Waterloo :: IV THE ALLIED RETREAT AND FRENCH ADVANCE UPON WATERLOO AND WAVRE

IV THE ALLIED RETREAT AND FRENCH ADVANCE UPON WATERLOO AND WAVRE

When the Prussians had concentrated to meet Napoleon at Ligny they had managed to collect, in time for the battle, three out of their four army corps.

These three army corps were the First, the Second, and the Third, and, as we have just seen, they were defeated.

But, as we have also seen, they were not thoroughly defeated. They were not disorganised, still less were the bulk of them captured and disarmed. Most important of all, they were free to retreat by any road that did not bring them against their victorious enemy. In other words, they were free to retreat to the north as well as to the east.

The full importance of this choice will, after the constant reiteration of it in the preceding pages, be clear to the reader. A retreat towards the east, and upon the line of communications which fed the Prussian army, would have had these two effects: First, it would have involved in the retirement that fresh Fourth Army Corps under Bulow which had not yet come into action, and which numbered no less than 32,000 men. For it lay to the east of the battlefield. In other words, that army corps would have been wasted, and the whole of the Prussian forces would have been forced out of the remainder of the campaign. Secondly, it would have finally separated Blucher and his Prussians from Wellington’s command. The Duke, with his western half of the allied forces, would have had to stand up alone to the mass of Napoleon’s army, which would, after the defeat of the Prussians at Ligny, naturally turn to the task of defeating the English General.

Now the fact of capital importance upon which the reader must concentrate if he is to grasp the issue of the campaign is the fact that the French staff fell into an error as to the true direction of the Prussian retreat.

Napoleon, Soult, and all the heads of the French army were convinced that the Prussian retreat was being made by that eastern road.As a fact, the Prussians, under the cover of darkness, had retired not east but north.

The defeated army corps, the First, Second, and Third, did not fall back upon the fresh and unused Fourth Corps; they left it unhampered to march northward also; and all during the darkness the Prussian forces, as a whole, were marching in roughly parallel columns upon Wavre and its neighbourhood.

It was this escape to the north instead of the east that made it possible for the Prussians to effect their junction with Wellington upon the day of Waterloo; but it must not be imagined that this supremely fortunate decision to abandon the field of their defeat at Ligny in a northerly rather than an easterly direction was at first deliberately conceived by the Prussians with the particular object of effecting a junction with Wellington later on.

In the first place, the Prussians had no idea what line Wellington’s retreat would take. They knew that he was particularly anxious about his communications with the sea, and quite as likely to move westward as northward when Napoleon should come against him.

The full historical truth, accurately stated, cannot be put into the formula, “The Prussians retreated northward in order to be able to join Wellington two days later at Waterloo.” To state it so would be to read history backwards, and to presuppose in the Prussian staff a knowledge of the future. The true formula is rather as follows:—“The Prussians retired northward, and not eastward, because the incompleteness of their defeat permitted them to do so, and thus at once to avoid the waste of their Fourth Army Corps and to gain positions where they would be able, if necessity arose, to get news of what had happened to Wellington.”

In other words, to retreat northwards, though the decision to do so depended only upon considerations of the most general kind, was wise strategy, and the opportunity for that piece of strategy was seized; but the retreat northwards was not undertaken with the specific object of at once rejoining Wellington.

It must further be pointed out that this retreat northwards, though it abandoned the fixed line of communications leading through Namur and LiÈge to Aix la Chapelle, would pick up in a very few miles another line of communications through Louvain, Maestricht, and Cologne. The Prussian commanders, in determining upon this northward march, were in no way risking their supply nor hazarding the existence of their army upon a great chance. They were taking advantage of one of two courses left open to them, and that one the wiser of the two.

This retreat upon Wavre was conducted with a precision and an endurance most remarkable when we consider the fact that it took place just after a severe, though not a decisive, defeat.

Of the eighty odd thousand Prussians engaged at Ligny, probably 12,000 had fallen, killed or wounded. When the Prussian centre broke, many units became totally disorganised; and, counting the prisoners and runaways who failed to rejoin the colours, we must accept as certainly not exaggerated the Prussian official report of a loss of 15,000.[13]

In spite, I say, of this severe defeat, the order of the retreat was well maintained, and was rewarded by an exceptional rapidity.

The First Corps marched along the westerly route that lay directly before them by Tilly and Mont St Guibert. They marched past Wavre itself, and bivouacked about midday of Saturday the 17th, round about the village of Bierges, on the other side of the river Dyle.

The Second Corps followed the First, and ended its march on the southern side of Wavre, round about the village of St Anne.

The Third Corps did not complete the retreat until the end of daylight upon the 17th, and then marched through Wavre, across the river to the north, and bivouacked around La Bavette.

Finally, still later on the same evening, the Fourth Corps, that of Bulow, which had come to Ligny too late for the action, marching by the eastward lanes, through Sart and Corry, lay round Dion Le Mont.

By nightfall, therefore, on Saturday the 17th of June, we have the mass of the Prussian army safe round Wavre, and duly disposed all round that town in perfect order.

With the exception of a rearguard, which did not come up until the morning of the Sunday, all had been safely withdrawn in the twenty-four hours that followed the defeat at Ligny.

It may be asked why this great movement had been permitted to take place without molestation from the victors.

Napoleon would naturally, of course, after his defeat of the Prussians, withdraw to the west the greater part of the forces he had used against Blucher at Ligny and direct them towards the Brussels road in order to use them next against Wellington. But Napoleon had left behind him Grouchy in supreme command over a great body of troops, some 33,000 in all, whose business it was to follow up the Prussians, to find out what road they had taken; at the least to watch their movements, and at the best to cut off any isolated bodies or to give battle to any disjointed parts which the retreat might have separated from support. In general, Grouchy was to see to it that the Prussians did not return.

In this task Grouchy failed. True, he was not given his final instructions by the Emperor until nearly midday of the 17th, but a man up to his work would have discovered the line of the Prussian retreat and have hung on to it. Grouchy failed, partly because he was insufficiently provided with cavalry, partly because he was a man excellent only in a sudden tactical dilemma, incompetent in large strategical problems, partly because he mistrusted his subordinates, and they him; but most of all because of an original prepossession (under which, it is but fair to him to add, all the French leaders lay) that the Prussian retreat had taken the form of a flight towards Namur, along the eastern line of communications, while, as a fact, it had taken the form of a disciplined retreat upon Wavre and the north.

At ten o’clock in the evening of Saturday the 17th, twenty-four hours after the battle of Ligny, and at the moment when the whole body of the Prussian forces was already reunited in an orderly circle round Wavre, Grouchy, twelve miles to the south of them, was beginning—but only beginning—to discover the truth. He wrote at that hour to the Emperor that “the Prussians had retired in several directions,” one body towards Namur, another with Blucher the Commander-in-chief towards LiÈge, and a third body apparently towards Wavre. He even added that he was going to find out whether it might not be the larger of the three bodies which had gone towards Wavre, and he appreciated that whoever had gone towards Wavre intended keeping in touch with the rest of the Allies under Wellington. But all that Grouchy did after writing this letter proves how little he, as yet, really believed that any great body of the enemy had marched on Wavre. He anxiously sent out, not northward, but eastward and north-eastward, to feel for what he believed to be the main body of the retreating foe.

During the night he did become finally convinced by the mass of evidence brought in by his scouts that round Wavre was the whole Prussian force, and the conclusion that he came to was singular! He took it for granted that through Wavre the Prussians certainly intended a full retreat on Brussels. He wrote at daybreak of the 18th of June that he was about to pursue them.

That Blucher could dream of taking a short cut westward, thus effecting an immediate junction with Wellington, never entered Grouchy’s head. He did not put his army in motion until after having written this letter. He advanced his troops in a decent and leisurely manner up the Wavre road through the mid hours of the day, and himself, just before noon, wrote a dispatch to the Emperor; he wrote it from Sart, a point ten miles south of Wavre. In that letter he announced “his intention to be massed at Wavre that night,” and begging for “orders as to how he should begin his attack of the next day.”

The next day! Monday!Already, hours before—by midnight of Saturday—Blucher had sent his message to Wellington assuring him that the Prussians would come to his assistance upon Sunday, the morrow.

Even as Grouchy was writing, the Prussian Corps were streaming westward across country to appear upon Napoleon’s flank four hours later and decide the campaign.

Having written his letter, Grouchy sat down to lunch. As he sat there at meat, far off, the first shots of the battle of Waterloo were fired.

So far, we have followed the retreat of the Prussians northwards from their defeat at Ligny. With the exception of the rearguard, they were all disposed by the evening of Saturday the 17th in an orderly fashion round the little town of Wavre. We have also followed the methodical but tardy and ill-conceived pursuit in which Grouchy felt out with his cavalry to discover the line of the Prussian retreat, and continued to be in doubt of its nature at least until midnight, and probably until even later than midnight, in that night between Saturday the 17th, evening, and Sunday the 18th of June.We have further seen that during the morning of Sunday the 18th of June he was taking no dispositions for a rapid pursuit, but, being now convinced that the Prussians merely intended a general retreat upon Brussels, proposed to follow them in order to watch that retreat, and, if possible, to shepherd them eastwards. He wrote, as we have just said, to the Emperor in the course of that morning of the Sunday, announcing that he meant to mass his troops at Wavre by nightfall, and asking for orders for the next day.

What the Prussians were doing during that Sunday morning when Grouchy was so quietly and soberly taking for granted that they could not or would not rejoin Wellington, and was so quietly shielding his own responsibility behind the Emperor’s orders, we shall see when we come to talk of the action itself—the battle of Waterloo.

Meanwhile we must return to the second half of the great strategic move, and watch the retreat of the Duke of Wellington during that same Saturday, and the stand which he made on the ridge called “the Mont St Jean” by the nightfall of that day, in order to accept battle on the Sunday morning.

An observer watching the whole business of that Saturday from some height in the air above the valley of the Sambre, and looking northwards, would have seen on the landscape below, to his right, the Prussians streaming in great parallel columns upon Wavre from the battlefield of Ligny. He would have seen, scattered upon the roads, small groups of mounted men, here in touch with the last files of a Prussian column, there lost and wandering forward into empty spaces where no soldiers were. These were the cavalry scouts of Grouchy. South of these, and far behind the Prussian rear, separated from them by a gap of ten miles, a dense body of infantry, drawn up in heavy columns of route, was the corps commanded by Grouchy.

What would such an observer have seen upon the landscape below and before him to his left? He would have seen an interminable line of men streaming northward also, all afternoon, up the Brussels road from Quatre Bras; and behind them, treading upon their heels, another column, miles in length, pressing the pursuit. The retreating column, as it hurried off, he would see screened on its rear by a mass of cavalry, that from time to time charged and checked the pursuers, and sometimes put guns in line to hold them back. The pursuers, after each such check, would still press on. The first, the thousands in retreat, were Wellington’s command retiring from Quatre Bras; the second, the pursuers, were a body some 74,000 strong formed by the junction of Ney and Napoleon, and pressing forward to bring Wellington to battle.

At Quatre Bras, Wellington had not been able, as he had hoped, to join the Prussians and save them from defeat. The French, under Ney, had held him up. He would even have suffered a reverse had Ney attacked promptly and strongly earlier in the day of Friday the 16th, but Ney had not acted promptly and strongly.

All day long reinforcements had come in one after the other, much later than the Duke intended, but in a sufficient measure to meet the tardy and too cautious development of Ney’s attack. Finally, the real peril under which the Duke lay (though he did not know it)—the junction of Erlon and his forces with Ney—had not taken place until darkness fell, and Erlon’s 20,000 had been wasted in the futile fashion which has been described and analysed.

The upshot, therefore, of the whole business at Quatre Bras was, that during the night between Friday and Saturday the 16th and the 17th the English and the French lay upon their positions, neither seriously incommoding the other.

During that night further reinforcements reached Wellington where his troops had bivouacked upon the positions they had held so well. Lord Uxbridge, in command of the British cavalry, and Ompteda’s brigade both came up with the morning, as did also Clinton’s division and Colville’s division, and so did the reserve artillery.

In spite of all these reinforcements, in spite even of the great mass of horse which Uxbridge had brought up, and of the new guns, Wellington’s position upon that morning of Saturday the 17th of June was, though he did not yet know it, very perilous.

He still believed that the Prussians were holding on to Ligny, and that they had kept their positions during the night, which night he had himself spent at Genappe, to the rear of the battlefield of Quatre Bras.[14]

When Wellington awoke on the morning of Saturday in Genappe, there were rumours in the place that the Prussians had been defeated the day before at Ligny. The Duke went at once to Quatre Bras; sent Colonel Gordon off eastward with a detachment of the Tenth Hussars to find out what had happened, and that officer, finding the road from Ligny in the hands of the French, had the sense to scout up northwards, came upon the tail of the Prussian retreat, and returned to Wellington at Quatre Bras by half-past seven with the whole story: the Prussians had indeed been beaten; they were in full retreat; but a chance of retreat had lain open towards the north, and that was the road they had taken.

Wellington knew, therefore, before eight o’clock on that Saturday morning, that his whole left or eastern flank was exposed, and it was common-sense to expect that Napoleon, with the main body of the French, having defeated the Prussians at Ligny, would now march against himself, come up upon that exposed flank (while Ney held the front), and so outnumber the Anglo-Dutch under the Duke’s command. At the worst that command would be destroyed; at the best it could only hope, if it gave time for Napoleon to come up, to have to retreat westward, and to lose touch, for good, with the Prussians.In such a plight it was Wellington’s business to retreat towards the north, so as to remain in touch with his Prussian allies, while yet that line of retreat was open to him, and before Napoleon should have forced a battle.

Sketch showing the situation in which Wellington was
at Quatre Bras on the morning of the 17th.

The Duke was in no hurry to undertake this movement, for as yet there was no sign of Napoleon’s arrival. The men breakfasted, and it was not until ten o’clock that the retreat began. He sent word back up the road to stop the reinforcements that were still upon their way to join him at Quatre Bras, and to turn them round again up the Brussels road, the way they had come, until they should reach the ridge of the Mont St Jean, just in front of the village of Waterloo, where he had determined to stand. This done, he made his dispositions for retirement, and a little after ten o’clock the retreat upon Waterloo began. His English infantry led the retreat, the Netherland troops following, then the Brunswickers, and the last files of that whole great body of men were marching up the Brussels road northward before noon. Meanwhile, Lord Uxbridge, with his very considerable force of cavalry and the guns necessary to support it, deployed to cover the retreat, and watched the enemy.

That enemy was motionless. Ney did not propose to attack until Napoleon should come up. Napoleon and his troops, arriving from the battlefield of Ligny, were not visible until within the neighbourhood of two o’clock. As he came near the Emperor was perceived, his memorable form distinguished in the midst of a small escorting body, urging the march; and the English guns, during one of those rare moments in which war discovers something of drama, fired upon the man who was the incarnation of all that furious generation of arms. In a military study, this moment, valuable to civilian history, may be neglected.

The flood of French troops arriving made it hard for Uxbridge, in spite of his very numerous cavalry and supporting guns, to cover Wellington’s retreat.

The task was, however, not only successfully but nobly accomplished. Just as the French came up the sky had darkened and a furious storm had broken from the north-west upon the opposing forces. It was in the midst of a rain so violent that friend could be hardly distinguished from foe at thirty yards distance that the pursuit began, and to the noise of limbers galloped furiously to avoid capture, and of all those squadrons pursuing and pursued, was joined an incessant thunder.

Things are accomplished in war which do not fit into the framework of its largest stories, and tend, therefore, to be lost. Overshadowed by the great story of Waterloo, the work which Lord Uxbridge and his Horse did on that afternoon of Saturday the 17th of June is too often forgotten.The ability and the energy displayed were equal.

The first deployment to meet the French advance, the watching of the retirement of Wellington’s main body, the continual appreciation of ground during a rapid and dangerous movement and in the worst of weather, the choice of occasional artillery positions—all these showed mastery, and secured the complete order of Wellington’s retreat.[15]

The pursuit was checked at its most important point (where the French had to cross the river Dyle at Genappe) by a rapid deployment of the cavalry upon the slope beyond the stream, a rapid unlimbering of the batteries in retreat, and a double charge, first of the Seventh Hussars, next of the First Life Guards.These charges were successful, they checked the French, and during the remainder of the afternoon the pursuit to the north of the Dyle slackened off until, before darkness, it ceased altogether.

Indeed, there was by that time no further use in it. The mass of Wellington’s army had reached, and had deployed upon, that ridge of the Mont St Jean where he intended to turn and give battle. They were in a position to receive any immediate attack, and the purposes of mere pursuit were at an end.

Facing that ridge of the Mont St Jean, where, at the end of the afternoon and through the evening, Wellington’s troops were already taking up their positions, was another ridge, best remembered by the name of a farm upon its crest, the “Belle Alliance.” This ridge formed the natural halting-place of the pursuers. From the height above Genappe to the ridge of the Belle Alliance was but 5000 yards; and if a further reason be quoted for the cessation of the pursuit and the ranging into battle array of either force, the weather will provide that reason.

The soil of all these fields is of a peculiar black and consistent sort, almost impassable after a drenching rain. The great paved high road which traverses it was occupied and encumbered by the wheeled vehicles and by the artillery. A rapid advance of infantry bodies thrown out to the right and left of the road, and so securing speed by parallel advance, was made impossible by mud, and the line grew longer and longer down the main road, forbidding rapid movement. From mud, that “fifth element in war” (as Napoleon himself called it), Wellington’s troops—the mass of them at least—had been fairly free. They had reached their positions before the downpour. Only the cavalry of the rearguard and its batteries had felt the full force of the storm. Dry straw of the tall standing crops had been cut on the ridge of the Mont St Jean, and the men of Wellington’s command bivouacked as well as might be under such weather.

With the French it was otherwise. Their belated units kept straggling in until long after nightfall. The army was drawn up only at great expense of time and floundering effort, mainly in the dark, drenched, sodden with mud, along the ridge of the Belle Alliance. It was with difficulty that the wood of the bivouac fires could be got to burn at all. They were perpetually going out; and all that darkness was passed in a misery which the private soldier must silently expect as part of his trade, and which is relieved only by those vague corporate intuitions of a common peril, and perhaps a common glory, which, down below all the physical business, form the soul of an army.

Napoleon, when he had inspected all this and assured himself that Wellington was standing ranged upon the opposite ridge, returned to sleep an hour or two at the farm called Le Caillou, a mile behind the line of bivouacs. Wellington took up his quarters in the village of Waterloo, about a mile and a half behind the bivouacs of his troops upon the Mont St Jean.

In such a disposition the two commanders and their forces waited for the day.

There must, lastly, be considered, before the description of action is entered on, the nature of the field upon which it was about to be contested. That field had been studied by Wellington the year before. He, incomparably the greatest tactical defensive commander of his time, and one of the greatest of all time, had chosen it for its capacities of defence. They were formidable. Relying upon them, and confident of the Prussians coming to his aid when the battle was joined, he rightly counted upon success.

Let us begin by noting that of no battle is it more important to seize the exact nature of the terrain, that is, of the ground over which it was fought, than of Waterloo.

To the eye the structure of the battlefield is simple, consisting essentially of two slight and rounded ridges, separated by a very shallow undulation of land.

But this general formation is complicated by certain features which can only be grasped with the aid of contours, and these contours, again, are not very easy to follow at first sight for those who have not seen the battlefield.

In the map which forms the frontispiece of this volume, and to which I will beg the reader to turn, I have indicated the undulations of land in pale green lines underlying the other features of the battle, which are in black, red, and blue. The contours are drawn at five metres (that is 16 feet 4 inches) distance; no contours are given below that of 100 metres above the sea. The valley floors below that level are shaded. Up to the 120-metre line the contours are indicated by continuous lines of increasing thickness. Above the 120-metre line they are indicated by faint dotted or dashed lines. I hope in this manner, though the task is a difficult one, to give a general impression of the field.

The whole field, both slight ridges and the intervening depression, lies upon a large swell of land many square miles in extent, while it slopes away gradually to the east on one side and the west on the other. The highest and hardly distinguishable knolls of it stand about 450 feet above the sea. The site of the battle lies actually on the highest part, the water-parting; and the floors of the valleys, down which the streams run to the east and to the west, are from 150 to 200 feet lower than this confused lift of land between. To one, however, standing upon any part of the battlefield, this feature of height is not very apparent. True, one sees lower levels falling away left and right, and the view seems oddly wide, but the eye gathers the impression of little more than a rolling plain. This is because, in comparison with the scale of the landscape as a whole, the elevations and depressions are slight.

Upon this rolling mass of high land there stand out, as I have said, those two slight ridges, and these ridges lie, roughly speaking, east and west—perpendicular to the great Brussels road, which cuts them from south to north. It was upon this great Brussels road that both Wellington and Napoleon took up, at distances less than a mile apart, their respective centres of position for the struggle. Though this line of the road did not precisely bisect the two lines of the opposing armies, the point where it crossed each line marked the tactical centre of that line: both Wellington and Napoleon remained in person upon that road.

Now it must not be imagined that the shallow depression between the ridges stretches of even depth between the two positions taken up by Wellington and Napoleon, with the road cutting its middle; on the contrary, it is bridged, a little to the west of the road, by a “saddle,” a belt of fields very nearly flat, and very nearly as high as each ridge. The eastern half of the depression therefore rises continually, and gets shallower and shallower as it approaches the road from east westward, and the road only cuts off the last dip of it. Then, just west of the road there is the saddle; and as you proceed still further westward along the line midway between the French and English positions you find a second shallow valley falling away. This second valley does not precisely continue the direction of the first, but turns rather more to the north. In the first slight decline of this second valley, and a few hundred yards west of the road, lies the country-house called Hougomont, and just behind it lay the western end of Wellington’s line. The whole position, therefore, if it were cut out as a model in section from a block of wood, might appear as does the accompanying plan.

In such a model the northern ridge P—Q some two miles in length is that held by Wellington. The southern one M—N is that held by Napoleon. Napoleon commanded from the point A, Wellington from the point B, and the dark band running from one to the other represents the great Brussels High Road. The subsidiary ridge O—O is that on which Napoleon, as we shall see, planted his great battery preparatory to the assault. The enclosure H is Hougomont, the enclosure S is La Haye Sainte.

Of the two ridges, that held by Napoleon needs less careful study for the comprehension of the battle than that held by Wellington.

The latter is known as the Ridge of the Mont St Jean, from a farm lying a little below its highest point and a little behind its central axis. This ridge Wellington had carefully studied the year before, and that great master of defence had noted and admired the excellence of its defensive character. Not only does the land rise towards the ridge through the whole length of the couple of miles his troops occupied, not only is it almost free of “dead”[16] ground, but there lie before it two walled enclosures, the small one of La Haye Sainte, the large one of Hougomont, which, properly prepared and loopholed as they were, were equivalent to a couple of forts standing out to break the attack. There is, again, behind the whole line of the ridge, lower ground upon which the Duke could and did conceal troops, and along which he could and did move them safely during the course of the action.

Anyone acquainted with Wellington’s various actions and their terrains will recognise a common quality in them: they were all chosen by an eye unequalled for seizing, even in where an immediate decision was necessary, all the capabilities of a defensive position. That taken up on the 18th of June 1815, in the Duke’s last battle, had been chosen, not under the exigencies of immediate combat, but with full leisure and after a complete study. It is little wonder, then, that it is the best example of all. Of all the defensive positions which the genius of Wellington has made famous in Europe, none excels that of Waterloo.

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