Dicing with death
Allan Mallinson
WATERLOO: NAPOLEON’S LAST GAMBLE by Andrew Roberts HarperCollins, £12.99, pp. 143, ISBN 0007190751 ✆ £11.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 Abook on Waterloo as short as this (the text proper is 100 pages, small format) tempts a rush to judgment; it has certainly been widely acclaimed already. Paul Johnson’s dust-jacket puff says that the battle ‘is both one of the most decisive in history and the most difficult to describe’. Decisiveness is important: Waterloo is the first in a series called ‘Making History’. The editors, Amanda Foreman and Lisa Jardine, claim that ‘there are moments when a single event topples the most apparently certain of outcomes, when one intervention changes the course of history. They are the landmarks along the horizon of the past.’ Mercifully, Andrew Roberts’s prose is altogether less florid, and he tackles his subject with a very prudent degree of circumspection.
Paul Johnson is wrong about Waterloo’s being the most difficult battle to describe. It is rather that historians have wilfully and otherwise overcomplicated it, sometimes for reasons of nationalism, sometimes from sheer lack of understanding of the importance of ground and the reality of battle. In the case of Waterloo, the ground is everything, and Roberts, perhaps rather surprisingly given his previous subjects, shows himself an absolute master of it.
Bonaparte’s aims in marching on Brussels, together with the Anglo-Prussian defensive strategy, the preliminary moves and the battles of Ligny and Quatre Bras, Roberts disposes of in a mere 27 pages. There is a saying in the army when describing someone who shirks detail — ‘big hand on small map’; but ‘down among the weeds’, or as the German army has it ‘daisy to daisy’, is equally pejorative. Roberts positions himself perfectly, although a map of the theatre of operations as a whole would have helped enormously. He concentrates on the salient and undisputed facts, nodding to the areas of controversy, which rarely in any case touch on the actual course of events. Wellington therefore perhaps gets off rather lightly. For instance, the duke left 17,000 men out of events at Hal, north-west of Waterloo. Roberts explains why this was a sound decision: they covered the Mons-Brussels road, a possible French axis of advance, and they could secure the withdrawal route to the coast in case the Prussian and British armies were forced to retreat down their divergent lines of communication. But the passivity of this corps once the dice were cast was hardly the stuff of a master of campaigning. Wellington also failed to resolve the problem of disunity of command, so that when, as Roberts points out, Marshal Blücher was hors de combat after the mauling at Ligny, the Prussians’ decision to stick with Wellington rather than withdraw northwards along their lines of communication turned on the fortuitous judgment of the Anglophobe chief of staff Gneisenau. Neither does it bear thinking about what would have been the outcome had Wellington himself been hors de combat after Quatre Bras, for the duke had no chief of staff worth the name and had said next to nothing to his nominal second in command, Lord Uxbridge. Bonaparte was a master of military aphorisms, which Roberts frequently quotes against him in his conduct of the battle, and he prized luckiness above all else in his generals. Wellington’s own luck at Waterloo was positively Napoleonic.
Gambling, as the title suggests, is the theme and the accusation of this book. One reviewer at least has taken Roberts to task in writing off Bonaparte as a gambler; yet the evidence, certainly from Austerlitz onwards, is compelling. And Bonaparte’s objective in the Waterloo campaign — a series of favourable political and strategic results precipitated by taking Brussels — stands up to no scrutiny but that of chance. Bonaparte was not the first to make wishful thinking a principle of war, nor the last: Hitler’s gamble in the Ardennes offensive 60 years ago was of the same vacuous logic, and his comprehensive failure has hardly scotched the practice since. Bonaparte’s conduct of the battle of Waterloo itself was no less cynically casual. He tossed troops into the pounding machine all day, true cannon fodder; and when his attacks against the Anglo-Belgian-DutchGerman line had failed, when the Prussians, whom he thought he had soundly defeated the day before, began threatening his flank, he threw in his reserves instead of going onto the defensive. A truly fine commander uses his reserves to reinforce success, not to underwrite failure. And when he had diverted more troops than he could spare in order to protect his right flank, he began lying to his own men: the distant figures arriving on the left flank of the British line were not Prussians, they were Marshal Grouchy’s men come to the relief. This cannot be dismissed as mere deception in war: it was sheer mendacity, and deserves, as Roberts recognises, absolute contempt. Since the horrifically expensive battle of Borodino in 1812, however, Bonaparte had inured himself to the terrible losses inherent in frontal assaults, and so when all else had failed, encouraged wishfully by what he perceived to be a moment of British wavering, he ordered the Garde to try a true last throw of the dice. In Wellington’s words, ‘He came on in the old way, and was seen off in the old way.’ Roberts is good at dismissing the myths too. Most historians have tried to scotch Victor Hugo’s idea of a ravine disordering the French cavalry, but Roberts does so by patiently describing the topography with the added authority of recent research into the topsoil of the battlefield, revealing also that the slope up to the Allied line was much steeper in 1815 than it is now. The myths multiply, however, even today. Roberts quotes a young French officer who in later years took upon himself the responsibility for the disastrously premature cavalry charge, claiming it to have been the unintended consequence of a simple re-alignment movement together with excessive elan. Roberts is right to treat this as a possibility only (a hair-trigger for the entire French cavalry corps takes some believing), but at least one reviewer quotes it as Roberts’s decided opinion, and so in future we will no doubt read of the greatest false start in history. Roberts does perpetuate one myth, however, that ‘horses will refuse to charge straight at a body of men who are pointing bayonets at them’. Horses will charge anything their riders have the courage to put them at.
As to the perpetual controversy whether or not Wellington could have won Waterloo without Blücher, Roberts is surely right to point to the absurdity of the question: without the Prussians, Wellington ‘would never have fought the battle’.
How decisive a battle Waterloo was he speculates on at some length, and reasonably, though the most interesting notion is that the French had la gloire knocked out of them at last. However, Marlborough had knocked it out of the Sun King at Blenheim a century earlier, so it would seem that la gloire resurfaces about every hundred years: vide the doctrine of Attaque à Outrance and the ludicrous Plan 17 of August 1914; and of late the substitution of an EU army for NATO.
Roberts’s prose is as lively as the action it describes; he is comprehensive in his survey of Waterloo historiography, and generous in his attributions. This is altogether a masterly synthesis, a veritable deforestation of what too often obscures the wood of Waterloo. But at the end of the day the battle was won by the British infantry, whose dogged courage Roberts rightly illuminates. He quotes Wellington in praise of the defenders of Hougoumont, the château-anchor of the right flank which held out all day against ferocious assaults, and Lord Saltoun, commanding the First Guards, in reply: it had been ‘touch and go,’ wrote the colonel, ‘a matter of life and death — for all within the walls had sworn that they would never surrender. Our officers were determined never to yield, and the men were resolved to stand by them to the last.’ I cannot but think that this tells us something profound about the mutually reinforcing courage that the British regimental system begets, and which the coming cuts and amalgamations jeopardise perilously.
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