WATERLOO

Today is the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. In British mythology, this was one of the great victories of our history, alongside Trafalgar, Agincourt and such like, big enough to warrant its own expression in the English language (to meet your Waterloo). However, the fact of the matter is that it is just that, a myth. Only around a third of the Duke of Wellington's 75,000 strong army was in fact British, the rest being made up of troops from the King's Hanoverian Duchy, plus other Germans, Dutch and Belgians. Even more fundamentally, Waterloo was merely the fourth day of a series of battles in which the French fought both the British and Prussian armies. It is true that victory at Waterloo was finally secured when Blücher's Prussians arrived on the battlefield during the late afternoon and early evening. What is left out of many British history books is the coordination of the armies in the preceding days, and the fighting that took place up until then.

Napoleon had been defeated in 1814 by a coalition of Britain (fighting mainly in Spain and at sea) and the continental powers, Prussia, Russia and Austria; and in the spring of 1815 there were occupying armies in southern Belgium, the British to the west with headquarters in Brussels and the Prussians further east. In an age before the telegraph, and complicated by notions of honour, national pride and precedence, allied armies didn't always coordinate well. However, Wellington and Blücher admired and respected each other; and virtually the first thing they did on learning of Napoleon's escape from Elba in March 1815 was to meet and agree what they should do if he crossed the frontier and attacked. They also took the opportunity to survey various potential battlegrounds, and pick the most advantageous; Waterloo was a strongpoint defending Brussels that was Wellington's preferred position.

Given the combined British/Prussian superiority in numbers (and leaving aside potential reinforcements from Austria and Russia), Napoleon's strategic plan was to drive a wedge between the two armies, and defeat one before turning on the other. Moreover, in defeating the one, he hoped to attack with a united army before the opposing one could concentrate (the allied forces were spread out over a large area in order to minimise the economic burden on the local population, and it would take them at least a day or so to rendezvous at a particular place). This was a gamble of a plan, to say the least. The surprise was not that Napoleon tried it - after all, he had gambled before and won - but that it very nearly worked; as Wellington later put it, Waterloo was "the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life".    

Napoleon crossed the frontier on 15 June and punched his way between the allied armies up to Charleroi. On the 16th he fought a major battle with the Prussians at Ligny, north east of Charleroi, while sending Marshal Ney northwest up the Charleroi-Brussels road to take the capital by surprise and provoke panic. Ligny was a bloodbath; the Prussians lost 30,000 killed, wounded and deserted, at least a third of their force. Blücher himself lost his horse and was nearly captured. However, they held firm and managed to withdraw during the night. Crucially for the later campaign, they did not withdraw east towards Namur as Napoleon had expected, away from the British and thereby increasing the gap between the two armies, but northwest to Wavre, parallel to the Charleroi-Brussels road and in accordance with the earlier arrangement that the allied armies would work together.

Ligny, rather than Waterloo, was Napoleon's great opportunity. That he couldn't crush the Prussians there was due to unexpected resistance by the British the same day at Quatre Bras, a key crossroads on the Charleroi-Brussels road that blocked Ney's path. In trying to force a way past the British, Ney used up more and more French troops that could otherwise have been used at Ligny. The result was that the French, instead of following the plan of destroying one army before tackling the other, ended up fighting a large part of both. They inflicted huge damage on the allies, but couldn't land the decisive blow.

Thinking that the Prussians were out of the game, Napoleon sent a portion of his forces to pursue them the next day and swung the bulk of his army left and towards the British. But then his famous luck deserted him. The spring and summer of 1815 had already been unusually wet; but on the 17th it rained for virtually the whole day and night in one of the worst downpours that contemporaries had ever seen. The terrible weather allowed Wellington to retreat from Quatre Bras along the Brussels road to his preferred defensive position at Waterloo, and consolidate his forces there. He sent word to Blücher that he would stand and fight on the 18th, provided one of the Prussians' four corps would march from Wavre and support his left wing. In the event, Blücher turned up with three, which is why the final victory was so decisive.

The weather also played its part on the 18th itself. First, the battle didn't start until 11.00am, relatively late for a summer day, since it took so long to get the guns into position on the waterlogged ground. Secondly, although it was only 8 miles from Wavre to Waterloo, and his three corps started early in the morning, the terrain was so difficult that it took Blücher eight hours to get there. Wellington had, therefore, to hold the Waterloo ridge with a weak left wing for most of the day.

Napoleon only realised in the afternoon that the Prussians, instead of retreating away from the British, were in fact coming to support them. Now his only hope was to crush the British before they arrived, so he threw everything at them, including the Old Guard, the elite troops that were normally only sent in in order to secure victory. The British lines wobbled but held out (just) until Bülow's corps arrived in the early evening and crashed into Napoleon's right wing. What had been a front against the British now turned into a horseshoe against the British and Prussians. Numbers began to tell; the French retreated and then fled.

The carnage at Waterloo was immense, the density of killing being greater than that byword for senseless slaughter a century later, the Battle of the Somme. In particular, most of the veteran British infantry were destroyed, one reason why Great Britain stayed out of a continental war until the Crimean adventure in the 1850's. Napoleon was finally defeated, and Prussia emerged as the leading land power in Europe. The effects of that were not fully felt for some time, but they were felt in the end. However, that did not stop British commentators and historians from claiming that it was the Brits that won it, a view that has lasted ever since.

Walter Blotscher