right. So although the Emperor would begin the battle with inferior numbers, he was confident that by nightfall his army would be reunited and the Prussians defeated. At 2 p.m. that afternoon the Emperor sent Ney more instructions:
It is His Majesty’s intention that you attack whatever force is presently in front of you and after driving it vigorously back you will turn in our direction in order to bring about the encirclement of these enemy troops, though if the latter are defeated first then His Majesty will manoeuvre in your direction to assist you.
In brief, Ney is to hurl the defenders away from Quatre-Bras and march to attack the Prussian right, though if Napoleon has already defeated the Prussians then the Emperor would march to join in the fight against the British–Dutch.
The hostilities at Ligny began in the early afternoon, and the Emperor found he had a much stiffer fight on his hands than he had anticipated. His artillery, as the Duke of Wellington had forecast, did grim work with the exposed Prussian infantry. A French officer recalled that the Emperor’s guns ‘played havoc with the Prussian columns which presented themselves without cover and received all the shot fired by the numerous batteries along our line’. The slaughter those guns made was horrific. Hippolyte de Mauduit, the Sergeant in the Imperial Guard, had seen many battlefields, but after the fight at Ligny he was appalled by what he saw on the long, exposed slopes where the Prussian infantry had waited for the French attack:
A vast number of corpses, both men and horses, were scattered about, horribly mutilated by shells and cannon balls. The scene was different from the valley where almost all the dead preserved a human appearance because canister, musket balls and bayonets were practically the only instruments of destruction used there. Here, as a contrast, it was limbs and scattered body parts, detached heads, ripped out entrails and disembowelled horses.
That was why Wellington used the ‘tired old dodge’ of sheltering his troops on the reverse slope. A brook ran along the valley that Sergeant de Mauduit mentioned, and it was a considerable obstacle to the French, because in that shallow valley was a chain of small villages that served as fortresses for the Prussians. Most of the fighting was in Saint-Amand and in Ligny, the village that was to give the battle its name. An anonymous Prussian officer described Ligny in bucolic terms: ‘a village built of stone and thatched with straw, on a small stream which flows through flat meadows’.
The day’s bright sunshine disappeared as heavy clouds rolled across the sky. Artillery smoke billowed and lingered, and out of that smoke emerged the first French columns marching to attack the battered Prussians. Those columns were greeted with a storm of cannon fire from the Prussian artillery. Their cannon were firing roundshot and shells, their targets the densely packed attack columns of blue-coated French infantry that needed to capture the villages if they were to drive Blücher back. The Prussians defended the villages staunchly and Napoleon, realizing that he needed more troops, sent another message to Ney, commanding him to come at once and fall on the Prussian rear. ‘Do not lose a moment,’ the Emperor wrote to Ney, because Blücher’s army ‘is lost if you act quickly! The fate of France is in your hands!’
The fate of France might be in Ney’s hands, but Quatre-Bras was not. The Emperor still believed that the crossroads had been captured, but Ney could not march to Napoleon’s aid because he was still dithering.
Yet there was other help available. Count d’Erlon commanded those 22,000 men who were still marching to assist Ney. D’Erlon could not, of course, march on the straight road which led from Quatre-Bras to Ligny because both ends were in enemy hands, so instead of that simple five-mile march he was forced to go twice as far on lesser roads, first southwards, then north-westwards. D’Erlon was summoned back to Napoleon’s army, and his men, who had almost reached Ney’s forces, turned round and retraced their steps.
Meanwhile the Prussians and French were in desperate battle. Napoleon’s plan was to hold the Prussian left with assaults from Grouchy’s Corps while his main effort was hurled against the centre of Blücher’s line where the villages were so stoutly defended. Grouchy’s attacks would stop the Prussians from reinforcing their centre with men from their left flank, but the right flank would be left unengaged, thus tempting Blücher to weaken it by drawing reinforcements from that part of his defensive line. Then, when the Prussian right wing was weakened Ney or, more likely, d’Erlon would attack from the west.
But while d’Erlon marched back the rest of Napoleon’s army was thrown against the Prussian defences. Charles François was a Captain in the 30th Regiment of the Line, which was ordered to assault the village of Ligny. ‘Within two hundred yards of the hedges which hid thousands of Prussian sharpshooters,’ he wrote, ‘the regiment took up battle order while still on the march.’ What François means by that is that his battalion went from column into line, and they did it without halting. That showed a fine discipline. The terms ‘line’ and ‘column’ will make frequent appearances in the story of the Waterloo campaign, and deserve some explanation. The basic fighting deployment of infantry was in line, which is simple enough to understand. A battalion made a straight line of, in the French and Prussian armies, three ranks, which faced towards the enemy. The British preferred a line of two ranks.
The line is an efficient way of utilizing a battalion’s firepower, but it is an extremely fragile formation. Attempting to march a line forward across anything except the smoothest parade ground led to disorder. Men straggled, stumbled, wavered, and the line would soon lose all cohesion. Worse, a line was very vulnerable to cavalry attack, especially if the enemy horsemen could attack from either end.
So the preferred method of advancing men across open country was to form a column. That is a slightly misleading term, suggesting a long thin block of men advancing like a spear shaft towards the enemy line. In fact the column was short and squat. A French battalion of around 500 men arrayed in column, such as that in which Captain François approached Ligny, might have a frontage of one or two companies. If the 30th of the Line closed on Ligny in a column just one company wide, then the Prussian defenders would have seen thirty men in the French front rank, and seventeen other ranks behind them. So the column is roughly twice as wide as it is deep. A two-company front (which was probably how François’s battalion attacked) had a front rank of about sixty men and only nine ranks in all.
The column had three advantages over the line. It was much easier to manoeuvre over rough ground, it was much less vulnerable to cavalry because there is no weak point that can be overwhelmed, and the very density of the formation was good for morale. In their haste to raise large armies at the beginning of the Revolution the beleaguered French discovered that large columns were doubly useful. Half-trained men could be marched into battle easily, and enemies were often overawed by the sheer size of the attacking columns. François’s 30th was not alone; his battalion was just one of several closing on the Prussians. In a couple of days the French would deploy a whole Army Corps in column, a massive block of men. A line, especially a British line just two ranks deep, would look very fragile against the advance of a dense column.
Yet if the column was psychologically powerful it also had two weaknesses. A column was desperately vulnerable to cannon fire, and only the men in the outer two ranks and files could use their muskets. If a column has seventeen ranks of thirty men each, totalling 510 men, then only the sixty in the first two ranks, and the two men on the outside of each rank, can actually fire at the enemy. So of the 510 men, fewer than a quarter can shoot their muskets. If they are approaching a line then they will be massively outgunned, because every man in the line can fire.
By 1815 the French are well aware of this weakness. In Spain French columns were mauled again and again by British, Portuguese and Spanish lines. At Busaco, where Ney received his drubbing from Wellington, it was British lines that blasted his columns off the hill. The answer to the problem was to utilize the ease of the column as a means to advance troops over rough ground, and then deploy into line as the columns closed on the enemy. That was what Charles
