A reader recently contacted me to ask about Napoleon’s legacy. This sent me down memory lane. At age fifteen I went to Paris to see a fabulous collection honoring the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s birth. Later that semester, I listened keenly to my British history professor who was particularly interested in the great Austrian diplomat, and Napoleon’s nemesis, Klemens von Metternich. Metternich supervised the 1814–1815 Congress of Vienna. Attendees included political and military leaders from every major, and most minor, European power. Among them was Sir Arthur Wellington.
I asked my history teacher, and some years later asked David Chandler, if Napoleon’s decision to return to France while the Congress was in progress was a mistake. Both exonerated the Emperor on the basis that France was restive under the king’s rule, so why not intervene. Then and thereafter, I think this was a bad strategic mistake.
Because all the important opponents were together when they learned that Napoleon had escaped from Elba and landed in France, they quickly coordinated plans to fight. They thus denied Napoleon time, perhaps even several months, to prepare for allied resistance. Mistake 1.
Napoleon’s audacious “invasion” of France returned him to power. He assembled an army and made crucial decisions about who would be his chief lieutenants. He left Marshal Davout in Paris as Minister of War. At the time he told Davout that he could trust no one else to serve in this position. Mistake 2. As readers know from my “Napoleon’s Invasion of Germany,” I believe that Napoleon never rebounded from his jealousy of Davout’s amazing success at Auerstadt in 1806 against the main Prussian army while the Emperor defeated a strong, but secondary, force at Jena. Consider how the 1815 campaign might have played out had Davout commanded either the force confronting Wellington at Quatre Bras or the force pursuing the Prussians after the Battle of Ligny. In other words, Davout instead of Ney or Grouchy.
Last autumn I returned to Waterloo for a third visit. As mentioned in my last update, I found much had changed. I toured Le Caillou where Napoleon slept on June 17, the day before the Battle of Waterloo. There he discussed plans with his subordinates. Marshal Soult, installed as Chief of Staff after the suicide or murder of his trusted Marshal Berthier, described Wellington’s tactics and advised caution. The Emperor replied that defeating “the Sepoy general” would be as easy as eating one’s breakfast. Mistake 3. In the garden where a battalion of Chasseurs of the Guard spent the rainy night on a security detail is a small structure filled with the bones of fallen French soldiers. After Waterloo, farmers cleared their fields and dumped these bones in “the ossuary.”
On June 18, Napoleon decided to wait for the ground to dry before beginning his assault. Mistake 4, but with a caveat. He presumed, incorrectly, that Marshal Grouchy was preventing the Prussians from intervening. So, he thought he was in no hurry.
My friend, Ralph Reinertsen, visited Waterloo after a day of rain. His observations remind us all of the insights one can gain by visiting a battlefield. Ralph noted how the water channeled into the low spots between the Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte. The drier ground was exactly where the ridiculous and futile charges of the French cavalry occurred. These charges were led by Marshal Ney. Ney, who had pledged to King Louis, that he would “capture Napoleon and bring him to Paris in iron chains,” had a change of heart when he witnessed how the Emperor still had the affection of most Frenchmen, in particular the soldiers. Ney rejoined Napoleon before the June 16 Battle of Ligny. The Emperor promptly installed him as wing commander. Mistake 5. Again, as readers know from my 1813 book, I believe that Ney suffered from what we now understand as post-traumatic stress syndrome (shell shock in WWI, battle fatigue in WWII). For all his zeal, he was unable to make cogent decisions while under fire in 1815.
All armies throughout history need to develop trusted relationships from squads to corps. Ney’s arrival at French headquarters was so hurried that he literally had to purchase horses in order have enough mounts for the impending campaign. There was no time for him, or any other French officer, to acquaint himself with his fellow officers and develop the trust and understanding that characterized Napoleon’s Grande Armeé during its glory days. These facts tie in with the Emperor’s first mistake to hurry to return to France. His decision left no time for the disparate groups—surviving veterans, returned prisoners of war, new recruits—to bond.
On my recent visit, after touring Napoleon’s HQ, Ralph and I examined the French artillery line. Napoleon Bonaparte, always a gunner first and foremost, counted on his grand battery to punch a hole in the Sepoy general’s line. Standing on this ground, we saw that the intervening heights blocked a view of the British main line. Thus, the artillery targeted the unfortunate Bijlandt’s Dutch-Belgians, but could not conduct observed fire against anyone else. The ‘overs’ still hit British and allied soldiers on the reverse slope, but their effect was by chance, with many balls absorbed by the wet ground, so there was little ‘bounce-through’. Mark Adkin, in his Waterloo Companion, provides an excellent analysis of the bombardment on pages 197–301.
We proceeded to Plancenoit because I had recently conducted a tabletop game based on the fighting between the Prussians and French along the French right flank. I had forgotten how close the village is to the rest of the battlefield. Standing on a knoll overlooking Plancenoit (a tiny bit of rising ground where a French field battery assisted the defenders of the village and subsequently a Prussian horse battery fired into the flank of the retreating French soldiers, including an Imperial Guard square) one sees how close is the hideous Lion’s Mound. It approximately marks the center of Wellington’s position.
We drove into the Bois de Paris to trace the line of march of General Bülow’s IV Corps. Prussian commanders considered the IV Corps the poorest in the army. It contained mostly Reserve and Landwehr troops. Count von Schwerin’s 1st Cavalry Brigade led the way. A ball fired from a French horse artillery battery killed Schwerin. He was probably the first Prussian to die on June 18. Hastily buried, his body was relocated two years later to a site marked by a monument outside of Plancenoit. We found the monument, overgrown by weeds, with the poignant inscription in German: “Count von Schwerin, knight and superior officer of the King, fallen in a foreign country for the Fatherland, during the victory of 18 June 1815.”
The Prussian infantry marched along a narrow, muddy track and did not reach the outskirts of Plancenoit until around 4:30 p.m. By that time, General Lobau’s VI Corps troops had enjoyed two hours to prepare their defense. They occupied a fine position protected by woods on either flank. Undulating terrain (something one does not notice in a vehicle but which becomes quite obvious when on foot) offered additional good defensive positions.
The ensuing Prussian assaults had to overcome numerous obstacles. Standing in the church yard, we could readily understand the difficulties. Also, the modern plaques that marked the role of the French artillery in repulsing numerous attacks (while most of the Prussian artillery remained stuck crossing the Lasne valley), and the remnants of the original church wall where French infantrymen tenaciously held until reinforced by the Young Guard, reminded us of the very difficult challenge the Prussians confronted. Still, to their great credit, the Prussian intervention attracted French reserves at a time when Napoleon needed every soldier to break the British line.
The words “met his Waterloo” still faintly resonate in our modern English. It connotes defeat and disaster. Indeed, Napoleon’s fate after Waterloo was one of sorrow, disease, and reflections about what might have been. Yet, he was one of only three Great Captains, along with Alexander and Genghis Khan, who exhibited the consummate tactical and strategic skill that ranks them ahead of all others.
British writers understandably compare Napoleon and Hitler. Both posed mortal threats to the British Empire. But the comparison is unfair. Hitler left a legacy of ruin. Napoleon’s legacy continues to this day with his Code de Napoleon (still the rule of law in France and many former French colonies), the central French bank, the French school system based (sadly only nominally based today) on aptitude over birth, and many other achievements.
The last time I spoke with David Chandler, he summed up Napoleon’s career with these words: “A Great, Bad Man.”
James R. Arnold
May 2024