still do not know why’.
The formidable 71-year-old Prince Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher – nicknamed ‘Marschall Vorwärts’ … Marshal Forwards. Wood engraving after a drawing by Adolph Menzel.
The fate of France is in your hands!
THE 16TH OF JUNE was a Friday. It dawned hot and sweltering. The Prussians were assembling their army close to the small town of Sombreffe, the French were advancing towards them, while the British–Dutch army was desperately trying to regain that lost day’s march. Wellington, realizing the importance of that insignificant crossroads at Quatre-Bras, had ordered his army to march there, but he had left the order late. Too late? Some troops marched from Brussels by moonlight, leaving the city at two in the morning, but most waited until dawn. The city was close to panic. Captain Johnny Kincaid, an officer of the 95th Rifles, slept on a pavement, or rather he tried to sleep:
But we were every instant disturbed by ladies as well as gentlemen; some stumbling over us in the dark, some shaking us out of our sleep, to be told the news … All those who applied for the benefit of my advice I recommended to go home to bed, to keep themselves perfectly cool and to rest assured that, if their departure from the city became necessary (which I very much doubted) they would have at least one whole day to prepare for it as we were leaving some beef and potatoes behind us, for which, I was sure, we would fight rather than abandon!
Few did sleep that night, though the Duke snatched a couple of hours before leaving for Quatre-Bras. English visitors to Brussels, and there were many, said their goodbyes to the soldiers. One of those visitors, Miss Charlotte Waldie, recalled ‘the tumult and confusion of martial preparation’:
Officers looking in vain for their servants, servants running in pursuit of their masters, baggage waggons were loading, trains of artillery harnessing … As the dawn broke the soldiers were seen assembling from all parts of the town, in marching order, with their knapsacks on their backs, loaded with three days’ provisions … Numbers were taking leave of their wives and children, perhaps for the last time, and many a veteran’s rough cheek was wet with the tears of sorrow. One poor fellow, immediately under our windows, turned back again and again to bid his wife farewell, and take his baby once more in his arms; and I saw him hastily brush away a tear with the sleeve of his coat as he gave her back the child for the last time, wrung her hand, and ran off to join his company which was drawn up on the other side of the Place Royale.
Miss Waldie does not say what nationality that poor soldier was, though it is very possible he was British. A small number of wives and children were allowed to accompany a battalion on foreign service. They were chosen by lottery on the eve of departure and the women were expected to be launderers and cooks, but the families had been instructed to stay in Brussels as the troops marched south. Lieutenant Basil Jackson of the Royal Staff Corps watched the exodus:
First came a battalion of the 95th Rifles, dressed in dark green, and with black accoutrements. The 28th Regiment followed, then the 42nd Highlanders, marching so steadily that the sable plumes of their bonnets scarcely quivered.
Lieutenant Jackson had been awake most of the night, delivering a message eastwards, and now he had a moment to rest before mounting his tired horse and following those steady Highlanders towards the crisis.
And it was a crisis. Quatre-Bras marked the last place where the allies had easy access to each other. Lose Quatre-Bras and the only connecting roads would be country lanes which twisted through hilly country and were obstructed by narrow bridges, so if Napoleon could thrust the British away from the crossroads then communication between the British–Dutch and the Prussians would become far more difficult. All the French needed to do was push, and the Emperor had massively reinforced Ney’s force. Indeed, by the morning of the 16th, the French had over 40,000 troops with which to overwhelm the small Dutch contingent under Saxe-Weimar. Those Nassauers had little ammunition left, just ten rounds a man. ‘I will defend the post entrusted to me as long as possible,’ Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar had promised, but how long could 4,000 men who were short of ammunition hold out against Ney’s overwhelming force?
But Marshal Ney, astonishingly, did nothing. He could have captured the crossroads any time that morning with little effort. He had an overwhelming advantage in numbers, yet still ‘the bravest of the brave’ hesitated. He claimed later to be waiting for further orders from Napoleon, yet he had not even obeyed the Emperor’s previous orders, which were clear enough, capture Quatre-Bras, and while he waited the British–Dutch reinforcements were marching from Nivelles and from Brussels. Many explanations have been offered for Ney’s inactivity: that he really was confused and waiting for orders, or that he misunderstood the Emperor’s intentions, or, perhaps, that he was being extremely cautious.
Ney knew he was facing the British–Dutch army that was commanded by the Duke of Wellington, and Ney had faced Wellington before. He had been at Busaco in 1810 when 65,000 French troops had attacked Wellington’s 50,000 and been bloodily repulsed. Ney had commanded an army Corps that had attacked the centre of the British line, and all seemed to be going well as the French troops advanced uphill against a fairly scattered skirmish line of British and Portuguese troops, but just as the Corps reached the heights of Busaco the British sprang their trap and two concealed battalions of redcoats stood and fired a tremendous volley at close range and followed it with a bayonet charge that sent Ney’s men reeling in panic down the hill.
Wellington was a master of the ‘reverse slope’. Very simply, that means he liked to conceal his troops behind a hill. At Busaco the British objective was to hold the high hill, but if Wellington had positioned his men on the crest, or on the forward slope, then they would have become targets for the deadly efficient French artillery. By placing them just behind the crest, on the reverse slope, he kept them safe from most artillery fire and concealed his dispositions from the enemy. One biographer of Napoleon called this a ‘tired old dodge’, which is a remarkably stupid comment. It was, perhaps, an obvious tactic, but concealing and protecting troops is neither a ‘dodge’ nor ‘tired’, and the surprising thing is how rarely other commanders used the tactic.
Ney, south of the crossroads, could not see what awaited him at Quatre-Bras. His view northwards was obstructed by thick woods, by some gentle undulations in the ground and, especially, by those tall crops of rye and other cereals. His experience in Spain, and his knowledge that he faced Wellington, could well have convinced him that the innocent-looking landscape actually concealed the whole of the British–Dutch army. This was a moment when Wellington’s reputation served him well. In truth the British–Dutch army was still marching on dusty roads under a sweltering sun and the crossroads was there for the taking, but Ney hesitated.
‘In three hours the campaign will be decided,’ Napoleon claimed that day, but Ney was wasting those hours. Napoleon had decided on his tactics for the day. He divided his army. One of the rules of war is never to divide an army, but Napoleon only meant the division to be temporary. He would attack the Prussians around the village of Ligny and fully expected that Ney would throw back any British attack at Quatre-Bras and then march eastwards from the crossroads to assault the flank of the Prussians. Napoleon, by attacking the Prussians from their front, would hold them in place until Ney’s strong force fell on their right flank to destroy them. Then, with the Prussians defeated and his army reunited, Napoleon would turn on the British–Dutch.
Blücher’s hopes for the day were almost a mirror-image of Napoleon’s. The Prussians would hold their