the other a tricolour, and depending on which colour flag I saw flying from the bell-towers of any town or village we passed through, I quickly decorated my hat with the appropriate cockade.
Colonel de l’Ain reached Paris and discovered his old regimental commander had already declared for Napoleon, as did almost the whole of the royal army, despite the oaths of loyalty they had sworn to Louis XVIII. Their officers might stay loyal to their royal oath, but the men had different ideas. Count Alfred-Armand de Saint-Chamans commanded the 7th Chasseurs, and as soon as he heard of Napoleon’s return he told his regiment to be ready to campaign, ‘because I believed we were going to fight the ex-Emperor’. His battalion, though, had a quite different objective:
Someone told me that several officers had gathered in the café and were determined to take their troops to join the Light Infantry of the Guard to support the Emperor, that others were having tricolour flags made which they planned to give to the men and so provoke a mutiny … I began to see the true state of affairs and to feel the misery of my position. What could I do? Any hopes I had of giving the King a fine loyal regiment to support the throne at this fateful hour were dashed to the ground.
The loyalty of the French army to Louis XVIII melted in a moment, giving Napoleon 200,000 troops. Thousands of veterans, like Colonel de l’Ain, were also volunteering, but Napoleon knew he needed an even larger army to defend against the attack that would surely come. One of Louis XVIII’s few popular measures had been the abolition of conscription, and Napoleon hesitated to reintroduce it, knowing how much people hated it, but he had no option, and that would raise another 100,000 men, though all would need training and equipping before they were ready to march, so the Emperor decreed that the National Guard, a local-based militia, would give him 150,000 troops. It was still not enough. The allies, he knew, would bring over half a million men to attack him.
France, in those first weeks, was frantic with preparations. Horses were requisitioned, uniforms made and weapons repaired. It was a compelling display of Napoleon’s administrative genius because, by early summer, he had one army ready to march and others placed to defend France’s frontiers. He still had too few men to resist the onslaught he knew was coming, and he needed yet more troops to suppress Royalist unrest in the Vendée, a region in the 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
