him to turn northwards and assault the Prussian flank, but just then yet another courier arrives, this one from Marshal Ney, demanding that d’Erlon return to Quatre-Bras immediately.
D’Erlon assumes that Ney is in desperate trouble and so he turns his Corps around and sets off a second time for Quatre-Bras. The Emperor has launched his great attack, but by the time he realizes d’Erlon is not engaged, the 1st Corps has vanished. Thus did those 22,000 men spend that Friday, marching between two battlefields and helping at neither. D’Erlon arrived at Quatre-Bras too late, the fighting had ended at sundown and his powerful Corps, which could have swung either the battle at Ligny or the fighting at Quatre-Bras, had achieved nothing. It is the French equivalent of the Grand Old Duke of York, except d’Erlon spent his day halfway between two fights, neither up nor down, and his prevarication denied Napoleon the crushing victory he expected.
Because Ligny was a victory. The final assault of the Imperial Guard captures the villages at the centre of the Prussian line and sends Blücher’s army reeling back. The pretty village of Ligny, with its thatched houses, is a charnel house, especially the church and graveyard which saw the severest fighting. Marshal Blücher, despite his age, tried to restore the position by attacking with his own cavalry. He was unhorsed and ridden over by French heavy cavalry, but Blücher’s aide-de-camp, with great presence of mind, draped a cloak over the Marshal’s medals and braid, so obscuring his eminent status, and in the failing light the French cavalry did not recognize him, so that at last he could be rescued by his own men. He was bruised and dazed, and his army was beaten, but it was not destroyed. The ‘ifs’ of history are generally pointless, but there can be little doubt that d’Erlon’s men, if they had done what the Emperor wanted, would have made the difference. The final successful attack would have been made earlier in the evening, giving the French more time to complete the enemy’s destruction, and d’Erlon’s Corps could have rolled up the Prussian right flank and, in all probability, caused such panic and chaos that Blücher’s army might have ceased to exist.
But it did exist. It had been wounded, but the two flanks were still coherent, and Blücher was alive and, though they had been beaten, they managed to withdraw from the battlefield in reasonable order and the French made no effort to pursue in the gathering dark. One Prussian officer recalled:
The men looked dreadfully tired after the fighting. In the great heat gunpowder smoke, sweat and mud had congealed into a thick crust of dirt so that their faces looked like mulattos … and many who had been unwilling to leave the ranks because of a slight wound wore bandages they had made themselves and in a number of men the blood was soaking through. As a result of fighting in the villages for hours and frequently crawling through hedges the men’s tunics and trousers were torn so that they hung in rags and their bare skin showed.
Blücher was still recovering, and Gneisenau, the clever Chief of Staff, was temporarily in charge of the Prussians. Sixteen thousand Prussians had been killed, wounded or taken prisoner, and another 8,000 had simply disappeared in the darkness and were heading for home as fast as they could, but General von Bülow’s Corps had never reached the battlefield, and was intact, and the remainder of the army was doing its best to regroup in the wet night. The diary of a senior Prussian officer – sadly his name is not known – records meeting Gneisenau that night:
I found him in a farmhouse. The village had been abandoned by its inhabitants and every building was crammed with wounded. No lights, no drinking water, no rations. We were in a small room where an oil-lamp burned dimly. Wounded men lay moaning on the floor. The General himself was seated on a barrel of pickled cabbage with only four or five people gathered about him. Scattered troops passed through the village all night long, no-one knew whence they came or where they were going … but morale had not sunk. Every man was looking for his comrades so as to restore order.
So Ligny was a victory for Napoleon, but it had not achieved his first objective, which was to destroy one of the allied armies. It remained to be seen whether he had achieved his second objective, which was to drive the Prussians away from their British–Dutch allies. If that happened, if Blücher led his army eastwards towards Prussia, then Ligny would be a stunning victory.
But though the Prussian army had been defeated, it was still capable of fighting, as was its commander, Blücher. In the morning after the battle he sent for Colonel Hardinge, the British liaison officer who had lost his left hand in the battle, and called him lieber Freund, dear friend, and Hardinge remembered how the old Marshal stank of schnapps and rhubarb, the first a medicine taken internally, the second a liniment on his bruises. And Marshal Forwards was still belligerent. He had been defeated, not beaten. ‘We lost the day,’ Blücher remarked, ‘but not our honour,’ and he would live up to his nickname and fight again.
His army had survived because d’Erlon’s Corps had failed to arrive.
But the British had also failed to arrive. That is another ‘if’ of history, what might have happened if Wellington had brought troops to Blücher’s aid. He had promised to do so, ‘provided I am not attacked myself’, but while Blücher was engaged in his desperate struggle at Ligny another battle was being fought just five miles away.
The battle of Quatre-Bras.
Marshal Michel Ney, c. 1804 (French school). ‘Bravest of the brave’, mercurial and fearsome, Ney, was fiery, red-haired and passionate – renowned for his extraordinary courage and inspiring leadership, no one would ever call Ney cool-headed.
‘Battle of Ligny – Marshal Blücher stunned by the violent fall lay entangled under his horse’. Marshal Blücher, despite his age, tried to restore the position by attacking with his own cavalry. He was unhorsed and ridden over by French heavy cavalry, but Blücher’s aide-de-camp, with great presence of mind, draped a cloak over the Marshal’s medals and braid, so obscuring his eminent status, and in the failing light the French cavalry did not recognize him, so that at last he could be rescued by his own men.
‘Battle of Ligny, 16 June 1815’. The battle was a desperate struggle, reduced to hand-to-hand fighting in the villages. A French officer said the dead in the main street ‘were piled two or three deep. The blood flowed from them in streams … the mud was formed from crushed bones and flesh.’ The sky thickened with great gouts of powder smoke belched by massive cannon that fill the air with man-made thunder.
Avancez, mes enfants, courage, encore une fois, Français!
BERNHARD OF SAXE-WEIMAR’S 4,000 troops at Quatre-Bras were reinforced early on that Friday morning with another 4,000 men from the Dutch army, but luckily for them Marshal Ney hesitated. He feared the landscape, thinking it might conceal Wellington’s whole army, while in truth that army was still desperately trying to reach the crossroads.
The battle that was to develop at Quatre-Bras was a scrambling affair and one that stands out from all Wellington’s others. He is usually depicted, somewhat disparagingly, as a great defensive general. He was indeed a great defensive general, choosing the ground on which he would fight and using that ground to his men’s advantage as he had at Busaco, but to dismiss him as merely a defensive fighter is to wilfully ignore some of his greatest victories. When he was asked, much later in life, of what he was most proud he replied in one