west of France which had always been Catholic and Monarchist, but by early summer Napoleon had a total force of 360,000 trained men, the best of whom were destined to assemble in northern France, where 125,000 experienced soldiers would form l’Armée du Nord, the army of the north.
Napoleon could have remained on the defensive that summer, stationing most of his men behind massive fortifications and hoping that the allied armies would batter themselves to destruction. That was not appealing. Such a war would be fought on French soil and Napoleon had never been a passive general. His skill was manoeuvre. In 1814 he had faced overwhelming odds as the Prussians, Austrians and Russians approached Paris from the north and east, and he had dazzled them with the speed of his marches and the suddenness of his attacks. To military professionals that campaign was Napoleon’s finest, even though it did end in defeat, and the Duke of Wellington took care to study it. Napoleon himself claimed:
The art of war does not need complicated manoeuvre; the simplest are the best, and common sense is fundamental. From which one might wonder why generals make blunders; it is because they try to be clever. The most difficult thing is to guess the enemy’s plan, to find the truth from all the reports. The rest merely requires common sense; it is like a boxing match, the more you punch the better it is.
The Emperor was being disingenuous. War was never quite that simple, but in essence his strategy was simple. It was to divide his enemies, then pin one down while the other was attacked hard and, like a boxing match, the harder he punched the quicker the result. Then, once one enemy was destroyed, he would turn on the next. The best defence for Napoleon in 1815 was attack, and the obvious enemy to attack was the closest.
It would take time for the massive Russian army to cross Europe and reach the French frontier, and the Austrians were still not ready in May. But just to the north of France, in the old province of Belgium that was now part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, two armies were gathering: the British and the Prussian. Napoleon calculated that if he could beat those two armies then the other allies would lose heart. If he defeated Wellington and drove the British back to the sea, there could even be a change of government in London which might bring a Whig administration inclined to let him stay as ruler of France. The enemy alliance would then fall apart. It was a gamble, of course, but all war is a gamble. He could have waited to raise and train more men until the French army almost matched the allies in number, but those two armies north of the border were too tempting. If they could be divided then they could be beaten, and if they could be beaten then the enemy coalition might collapse. It had happened before, so why not now?
The army he would take north was a good one, filled with experienced troops. If it had a weakness it was in the high command. Napoleon had always depended on his Marshals, but of the twenty Marshals still living four remained loyal to Louis XVIII, four more defected to the allies and two simply lay low. One of those two was Marshal Berthier, who had been Napoleon’s Chief of Staff and had a genius for organization. He fled to Bavaria, where on 1 June he fell to his death from a third-floor window of Bamberg Castle. Some suspect murder, but the most likely explanation is that he simply leaned too far out to watch some Russian cavalry pass through the square beneath. He was replaced by Nicolas Jean de Dieu Soult, a hugely experienced soldier who had risen from the ranks. Napoleon once called him ‘the greatest manoeuvrer in Europe’, but when Soult commanded armies in Spain he found himself constantly outfought by Wellington. He was a difficult man, prickly and proud, and it remained to be seen whether he possessed Berthier’s administrative talents.
Two of the Emperor’s most brilliant Marshals, Davout and Suchet, did not accompany l’Armée du Nord. Davout, a grim and relentless fighter, was made Minister for War and stayed in Paris, while Suchet was appointed commander of the Army of the Alps, a grand name for a small and ill-equipped force. Napoleon, asked which were his greatest generals, named André Masséna and Louis-Gabriel Suchet, but the first was in ill health and Suchet was left behind to defend France’s eastern frontier against an Austrian attack.
Napoleon created one new Marshal for the coming campaign: Emmanuel, Marquis de Grouchy. Davout advised against the appointment, but Napoleon insisted. Grouchy was an aristocrat from the ancien régime and had been fortunate to survive the slaughters of the French Revolution. He had made his reputation as a cavalryman; now he would be given command of one third of l’Armée du Nord.
Then there was the Marshal who was called the ‘bravest of the brave’, the mercurial and fearsome Michel Ney, who, like Soult, had risen from the ranks. He was fiery, red-haired and passionate, the son of a barrel-maker. He was forty-six years old in 1815, the same age as Napoleon and Wellington, and he had made his reputation on some of the bloodiest battlefields of the long war. No one doubted his courage. He was a soldier’s soldier, a warrior who, when Napoleon landed from Elba, had famously promised Louis XVIII to bring the Emperor back to Paris in an iron cage. Instead he had defected with his troops. He was renowned for his extraordinary courage and inspiring leadership, but no one would ever call Ney cool-headed. And, ominously, Soult detested Ney, and Ney detested Soult, yet the two were expected to work together in that fateful summer.
The Marshals were important, and none more so than the Chief of Staff, because it was his job to translate the Emperor’s wishes into mundane orders of march. Berthier had been a brilliant administrator, foreseeing problems and sorting them efficiently, and it remained to be seen whether Marshal Soult had the same ability to organize over a hundred thousand men, to feed them, move them and bring them to battle according to his Emperor’s wishes. The other Marshals would have the heavy responsibility of independent command. If the Emperor’s tactic was to pin one enemy army and keep it in place while he defeated the other, then a Marshal would be the man doing the pinning. At the opening of hostilities it was Marshal Ney’s job to keep Wellington busy while Napoleon fought the Prussians, and two days later Marshal Grouchy had to divert the Prussians while Napoleon destroyed Wellington’s men. Those tasks were not done by just following orders, but by imaginative soldiering. A Marshal was expected to take the difficult decisions, and Napoleon was entrusting them to Grouchy, new to his high rank and nervous of failure, and to Ney, whose only mode of battle was to fight like the devil.
L’Armée du Nord would face two armies in Belgium, of which the largest was the Prussian. It was led by the 74-year-old Prince Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, who had first fought for Sweden against the Prussians, but after being captured was commissioned into the Prussian army by Frederick the Great. He was vastly experienced, a cavalryman with the nickname of Marschall Vorwärts, Marshal Forwards, because of his habit of shouting his men forward. He was popular, much loved by his troops and, famously, prone to bouts of mental illness during which he believed himself pregnant with an elephant fathered by a French infantryman. There was no trace of this madness during the summer of 1815; instead Blücher marched with a fanatical determination to defeat Napoleon. He was bluff, courageous, and if he was not the smartest general he had the sense to employ brilliant staff officers. In 1815 his Chief of Staff was August von Gneisenau, a man of vast ability and long experience, some of which had been gained fighting alongside the British during the American Revolution. That had soured his views of the British army, and Gneisenau was extremely suspicious of British abilities and intentions. When Baron von Müffling was appointed as the liaison officer to Wellington he was summoned by Gneisenau, who warned him:
To be much on my guard with the Duke of Wellington, because by his relations with India and his transactions with the deceitful Nabobs, this distinguished general had so accustomed himself to duplicity that he had at last become such a master in the art as to outwit the Nabobs themselves.
It defies imagination to know how Gneisenau got hold of this strange opinion, but given Gneisenau’s responsibilities and Blücher’s high regard for his advice, it hardly boded well for future relations between the British and Prussians. There was mistrust anyway between the two countries over Prussia’s ambition to annex Saxony, a disagreement that had soured the Congress of Vienna. The British, French and Austrians were so opposed to this expansion of Prussian power that they had agreed to go to war rather than permit it. Russia had similar ambitions for the whole of Poland, and at one time it looked as if a new war would break out in Europe with Prussia and Russia fighting against the rest. That had been averted,