like the Prussian regiments, filled with new recruits. The largest and one of the best battalions at Waterloo was the 52nd, the Oxfordshire Light Infantry, which had been in more or less continuous combat from 1806 until Napoleon’s first abdication. At Waterloo the battalion numbered 1,079 men, but of those 558 had joined since its last battle. The Guards Division was the same. Ensign Robert Batty of the 1st Foot Guards said the division was filled with ‘young soldiers and volunteers from the militia who had never been exposed to the fire of an enemy’.
Yet the old hands, the veterans, were full of confidence. Frederick Mainwaring was a Lieutenant in the 51st, a Yorkshire battalion that had fought at Corunna, Fuentes d’Onoro, Salamanca, Vitoria and in the battles of the Pyrenees and southern France. It was stationed at Portsmouth when the news of Napoleon’s return reached Britain. Mainwaring recalled:
I was seated with two or three others at breakfast in the mess-room, the Bugle-Major came in with the letters and as usual laid the newspaper on the mess-table. Someone opened it and glanced his eyes carelessly over its contents when suddenly his countenance brightened up, and flinging the newspaper into the air like a madman, he shouted out ‘Glorious news! Nap’s landed again in France, Hurrah!’ In an instant we were all wild … ‘Nap’s in France again’ spread like wildfire through the barracks … the men turned out and cheered … our joy was unbounded!
Captain Cavalié Mercer commanded a troop of Royal Horse Artillery at Colchester when the news arrived and tells the same story as Lieutenant Mainwaring. The order to march was ‘received with unfeigned joy by officers and men, all eager to plunge into danger and bloodshed, all hoping to obtain glory and distinction’.
The French and Prussians were no different. Eager volunteers had flocked to the Prussian colours, and in France most soldiers were overjoyed at the Emperor’s return. Many had been prisoners-of-war in the dreadful British prisons, either on Dartmoor or in the pestilential hulks that were great dismasted ships that lay at permanent anchor, and those men wanted revenge. They wanted glory. Captain Pierre Cardron, an infantry officer, recorded a scene that happened again and again across France. His regiment had sworn loyalty to the King, but after Napoleon’s return the Colonel summoned all the officers. They stood in two ranks ‘asking one another what was going on? What was there? In the end we were filled with worry,’ Cardron remembered, but then their Colonel appeared:
holding in his hands, what? You would not guess in a hundred years … Our eagle, under which we had marched so many times to victory and which the brave Colonel had hidden inside the mattress of his bed … At the sight of the cherished standard cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ could be heard; soldiers and officers, all overwhelmed, wanted not only to see, but to embrace and touch it; this incident made every eye flow with tears of emotion … we have promised to die beneath our eagle for the country and Napoleon.
No wonder that one French general wrote home that his men were in a ‘frenzy’ for the Emperor. And in that frenetic atmosphere Napoleon decided on a pre-emptive blow against the British and the Prussians. He would attack them before the Austrian and Russian armies could reach the French frontier, and for his attack he had 125,000 men and 350 cannon. Facing him was Blücher with 120,000 men and 312 cannon and Wellington’s army of 92,000 men and 120 guns. The Emperor was outnumbered, but that was nothing new and he was a master of manoeuvre. His task now was to divide the allies then destroy them one by one. War, he had declared, was simple. ‘It’s like a boxing match, the more you punch the better it is.’
And in June of 1815 he set out to punch Blücher and Wellington into oblivion.
Franz Lieber was just seventeen years old when he heard the Prussian army’s call to arms, and he and his brother volunteered in Berlin. 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 Marshal Blücher’s forces. He would go on to have a distinguished career in America, emigrating in 1827, where he became Professor of Political Economics at South Carolina College. He moved to the north before the Civil War and taught at Columbia University, where he compiled the Lieber Code, credited as the first attempt to codify the rules of war. He lived till 1870.
‘The Duke of Wellington’, by Francisco Goya. When in 1814 the Duke was asked whether he regretted that he had never fought the Emperor in battle, he replied: ‘No, and I am very glad.’ He despised Napoleon the man, but admired Napoleon the soldier.
Portrait of the Empress Josephine, by Pierre-Paul Prud’hon.
‘Napoleon, Fontainebleau, 31 March 1814’, by Paul Delaroche – the handsome, slim young man was gone, replaced by a pot-bellied, short-haired figure with sallow skin.
Czar Alexander I of Russia, 1814, by Baron François Gérard: ‘It is up to you,’ he told the Duke of Wellington, ‘to save the world again.’
‘Clemens Lothar Wenzel, Prince Metternich, 1815’, by Sir Thomas Lawrence: ‘War’, Metternich recalled, ‘was decided in less than an hour.’
‘The Arrival of Napoleon at the Tuileries’: It was evening before Napoleon arrived at the palace. The waiting crowd could hear the cheering getting closer, then came the clatter of hoofs on the forecourt and finally the Emperor was there.
A souvenir made to mark Napoleon’s return to Paris in March 1815. The violet was Napoleon. His beloved Josephine had carried violets at their wedding, and he sent her a bouquet of the flowers on every anniversary.
Portrait of Louis XVIII of France with the coronation robe, by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin.
Napoleon has humbugged me, by God!
NAPOLEON WAS SURELY RIGHT when he claimed that the most difficult thing in war was ‘to guess the enemy’s plan’. And that was precisely the difficulty that Marshal Blücher and the Duke of Wellington faced. What was the Emperor planning?
The first question was whether the Emperor would attack at all, and if the answer was yes, then they needed to know where and when that attack would occur. Yet only three days before the storm burst
