and two days later Marshal Grouchy had to divert the Prussians while Napoleon destroyed Wellington’s men. Those tasks were not done by just following orders, but by imaginative soldiering. A Marshal was expected to take the difficult decisions, and Napoleon was entrusting them to Grouchy, new to his high rank and nervous of failure, and to Ney, whose only mode of battle was to fight like the devil.
L’Armée du Nord would face two armies in Belgium, of which the largest was the Prussian. It was led by the 74-year-old Prince Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, who had first fought for Sweden against the Prussians, but after being captured was commissioned into the Prussian army by Frederick the Great. He was vastly experienced, a cavalryman with the nickname of Marschall Vorwärts, Marshal Forwards, because of his habit of shouting his men forward. He was popular, much loved by his troops and, famously, prone to bouts of mental illness during which he believed himself pregnant with an elephant fathered by a French infantryman. There was no trace of this madness during the summer of 1815; instead Blücher marched with a fanatical determination to defeat Napoleon. He was bluff, courageous, and if he was not the smartest general he had the sense to employ brilliant staff officers. In 1815 his Chief of Staff was August von Gneisenau, a man of vast ability and long experience, some of which had been gained fighting alongside the British during the American Revolution. That had soured his views of the British army, and Gneisenau was extremely suspicious of British abilities and intentions. When Baron von Müffling was appointed as the liaison officer to Wellington he was summoned by Gneisenau, who warned him:
To be much on my guard with the Duke of Wellington, because by his relations with India and his transactions with the deceitful Nabobs, this distinguished general had so accustomed himself to duplicity that he had at last become such a master in the art as to outwit the Nabobs themselves.
It defies imagination to know how Gneisenau got hold of this strange opinion, but given Gneisenau’s responsibilities and Blücher’s high regard for his advice, it hardly boded well for future relations between the British and Prussians. There was mistrust anyway between the two countries over Prussia’s ambition to annex Saxony, a disagreement that had soured the Congress of Vienna. The British, French and Austrians were so opposed to this expansion of Prussian power that they had agreed to go to war rather than permit it. Russia had similar ambitions for the whole of Poland, and at one time it looked as if a new war would break out in Europe with Prussia and Russia fighting against the rest. That had been averted, but the bad blood remained.
Now the Prussian army was in the province of Belgium. It was an untested army. The Prussians had experienced defeat, occupation, reorganization and, after Napoleon’s abdication in 1814, demobilization. There were good, experienced troops in Blücher’s ranks, but not enough, and so the numbers were made up by volunteers and by the Landwehr, the militia. The call to arms was answered enthusiastically in 1815. Franz Lieber was just seventeen years old when he heard that call, so he and his brother went to Berlin, where they discovered:
a table was placed in the centre of a square … at which several officers were enlisting those who offered themselves. The crowd was so great that we had to wait from ten until one o’clock before we could get a chance to have our names taken.
He reported to his regiment at the beginning of May, had one month’s training and then was marched into the Low Country to join Blücher’s forces. Lieber was intrigued to discover that one sergeant in his regiment was a woman who had so distinguished herself in combat that she had been awarded three gallantry medals. So by the summer of 1815 Blücher led at least one woman and 121,000 men, a formidable army on paper, but as Peter Hofschröer, an historian very sympathetic to the Prussians, writes, ‘a substantial part of Blücher’s forces consisted of raw levies capable of two basic manoeuvres: going forwards in a state of disorder, or going backwards in a state of chaos.’ That is witty and, as things turned out, those raw levies proved capable of fighting too, but it remained to be seen whether Gneisenau would overcome his Anglophobia and cooperate with the army gathering on the Prussian right.
That was the British–Dutch army led by the Duke of Wellington, who, famously, described it as ‘an infamous army’. And so it was when he first arrived in Brussels. It was under-strength, many of the Dutch regiments were from the French-speaking province of Belgium, and the Duke was wary of those troops because so many of them were veterans of Napoleon’s armies. The French-speaking Belgians were unhappy that their land had been given to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and the Emperor knew of that dissatisfaction. Pamphlets were being smuggled across the French border and distributed among the Belgian troops in the Duke’s army. ‘To the brave soldiers’, the pamphlets read, ‘who have conquered under the French Eagles, the Eagles which have led us so often to victory have reappeared! Their cry is always the same, glory and liberty!’ The Duke doubted the reliability of those regiments and took the precaution of separating them, brigading them with battalions whose loyalties were unquestioned.
Those loyal battalions were either British troops or the 6,000 men of the King’s German Legion (KGL), a unit which had fought brilliantly for the Duke during the long Peninsular War. The Legion had been raised in Hanover, which of course shared a King with Great Britain, and in 1815 Hanover sent another 16,000 men to join Wellington’s army. Those 16,000 were untested and so, like the Dutch army, they were split up and brigaded with either British or KGL battalions. It was not a popular decision. ‘It was a severe blow to our morale,’ Captain Carl Jacobi of the 1st Hanoverian Brigade complained:
The English generals were totally unfamiliar with the traditions of the Hanoverians … In their eyes, everything was imperfect, even open to criticism if it did not conform to English concerns and institutions. There was no camaraderie among the allied troops, not even among the officers. The ignorance of the other’s language, on both sides, the major difference in pay and the resulting great difference in life styles prevented any closer companionship. Even our compatriots in the King’s German Legion did not associate with us; the fifteen year old ensign with the red sash looked down on the older Hanoverian officer.
By summer, when the war began, Wellington had some 16,000 Hanoverians and just under 6,000 men from the King’s German Legion. The Dutch army, which was part of his ‘infamous’ army, numbered almost 40,000, of whom half were in regiments that were French-speaking and so of doubtful reliability. The rest of his army, some 30,000 men, were British, and the Duke wished he had more of them.
But Britain had just fought a war with the United States, and many of the best regiments, veterans of Wellington’s victories, were still across the Atlantic. They were returning, and some battalions found themselves travelling straight from America to the Netherlands. The Duke would have been far more confident if he had possessed his Peninsular army, which had been one of the best that ever fought under British colours. A few weeks before Waterloo he was walking in a Brussels park with Thomas Creevey, a British parliamentarian, who rather anxiously asked the Duke about the expected campaign. A red-coated British infantryman was staring at the park’s statues and the Duke pointed at the man. ‘There,’ he said, ‘there. It all depends upon that article whether we do the business or not. Give me enough of it, and I am sure.’
In the end there was just enough of it. A little over 20,000 British infantry were to fight at Waterloo, and they were to bear the brunt of the Emperor’s attacks. Napoleon’s generals warned him of those red-coated soldiers, saying how staunch they were. General Reille annoyed Napoleon by saying that British infantry were inexpugnable, impregnable, while Soult told the Emperor that ‘In a straight fight the English infantry are the very devil.’ And so they were. The Emperor had never fought against them and he dismissed the warnings, but Wellington knew their worth, and the similar worth of the King’s German Legion. Four years after the battle, walking the field of Waterloo, the Duke remarked, ‘I had only about 35,000 men on whom I could thoroughly rely; the remainder were but too likely to run away.’
The Duke had twenty-two British battalions,
