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 word, ‘Assaye’. Assaye was a battle fought in India, against a much larger army, and he turned the enemy’s flank, attacked and crushed them. Then there was Salamanca, in Spain, sometimes termed his masterpiece, where 40,000 Frenchmen were destroyed in 40 minutes. Salamanca was a brilliant offensive battle that took the French by surprise and routed them. Or Vitoria, the battle that cleared the French from Spain, another offensive masterpiece that left the enemy in ruins. He was, in truth, a great attacking general, but attacks are, broadly speaking, more expensive in men than defensive tactics, and Britain’s army was small and there were never enough replacements for battle casualties, and so the Duke preferred defensive battles where he could use the terrain to shelter his men from enemy artillery.
Quatre-Bras was, essentially, a defensive battle, but one fought on terrain that Wellington had not chosen. He had no time to prepare and little time to react to the enemy’s assaults, and for almost all of the day he was outnumbered. The story of Quatre-Bras is essentially that of allied troops arriving in the nick of time to stave off another crisis, yet it all began quietly enough. Wellington reached the crossroads at about ten in the morning and, finding that the French were still hesitating, he rode east to meet Blücher. That was the conference at the Brye windmill where Wellington promised to send troops to help the Prussians ‘provided I am not attacked myself’.
Yet by mid-afternoon he was being attacked and there would be small chance of sending any troops to assist the Prussians. Wellington needed every man who arrived. He had to defend the crossroads because that was his link to the allies, and the French had at last made up their minds to capture the vital junction. They were advancing in force and most of Wellington’s men were still marching in the sweltering heat to reach Quatre-Bras.
Most of the British troops arrived from Brussels, a march of 22 miles. Once at Quatre-Bras they faced a tight battlefield. In front of them was a stretch of gently rolling countryside in which sturdy stone-built farmsteads stood like small forts. Not that any man could see much. The landscape was obscured by thick stands of trees and by the fields of high, obstinate rye which grew between the pastureland. It was also hidden by gun smoke which gradually thickened.
The fighting was to take place south of the Nivelles road, the highway which led east to the Prussians. The western side of the battlefield was
