Battle of Waterloo (18 June 1815)

Napoleon took supreme command of the army, but could not fall back on his old team: Marshal Louis Alexandre Berthier, his former chief of staff, was dead, and he regarded Marshal Joachim Murat as a traitor. Other marshals refused to serve, either because of age or because they had taken an oath of allegiance to the new king, Louis XVIII. Napoleon's appointments in 1815 are often criticized by historians. Marshal Nicolas-Jean de Dieu Soult, an able commander in his own right, became chief of staff, although he had no training for it. Marshal Emmanuel de Grouchy was first to lead the cavalry, for which he was particularly suited. He was later given command of the right wing of the army, although he had never commanded even one corps. The left wing was entrusted to Marshal Michel Ney, whose defection from the Bourbons and transition to Napoleon had been of the greatest importance in the latter's triumphal march to Paris. Ney was considered a fighter, but not a thinker. Marshal Louis-Nicolas Davout, arguably the ablest of the marshals, stayed behind as Minister of War to hold Paris for the Emperor.

Through French sympathizers in the Netherlands, Napoleon had a clear idea of the troop disposition of his enemies. The armies were grouped in loose corps formation. The Prussians were in the Liège - Dinant - Charleroi - Tienen area. Wellington's army, which included Dutch, Hanoverian, Brunswick and Nassau units as well as British, was in the Brussels - Ghent - Leuze - Mons - Nivelles area. The massing of such an army could take days. The supply lines of both armies diverged, those of Wellington ran northwards, those of Blücher eastwards into Germany. In the event of any surprise attack that would have forced them to retreat, the allies would fall back along these routes. Napoleon wanted to strike first one army, then the other, without having to worry about the other. Napoleon's formation was ideally aligned for such a move. Two wings under Ney and Grouchy were to precede the army, and Napoleon was to follow in the centre, throwing the weight on either flank as he chose.

On the 15th of June the French army crossed the frontier into the Netherlands, and at nightfall Napoleon took up his quarters at Charleroi. His army was massed and stood between the allies. During dinner Wellington learned from the Crown Prince of the Netherlands that French scouts had reached Quatre-Bras (19 km south of Waterloo), an important road junction on the army's way to meet Blücher. He had anticipated a bypass on his right flank and had therefore begun to mass his army at Nivelles (Nivelles is 11 km west of Quatre Bras, 22 km west of Sombreffe and 16 km southwest of Waterloo). The Dutch commander at Quatre Bras had realised the importance of the crossroads and disobeyed orders to move to Nivelles. Two brigades now held this crossroads, 33 km from Brussels. It could be held by the Dutch, the Nassau and gradually arriving British and Brunswick reinforcements throughout 16 June (Battle of Quatre-Bras).

Ney, seeing before him a slight slope leading up to the cross-roads, supposed that, though this was held only by weak forces, yet behind it, concealed, lay the allied army in full strength. His experience in Spain had taught Ney to refrain from attacks on Wellington in prepared positions. Thus he made only reconnaissance attacks in the morning, and missed the chance of taking the crossroads before the arrival of the reinforcements. On the same day the Prussians faced the French attack in a previously reconnoitred position and were defeated in the battle of Ligny. Napoleon was unable to win a decisive victory, however, as the French I Corps received conflicting orders on the march from Quatre Bras to Ligny, and thus could not be used at either the Battle of Quatre Bras or Ligny. Thus, the Prussian army was able to avoid annihilation and retreat largely intact.

Field Marshal Blücher had been wounded in the battle and almost captured. The command was therefore led the following night by his Chief of Staff, Lieutenant General von Gneisenau, who ensured that the retreat was not in an easterly direction as expected by the French, but in a northerly direction towards Wavre, from where the Prussians could either come to Wellington's aid or retreat to the east - a decisive factor for the outcome of the later battle.

On the morning of 17 June, Wellington, having learned of the defeat of the Prussians at the battle of Ligny and their retreat to Wavre, set out from Quatre-Bras at 10 o'clock and took up a position between the little town of Braine-l'Alleud and the Meierhof Papelotte. By the morning of June 18 he had drawn up his main force in two divisions on either side of the Charleroi-Brussels road, on a ridge running from west to east. In front of the front of the right wing was the castle of Hougoumont, in the centre the fortified farm of La Haye Sainte, in front of the extreme left wing the farmsteads of Papelotte, La Haye and Fichermont.

Wellington, after the unfortunate outcome of the battle of Ligny, had to expect to be attacked by Napoleon's main force, and therefore confined himself entirely to defence until the arrival of the Prussians. Napoleon had carefully considered the position of his enemy, and had not allowed the troops to set out from their night camps until about 10 o'clock in the forenoon. He placed them about 2 km from the enemy in battle order, so that the infantry formed two meetings, the cavalry a third.

It is hardly possible to reconstruct the exact course of events in their temporal context. This was already clear to Wellington when he wrote to his friend John Wilson Croker:

Napoleon

Wellington

Blücher

The immediate results of the battle were significant. The entire artillery park, the guns and the field equipage of the Emperor fell into the hands of the victors. The French, with all the dead, wounded, and prisoners, lost more than half the army, besides 182 guns. The loss on the part of the allies was 1,120 officers and 20,877 men. On St Helena, Napoleon later blamed the seemingly haphazard advance of the reserve cavalry and the failure of Marshal Grouchy to meet his defeat. Grouchy later claimed to have received the order given by Napoleon on the morning of 18 June only after 7 p.m.; however, his generals Girard and Vandamme contradicted this, and Soult also acknowledged having sent more than one courier at Napoleon's request.

Regarding the seemingly "arbitrary" advance of the cavalry from about 4 p.m. onwards, historians note: Even if the first attack was not directly ordered by Napoleon, he subsequently did nothing to either sufficiently support these cavalry attacks with infantry (Guards) or to break off the attack, which after all took place over a period of about two hours and ultimately comprised about 9,000 horsemen. On the contrary, it is considered certain (Houssaye, 1815) that Napoleon personally ordered the brigade Kellermann, which had initially been held back, to ride up and support the general cavalry attack, which from today's perspective was also militarily senseless and sufficiently invalidates later counter-arguments and cover-up attempts regarding Napoleon's personal "uninvolvement".

On the question of Grouchy, it is usually commented that Grouchy could only have been of use if he had received the orders early on June 18, since the distance to be covered by his troops from Gembloux to the battlefield was far longer than the route taken by the Prussians from Wavre. For a timely intervention, appropriate messages and orders should have been sent to Grouchy as early as night on June 17.

There is no doubt, however, about the fact that Napoleon did not realize the seriousness of his situation until about 1:30 p.m. on June 18, and he also initially assumed that he could deal with Bulow's corps. He did not know that von Zieten was on the march to support Wellington's wavering left flank. Nor did Napoleon suspect that eventually General von Pirch's brigades, marching up behind Bulow, would take Plancenoit in flanking and soon break the French's direct line of retreat. Then, when the first volleys of Prussian twelve-pounders came down on the Charleroi-Brussels road at about 6:30 p.m., Napoleon's flawed strategy was evident.

Napoleon himself had on that day lost his usual firm and cold-blooded attitude, and by his last desperate attack had become militarily responsible for the destruction of his army, and with it the loss of his hundred days' rule. From a historical point of view, three mistakes Napoleon made before the battle are usually mentioned:

• On the morning of 17 June Napoleon could have crushed Wellington with his superior numbers of infantry and especially artillery, while the Prussians were still in retreat after Ligny. Instead, he visited wounded men that morning. He also failed to give Ney the immediate order to attack.
• His second mistake was that he underestimated the tactical skill of Wellington and the cold-bloodedness of the British.
• The third fault was his overconfidence. According to the information given by his brother Jérôme, who had learned of the Prussians' plans from a waiter at the Roi d'Espagne inn, he should have ordered Grouchy to Wavre at once. In that case, only v. Bulow's corps would have succeeded in appearing on the battlefield. Napoleon believed that after the battle of Ligny the Prussians would not succeed in recovering quickly from the battle and attacking again.