the thirsty. One surgeon described the ordeal of continually operating on the wounded for thirteen hours straight, until, as he put it, his clothes were “stiff with blood, and [his] arms powerless with the exertion of using the knife!” Unfortunately for the soldiers, it was a dreadful experience: The rushed and overworked surgeons labored without the benefit of anesthesia or sophisticated instruments.

Metternich wrote to congratulate the Duke of Wellington for his victory at Waterloo, or, as he put it, “the brilliant opening of the campaign.” Wellington, though, was more optimistic about its significance. “I may be wrong,” he said shortly afterward, “but my opinion is that we have given Napoleon his death blow.” Nine days after completing the historic Final Act in Vienna, the Duke of Wellington, Field Marshal Blücher, and their combined armies had indeed defeated the French emperor.

Napoleon, however, was not ready to concede. He arrived back in Paris three days after the battle, ready to raise another army. He would use Grouchy’s troops as a core, combine them with his National Guard reserves, and impose another conscription. He would take the field again with some three hundred thousand men and avenge Waterloo.

But a powerful group within his own government was disturbed at the thought of another awful fight to the death under a desperate Bonaparte, and worked to undermine his plan. Among the many plotters were Napoleon’s minister of police, Fouché, “a Trojan horse within the city walls” of Paris. Fouché worked closely with several leaders in the French legislature, including the former Bonapartist who had also been an assistant to George Washington and a French revolutionary hero, the Marquis de Lafayette. Now, years later, the fifty-seven-year-old was using his influence to denounce Napoleon in the chambers.

“The Emperor must abdicate without delay,” Lafayette said, as the legislature debated its course of action following Waterloo. “If we rid ourselves of him, peace will be ours for the asking!” One of Napoleon’s advisers, Carnot, took the podium to defend the emperor, as did Napoleon’s brother Lucien and the former revolutionary Emmanuel Sièyes. True, “Napoleon has lost a battle,” another said, but the French must rally to his side and “drive the barbarians from our country.” Napoleon was their best chance for victory.

“Have you forgotten where the bones of our sons and brothers whiten?” Lafayette asked. The deserts of Egypt, the snows of Russia, and now the plains of Belgium—Will it also be the streets of Paris? France had already sacrificed a few million, all victims “of this one man who wanted to fight all Europe! Enough!” he concluded, tired of the bloodshed.