Wellington’s Meeting with Blücher
Having left Quatre Bras towards one o’clock, believing there were few French troops on the Brussels road, Wellington joined Blücher on the heights of Bry. En route, he said to his Prussian liaison officer Müffling, ‘If, as seems likely, the division of the enemy’s forces posted at Frasnes, opposite Quatre Bras, is inconsiderable, and only intended to mask the English army, I can employ my whole strength in support of the Field Marshal [Blücher], and will gladly execute all his wishes in regard to joint operations.’1 On arrival, Wellington and Blücher climbed up the mill of Bussy from which there was an excellent view of the surrounding area. From here they were not only able to see a very large French force assembling, but also, with their telescopes, Napoleon himself, surrounded by a numerous staff. They concluded that they had before them the entire imperial army. The discussion then turned to how Wellington was going to support his allies, supposing that he had only a small holding force in front of him at Quatre Bras.
Two options were discussed. Wellington’s preference was to brush aside the force in front of him and march on Gosselies, thus threatening the French left rear and their lines of communication. This appealed to Wellington as it preserved his own independence of command and freedom of action. The Prussians, led by Blücher’s chief-of-staff, Gneisenau, who had a lingering suspicion about Wellington’s dependability, argued for the Anglo-Dutch army to march straight down the road from Quatre Bras towards Namur, which would bring them in behind the Prussian right and into reserve, where they would be well placed and available for use wherever they were required. Wellington opposed this option as he foresaw his men being drip-fed into battle, and because he would therefore lose centralised command of them. A consensus was not reached and Wellington reportedly ended the discussion with the words, ‘Very well! I will come, if I am not attacked myself.’
It seems that Blücher, by concentrating his army around Ligny during the morning, had already determined on fighting a battle without any assurance from Wellington that he would be directly supported by his allies. Wellington’s visit, although a final plan had not definitively been agreed, would no doubt have reassured him that he was to get some substantial help which, given Bülow’s failure to move sufficiently quickly to join him, would still give him a superiority in numbers. As the Prussian deployment left their right flank very much ‘in the air’, we can assume that Blücher felt that if this was exploited by Napoleon, Wellington’s troops would be closest to this flank to come to his support.
But did Wellington really believe he could concentrate enough of his own troops and then march them to Ligny in sufficient time to make a decisive impact? We do not know what size force Wellington envisaged, but he must have realised that he would need to keep some troops at Quatre Bras to contain the ‘division’ he calculated the French had there, and given the locations of his troops and the forced marches they were already making in order to concentrate, it is reasonable to predict that it would be late afternoon at the earliest before he could bring even a modest force to support the Prussians. Whether Wellington deliberately misled his allies has been hotly debated in recent years, but whether or not it was deliberate, it does indeed seem that he misled them, even given the ‘let out clause’ he finished with, and not all those present at the discussion agree that this was what he said. We shall return to this issue later.
At 2pm Wellington left the Prussian commander-in-chief to return to Quatre Bras.
Napoleon’s Plans
It is important to understand how Napoleon’s mind was working as the situation before him became clear. He had informed Ney that he planned to push the Prussians down their lines of communication and away from their Anglo-Dutch allies so that he could then turn and attack Wellington, destroy him and then march on Brussels. This supposed that Blücher was not planning to make a stand and risk a battle, which would probably be without Wellington’s support. However, as the hours passed, it became increasingly evident that Blücher was indeed planning to make a stand. As Wellington and Blücher met at the Bussy windmill, Napoleon was carrying out a reconnaissance of the Prussian position and identified that its right wing was ‘in the air’; that is, not anchored on a strong feature that would prevent it being outflanked. As we have heard, we can only suppose, since this was the western flank, that Blücher was relying on Wellington to arrive to support this wing of his army.
At two o’clock, it was clear that there was going to be a major battle at Ligny and it is only at this point that Napoleon finally developed his idea of fixing the Prussian army in place by a strong frontal attack, and then enveloping their right wing by drawing troops from Marshal Ney, whom he expected to have occupied the vital crossroads of Quatre Bras and to have deployed his troops as he had directed in his orders sent that morning. Napoleon gave the necessary orders to the right wing and reserve for the attack and had Soult write an order to Ney informing him of the need to send a force onto the Prussian right flank. We will note the detail of this order and its arrival with Ney later, but at this point Ney was unaware that Napoleon had the majority of the Prussian army in front of him and was about to attack it. But equally, the emperor was unclear on the situation facing his left wing commander. This breakdown of communications and the failure of each of these two key commanders to understand the true situation that faced the other, was to have catastrophic consequences.
The Battlefield of Quatre Bras
To a modern visitor the area around the crossroads and small hamlet of Quatre Bras has little to recommend it as a defensive position, and it certainly did not offer the true reverse slope position that Wellington was so renowned for. The hamlet of Quatre Bras consisted of only a large farm, named for the hamlet, an inn (apparently named Trois Bras, which may also account for Marshal Soult referring to the crossroads by this name) and a few other buildings associated with farming.
The field of action was an undulating plain which was delineated by the heights of Quatre Bras to the north and Balcan to the south. From the relative high ground of Quatre Bras, the ground fell gently away towards the farm of La Bergerie; an open area which would have offered a clear killing ground for the defenders if the crops had not been so high as to partially obscure their sight. Unfortunately it is impossible to really understand how this lack of visibility affected the view for those in the area of the crossroads, but it certainly commanded the undulations of the ground immediately in front of it towards the Barti Saint-Bernard ridge. This ridge blocked all further observation into the shallow valleys beyond and only the crests of the Gémioncourt ridge and the Balcan heights could be seen beyond it.
A little over a mile to the south, the Balcan ridgeline acted for the French as Quatre Bras did for the allies; giving a good, wide view of the battlefield, but no line of sight into the shallow valleys. However, it offered an excellent gunline for the artillery to support the initial deployment and advance. The Delhutte wood, to the east of Frasnes, formed something of a chicane with that village, which needed to be negotiated by the French before they had sufficient open ground to deploy their entire line of battle. Once clear of this choke point, Reille’s divisions could shake out into their prescribed formation.
From the Balcan heights, named after the inn that once stood there, the French had three approaches they could use to seize the crossroads.
The right (eastern) approach would require them to secure the farm of Lairalle, then the farm and hamlet of Piraumont, followed by the small hamlet of Thyle that lay on the main Namur to Nivelles road, before advancing up this road towards Quatre Bras. Close to Quatre Bras itself, the Namur road had quite high banks which made it a natural defensive position facing south and south-west, but offered no protection against anyone marching up the road from the south-east. This approach had the advantage of cutting the main road between Quatre Bras and the Prussian position at Ligny, but risked having Prussian troops moving up it towards their allies and on to the French right rear. The relatively small, but significant lake called the Étang Materne, and the Gémioncourt stream that fed it, would also rather isolate this approach from the rest of the battlefield.
The second approach was a central approach using the main Brussels road as an axis. To the right of the road, this would take the attackers up and over a number of low ridges with shallow valleys in between. The two biggest of these shallow valleys had small streams running along the bottom; from the south, these were the Pré des Queues and then the Gémioncourt stream. The latter in particular was a serious obstacle, described as:
. . . bordered by hedges impassable for mounted troops, and through which infantry could only move in single file. The ground inside the two hedges is from three to five feet lower than that outside, and this added to the difficulty of passing through them.2
Along the main road lay the farms of Gémioncourt and La Bergerie; the former lay in a hollow beside the main road and was particularly strongly built, with high walls joining the farm house and outbuildings making it almost a fortress. La Bergerie was a relatively small, two-storey building, surrounded by a hedge. Across the road was a small garden, also surrounded by a hedge. The shallow valleys offered protection from artillery fire and the ridges above them made a series of ideal artillery positions. This part of the battlefield was widely cultivated and was described by one British soldier as, ‘being covered with rye, and of an extraordinary height, some of it measuring seven feet’.3 This made orientation and coordinated movement difficult, and largely hid from view the troops moving through it, making identification equally tricky. One of the main constraints of this approach was that the main Namur road to the east, and the Bossu wood to the west, funnelled any advance towards the crossroads on an ever-decreasing frontage.
To the west of the main road the ground was more undulating and irregular, with a number of hollows and heights, although suitable for both infantry and cavalry to manoeuvre in cover. The heights to the west of the main road that can be clearly identified on the map offered more dominating artillery positions. An advance along this left-hand (western) approach would first need to clear Petit and Grand Pierrepont, two large farms that could be easily fortified and which were surrounded by orchards and gardens. Unfortunately for the defence, the latter was built in a dip, without fields of fire, and was therefore of little tactical importance. The open ground was relatively flat and good for both infantry and cavalry, although a number of sunken tracks offered cover for defenders and obstacles for attackers.
The third approach was through the wood of Bossu. This was a relatively long, thin wood (long since cut down); about 2,500 metres long and between 500 and 1,000 metres wide, it offered a covered approach right up to within 150 yards of Quatre Bras itself. Orientated south-west to north-east it had a sunken track running north to south and another east to west about two-thirds of the way down its length. Level with Gémioncourt, the edge of the wood was 500 metres from the main road, forming, with that farm, a relatively narrow bottleneck through which, given the difficulty of the stream to the east of Gémioncourt, all French cavalry would have to pass. Contemporary accounts give the impression that within the wood there were areas of dense undergrowth where movement, observation and command and control were very difficult, and more open areas where the trees were thicker and there was little undergrowth. Indeed, one author claims that cavalry could pass through in ‘extended order’ and even that the French deployed two batteries within it.4 The edges of the wood were lined with thick vegetation, giving the impression of a hedge, and making the ordered entry and exit of the wood difficult except on the few tracks. The wood provided good cover to those who occupied it and wished to shoot out across the open ground, but it would be as difficult to defend as to attack due to the difficulty of maintaining cohesion and control.
The Allied Deployment
At 2pm when the French attack began, the Prince of Orange had available 8,000 infantry and sixteen guns. In fact, the two battalions of the Orange-Nassau Regiment had no more than ten rounds in their ammunition pouches; a shocking failure of logistics given that these troops had not yet been seriously engaged in the campaign. To make ammunition resupply even more challenging, the two volunteer chasseur companies had four different calibres of firearms! Significantly, apart from fifty stray Prussian hussars that left soon after the outpost skirmishing early in the morning, there were no allied cavalry at Quatre Bras until sometime after 3pm.
Across his whole front the Prince of Orange had deployed a line of skirmishers, but the main line of defence was heavily weighted to the west of the main road. Here he had a line of four battalions and a company of volunteer ja¨ger, orientated along the edge of the Bossu wood. These were supported by a battery of artillery (Stevenaar’s), deployed just to the west of the main road on one of the low ridges where it had a good field of fire covering that road. The Prince of Orange clearly felt that the Bossu wood offered good cover for his outnumbered troops and, by making it something of a bastion, he would protect the Nivelles road along which he expected his earliest reinforcement to come.
To the east of the road, the line between Gémioncourt and the Étang Materne was held by a single battalion; the 27th Ja¨gers, although the farm itself was occupied by two companies of the Orange-Nassau Regiment. This flank did, however, also have the support of a battery of artillery; two sections were deployed on the heights just forward of Gémioncourt with the other section covering down the main road towards Namur.
In reserve were a further four battalions, including the 7th Line Battalion, the final unit of the 2nd (Netherlands) Division which rejoined just before the battle started. These were deployed either side of the Quatre Bras crossroads, but rather too far back to give the front line any immediate support.
The Netherlands defence line was therefore very much based on the natural defence line of the Bossu wood, protecting the Nivelles road. The Prince had given no thought to trying to keep the Namur road open, along which the Prussians were expecting allied support; he clearly felt he had insufficient troops to do both.
The French Deployment
At 2pm, Ney still had only the divisions of Bachelu, Foy and Piré immediately available; a total of about 10,000 infantry, 2,000 cavalry and thirty guns, although he did have Lefebvre-Desnouëttes’ 2,400 Guard cavalry and its two horse batteries available in an emergency. Having concentrated these divisions around Frasnes, they first had to advance and skirt around the Delhutte wood on the high ground above the village from which allied officers, including Wellington himself at one time, had been observing them throughout the morning. Reille describes the initial deployment:
The 5th [Bachelu] and 9th [Foy] Divisions and the cavalry division [Piré] formed up, starting the attack towards 2pm. The 5th Division marched in columns par bataillon, to the right of the road and the 9th Division had a brigade on the road and one in reserve.
Piré’s cavalry division flanked the right, while the marshal was on the main road with the Guard cavalry division and a body of heavy cavalry commanded by the Count de Valmy which had just arrived, deployed to the left.
The 6th Infantry Division [Jérôme] was still spread out behind and the commander of the 7th [Girard] sent word that at that moment the emperor had met him at Wagnée [in fact it was Wangenies] just as he was setting off for Quatre Bras and had taken him off with him to Saint-Amand.5
So even before the battle started, Ney had been deprived of one of Reille’s divisions. Girard’s troops were destined to take a leading part in the battle of Ligny and Girard himself was to find a glorious death there at the head of his soldiers during the desperate fighting.
Wathier’s lancer brigade had led Bachelu’s division into position towards the right, but it soon became clear that the ground here was unsuitable for cavalry action and they were promptly recalled to join Hubert’s brigade near the main road. The artillery unlimbered along the ridgeline, giving them an excellent field of fire towards Quatre Bras about 2 kilometres to the north. Having skirted the wood, Bachelu’s battalions wheeled to the left to face north, except for the lead regiment, which had been ordered to seize the farm and hamlet of Piraumont and to cut the Namur road. This deployment was conducted in full view of the relatively inexperienced Dutch and Nassau troops and must have been an impressive and intimidating sight.