Napoleon Returns
Today, on the eve of the bicentennial of the Battle of Waterloo, we do not celebrate war. Only a fool would celebrate something so horrible. But we pay our respects to the glorious imbecility of it.
War may be dreadful, little more than a racket in many ways, but it is also a magnificent undertaking. It engages the heart and the brain at once and exposes both the genius of our race and its incredible stupidity.
But we are talking about real war. Not phony wars against enemies who pose no real threat. Phony wars earn real profits for the war industry, but only an ersatz glory for the warriors. Real soldiers take no pride in them. Instead, to a real hero, they are a source of shame and embarrassment.
Wars are not conducted to “Free the Holy Land.” Or “Make the World Safe for Democracy.” Or “Rid the World of Tyrants.” Or “Fight Terrorism.” Those are only the cover stories used by the jingoists to get the public to surrender its treasure… and its sons. Wars are fought to release the fighting spirit – that ghost of many millennia – in the scrap for survival.
And so it was that, 200 years ago tomorrow, one of the greatest military geniuses of all time, Napoleon Bonaparte, faced the armies of the Seventh Coalition – principally, the British, under the Duke of Wellington, and the Prussians, under Gebhard von Blücher.
Napoleon Bonaparte, born in Ajaccio, Corsica, later emperor of France and famous (and usually victorious) general, and later still, pensioner on the island of St. Helena
Painting by Paul De La Roche, 1814
Napoleon had been run out of France, but he had come back. The veterans of the Napoleonic Wars rallied to his cause, and he soon had an army of 73,000 seasoned soldiers. Moving fast, he put his forces in his favored “central position” between Wellington and Blücher.
On June 16, he attacked the Prussians at the Battle of Ligny and drove them back. Then he turned to Wellington, who had formed his army on a low ridge, south of the Belgian village of Waterloo.
Arthur Wellesley, the first Duke of Wellington, here seen trying to imitate Napoleon
Painting by Robert Home
Napoleon knew how to plan and execute a campaign. He was where he wanted to be, with two of his best commanders on either side of him, Marshal Grouchy on his right and Marshal Ney on his left.
But two things conspired against Napoleon. The Prussians had been beaten, but not destroyed. They quickly regrouped and then marched on Waterloo. And it rained. Soft ground always favors the defender. The attacker wears himself out in the mud. Wellington only had to hold his position. Napoleon had to break the British line before the Prussians arrived at his back…
Prince Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, who upset Napoleon’s plans at Waterloo by arriving a lot earlier than expected, shortly after having been defeated already at Ligny two days earlier.
Unknown artist, via Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin
“Wellington Is a Bad General”
And so, the stage was set, on June 18, for one of the most extravagant showdowns in military history. Napoleon was having breakfast on the morning of the battle when one of his generals suggested a reorganization that might strengthen the French position. Bonaparte replied:
“Just because you have all been beaten by Wellington, you think he’s a good general. I tell you Wellington is a bad general, the English are bad troops, and this affair is nothing more than eating breakfast.”
Wellington shared Napoleon’s opinion of his troops. He thought they were bad, too. They were a collection of soldiers drawn from many different units. They had not seen action in almost 20 years. Many were poorly trained. Of his cavalry he wrote:
“I didn’t like to see four British opposed to four French. And as the numbers increased and order, of course, became more necessary, I was the more unwilling to risk our men without having a superiority in numbers.”
The battle began in the late morning. No one knows exactly when. Quickly, the “fog of war” descended on the battlefield, with no one sure what was going on. Crucially, Napoleon missed the rapid approach of the Prussians. He had expected them to need two days to get back in fighting order after their defeat at Ligny.
The Battle of Waterloo
Painting by Clément-Auguste Andrieux
An Englishman describes the scene once the battle was under way:
“I stood near them for about a minute to contemplate the scene: It was grand beyond description. Hougoumont [the escarpment where British and other allied forces faced off against the French] and its wood sent up a broad flame through the dark masses of smoke that overhung the field; beneath this cloud the French were indistinctly visible.
Here a waving mass of long red feathers could be seen; there, gleams as from a sheet of steel showed that the cuirassiers [armored French cavalry] were moving; 400 cannon were belching forth fire and death on every side; the roaring and shouting were indistinguishably commixed – together they gave me an idea of a laboring volcano.
Bodies of infantry and cavalry were pouring down on us, and it was time to leave contemplation, so I moved towards our columns, which were standing up in square.”
A map of the battle: Napoleon’s troops in blue, Wellington’s in red, and Blücher’s in gray, by Ipankonin – click to enlarge.
To win the battle, the French had to dislodge Wellington from his ridge at Hougoumont. Again and again, they attacked. And again and again, they failed. The Englishmen – along with a large number of Irishmen, Scots, and Germans – held their ground.
The Royal Scots Greys, the Gordon Highlanders, the Irish Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers – all fought better than Bonaparte or Wellington had expected. But the “bravest of the brave” was on the French side – Marshal Ney, whose statue we encountered on Sunday.
Good old Marechal Michel Ney, who was responsible for tactics on the battlefield. He had one horse after another shot out from under him. Not a quitter, that’s for sure.
Painting by
A Hero’s Hero
When we saw the statue, we wondered: What sort of people are these who execute a man for treason and then honor his memory with a statue of him in their capital city?
Ney was a hero’s hero – a man whose military career was such a long shot… that so defied the odds… it was hard to believe he ever existed. He was everything our modern military lard-butts are not. He was the fighting spirit in the flesh.
The French launched as many as 12 separate attacks against Wellington’s lines. Ney, leading the charges personally, had five horses shot from under him.
A British infantryman remembers what it was like to see him coming:
“About 4 p.m., the enemy’s artillery in front of us ceased firing all of a sudden, and we saw large masses of cavalry advance: Not a man present who survived could have forgotten in after life the awful grandeur of that charge.
You discovered at a distance what appeared to be an overwhelming, long moving line, which, ever advancing, glittered like a stormy wave of the sea when it catches the sunlight.
On they came until they got near enough, whilst the very earth seemed to vibrate beneath the thundering tramp of the mounted host. One might suppose that nothing could have resisted the shock of this terrible moving mass.
They were the famous cuirassiers, almost all old soldiers, who had distinguished themselves on most of the battlefields of Europe.
In an almost incredibly short period they were within twenty yards of us, shouting “Vive l’Empereur!”
The word of command, “Prepare to receive cavalry,” had been given, every man in the front ranks knelt, and a wall bristling with steel, held together by steady hands, presented itself to the infuriated cuirassiers.”
Marshal Ney leading the charge of the French cavalry.
Painting by Louis Dumoulin
Marshal Ney’s cavalry overran the British cannons. But without infantry and artillery support, he could not break the cavalry-proof defensive squares Wellington’s infantrymen formed.
And then Blücher arrived … and Napoleon was beaten. His “central position became a trap.” The Prussians hammered the French against the British anvil. At the end of the battle, Ney led one of the last infantry charges, shouting to his men, “Come see how a marshal of France dies!”
Prince Blücher’s Prussian troops, in form of the remainder of the IV. corps led by Friedrich Wilhelm Freiherr von Bülow, attack Plancenoit, at the right flank of Napoleon’s troops.
Painting by Adolph Northen
Four days after the battle, Major W.E. Frye described what he saw:
“22 June – This morning I went to visit the field of battle, which is a little beyond the village of Waterloo, on the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean; but on arrival there the sight was too horrible to behold. I felt sick in the stomach and was obliged to return.
The multitude of carcasses, the heaps of wounded men with mangled limbs unable to move, and perishing from not having their wounds dressed or from hunger, as the Allies were, of course, obliged to take their surgeons and wagons with them, formed a spectacle I shall never forget. The wounded, both of the Allies and the French, remain in an equally deplorable state.”
More to come … on what happened to brave Marshall Ney.
This house served as Napoleon’s headquarters during the battle of Waterloo
Photo credit: Kelisi
The battle between 5:30 to 8:00 pm: Bülow’s attack on Plancenoit begins at 5:30 pm. Ney and his cavalry take La Haye Sainte around 6:00 pm and the Old Guard launches an attack on the British center at 7:00 pm. Map by Gregory Fremont-Barnes.
The storming of La Haye – Marshal Ney can be spotted to the right, sword pointing to the sky.
Painting by Richard Knötel
Addendum: Lord Uxbridge’s Leg
Lord Uxbridge led countless charges of British light cavalry, and similar to Marshal Ney, had numerous horses shot from out under him in the process. One of the last cannonballs fired in the battle shattered one of his legs (Uxbridge to Wellington: “By God, sir, I’ve lost my leg!” Wellington pauses, takes a look. “By God sir, so you have”). The leg, as well as its replacement, subsequently attained considerable, if somewhat morbid, fame.
Lord Uxbridge’s famous wooden leg. His real leg was hit by a cannonball during the battle and had to be amputated without antiseptic or anesthetics. Lord Uxbridge reportedly remarked during the procedure that “the knives appear somewhat blunt”.
Photo credit: Andreas von Einsiedel
Uxbridge’s real leg got its own burial place, while his wooden prosthetic leg is these days exhibited in a museum. The inscription on the tombstone of his leg reads:
“Here lies the Leg of the illustrious and valiant Earl Uxbridge, Lieutenant-General of His Britannic Majesty, Commander in Chief of the English, Belgian and Dutch cavalry, wounded on the 18 June 1815 at the memorable battle of Waterloo, who, by his heroism, assisted in the triumph of the cause of mankind, gloriously decided by the resounding victory of the said day.”
The leg’s burial site soon began to attract tourists from all over Europe, which proves that one definitely shouldn’t let a shattered leg go to waste.
George Canning was even moved to write a poem about Uxbridge’s leg:
“Here rests, and let no saucy knave
Presume to sneer and laugh,
To learn that mouldering in the grave
Is laid a British calf.
For he who writes these lines is sure
That those who read the whole
Will find such laugh were premature,
For here, too, lies a sole.
And here five little ones repose,
Twin-born with other five;
Unheeded by their brother toes,
Who now are all alive.
A leg and foot to speak more plain
Lie here, of one commanding;
Who, though his wits he might retain,
Lost half his understanding.
And when the guns, with thunder fraught,
Pour’d bullets thick as hail,
Could only in this way be taught
To give his foe leg-bail.
And now in England, just as gay –
As in the battle brave –
Goes to the rout, review, or play,
With one foot in the grave.
Fortune in vain here showed her spite,
For he will still be found,
Should England’s sons engage in fight,
Resolved to stand his ground.
But fortune’s pardon I must beg,
She meant not to disarm;
And when she lopped the hero’s leg
By no means sought his harm,
And but indulged a harmless whim,
Since he could walk with one,
She saw two legs were lost on him
Who never meant to run.
Image captions and addendum by PT
The above article originally appeared at the Diary of a Rogue Economist, written for Bonner & Partners. Bill Bonner founded Agora, Inc in 1978. It has since grown into one of the largest independent newsletter publishing companies in the world. He has also written three New York Times bestselling books, Financial Reckoning Day, Empire of Debt and Mobs, Messiahs and Markets.
Napoleonic history is well documented and a great read by the right author. some of the stories I have read have been quite memorable.
So much for military genius. Robert E. Lee also thought he could defeat an entrenched enemy on the high ground at Gettysburg.
Chapter IX. The Unexpected
There were three thousand five hundred of them. They formed a front a quarter of a league in extent. They were giant men, on colossal horses. There were six and twenty squadrons of them; and they had behind them to support them Lefebvre-Desnouettes’s division,–the one hundred and six picked gendarmes, the light cavalry of the Guard, eleven hundred and ninety-seven men, and the lancers of the guard of eight hundred and eighty lances. They wore casques without horse-tails, and cuirasses of beaten iron, with horse-pistols in their holsters, and long sabre-swords. That morning the whole army had admired them, when, at nine o’clock, with braying of trumpets and all the music playing “Let us watch o’er the Safety of the Empire,” they had come in a solid column, with one of their batteries on their flank, another in their centre, and deployed in two ranks between the roads to Genappe and Frischemont, and taken up their position for battle in that powerful second line, so cleverly arranged by Napoleon, which, having on its extreme left Kellermann’s cuirassiers and on its extreme right Milhaud’s cuirassiers, had, so to speak, two wings of iron.
Aide-de-camp Bernard carried them the Emperor’s orders. Ney drew his sword and placed himself at their head. The enormous squadrons were set in motion.
Then a formidable spectacle was seen.
All their cavalry, with upraised swords, standards and trumpets flung to the breeze, formed in columns by divisions, descended, by a simultaneous movement and like one man, with the precision of a brazen battering-ram which is effecting a breach, the hill of La Belle Alliance, plunged into the terrible depths in which so many men had already fallen, disappeared there in the smoke, then emerging from that shadow, reappeared on the other side of the valley, still compact and in close ranks, mounting at a full trot, through a storm of grape-shot which burst upon them, the terrible muddy slope of the table-land of Mont-Saint-Jean. They ascended, grave, threatening, imperturbable; in the intervals between the musketry and the artillery, their colossal trampling was audible. Being two divisions, there were two columns of them; Wathier’s division held the right, Delort’s division was on the left. It seemed as though two immense adders of steel were to be seen crawling towards the crest of the table-land. It coursed through the battle like a miracle.
Nothing like it had been seen since the taking of the great redoubt of the Muskowa by the heavy cavalry; Murat was lacking here, but Ney was again present. It seemed as though that mass had become a monster and had but one soul. Each column undulated and swelled like the ring of a polyp. They could be seen through a vast cloud of smoke which was rent here and there. A confusion of helmets, of cries, of sabres, a stormy heaving of the cruppers of horses amid the cannons and the flourish of trumpets, a terrible and disciplined tumult; over all, the cuirasses like the scales on the hydra.
These narrations seemed to belong to another age. Something parallel to this vision appeared, no doubt, in the ancient Orphic epics, which told of the centaurs, the old hippanthropes, those Titans with human heads and equestrian chests who scaled Olympus at a gallop, horrible, invulnerable, sublime–gods and beasts.
Odd numerical coincidence,–twenty-six battalions rode to meet twenty-six battalions. Behind the crest of the plateau, in the shadow of the masked battery, the English infantry, formed into thirteen squares, two battalions to the square, in two lines, with seven in the first line, six in the second, the stocks of their guns to their shoulders, taking aim at that which was on the point of appearing, waited, calm, mute, motionless. They did not see the cuirassiers, and the cuirassiers did not see them. They listened to the rise of this flood of men. They heard the swelling noise of three thousand horse, the alternate and symmetrical tramp of their hoofs at full trot, the jingling of the cuirasses, the clang of the sabres and a sort of grand and savage breathing. There ensued a most terrible silence; then, all at once, a long file of uplifted arms, brandishing sabres, appeared above the crest, and casques, trumpets, and standards, and three thousand heads with gray mustaches, shouting, “Vive l’Empereur!” All this cavalry debouched on the plateau, and it was like the appearance of an earthquake.
All at once, a tragic incident; on the English left, on our right, the head of the column of cuirassiers reared up with a frightful clamor. On arriving at the culminating point of the crest, ungovernable, utterly given over to fury and their course of extermination of the squares and cannon, the cuirassiers had just caught sight of a trench,– a trench between them and the English. It was the hollow road of Ohain.
It was a terrible moment. The ravine was there, unexpected, yawning, directly under the horses’ feet, two fathoms deep between its double slopes; the second file pushed the first into it, and the third pushed on the second; the horses reared and fell backward, landed on their haunches, slid down, all four feet in the air, crushing and overwhelming the riders; and there being no means of retreat,– the whole column being no longer anything more than a projectile,– the force which had been acquired to crush the English crushed the French; the inexorable ravine could only yield when filled; horses and riders rolled there pell-mell, grinding each other, forming but one mass of flesh in this gulf: when this trench was full of living men, the rest marched over them and passed on. Almost a third of Dubois’s brigade fell into that abyss.
This began the loss of the battle.
A local tradition, which evidently exaggerates matters, says that two thousand horses and fifteen hundred men were buried in the hollow road of Ohain. This figure probably comprises all the other corpses which were flung into this ravine the day after the combat.
Let us note in passing that it was Dubois’s sorely tried brigade which, an hour previously, making a charge to one side, had captured the flag of the Lunenburg battalion.
Napoleon, before giving the order for this charge of Milhaud’s cuirassiers, had scrutinized the ground, but had not been able to see that hollow road, which did not even form a wrinkle on the surface of the plateau. Warned, nevertheless, and put on the alert by the little white chapel which marks its angle of junction with the Nivelles highway, he had probably put a question as to the possibility of an obstacle, to the guide Lacoste. The guide had answered No. We might almost affirm that Napoleon’s catastrophe originated in that sign of a peasant’s head.
Other fatalities were destined to arise.
Was it possible that Napoleon should have won that battle? We answer No. Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blucher? No. Because of God.
Bonaparte victor at Waterloo; that does not come within the law of the nineteenth century. Another series of facts was in preparation, in which there was no longer any room for Napoleon. The ill will of events had declared itself long before.
It was time that this vast man should fall.
The excessive weight of this man in human destiny disturbed the balance. This individual alone counted for more than a universal group. These plethoras of all human vitality concentrated in a single head; the world mounting to the brain of one man,–this would be mortal to civilization were it to last. The moment had arrived for the incorruptible and supreme equity to alter its plan. Probably the principles and the elements, on which the regular gravitations of the moral, as of the material, world depend, had complained. Smoking blood, over-filled cemeteries, mothers in tears,– these are formidable pleaders. When the earth is suffering from too heavy a burden, there are mysterious groanings of the shades, to which the abyss lends an ear.
Napoleon had been denounced in the infinite and his fall had been decided on.
He embarrassed God.
Waterloo is not a battle; it is a change of front on the part of the Universe.
-Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Anyone who’s ever been to a horse race and stood close to the track knows what I’m talking about…
A dozen or so thoroughbreds going by, built for speed with light riders, shakes the ground. You can feel it.
Three thousand, five hundred heavy cavalry? With the biggest guys they could find, armed and armored, at full gallop and heading right for you, personally?
I do believe I would shit my britches… 3,500 heavy cavalry at full gallop, acting as one, isn’t a military formation – at that point I do believe it’s a force of nature. Like the Winged Hussars a century or so earlier – to attempt to stand against them – on foot, in the open – is madness.
Hey, I want you to stand right here and not move. You’ll get a fairly long pointy stick. When these guys show up, I want you to not move, k?
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Oh, and there’s gonna be about 3,000 of them, too… sooooooo, good luck with that, k? Imma be over here.
You shoulda been a perfessor
Pretty cool, Billy. Admin is going to have to roll out a new category for you, TripleS, Stucky and a few others.
Hey, I’m Anon now.