On the morning of the eighteenth Wellington did not know the exact position of all French forces. He could see by personal observation that Napoleon had detached a considerable portion of his entire army. There were about 39,000 Frenchmen unaccounted for; he knew of Grouchy’s movements in general, but not his strength. If Grouchy had only half this force, the other half could have been moving to turn the Duke’s right flank. Wellington did not underrate Napoleon, he wanted to prevent the Emperor from winning by really doing the unexpected.15
On the all-important question of the numbers present at the battle, I propose to take those quoted in Mark Adkin’s excellent book The Waterloo Companion, which as well as their innate scholarly worth are close to those of most of the other experts. After their losses of 17,500 men at Ligny and Quatre Bras, and Grouchy’s detaching with 30,000 men, the French army under Napoleon comprised 53,400 infantry, 15,600 cavalry and 6,500 artillerymen servicing 246 guns, along with 2,000 support staff from medics to engineers, making a total of 77,500. After losing 4,500 at Quatre Bras, and stationing 17,000 at Hal, the Anglo-Allied army under Wellington comprised 53,800 infantry, 13,350 cavalry, 5,000 artillerymen servicing 157 guns and one rocket section, and 1,000 support staff, totalling 73,150 men. The Prussian troops available to assist Wellington if Blücher’s plan was properly implemented consisted of 38,000 infantry, 7,000 cavalry, 2,500 artillerymen servicing 134 guns, and 1,500 support staff, totalling 49,000 men. Of the Prussian forces, IV Corps would arrive on the battlefield at about 4.30 p.m. with 31,000 men and eighty-six guns, II Corps would get there at about 6.30 p.m. with 12,800 men, and I Corps at around 7.30 p.m. with 5,000 men.
By the time the sun rose on the undulating plateau of Mont St Jean on Sunday, 18 June it was clear to everyone that there was going to be a major engagement that day — a battle on the scale of any of the great clashes of the Napoleonic Wars, such as Marengo, Friedland, Austerlitz, Borodino or Leipzig. ‘Ah! Now I’ve got them, those English!’ Napoleon is said to have exclaimed when he was certain that the Anglo-Allied army had not filed away down the road through the Forest of Soignes during the night. He later expressed incredulity that Wellington had fought with an impassable forest to his rear, but in fact Wellington did this on purpose. ‘It is not true that I could not have retreated,’he told his friend Harriet Arbuthnot eight years later. ‘I could have got into the wood and I would have defied the Devil to drive me out.’16
Napoleon underlined his extreme optimism at a breakfast meeting with his senior commanders held in the farmhouse of Le Caillou, on the Charleroi—Brussels road, where he had spent the previous night. ‘We have ninety chances in our favour,’he crowed, ‘and not ten against.’ General Maximilien Foy tried to warn the Emperor of the likely steadfastness of the British line, saying: ‘The time has come when an old soldier feels it is his duty to remind Your Majesty that while the Duke of Wellington’s position is one that he cannot contemplate for permanent occupation, you are now in front of an infantry which, during the whole of the Spanish war, I never saw give way.’ Marshal Soult, who had also spent years in the Peninsula, supported Foy, but Napoleon was quick to pooh-pooh them. ‘Just because you have been beaten by Wellington,’he told them, ‘you think he’s a good general. But I tell you that Wellington is a bad general and the English are bad troops.’ The whole business would be, he assured them, ‘l’affaire d’un déjeuner’ (a picnic).17 Instead it turned out to be perhaps the most famous battle of world history.
THE BATTLE
1
The First Phase
WELLINGTON HAD CHOSEN his ground well. As he looked southwards from his vantage point under an elm tree at the crossroads of the Ohain road towards the French army on the morning of the battle he would have seen two buildings, each of which was to play a key role in the coming events. To his centre-right in an advanced position were the château and outbuildings of Hougoumont, well protected with walls, ditches, hedges and surrounded by a wood, which the Duke had invested with his best troops of all, the British Foot Guards (along with some Nassauers, Hanoverians and Lüneburgers), with orders to hold the place come what might. That they succeeded in this, despite heavy and repeated attacks by the French infantry, was one of the keys to Wellington’s victory at Waterloo.
Over to his centre-left was La Haye Sainte, another well-defended farmhouse with stables, a barn and a piggery, all enclosed by high walls, which Wellington filled with the King’s German Legion, the émigré unit loyal to King George III which had demonstrated its first-class fighting abilities during the Peninsular War. The possession of these two strongholds, with their high brick walls, would prove invaluable in disrupting the French line of advance, because, as one historian put it, ‘no enemy could pass without being assailed in flank by musketry’.1
The two armies — separated by a shallow valley — were only a thousand yards or so apart as they cooked their breakfasts on the morning of the battle (Hougoumont was much closer, only 400 yards from the enemy front line). In the distance, behind the French lines, Wellington could make out the red-tiled, whitewalled farmhouse of La Belle Alliance, the appositely named inn that was to play a romantic role in the battle’s epilogue. On his far left were three more walled and well-defended buildings, the farms of Papelotte and La Haye and the château of Frischermont.
Howell Rees Gronow, a Welsh Old Etonian ensign who was on duty with the 1st Regiment of Foot Guards at St James’s Palace when the Waterloo campaign began, skipped his guard duty there hoping to see action at Waterloo and to return before anyone noticed he was missing. On the morning of the battle, he recalled:
We had not proceeded a quarter of a mile when we heard the trampling of horses’ feet, and on looking round perceived a large cavalcade of officers coming at full speed. In a moment we recognised the Duke himself at their head … The entire staff of the army was close at hand … They all seemed as gay and unconcerned as if they were riding to meet the hounds in some quiet English county.2
They had good reason to be confident, if not quite ‘gay and unconcerned’, because the topography across which Wellington had chosen to receive Napoleon’s attacks could hardly have been better suited for infantry, complete with folds and dips in the ground that could shelter defenders against the artillery bombardment of a far larger force of cannon — Napoleon had 246 to Wellington’s 157. Sergeant-Major Edward Cotton of the 7th Hussars discoursed upon ‘the principal advantages’of Wellington’s position, which had much to recommend it besides the two defensible buildings, including factors that — due to the lie of the ground — would not have been visible to Napoleon:
The juncture of the two high-roads immediately in rear of our centre, from which branched off the paved road to Brussels, our main line of communication … added to the facility of communication, and enabled us to move ammunition, guns, troops, the wounded, etc, to or from any part of our main front line, as circumstances demanded … the continuous ridge from flank to flank towards which no hostile force could advance undiscovered, within range of our artillery upon the crest. Behind this ridge our troops could manoeuvre, or lie concealed from the enemy’s view, while they were in great measure protected from the fire of the hostile batteries … Our extreme left was strong by nature. The buildings, hollow-ways, enclosures, trees and brushwood, along the valley from Papelotte to Ohain, thickly peopled with light infantry, would have kept a strong force long at bay … Our extreme right was secured by numerous patches of brushwood, trees and ravines, and further protected by hamlets.3