The Age of Elegance (32 page)

had put him there. The Emperor, brave men whispered hoarsely, would return in the spring with the violets. And, as the hereditary boobies in Vienna undid his life's work and the London crowds queued outside the Panorama in Leicester Square to see the model representation of his island cage, the little man in the garden at Porto Ferrajo, with his telescope fixed on every passing sail, saw his opportunity. That February an English traveller was informed that Leghorn Jews were shipping eagled buttons to Elba.
¹
The British Commissioner in the island sent a warning to London that something was afoot, the French Government pleaded nervously for the Emperor's removal to St. Helena. But at Vienna, where the tinkling sleigh parties drove nightly home from the Wienerwald, the Congress was too busy to listen.

On the night of March 7th a great ball was to be held in the Austrian capital. That afternoon the Czar laid a wager with a lady as to who could dress most quickly. At a signal both left the room by different doors, the one returning reclad in a minute and a quarter, the other in a minute and fifty seconds. During the evening a courier arrived at Metternich's house with dispatches from Genoa. The Chancellor was tired from too much business by day and revelry by night. After resting for a while on his couch he opened the dispatch. Napoleon had escaped. In its well-bred inefficiency the
ancien regime
had let out the Corsican ogre.

Thereafter events moved at a terrible speed. On March 10th Napoleon, evading all attempts by the authorities to arrest him, appeared at Lyons, announcing that he had come to save the French from degradation and that his eagles, once more on the wing, would soon alight on the spires of Notre Dame. Unit after unit of the Bourbon army went out to stop him, and, on meeting that familiar, grey-coated figure at the head of his daring few, threw down their arms and welcomed him in a tempest of emotion. On the 14th he was joined by Marshal Ney, who had promised King Louis that he would bring him back to Paris in a cage. Six days later he reached Fontainebleau, where less than a year before he had abdicated and bade a last farewell to his veterans. That night he slept at the Tuileries, the King with a handful of courtiers tearfully

¹
Brougham,
II, 63-4. Holland,
Journal,
I, 232.

scampering before him across the Flemish frontier. France had gone about again and the Revolution Militant was once more enthroned.
¹
In Italy the impetuous Murat put Ins army in motion and the Pope and his Cardinals fled from Rome. So, except for a few fastidious Whig aristocrats, did most of the English tourists.

The Sovereigns of Europe assembled at Vienna refused to accept the outrageous
fait accompli.
On March 18th they proclaimed the escaped prisoner an outlaw and "disturber of the peace of the world." Thereafter they ordered an immediate mobilisation of the Continent's armies and appointed the Duke of Wellington to command the advance-guard in the Low Countries—the doorway to the plains of France—until the immense forces of Prussia, Austria and Russia could be mobilised. The flower of the British Peninsular Army —what remained of. it after demobilisation—was still in America or on the high seas returning from that country. But every man that could be raised was sent in haste to Flanders; even Ireland, despite the protests of Dublin Castle and young Robert Peel, was stripped of troops. Everywhere the trumpets were sounding again for war.

¹
Cam Hobhouse was told during his visit to Paris that summer that the only change in the French capital after Napoleon's entry was that the newspapers and the pats of butter no longer had lilies printed on them.

CHAPTER
SEVEN

Waterloo

"The British infantry are the best in the world. Fortunately there are not many of them."

Marshal Bugeaud

"What a happy consummation of his glory it would be to put the last hand to the destruction of Buonaparte's power in direct conflict with Buonaparte himself."

Canning to Castlereagh,
28
April,
1815

D
uring
the afternoon of Sunday, June 18th, 1815, the city of Brussels was in a state of panic. Since three o'clock a stream of fugitives had been pouring in from the plain beyond the forest of Soignes where, twelve miles south of the capital, Wellington, with 21,000 British and 42,000 Germans and Netherlanders, was barring the way of a victorious French army of 70,000 veterans commanded by Napoleon. Most of the English visitors who had invaded the city in the wake of their army had already fled to the north and were crowding the roads and waterways to Antwerp, where, on Wellington's orders, a state of siege had been proclaimed and crowds waited all day in the rain for news. But hundreds more, unable to obtain transport in the panic—for everything on wheels had been requisitioned—remained in the city without hope of escape. Every few minutes fugitives from the battlefield kept galloping into the town shouting that all was lost and that the French were at their heels. Once a whole regiment of Hanoverian cavalry poured in through the Namur gate with swords drawn and foam-flecked horses and rode through the town towards the north, upsetting everything in the streets on their way. There were other fugitives with bloody and bandaged heads, and cartloads of wounded, and occasionally, towards evening, an officer of high rank, British or Belgian, extended upon a bier borne by soldiers. As the dreadful afternoon advanced and the distant camionade grew in intensity, the rumour spread—possibly circulated by French sympathisers, of whom there were said to be many—that Napoleon had promised his soldiery the sack of the city. Every woman knew what that meant. "I never saw such consternation," wrote Fanny Burney. "We could only gaze and tremble, listen and shudder."
¹

Yet three days earlier Brussels had seemed as securely held by British wealth and the martial power of united Europe as London. For weeks it had been a scene of gaiety and military pageantry, with the brilliant aristocracy of England flooding the city in the wake of her army and spending money with a profusion never matched by its successive Spanish, Austrian, French and now Dutch rulers. The nearest French vedettes had been forty miles away beyond the Sambre, and between them and the Belgian capital two great armies had guarded every road on a hundred-mile front, growing daily in strength and commanded by the two most famous soldiers of the European alliance that had defeated and dethroned Napoleon. The Prussian host of around 113,000 men—almost as numerous as the largest striking force Napoleon could be expected to raise from an exhausted and divided France—had entered Belgium under Blucher to hold the frontier from the Ardennes to Charleroi, while a smaller joint British, Netherlands, Hanoverian and Brunswick army had guarded it from Mons to the North Sea under the Duke of Wellington. Every week the young, under-strength battalions sent out in haste from England were being joined by the veteran regiments which had driven the French from Spain and which were now returning from America. Elsewhere more than half a million men, mobilised by the Sovereigns of Europe, were on the march, their vanguards already closing in on the French frontiers. The danger to Brussels and the Low Countries, so great three months before, seemed to have passed. Though no official state of war existed— Napoleon being merely treated as an outlaw under the new international system of collective security—it had been known that an invasion of France was to begin in July. It had even seemed likely that the French, republicans or royalists, would themselves throw out the usurper and so avoid the necessity of invasion. Napoleon's house, Wellington had told English visitors to the front, was tumbling about his ears.

On the night of Thursday, June 15 th, there had been a ball in the

¹
D'Arblay, III, 353. See
idem,
3S4-6o, 368. See
Near Observer,
16-19; Costello, 195-6;
Creevey Papers,
I, 232-5;
Life and Times,
78-80, 87-9; Jackson, 38-9, 81-3; Smith, I, 281-3; "Picton, 104.

city. It had been given by an English milord of fabulous wealth, the Duke of Richmond, and the principal officers of the British and Allied army had attended it, including the Duke of Wellington and the leader of the Netherlands forces, the Prince of Orange, heir to the throne of the new kingdom. But during its course, and even before it had begun, it had become known that something was amiss. Several times Wellington had been interrupted by messages and was seen to write orders, and at an early hour many of his officers took their leave. During the small hours of the 16th the squares and streets of Brussels had filled with troops as trumpets sounded and drums beat to arms. Presently the troops—green-jacketed Riflemen, scarlet-clad infantry of the line and Highlanders, blue-coated Belgians and Brunswickers in black—had moved off, laughing and joking in the early morning sunshine, and asking one another what all the fuss was about. The stolid Flemish country folk, rolling into the city in their carts, had watched them with curious eyes as they marched out down the Charleroi road. Everyone in command had seemed very composed and quiet; old Sir Thomas Picton, commander of the British
5
th Division, with top hat and reconnoitring glass slung over his shoulder, cheerfully accosted his friends as he rode through the streets.

Elsewhere—at Enghien, Ath, Grammont, Nivelles, Oudenarde and even as far away as Ghent—other troops, British, German and Netherlandish, roused from their cantonments, had assembled to the sound of trumpets and bugles, and, marching off along the hot, dusty highroads southwards and eastwards, had begun to converge on the assembly point. It had been a day of intense heat. As they emerged from the beech forests on to the great corn plain that fringed the Sambre to the north, the tramping infantrymen and jingling cavalry and gunners heard a dull, sullen sound like distant thunder and saw on the horizon columns of smoke arising.
¹

For on June 15 th, after one of his incredibly swift and secret concentrations, Napoleon had sprung like a tiger across the Sambre and driven in the outposts of
Blücher
's army at the point where its right touched the left of Wellington's equally scattered force. When the first news of the crossing had reached the Prussian and British

¹
"There they go, shaking their blankets again," said the old soldiers. Leake,
i,
11;
Near Observer,
2-4; Becke, 49-5; Bessborou
gh, 240-1; Costello, 190;
Creevey Papers,
1,
223,226-7,229-230, 232; Lynedoch, 756; D'Arblay, III, 341-2. 34
7-8; Frazer, 520-4, 529-30, 536
544. 572; Jackson, 6,14-18; Kincaid, 153-6
; Mercer, I, 47. 53-5,103-4, l5
5-7,198-202,217-19,230-9,242-243, 284; Siborne, 3, 23; Simpson, 16-17; Smith, I, 226.

commanders, they had suspected it to be a feint. The hours Napoleon had thereby gained had given him the chance to drive a wedge between them. With 124,000 men he
had placed himself between Blü
cher's 113,000 Prussians and Wellington's miscellaneous 83,000. His object had been to defeat one or the other before they had time to concentrate and then, forcing both back on their divergent communications, to enter Brussels as a conqueror. Thereafter, he had believed, the Belgian common people would rise against the Dutch, the war-weary French take heart and unite behind him, the Tory Government in London fall, and his Austrian father-in-law, deprived of British subsidies, sue for peace.

All afternoon on the 16th the people of Brussels had heard, through the hot, airless haze, the sound of cannonading from Quatre-Bras, where twenty miles to the south Marshal Ney was trying to brush aside a weak Netherlands force from the crossroads which preserved front-line communication between the Prussian and Anglo-Dutch armies. By some miracle of tough, confused fighting, in which Picton's Highlanders had covered themselves with glory and the Duke of Brunswick had fallen, Wellington, reinforced by successive contingents, had held the crossroads and by nightfall assembled 30,000 troops in Ney's path. But owing to the delay in ordering his concentration—the result of faulty staff
work—he had failed to join Blü
cher in battle that day against Napoleon. By nightfall, six miles away at Ligny, 63,000 Frenchmen under the great Emperor had beaten the 80,000 Prussians concentrated against them and inflicted 15,000 casualties. The seventy-two-year-old Field Marshal had only narrowly escaped capture after being trampled on by French cavalry.

Yet Napoleon's victory had not been as complete as he had thought. Owing to the failure of one of his corps which, through contradictory orders, had marched and countermarched all day between the two battlefields without taking part in either, the Prussians had escaped annihilation and were able to withdraw in tolerable order into the night. Next morning, when the Emperor, detaching 33>ooo troops under Marshal Grouchy to pursue the Prussians, had thrown the rest of his army against Wellington, the latter had withdrawn in good time up the Charleroi-Brussels highway. And though Napoleon had supposed that he had driven the Prussians back eastwards towards their comm
unications, Blucher had in fact
withdrawn northwards towards
Wavre on a road parallel to the
British only a dozen miles to the
east. Unknown to Napoleon, the
Allied armies had thus remained i
n touch and, though the Emperor
had reduced their numerical superior
ity and shaken their morale, he
had not, as he supposed, divided
them. Nor, though the people of
Brussels had expected all day to s
ee the victorious French emerge
from the Forest of Soignes, had
the British withdrawal towards
Brussels been on the whole preci
pitate. It had been brilliantly
covered by Lord Uxbridge's cavalry and
horse artillery, and by night
fall Wellington had concentrate
d his army on the ridge of Mont
St. Jean twelve miles south of
the city. During the afternoon
Napoleon's retreat had been inc
reasingly delayed by torrential
thunderstorms which had converted the Charleroi
chaussee
and the
fields on either side into quagmires. It had seemed, recalled one
officer, as if the water was
being tumbled out of heaven in
tubs.
¹

The two armies had spent an uncomfortable night. The rain fell almost continually, with flashes of lightning and violent gusts of wind. The ground on which the men lay, drenched to the skin and shaking with cold, was sodden with wet crops. A few old campaigners made themselves tolerably comfortable by smearing their blankets with clay and making pillows of straw. Few of the newcomers to war, who in the Allied army outnumbered the old hands, got any sleep at all.

Dawn on the
18th
was cold and cheerless. Everyone was covered in mud from head to foot. Presently the clouds began to lift, and the men managed to get their camp-fires lit and to cook breakfast. Afterwards, on the officers' orders, they dried their ammunition and cleaned their arms. Later, as the sun came out, Wellington rode round the lines, accompanied by his staff. They looked as gay and unconcerned as if they were riding to a meet in England.
²

The ridge or rather rolling plateau on which the British army had halted was one which the Duke had long marked as a favourable position for the defence of the Belgian capital. It crossed the highroad from Brussels to Charleroi a mile and a half south of the village of

¹
Hamilton of Dalzell, MS., 46-8, 77. See also Simmons, 364; Stanhope, 244; Tomkinson, 286-8.

²
Gronow, I, 186-7; Smith, I, 270.

Waterloo and the forest of Soignes. It was named after the little village of Mont St. Jean which nestled by the roadside in one of its northern folds. In the course of riding and hunting expeditions Wellington had carefully studied its gentle undulations and contours.
¹
It was here that twenty-one years before, when he was a young lieutenant-colonel marching from Ostend to join a hard-pressed and almost identically circumstanced army, his chief, the Duke of York, had urged the Austrian generalissimo, Coburg, to give battle to Jour dan's levies after Fleurus. But Coburg had chosen to fall back eastward on his communications, leaving Brussels to its fate and the British to shift for themselves. It was because, after a generation of disaster and servitude, a Prussian Field Marshal had learnt the necessity of unselfish co-operation between allies, that Wellington was able to take his stand here. For though his only reliable troops were outnumbered by two to one and though the French had nearly double his weight of artillery, he knew that he had only to hold his ground with one wing of an international army until the other under
Blücher
could reach the battlefield. Then, on the morrow, the whole mighty force could take the offensive and sweep Napoleon back to France.

Unlike Blucher at Ligny, who, in the normal Continental manner, had drawn up his army in view of Napoleon, Wellington—the greatest master of defensive tactics in Europe—had chosen a position where his infantry could inflict the utmost damage on the attackers while suffering the least themselves. Its reverse or northern slope, in whose undulations he concealed his forces, gave him precisely the cover and field of fire needed for an active defence. Behind it lay the forest which, stretching for miles on either side of the Brussels highway, constituted, with its close-growing beeches and freedom from undergrowth, an excellent temporary refuge into which to withdraw inexperienced troops if they proved unable to withstand Napoleon's attack. Once inside it, he remarked, he would have defied the Devil himself to drive him out.
²
But as, like his ally, he was thinking in ultimate terms, not of defence but of offensive

¹
"If the Prussians are beat, which I think is very probable," he told the Duke of Richmond on the night of the famous ball, "that is the spot"—pointing at Waterloo on the map—"where we must lick those fellows." Lady Shelley,
1,
171. For a first-hand confirmation of this story, see Granville, II, 538. See also Mercer, I, 194.

2
"It is not true that I could not have retreated. I could have got into the wood and I would have defied the Devil to drive me out." Mrs. Arbuthnot,
Journal,
16th May, 1823. See also Cotton, 303.