All the King’s Men, page 49
For his part, Wellington used his final General Order of 14 June to congratulate his troops ‘upon the recent events which have restored peace to their country and the world’. He added: ‘The share which the British army has had in producing these events, and the high character with which the army will quit this country, must be equally satisfactory to every individual belonging to it, as it is to the Commander of the Forces … [He] assures them that he shall never cease to feel the warmest interest in their welfare and honour, and that he will at all times be happy to be of service to those whose conduct, discipline and gallantry, their country is much indebted.’98
He and they had come a long way from the broken, dispirited British force that was driven out of Holland by the victorious French Revolutionary Army during the bitter winter of 1794/5. The reforms of the Duke of York had helped to create a more efficient, meritocratic army; and the long years of almost constant combat in the Peninsula had turned Wellington’s soldiers into battle-hardened veterans to compare with any in history. Certainly Wellington felt that by 1814 no task, however difficult, was beyond them. ‘They will do for me,’ he declared, ‘what perhaps no one else can make them do.’99
But with the war over, this formidable fighting force was broken up, some to be sent to North America and the East and West Indies, others to Britain and Ireland. As for the Portuguese and Spanish women camp followers who had marched, cooked, washed, slept with and plundered for the soldiers, they were to be ruthlessly discarded. The last sound that Wellington’s men remember as their transports weighed anchor at Bordeaux was the wailing of the women left behind.100
In Paris, meanwhile, Wellington was asked if he had any regrets that he was never opposed by Napoleon in person. ‘No, and I am very glad I never was,’ he replied with disarming humility. ‘I would at any time rather have heard that a reinforcement of forty thousand men had joined the French army, than that he had arrived to take command.’101
20. Escape from Elba
On 1 March 1815 an armed brig and six smaller vessels dropped anchor off Golfe-Juan, near the French fort of Antibes on the Côte d’Azur. Within minutes, cutters packed with soldiers were heading for the rocky shoreline. The first to disembark and approach the fort were arrested. But the soldiers kept coming, and soon more than a thousand grenadiers, a troop of Polish lancers and two guns had been landed. As the light began to fail, a familiar short stocky figure came ashore, walking along an improvised gangway held up by soldiers waist-deep in the water. This time an officer was dispatched to the fort to inform the commandant that the ex-Emperor Napoleon, after ten months’ exile on Elba, had returned to reclaim his throne.
News of Napoleon’s escape reached Paris on 4 March, and three days later Vienna, where the Duke of Wellington was sitting as Britain’s plenipotentiary to the Congress tasked with redrawing Europe’s boundaries. Many of the delegates thought the news a joke and burst out laughing. But confirmation soon arrived, and on 12 March Wellington informed Lord Castlereagh, the foreign secretary, that the Allies planned to raise three armies to oppose Napoleon: an Austrian army in northern Italy; an Austro-German army on the upper Rhine; and a Prussian army on the lower Rhine that would advance into the Netherlands to link up with the British and Hanoverian army of occupation. A slower-moving Russian army, meanwhile, would constitute a reserve.
Castlereagh’s response was to offer Wellington a choice: remain in Vienna as the British plenipotentiary or take command of the Anglo-Hanoverian troops in Flanders. Preferring to ‘carry a musket’, he opted for the latter. Before leaving Vienna, he was left in no doubt of his responsibility. ‘It is for you,’ said Tsar Alexander, laying a hand on his shoulder, ‘to save the world again.’1 By now the Congress had declared Napoleon an outlaw subject to ‘vindicte publique’ (though there was much debate as to whether this authorized summary punishment or the need for a trial).2
Back in London, the government and the public anxiously awaited the outcome of Napoleon’s audacious move. On 12 March dispatches arrived from Colonel FitzRoy Somerset in Paris to the effect that ‘Bonaparte had not advanced further than Gap, and had not received any assistance.’ Four days later Somerset corrected himself: ‘Bonaparte had been joined by all the troops which had been sent against him, and … had entered Grenoble, and afterwards Lyon on the 10th.’3
Somerset was more optimistic on the 18th. Napoleon, whose ‘whole force did not amount to 9,000 men’, had not advanced beyond Lyons, Paris was ‘quite quiet’ and the marshals ‘were all firm in their allegiance’ to Louis XVIII. Two days later came an unofficial report that Napoleon’s rearguard ‘had been defeated with great loss by Marshal Ney’. A more accurate picture emerged on the 22nd, when a King’s Messenger confirmed that the French king had left Paris for Abbeville. The following day, word was received that Napoleon had made a triumphal entry into Paris on the 20th. ‘No … dispatches have arrived,’ recorded the diarist Charles Greville, ‘but it appears that the Troops everywhere joined him, and that he marched to the capital without the slightest opposition, or a shot having been fired since his landing at Cannes [sic].’4
Once in Paris, Napoleon wrote personally to all the sovereigns of Europe, assuring them that he desired only peace and renouncing all claims to the territories that had belonged to France at the height of his empire. The monarchs did not even deign to respond, though in Britain the reaction from senior politicians was surprisingly mixed. Earl Grey and a significant proportion of the Whig Opposition wanted to recognize Bonaparte’s new regime as a lesser evil than Louis XVIII’s corrupt government. So, too, did Lord Wellesley, Wellington’s elder brother. But Liverpool’s government, backed by a sizeable parliamentary majority – all the Tories, most of the Independent MPs and Lord Grenville’s Whigs – was determined to crush Napoleon once and for all. Britain’s three European allies – Prussia, Austria and Russia – were similarly resolute, with each country pledging 150,000 men and Britain an additional £6 million in subsidies to make up for its shortfall in troops. With the government short of cash, it was left to the Rothschild brothers to raise the money.
Wellington reached Brussels on 4 April to find the French royal family in residence. He had little time for the king and his brother, the Comte d’Artois, having witnessed at first hand the failings of the restored monarchy during his time as ambassador in Paris from June 1814 to February 1815. He therefore proposed to his government a compromise ‘third term’ monarch in the person of the Duc d’Orléans, son of Philippe Égalité and head of a junior branch of the Bourbons. But Castlereagh was unimpressed, informing Wellington on 16 April that Louis XVIII must be supported ‘for the present’.5
With his political initiative rebuffed, Wellington concentrated on what he knew best: preparing an army for war. He was helped immeasurably by the decision of King William I of the Netherlands to make him commander-in-chief of all Dutch–Belgian forces on 3 May. This allowed him to mix Dutch–Belgian and German troops with his more reliable British and King’s German Legion (KGL) units, as he had done so successfully with Portuguese troops in the Peninsula. His three corps – I, II and a Reserve Corps commanded by him in person – were each composed of two British divisions and two of other nationalities. Yet still he was concerned. ‘I have got an infamous army,’ he complained in mid-May, ‘very weak and ill-equipped, and a very inexperienced staff. In my opinion they are doing nothing in England.’6
Wellington was right to complain. Many of his Peninsular veterans had been disbanded or dispatched overseas – some to America, where the insufficiently named War of 1812 with the United States had just ended with a British victory and a measure of revenge for the army’s humiliation in the War of Independence – and even those garrisoned in the British Isles were arriving in dribs and drabs. One of the first battalions to reach the Netherlands from England was the 1/23rd Fusiliers, once more a single-unit regiment since the disbandment of its 2nd Battalion in October 1814. It was in barracks at Gosport on the south coast when it was warned of its move on 23 March. ‘We are all in the highest spirits,’ wrote Lieutenant John McDonald to his father that day.
Quite delighted for we received our order for embarkation this morning. Destination of course not mentioned but must be either France or Holland. Every person quite astonished at the progress Bonaparte has made. A messenger passed this morning who said he’s at Fontainbleu [near Paris], also that all the troops refuse to act against him, but we do not believe every thing we hear this way for we have had so many sharpers [conmen] that pretend to be government agents and have taken in the good people of Portsmouth for large sums. We embark tomorrow morning at nine o’clock about seven hundred as fine men as ever fixed bayonets.7
Contrary winds prevented McDonald’s battalion from landing in Ostend until 30 March, and from there it moved by barge to Bruges, and on foot to its billets in Ghent, arriving on 2 April. McDonald wrote a day later:
Tell the Girls [his sisters] I saw Louis the Eighteenth yesterday and was even at his dinner table! … The King and Royal Family always dine in Public, at last allowing all Ladies to enter, and yesterday he included all British officers in uniform. [Marshals] Victor, Augereau, Marmont, Clarke and a number of other French officers of distinction were at his table.8
Another of Wellington’s Peninsular veterans who arrived in Flanders at this time was Private Thomas Pococke of the 71st Highlanders. His battalion had been due to sail from Cork for America; but unfavourable winds delayed its departure for six weeks, long enough for the transports to be diverted to Antwerp. ‘Next morning,’ wrote Pococke, ‘we were marched to Leuze, where we lay, quartered in different villages around, until the 16th of June, 1815. We used to be drilled every day.’9 The 71st was – with the 52nd Light Infantry and the 2nd/95th Rifles – part of the crack Light Brigade under Major-General Frederick Adam.
Private Charles Stanley of the 1st King’s Dragoon Guards, who had not fought in Spain, had landed at Ostend in April and by mid-May was billeted with his regiment to the west of Brussels as part of the Household Brigade of Heavy Cavalry. He could not wait to get to grips with Bonaparte’s Army of the North, part of which was stationed on the French frontier, just 15 miles south of Brussels. ‘We have the most cavalry of the English that ever was at one time,’ he wrote to his cousin in May, ‘and in good condition and good spirits. There is no doubt of us beating the confounded rascal. It may cost me my life, and many more, [but] that will only be the fortune of war. My life I set no store by at all … I hope you will never think of being a soldier. It is a very rough concern.’10
An officer in the same regiment, Lieutenant John Hibbert, was pleasantly surprised by the reception they received from the locals as they marched through Flanders. He wrote to his father on 15 May:
The country we have hitherto passed through is most beautiful; from Ostend to Ghent the road is paved and as level as a bowling green the whole way, but the country on each side is a perfect garden, the cottages and gardens far surpass England and the inhabitants are uncommonly civil especially to English men who are much liked in Flanders. They detest the Prussians; they gave us to understand that it was impossible to satisfy them in any particular, and the common men would generally plunder them of everything they had before they departed from their billets. They said we behaved like gentlemen, and therefore tried to anticipate our wishes in everything they could.11
As ever, the number of soldiers’ wives that were allowed to follow the troops on campaign was tightly restricted. When the Scots Greys embarked from Gravesend, for example, ‘many a man left behind him a wife and children unprotected and unprovided for’, according to the diary of a quartermaster-sergeant. He added: ‘On going ashore [before departure] we had the opportunity of witnessing the most distressing scenes of women parting from their husbands, their faces covered with tears, and some of them with a child on their back and one in each hand, calling out from the shore to their husbands on board the transports, many of whom would never meet again.’12
Some of those following the 42nd Highlanders got as far as Ostend before they were separated from their protectors and told to fend for themselves. Two days later, recorded Quartermaster-Sergeant James Anton, ‘they found their way to the regiment’ at Ghent, but were recognized and taken back to Ostend. Undeterred, ‘they eluded the vigilance of the sentries, and joined their husbands once more, and as no official reports were made to their prejudice, they followed the fortunes of their husbands during the campaign, along with those who boasted the privilege.’13 Anton’s own view was that no women should be allowed to accompany their husbands to war. ‘If an exception is made in one single instance,’ he wrote,
it only gives room for pressing, and almost irresistible applications from others, and throws the performance of a very painful duty, namely, that of refusing permission, on the officers commanding the companies … Why should not the soldier contribute part of his pay towards the maintenance of his family at home? In fact, it ought to be stipulated that he should do so, before permission is given him to marry. If no women were permitted to accompany the army (I mean on a hostile campaign, for I see no objection that can be made to the women being permitted to follow their husbands in time of peace …), the married men might earn more than their daily pay, by washing for the officers and non-commissioned officers, and to any of the single men who are not inclined to wash their own linen, and thus be enabled to make the larger remittances.14
For those seemingly fortunate wives who made the quota, conditions on campaign were both harsh and dangerous, and would have been unbearable ‘were it not that each sees her neighbour suffering as much as herself’. Anton explained: ‘Her bed is generally the damp ground; her threadbare mantle, which envelops her bundle by day, serves for a sheet by night, and her husband’s blanket for a coverlet.’15
By late May only a little over a third of Wellington’s 114,000-strong army was made up of British soldiers. They were stiffened by units of cavalry and infantry from the KGL, a formation loyal to George III that in the Peninsula had proved itself equal to any British unit. ‘It was,’ concluded the Waterloo chronicler Ian Fletcher, ‘a pale shadow of the old Peninsular army, but there were, nevertheless, some fine regiments present, and the British contingent was certainly not the inexperienced and raw army … that some historians would have us believe.’16
Regardless of his complaints, even Wellington was confident that he and the Prussians, under the sprightly 73-year-old Marshal Gebhard von Blücher, would be too strong for Napoleon. ‘By God!’ he told the diarist Thomas Creevey in a Brussels park, ‘I think Blücher and myself can do the thing.’ He then pointed to a British private admiring the park’s statues: ‘It all depends upon that article whether we do the business or not. Give me enough of it, and I am sure.’17
What Wellington was not expecting was for Napoleon to take the initiative. ‘Blücher and I are so well united, and so strong,’ he told Charles Stewart, Castlereagh’s brother, on 8 May, that he did not believe they would be attacked.18 His intention, instead, was to wait for the other Allied armies to reach the frontiers of France before he and Blücher advanced side by side. But he was also acutely aware that his army, as ever, depended upon maritime lines of communication – both for resupply and, in the event of a reverse in battle, possible evacuation – and it was for that reason that he fortified and left sizeable garrisons in Antwerp and Ostend to guard these two potential lines of retreat.
On 3 May, Wellington and Blücher met at Tirlemont, 25 miles east of Brussels, to discuss strategy. Neither left a detailed record of the meeting, but we do know they agreed that the old Roman road from Ligny to Maastricht would be their line of demarcation, with Wellington’s army keeping to the west of the line and the Prussians to the east. It seems likely they also decided, in the event of Napoleon advancing through either Charleroi or Mons to threaten their line of junction, to concentrate their respective armies at Nivelles (Wellington) and Sombreffe (Blücher), either side of the strategic crossroads at Quatre Bras so that they could support each other. They had already exchanged liaison officers, with Colonel Henry Hardinge (the hero of Albuera) accompanying Blücher and Major-General Baron Carl von Müffling joining Wellington’s staff.
Efforts were made to gather intelligence, with Lieutenant-Colonel Colquhoun Grant running a spy ring inside France for Wellington, and Major-General Sir William Dörnberg, commanding a Hanoverian cavalry brigade near Mons on the frontier, also sending reports back to headquarters. But their efforts were hampered by the fact that, as Wellington put it on 11 May, they were ‘neither at war nor at peace, unable on that account to patrole up to the enemy and ascertain his position by view’; moreover Dörnberg was not privy to Grant’s mission and failed to forward a message from him on 14 June that would have given Wellington advance warning of French movements.19
Napoleon, meanwhile, was busily expanding the army he had inherited from the Bourbons by recalling the previous year’s conscripts, mobilizing the National Guard, mass producing muskets and buying or confiscating all available horses. By early June he had assembled a field army – the Army of the North – of 124,000 men and 344 guns. Commanded by him in person, it was made up of the Imperial Guard, a cavalry army and five infantry corps, and contained a mixture of veterans and untried conscripts, staunch Bonapartists and resentful royalists. ‘It lacked,’ wrote Richard Holmes, ‘the innate cohesion and staying power of the armies that Napoleon had once commanded.’20
