He planned to give a ball in Brussels on 21 June, the anniversary of his great victory at Vitoria, and when the Duchess of Richmond asked whether it would be sensible for her to give a ball on 15 June he reassured her, ‘You may give your ball with the greatest safety without fear of interruption.’ On Tuesday, 13 June, he wrote to a friend in England:
There is nothing new here. We have reports of Buonaparte’s joining the army and attacking us, but I have accounts from Paris of the 10th, on which day he was still there; and I judge from his speech to the Legislature that his departure was not likely to be imminent. I think we are now too strong for him here.
That letter was written on Tuesday, and on the day before, Monday, 12 June, Napoleon had left Paris to join l’Armée du Nord in Flanders. On 14 June that army closed up to the frontier and the allies still suspected nothing. Blücher shared Wellington’s opinion. He had written to his wife, ‘Bonaparte will not attack us,’ but Bonaparte was poised to do just that. He had closed France’s borders – ‘Not a stage or carriage must pass,’ he ordered – while north of the frontier, in the province of Belgium, the British and Prussian armies were spread across a swathe of country over a hundred miles wide.
That dispersal was necessary for two reasons. The allies are in a defensive posture. They will not be ready to attack until they have overwhelming force, when the Austrians and Russians have reached the French frontier, so for the moment Wellington and Blücher are waiting and, of course, they know that the Emperor may attack them before they move against him. Wellington may have thought such an attack unlikely, but he still must guard against the possibility, and that means watching every route that the French might take. With hindsight it seems obvious that Napoleon would strike at the junction of the Prussian and British armies, to separate them, but that was not so obvious to either Blücher or to Wellington. Wellington’s fear was that Napoleon would choose a route further west, through Mons and so on to Brussels or even towards Ghent, where Louis XVIII had taken refuge. Such an attack would cut Wellington off from the coast, and so sever his supply lines. Whatever happened Wellington wanted to be certain that his army had a way to retreat to safety if it was outfought, and that safe retreat led west to Ostend, where ships could evacuate the army to Britain. Blücher had the same concern, only his retreat would be eastwards, towards Prussia.
So the two armies are spread wide because they need to guard against every possible French attack. The most westerly Prussian forces, General von Bülow’s Corps, are a hundred miles to the east of Wellington’s western flank. That dispersal was also necessary to feed the armies. The troops depended on buying local supplies and too many men and too many horses in a single place soon exhausted the available food.
So the allies were spread across a hundred miles of country, while Napoleon was concentrating his army south of the River Sambre on the main road which led through Charleroi to Brussels. So why did the allies not detect this? In Spain the Duke of Wellington had a superb intelligence service; indeed his problem had been that he received too much intelligence, but in Flanders, in 1815, he was virtually blinded. Before the frontier was closed he had received plenty of reports from travellers coming north out of France, but most of those reports were fanciful and all were contradictory. He was also denied his favourite intelligence instrument, his Exploring Officers.
The Exploring Officers were reliable men who scouted enemy country and depended on their superb horses to escape French pursuit. They rode in full uniform, so they could not be accused of spying, and they were extremely effective. Chief among them was a Scotsman, Colquhoun Grant, and Wellington demanded Grant’s presence in Belgium as the head of his Intelligence Department. Grant arrived in Brussels on 12 May and immediately set about establishing a network of agents on the French frontier, in which activity he was severely disappointed because the local population, all French-speaking, was either sympathetic to Napoleon or sullenly apathetic. Nor could Grant send Exploring Officers south of the border because, officially, the allies were not at war with France, only with Bonaparte.
But Grant did have superb contacts in Paris. This was by accident, because in 1812 Grant had the misfortune to be captured by the French in Spain. The French, knowing his value to Wellington, refused to exchange or parole him, but sent him to France under close guard, though not close enough, because, once over the frontier in Bayonne, the Scotsman escaped and learned that General Joseph Souham, a French officer who had risen from the ranks, was staying in the town and planning to travel to Paris. In an act of superb bravado Grant introduced himself to Souham as an American officer and asked to travel in the General’s carriage. He was still wearing the red coat of the British 11th Regiment of Foot and no one thought to question it. What did Frenchmen know of American uniforms? Once in Paris the intrepid Grant found a source in the Ministry of War and contrived to send reports to the Duke in Spain. Grant eventually made his way back to England, but his source still existed in Paris and, once established as head of Wellington’s Intelligence Service, Grant managed to make contact again. The source gave him much valuable information about l’Armée du Nord, but not what he really wanted to know: was Napoleon going to attack? And if so, where? The French were not making it easy to guess; the earliest contacts between the armies were on the road to Mons where French cavalry patrols exchanged shots with allied picquets, suggesting that Napoleon was reconnoitring the direct route to Brussels.
The map here shows the allied positions. The Prussians occupy a spread of land to the east of the main road leading north from Charleroi, the British are widely spread to the west of that road. The British headquarters is in Brussels, while Marshal Blücher’s is almost 50 miles away in Namur, guarding the best routes the Prussians might need if they are forced to retreat. This is important. If Napoleon punches really hard and defeats both his enemies, then he shatters any chance they have of cooperating, because the Prussians will retreat eastwards and the British will withdraw westwards, both seeking the safety of their homelands. This, in essence, is Napoleon’s plan, to divide the allies and, once divided, to deal with them separately. And to achieve this, on 14 June, he concentrates his army just south of Charleroi. Now he is ready to launch his men like a spear into the heart of the widespread allied dispositions.
Napoleon attacked on Thursday, 15 June. He crosses the frontier and his troops march on Charleroi. The Prussian cavalry screen skirmishes with French horsemen and messengers gallop north with the news of the French advance, but when those messages reach Wellington he mistrusts them. The Duke fears that any French advance on that road is really a feint intended to distract him while the real attack is launched on his right wing. Hindsight condemns the Duke for his caution, claiming that Napoleon would never have attacked in the west because such an assault would have driven Wellington back onto Blücher’s army, but the Duke knows he must expect the unexpected from Napoleon. So the Duke remains cautious. In Brussels there is a rumour that the army will march on 25 June, but it is only one rumour among many. Edward Healey, an undergroom in the service of a British staff officer, noted the rumour in his diary, and added that officers were taking their swords to ironmongers’ shops to be ground and purchasing cloth from linen-drapers to make bandages, ‘but in a general way,’ he adds, ‘things were going on as if nothing was the matter.’
The Emperor marched close to the frontier on 14 June. Next night, the Duchess of Richmond gives a ball in Brussels. The Duke attends.
While everything to the south is going wrong for the allies.
* * *
Charlotte, Duchess of Richmond, was married to the fourth Duke, a not too successful soldier whose real passion was cricket. He was given command of a small reserve force that was posted in Brussels and his Scottish wife, herself the daughter of another duke, is one of society’s hostesses. She was forty-seven in 1815, the mother of seven sons and seven daughters. Wellington had assured the Duchess that her ball would not be interrupted by unwelcome news, though he had also advised her against throwing a lavish picnic in the countryside south of Brussels. There had been too many reports of French cavalry patrols,
