Waterloo

The History of Four Days, Three Armies, and Three Battles

Bernard Cornwell

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780062312068
• eBook ISBN: 9780062312075
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

#1 Bestseller in the U.K.

From the New York Times bestselling author and master of martial fiction comes the definitive, illustrated history of one of the greatest battles ever fought—a riveting nonfiction chronicle published to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s last stand.

On June 18, 1815 the armies of France, Britain and Prussia descended upon a quiet valley south of Brussels. In the previous three days, the French army had beaten the Prussians at Ligny and fought the British to a standstill at Quatre-Bras. The Allies were in retreat. The little village north of where they turned to fight the French army was called Waterloo. The blood-soaked battle to which it gave its name would become a landmark in European history.

In his first work of nonfiction, Bernard Cornwell combines his storytelling skills with a meticulously researched history to give a riveting chronicle of every dramatic moment, from Napoleon’s daring escape from Elba to the smoke and gore of the three battlefields and their aftermath. Through quotes from the letters and diaries of Emperor Napoleon, the Duke of Wellington, and the ordinary officers and soldiers, he brings to life how it actually felt to fight those famous battles—as well as the moments of amazing bravery on both sides that left the actual outcome hanging in the balance until the bitter end.

Published to coincide with the battle’s bicentennial in 2015, Waterloo is a tense and gripping story of heroism and tragedy—and of the final battle that determined the fate of nineteenth-century Europe.

CHAPTER ONE

Glorious news! Nap’s landed again in France, Hurrah!

‘MY ISLAND IS NONE TOO BIG!’ Napoleon declared when he found himself ruler of Elba, the tiny island that lies between Corsica and Italy. He had been Emperor of France and ruler of 44 million people, yet now, in 1814, he governed just 86 square miles and 11,000 subjects. Yet he was determined to be a good ruler, and no sooner had he arrived than he began issuing a string of decrees that would reform the island’s mining industry and its agriculture. Little escaped his attention; ‘Inform the intendant’, he wrote, ‘of my dissatisfaction at the dirty state of the streets.’

His plans extended far beyond street-cleaning. He wanted to build a new hospital, new schools and new roads, but there was never enough money. The restored monarchy in France had agreed to pay Napoleon a subsidy of 2 million francs a year, but it soon became apparent that the money would never be paid, and without money there could be no new hospitals, schools or roads. Frustrated by this failure, the Emperor retired into a sulk, passing the days by playing cards with his attendants, and all the while aware of the British and French warships that guarded Elba’s coast to make certain he did not leave his Lilliputian kingdom.

The Emperor was bored. He missed his wife and son. He missed Josephine too and he was inconsolable when the news of her death reached Elba. Poor Josephine, with her black teeth, languid manner and lissom body, a woman who was adored by every man who met her, who was unfaithful to Napoleon, yet was always forgiven. He loved her even though, for dynastic reasons, he had divorced her. ‘I have not passed a day without loving you,’ he wrote to her after her death as though she still lived, ‘I have not spent a night without clasping you in my arms … no woman was ever loved with such devotion!’

He was bored and he was angry. He was angry at Louis XVIII, who was not paying the agreed subsidy, and furious at Talleyrand, once his own Foreign Minister, who now negotiated for the French monarchy at the Congress of Vienna. Talleyrand, sly, clever and duplicitous, was warning the other European envoys that Napoleon could never be kept safe on a small Mediterranean island so close to France. He wanted the Emperor sent far away to some remote place like the Azores, or better still to a West Indian island where the yellow fever raged, or perhaps to some speck in a distant ocean like Saint Helena.

Talleyrand was right while the British Commissioner, sent to Elba to keep a watchful eye on the Emperor, was wrong. Sir Neil Campbell believed that Napoleon had accepted his fate and wrote as much to Lord Castlereagh, Britain’s Foreign Minister. ‘I begin to think’, he reported, ‘that he is quite resigned to his retreat.’

The Emperor was anything but resigned. He followed the news from France and noted the dissatisfaction with the restored monarchy. There was widespread unemployment, the price of bread was high, and people who had greeted the Emperor’s abdication with relief now looked back on his regime with regret. And so he began to make plans. He had been allowed a puny navy, nothing large enough to threaten the French and British ships that guarded him, and in mid-February 1815, he ordered the Inconstant, the largest of his brigs, brought into port; ‘have its copper bottom overhauled,’ he commanded, ‘its leaks stopped and … have it painted like the English brigs. I want it in the bay and ready by the 24th or 25th of this month.’ He ordered two other large ships to be chartered. He had been allowed to take 1,000 soldiers to Elba, including 400 veterans of his old Imperial Guard and a battalion of Polish lancers, and with those troops he would attempt to invade France.

And Sir Neil Campbell suspected nothing. Sir Neil was a decent man, thirty-nine years old in 1815, with a successful military career which almost ended in 1814 when he was appointed Military Attaché to the Russian army invading France. He had survived battles in Spain, but at Fère-Champenoise he was mistaken by an over-enthusiastic Cossack for a French officer and savagely wounded.

He survived his wounds and was appointed British Commissioner to His Highness the Emperor Napoleon, ruler of Elba. Lord Castlereagh stressed that Sir Neil was not the Emperor’s jailer, but of course part of his job was to keep a close eye on Napoleon. Yet Sir Neil had been lulled, and in February 1815, while the Inconstant was being disguised as a British ship, he told the Emperor that he needed to sail to Italy to consult with his doctor. That may well have been true, but it is also true that Signora Bartoli, Sir Neil’s mistress, lived in Leghorn, and that is where he sailed.

The Emperor wished Sir Neil well and hoped he would return by the end of the month because the Princess Borghese was giving a ball, and Sir Neil promised he would do his best to attend. The Princess Borghese was Napoleon’s beguiling sister, the lovely Pauline, who had joined her brother in exile. Penury had forced the sale of her lavish house in Paris, which had been purchased by the British government for use as their embassy. That meant that for five months it had been home to the Duke of Wellington, who had been appointed Britain’s ambassador to the court of Louis XVIII. The house, on the rue du Faubourg St-Honoré, is a jewel, and is still Britain’s embassy.

Sir Neil sailed to Leghorn in the Royal Navy brig Partridge, which usually blockaded Elba’s main harbour. With the Partridge flown the Emperor could put his plans into effect and on 26 February his small fleet sailed for France with just 1,026 troops, 40 horses and 2 cannon. The voyage lasted two days and on 28 February the Emperor landed in France again. He led a puny army, but Napoleon was nothing if not confident. ‘I will arrive in Paris’, he told his troops, ‘without firing a shot!’

The peace was over, struck by a thunderbolt.

* * *

During the winter of 1814 to 1815 many women in Paris wore violet-coloured dresses. It was not just fashion, but rather a code which suggested that the violet would return in the spring. The violet was Napoleon. His beloved Josephine had carried violets at their wedding, and he sent her a bouquet of the flowers on every anniversary. Before his exile to Elba he had said he would be modest, like the violet. Everyone in Paris knew what the colour violet represented, and if at first the French had been relieved that the Emperor was dethroned and that the long destructive wars were over, they soon found much to dislike in the Emperor’s replacement. The restored monarchy, under the grossly obese Louis XVIII, proved rapacious and unpopular.

Then the violet returned. Most people expected that the Royalist army would swiftly defeat Napoleon’s risible little force, but instead the King’s troops deserted in droves to the returned Emperor and within days French newspapers were printing a witty description of his triumphant journey. There are various versions, but this one is typical:

The Tiger has left his den.

The Ogre has been three days at sea.

The Wretch has landed at Fréjus.

The Buzzard has reached Antibes.

The Invader has arrived at Grenoble.

The Tyrant has entered Lyon.

The Usurper has been glimpsed fifty miles from Paris.

Tomorrow Napoleon will be at our gates!

The Emperor will proceed to the Tuileries today.

His Imperial Majesty will address his loyal subjects tomorrow.

His Imperial Majesty, Napoleon Bonaparte, was forty-six years old as he entered the Tuileries Palace in Paris, where an excited crowd awaited his arrival. They had been gathered for hours. The King, fat Louis XVIII, had fled Paris, going to Ghent in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and the carpet of his abandoned throne room was tufted with embroidered crowns. Someone in the waiting crowd gave one of the crowns a dismissive kick and so loosened it to reveal that the royal tuft hid a woven bee. The honey-bee was another of Napoleon’s symbols, and the excited crowd went to its knees to tear off the crowns, thus restoring the carpet to its old imperial splendour.

It was evening before Napoleon arrived at the palace. The waiting crowd could hear the cheering getting closer, then came the clatter of hoofs on the forecourt and finally the Emperor was there, being carried shoulder-high up the stairs to the audience chamber. An eyewitness said ‘his eyes were closed, his hands reaching forward like a blind man’s, his happiness betrayed only by his smile’.

What a journey it had been! Not just from Elba, but from Napoleon’s unpromising birth in 1769 (the same year as the Duke of Wellington’s birth). He was christened Nabulion Buonaparte, a name that betrays his Corsican origin. His family, which claimed noble lineage, was impoverished and the young Nabulion flirted with those Corsicans who plotted for independence from France and even thought of joining Britain’s Royal Navy, France’s most formidable foe. Instead he emigrated to France, frenchified his name and joined the army. In 1792 he was a Lieutenant, a year later, aged twenty-four, a Brigadier-General.

There is a famous painting of the young Napoleon crossing the St Bernard Pass on his way to the Italian campaign which rocketed him to fame. Louis David’s canvas shows him on a rearing horse, and everything about the painting is motion; the horse rears, its mouth open and eyes wide, its mane is wind-whipped, the sky is stormy and the General’s cloak is a lavish swirl of gale-driven colour. Yet in the centre of that frenzied paint is Napoleon’s calm face. He looks sullen and unsmiling, but above all, calm. That was what he demanded of the painter, and David delivered a picture of a man at home amidst chaos.

The man who was carried up the Tuileries staircase was much changed from the young hero who had possessed rock-star good looks. By 1814 the handsome, slim young man was gone, replaced by a pot-bellied, short-haired figure with sallow skin and very small hands and feet. He was not tall, a little over five foot seven inches, but he was still hypnotic. This was the man who had risen to dominate all Europe, a man who had conquered and lost an empire, who had redrawn the maps, remade the constitution and rewritten the laws of France. He was supremely intelligent, quick-witted, easily bored, but rarely vengeful. The world would not see his like again until the twentieth century, but unlike Mao or Hitler or Stalin, Napoleon was not a murderous tyrant, although like them he was a man who changed history.

He was a superb administrator, but that was not how he wanted to be remembered. Above all, he was a warlord. His idol was Alexander the Great. In the middle of the nineteenth century, in the American Civil War, Robert E. Lee, the great Confederate General, watched his troops executing a brilliant and battle-winning manoeuvre and said, memorably, ‘It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.’ Napoleon had grown too fond of it, he loved war. Perhaps it was his first love, because it combined the excitement of supreme risk with the joy of victory. He had the incisive mind of a great strategist, yet when the marching was done and the enemy was outflanked he still demanded enormous sacrifices of his men. After Austerlitz, when one of his generals lamented the French lying dead on that frozen battlefield, the Emperor retorted that ‘the women of Paris can replace those men in one night’. When Metternich, the clever Austrian Foreign Minister, offered Napoleon honourable peace terms in 1813 and reminded the Emperor of the human cost of refusal, he received the scornful answer that Napoleon would happily sacrifice a million men to gain his ambitions. Napoleon was careless with the lives of his troops, yet his soldiers adored him because he had the common touch. He knew how to speak to them, how to jest with them and how to inspire them. His soldiers might adore him, but his generals feared him. Marshal Augereau, a foul-mouthed disciplinarian, said, ‘This little bastard of a general actually scares me!’, and General Vandamme, a hard man, said he ‘trembled like a child’ when he approached Napoleon. Yet Napoleon led them all to glory. That was his drug, la Gloire! And in search of it he broke peace treaty after peace treaty, and his armies marched beneath their Eagle standards from Madrid to Moscow, from the Baltic to the Red Sea. He astonished Europe with victories like Austerlitz and Friedland, but he also led his Grande Armée to disaster in the Russian snow. Even his defeats were on a gargantuan scale.

Now he must march again, and he knew it. He sent peace feelers to the other European powers, saying that he had returned to France in response to the public will, that he meant no aggression, and that if they accepted his return then he would live in peace, but he must have known those overtures would be rejected.

So the Eagles would fly again.

* * *

The Duke of Wellington’s life was in danger. Appointing him as Ambassador to France was not, perhaps, the most tactful move the British government made, and Paris was filled with rumours about impending assassination attempts. The government in London wanted the Duke to leave Paris, but he refused because such a move would look like cowardice. Then came the perfect excuse. Lord Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary and the chief British negotiator at the Congress in Vienna, was urgently needed in London and the Duke was appointed as his replacement. No one could depict that move as a fearful flight from danger because it was plainly a promotion, and so the Duke joined the diplomats who laboriously attempted to redraw the maps of Europe.

And while they talked Napoleon escaped.

Count Metternich, the cold, clever, handsome Foreign Minister of Austria, was perhaps the most influential diplomat in Vienna. He had gone to bed very late on the night of 6 March 1815 because a meeting of the most important plenipotentiaries had lasted until 3 a.m. He was tired, and so he instructed his valet that he was not to be disturbed, but the man woke the Count anyway at 6 a.m. because a courier had arrived with an express despatch marked ‘URGENT’. The envelope bore the inscription ‘From the Imperial and Royal Consulate at Genoa’, and the Count, perhaps thinking that nothing vital would be communicated from such a minor consulate, put it on his bedside table and tried to go to sleep again. Finally, at around 7.30 in the morning, he broke the seal and read the despatch. It was very short:

The English commissioner Campbell has just entered the harbour asking whether anyone has seen Napoleon at Genoa, in view of the fact that he had disappeared from the island of Elba. The answer being in the negative, the English frigate put to sea without further delay.

It might seem strange that Sir Neil Campbell had sailed to Italy in search of the missing Napoleon rather than looking for the errant Emperor i...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Glorious news! Nap’s landed again in France, Hurrah!
• 2 Napoleon has humbugged me, by God!
• 3 The fate of France is in your hands!
• 4 Avancez, mes enfants, courage, encore une fois, Français!
• 5 Ah! Now I’ve got them, those English!
• 6 A cannon ball came from the Lord knows where and took the head off our right-hand man
• 7 The Big Boots don’t like rough stuff!
• 8 Those terrible grey horses, how they fight!
• 9 We had our revenge! Such slaughtering!
• 10 The most beautiful troops in the world
• 11 Defend yourselves! Defend yourselves! They are coming in everywhere!
• 12 Next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained
• Aftermath: A thousand shall fall beside thee, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• Picture Credits
• About the Author
• Also by Bernard Cornwell
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher