Sharpe’s Waterloo: The Waterloo Campaign, 15–18 June, 1815. Bernard Cornwell
no plot of mine could compete with the dramatic story of the battle itself. The whole story, from the first shots of the campaign to the collapse of Napoleon’s army, took place in just four days, and those four days saw four battles (Ligny, Quatre Bras, Wavre and Waterloo). There was to be more fighting as the allies advanced on Paris, but essentially Napoleon’s ambitions and the hopes of France collapsed on the ridge of Mont St Jean on the evening of 18 June 1815.
The two leading characters of Waterloo are as compelling as the battle itself. By 1815 no one would have denied that the two greatest soldiers of the age were Napoleon and Wellington. Napoleon had engulfed Europe in war, leading his eagles from Madrid to Moscow, shattering armies, toppling thrones and gaining such great triumphs as Friedland and Austerlitz. His armies moved fast, he had a talent for spotting and exploiting an enemy’s weakness, he was an inspiration to his men, and his presence on the battlefield, the Duke of Wellington reckoned, was worth 40,000 men. He was extraordinarily hard-working, had a genius for administration, and his legislative accomplishments still command much of Europe, but above all else he was a warlord. He gave France what she craved, la gloire! His ambitions were gargantuan, leading to such spectacular failures as the Russian campaign of 1812, but no one doubted his talents. In 1814, as the allies gradually tightened their noose about Paris, he dazzled them with his lightning marches and sudden assaults. He was, as his enemy Czar Alexander called him, ‘the world’s Conqueror’.
But Czar Alexander also called Wellington ‘the Conqueror of the world’s Conqueror’. The Duke was not flamboyant like the Emperor, he did not rouse fervent adulation from his men, he even had a reputation as a cautious general, but he was a general who, unlike Napoleon, had never lost a battle. He had a wealth of common sense, a talent for reading ground, and a care for his troops which they rewarded with dogged loyalty. His enemies scorned him as a defensive general, and it is true that a quick way to lose any battle was to attack the Duke in a position he had decided to defend, but at Assaye, Salamanca and Vittoria he had shown he could attack with a panache and daring the equal of Napoleon’s. He and the Emperor were both forty-six years old in 1815, and both men had been fighting for their entire adult lives, yet they had never met in battle. No one doubted they were the two greatest generals of the era, but if they met, who would prove the greater? That drama is also part of the story of Waterloo, and made more dramatic by the knowledge that each man knew the reputation of the other. They were fighting for posterity’s judgement as well as the fate of nations.
And the battle has a cliff-hanger of an ending. Waterloo was, as the Duke often admitted, a very close-run thing. ‘It was the most desperate business I was ever in,’ he wrote to his brother William after the battle. ‘I never took so much trouble about any battle, and was never so near to being beat.’ Since late morning the French had assaulted the Duke’s position, attack after attack, each one wearing the thin red line ever thinner, until at last, around 7.30 p.m. on the evening of 18 June, the Emperor launched his Imperial Guard against Wellington’s right flank. The Imperial Guard! They were the elite of Napoleon’s army, deeply experienced, proven brave, fervently loyal and protecting the reputation of being unbeatable. When in trouble Napoleon sent in the Guard and again and again they had won his battles. They were the famous ‘immortals’, and as the sun went lower across a battlefield heated by the great guns, shrouded by smoke and littered with corpses, the Imperial Guard was sent to break the Duke’s army. What happened next is one of the great passages of arms and the culmination of that most desperate business.
So it is a magnificent story, but I would be the first to admit that the version told in the novel Sharpe’s Waterloo is skewed by Sharpe’s point of view. He is fiercely protective of the British army and, like many of the battle’s British survivors, is scornful of his allies (with the exception of the King’s German Legion which was regarded as every bit as good as the British army). The Prussians are acknowledged as helpful, but blamed for being late. Waterloo, then, is depicted as a British victory. I knew, when I wrote the novel, that this was a distortion but Sharpe would have shared the prejudices of the rest of the army. Then, two years ago, I wrote Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles, a non-fiction account of the events described in the novel and, of course, the viewpoint is very different (The ‘Three Battles’ in the title are Ligny, Quatre Bras and Waterloo as the book more or less ignored the battle of Wavre altogether). The truth is that Waterloo was essentially an allied victory. Wellington would never have defended the ridge at Mont St Jean if he had not been totally confident that the Prussians were coming to his aid, and Blücher would never have marched to Mont St Jean if he had not believed that Wellington would stay and fight. For both men the decisions were brave and difficult, and if either had mistrusted the other then the campaign would have been lost. Yes, it is true that the Prussians took longer to arrive than either Wellington or Blücher had hoped, but that late arrival, though it stretched Wellington’s resources perilously thin, also doomed the French because, by the time the Prussians attacked, Napoleon’s army was wholly committed to the attack on Wellington’s position and had no chance of disengaging. A defeat turned into a rout.
Waterloo ended the long world war which had seen both Washington and Moscow burned. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars were the culmination of fifty years of intense rivalry between Britain and France and the war’s outcome was a British triumph, so it is not unsurprising that Waterloo was depicted by the British as their triumph rather than as an allied victory. Nowhere illustrates that better than the fight at Hougoumont. The château was garrisoned by Dutch and British troops. The Dutch were posted ahead of the château, guarding the wood which lay between Hougoumont and the French position so, naturally, they were the first to go into action when the French attacked. They were hugely outnum-bered and forced to retreat. They could not enter the château on its northern side (which faced the French) because all the gateways had been blockaded so they ran around the edges of the compound to join the defenders inside the walls. The British saw them running and must have believed they were fleeing. One British Guard’s officer wrote scornfully, ‘the Dutch instantly gave way and fled’. Another Guard’s officer recalled, ‘after the first hour there was not one of them to be seen, they had all vanished.’ That testimony seems fairly clear, the Dutch had fled in panic, but Dutch accounts tell a very different story! A Dutch officer said that his men defended the château and were reinforced by some British Guards who came to ‘support the battalion under my command’, which suggests that the British played a secondary role! Other Dutch accounts confirm that their troops were in the fighting that raged all afternoon and into the evening, but British accounts of the battle rarely gave them any credit. The nineteenth century was to be Britain’s era, she ruled the world, and the battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo were seen as justification for her pre-eminence so the British were loath to share any of the credit for those victories.
It was not Sharpe’s business to be fair to his allies, that would be asking too much of him, and like all the other men who survived that terrible day, his memory was shaky. Men saw little of the battle. Smoke hung thick across the field. For much of the day the allied infantry was sheltered on the reverse slope, unable to see into the valley where the killing took place. And what they did see was often confusing and terrifying. One British infantry officer said he hardly saw a Frenchman all day, just thick skeins of smoke being lit by musket flashes, so his men fired at the flashes. ‘I am endeavouring to do an impossibility,’ one young British officer wrote to his father just afterwards, ‘to describe a battle’. Captain Powell of the 1st Foot Guards was sure his battalion was attacked by 6,000 men of the Imperial Guard, but there could not have been more than 2,000 attackers. Ensign Leeke of the 52nd, who was engaged in the same fight against the Chasseurs, confidently believed they numbered about 10,000. This is not to criticize the men who were there, they were brave and they achieved greatness at Mont St Jean, but their recollections are not always accurate.
Waterloo is a magnificent and terrible story, but it is not just the story of a great British triumph. It is the tale of an allied victory in which the British played a crucial part. When the Duke finally waved his line forward at the end of the day Von Müffling, the Duke’s Prussian liaison officer, recalled, ‘when the line of infantry moved forward small masses of only some hundred men, at great intervals, were seen everywhere advancing. The position in which the infantry had fought was marked, as far as the eye could see, by a red line caused by the red uniforms of the