THE SHEEP WORRIER OF EUROPE IS ON THE LOOSE
Napoleon’s nine months on Elba, where he mused on what had been and on what might yet be, were not unproductive and he made genuine attempts to better the lot of his few thousand subjects. He initiated an ambitious scheme of road-building, ordered the construction of a hospital, issued decrees for the planting of vineyards, introduced a variant of the civil legal code that he had already established in France, and paraded his little army. But if one has had the whole of Europe at one’s feet, being the mayor of, say, Grimsby is not quite the same thing, and as the Bourbon government failed to pay the promised subvention of two million francs, most of his plans came to nothing. Elba is only seven miles off the coast of Italy, and, although the Royal Navy patrolled the waters of his tiny kingdom, Napoleon was not a prisoner and it was impossible for him not to be kept informed of what was going on in the rest of the world. While his wife, Marie Louise of Austria, who had replaced Joséphine in 1810, and his only son were confined to the empress’s homeland, Napoleon’s old confidants came and went, his sister Pauline visited him (the only one who did) and the marshals, most of whom had happily turned their coats and were serving the restored regime, ensured that they kept open a channel of communication with their old master, just in case the wind changed. The same applied to the two most influential civilian functionaries: Joseph Fouché, the minister of police, who had served the Revolution, Napoleon and now the Bourbons, and Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, the foreign minister, an excommunicated bishop who had enjoyed an even more varied career as a servant of Louis XVI, the Revolution, Napoleon and the restored monarchy. Both kept in touch with Napoleon and both would serve him again.
In 1814 the population of France had had enough of war, its bloodshed and its taxation. The marshals, too, had had enough, and when Louis XVIII,* nephew of the executed Louis XVI, arrived in Paris from exile in Buckinghamshire a few days after Napoleon’s departure,† he was greeted by cheering crowds and rapturous relief as the victorious powers, which now included representatives of newly reinstated Bourbon France, settled down in Vienna to decide the future shape of Europe. Had the Bourbons accepted that France had changed and that many aspects of the Revolution were right and necessary, then all might have been well, but while Louis himself – timid, fifty-nine years old and grossly overweight – was relatively harmless, those who accompanied him were not. A whole rag, tag and bobtail of former generals, clergy, émigrés, nobles and dispossessed landowners came flooding back, all expecting to be restored to their pre-revolutionary positions and to be compensated for their losses. The Allies had insisted that the restored monarchy should be constitutional, as opposed to absolute, so there were limits to Louis’ ability to revert to the status quo ante, but he did his best. That he signed the constitution forced upon him by the Allies ‘in the nineteenth year of our reign’ was a pointer of what was to come. Much of the army was demobilized – an economic as much as a political necessity – with eighty-eight regiments of infantry being disbanded and the remainder reduced to two battalions per regiment instead of three, while the cavalry lost ninety-one regiments of various types. The Imperial Guard became just another regiment of the line, Swiss mercenary regiments were raised to replace French ones, the Légion d’honneur, instituted by Napoleon, became a civil as well as a military distinction, and Louis particularly upset the Paris mob by ordering that bars should close on Sundays.
In a remarkably short space of time the popularity of the returned monarchy evaporated. The civil rights won by the Revolution may have been eroded during the long years of war, but Napoleon had given France firm government while the Bourbons had spent their time drinking tea in England – as the king was forcefully reminded by Marshal Ney – and had been restored as the puppets of foreign powers. French frontiers had shrunk back to those of 1792 and Belgium had been ceded to the Netherlands, a crippling blow to French pride. France was still an agrarian society, and one sector that had done well out of the Revolution was the peasantry. Released from indentured labour and all sorts of restrictions that had existed under the ancien régime, many had become established as independent small farmers in their own right following the redistribution of land confiscated from executed or absent magnates. The threat of losing that land to the returned original owners alarmed them. Although the king issued a decree promising that, while the original owners would be compensated, there was no intention of restoring their lands, the peasantry did not believe it, or if they did, they thought that the king’s brother and heir, the comte d’Artois, would revoke any promises made. The army, too – its veterans and its demobilized soldiery – missed the prestige that they had enjoyed under the emperor, and more and more the cafés would fill with gatherings of ex-officers on half-pay or pensions that were paid late or not at all, who would hark back to the glory that had been theirs. Prisoners of war returned to find that there were no jobs for them. Veterans defiantly wore their medals, won at a hundred battles, and sentries of the new royal army saluted them, whatever the regulations might say.
While the regimental officers, the ex-officers and the rank and file grumbled and grew ever more bitter, most of the marshals and generals soldiered on. Of the twenty-six marshals created by Napoleon, three were dead by April 1814, two were kings or crown princes, one was retired and one remained strictly neutral. Of the remaining nineteen, no fewer than eighteen declared their loyalty to Louis XVIII and kept their titles and lands and lucrative appointments – something that did not go unnoticed by their juniors.
Napoleon had never accepted that his empire was at an end – he was sure that sentiment in France would turn towards him once more, as indeed it was doing. In final exile on St Helena, he remarked in hindsight that he should have waited until the Bourbon regime collapsed, when he could have returned by popular demand. But in truth, by early 1815 he had to make his move swiftly. He knew that there was disagreement among the Allies at Vienna, that the Austrians and the Russians wanted him removed to somewhere much farther away than Elba, and that at any moment he could well be the target of an assassination attempt. In any case, he was running out of money to pay his soldiers. So, on 26 February 1815, Napoleon left Elba, with those soldiers, his horses and his guns aboard the brig Inconstant and a tiny fleet of smaller vessels, and on 28 February, having narrowly evaded patrolling warships, he landed at Golfe Juan, west of Cannes, and began to march north. The region of Provence was unrepentantly royalist, so his best route lay through the mountainous passes along the Italian border. At first nobody noticed his arrival: the news that he had absented himself from Elba took several days to reach Paris, and even longer to reach London and the Congress in Vienna. The population of the areas through which the little expedition passed stayed quiet, waiting to see what would happen. When the news that the ‘hound had slipped the leash’ did reach Paris, the army under Soult, a former marshal of Napoleon’s, was instructed to arrest him. Soult deployed far more troops than would have been necessary for that task – 60,000 regulars and 120,000 reservists – and presumably did so with a view to jumping ship when the time was ripe, while Marshal Ney, now commanding the Bourbon cavalry, assured King Louis that he would bring Napoleon back to Paris ‘in an iron cage’.
Napoleon and his party had travelled twenty-five miles a day since landing, an extraordinary achievement given the roads and the weather. The first confrontation took place at Laffrey, south of Grenoble, on 7 March, when he was faced by a detachment of the 5th Regiment of the Line, drawn up across the road under the command of a captain. Now occurred one of the underpinnings of the Napoleonic legend. Ordering his own men to stand still with shouldered arms, he walked alone towards the serried ranks of the men sent to arrest him. He opened his greatcoat and spread his arms wide, saying, ‘If you want to shoot your emperor, then here I am.’ It would have taken only one shot, or even an accidental discharge, to end the whole adventure, but instead cries of ‘Vive l’empereur!’ went up and the entire detachment returned to its old allegiance. The following day Napoleon entered Grenoble, having covered another twenty-five miles, to find cheering crowds, the artillery refusing to fire on him and the infantry pulling out of hiding the imperial colours and eagles. As he continued to move north, his army grew larger and larger as troops sent to stop him instead joined him. In Paris wags put up tracts that declared: ‘Dear Louis, please do not send me any more troops – I have enough. Signed, Bonaparte’.
At Lyon, which he reached on 10 March, his army swollen by the defection of yet another garrison, Napoleon issued the first decree of his new reign: Bourbon placeholders were dismissed; commissions and appointments granted or made by Louis XVIII were cancelled; Swiss regiments were disbanded; Bourbon insignia were to be replaced by those of the Revolution; land taken back by émigrés was to be restored to the peasants; changes in the legal code were nullified; and a provisional government was formed. On 14 March, Ney, for all his bombast about iron cages, found he could not resist the charisma of his old commander and also joined him, taking his troops with him. By now, Napoleon had eleven regiments of infantry, each of two battalions, two regiments of cavalry, nine batteries (fifty-four guns) of artillery and a host of ex-officers and soldiers – perhaps 25,000 men in all.*
The momentum behind Napoleon was such that nothing could stop him. Diplomats began to leave Paris and royalists to liquidate their assets. On Sunday, 19 March, the day Napoleon reached Fontainebleau, Fat Louis and his court left Paris for Ghent in Holland. By nine o’clock that evening, Napoleon was in Paris, once more Emperor of the French. He had achieved the restoration of his regime in a mere three weeks and without firing a shot. Now he had to consolidate his position. He could no longer rule as an absolute autocrat, and by forming a broadly based government and summoning an electoral college, he tried to appease those who wanted to return neither to the ancien régime nor to the imperium. Decrees flew from his pen: the abolition of slavery, the abolition of feudal (royalist) titles, guarantees of press freedom and civil liberties, and universal suffrage. But more than anything else, if he was to have any chance whatsoever of remaining in power, he had to have peace.
From Napoleon’s point of view, it was unfortunate that, when he absented himself from Elba, the Congress was still in being. The representatives of the European powers were still all together in Vienna and able to consult and take decisions swiftly, which might not have been the case had they dispersed to their home countries. Napoleon sent letters to all the heads of state and governments: he would accept the 1792 frontiers, he had no intention of territorial aggrandizement, and he hoped that peace and tranquillity could prevail. But the Allies had heard all this before: there had been occasions during the long years of war when Napoleon had first appeared to accept reasonable proposals and then reneged. Whatever they may have thought of the Bourbons (not much, in most cases), they were not prepared to trust Napoleon under any circumstances and letters were returned unopened and representatives spurned. In Vienna, the Tsar turned to the Duke of Wellington, there to represent the British government, and said dramatically: ‘Now it is for you to save the world again.’ Napoleon was declared an outlaw and yet another coalition – the seventh – was formed to depose him. The coalition armies would be composed of a great many German, Austrian, Russian and Dutch troops, with the addition of such British troops as might be available (not many) and a great deal of British money.
The declaration of outlawry was unusual but supported the legal fiction that it was not France that was the enemy but the usurper Napoleon personally. Britain had refused to sign the Treaty of Fontainebleau, which brought the war to an end in 1814 and consigned Napoleon to Elba, and had done so on the grounds that the treaty recognized that Napoleon had been a legitimate ruler. However, since outlawry technically allowed anyone to kill the outlaw without fear of sanction, Samuel Whitbread’s castigation of the British government in the House of Commons, as he accused it of being a party to the encouragement of murder, gave rise to much ministerial feet-shuffling and weasel-wording.
At first it was thought that Napoleon’s return would lead to civil war in France, King Louis’ army set against the Bonapartist adventurers, and that Allied troops would merely stand by to reinforce the royalists if necessary. When it became apparent – as it did rather quickly – that there was no royalist army and that most of the population welcomed the return of the emperor, there was no option for the Allies but to remove Napoleon themselves. It was agreed at Vienna that the Austrians would provide two armies of 210,000 and 75,000 men, the Prussians 117,000, the Russians 150,000, and the British and the Dutch 110,000 between them. As Britain was unlikely to be able to produce anything like the number of men agreed, she would contribute £5 million in sterling, money that would not only finance the coalition as a whole but also pay for soldiers provided by the minor German states. The Austrians would approach from the upper Rhine and from northern Italy through the Riviera; the Russians would mass on the central Rhine; the Prussians would approach through Liège, on the left of the Anglo-Dutch, who would move from the area of Brussels. Then, all armies would strike for Paris, forcing Napoleon to split his armies, never certain from where the main thrust was coming. It would, of course, take time for all the Allied armies to position themselves on the French frontiers, and while the Anglo-Dutch and the Prussians were in Flanders by May, it would be some time before the others were ready. This gave Napoleon time that he sorely needed.
The French army that was left once the restored Bourbons had finished reducing it numbered only about 200,000, nothing like the size that would be needed if Napoleon was to have any chance at all of dealing with the five armies of the coalition. An instant reinforcement came in the form of 75,000 veterans, unemployed since Napoleon’s abdication, while about 15,000 as yet untrained volunteers enlisted. Border guards, policemen and redundant sailors could also be drafted in, and units of the National Guard – a revolutionary militia or home guard, disarmed by Napoleon (and generally useless) but recalled in 1814 as part of a last-ditch attempt to defend the French frontiers – could be used to garrison towns and static fortifications to release soldiers of the army proper. All over France, drapers were making uniforms and powder mills cartridges, gunsmiths were turning out muskets and horses were being requisitioned for the artillery. More cavalry was needed too, and in citadels across the nation grizzled sergeants attempted to contain their exasperation as recruits fell off their mounts and horses galloped riderless over the horizon.
Despite the problems of finding the necessary manpower, training it and equipping it, the army grew steadily in numbers and competence. The old numbers and names were restored, imperial standards and flags reissued, and once again regiments had their eagles, although this time only one per regiment, held by the first battalion. Despite all this, it would not be anything like large enough to deal with all the Allied armies at once. Napoleon therefore had two options. He could station his field army in a defensive posture in the vicinity of Paris and rely on the Allies’ need to capture and then man all the frontier garrisons. This would reduce his enemies to a manageable size and might allow him to win a victory outside Paris, but it could only postpone the inevitable: the Allies would simply pour more and more troops in until he was overwhelmed. Alternatively, he could take the initiative before the Allies were in position and try to defeat them one by one.
As in the earlier wars, Napoleon’s most dangerous enemy was England, not because of her relatively tiny army but because of her deep pockets and the Royal Navy’s blockade. If England could be knocked out of the war, then without its paymaster the coalition would fall apart. A crushing military defeat of the British army in Flanders, sending the remnants reeling back across the Channel, would cause the Tory government to fall and to be replaced by a Whig administration that would make peace. So ran Napoleon’s logic, although as a keen student of history he should perhaps have noticed that being booted out of Europe in the past had generally served to make the British more grumpy rather than less. As it was, both the Prussian and the Anglo-Dutch armies were stationed where they could watch the French frontiers. But although they were deployed in positions from which they could invade France, they were not disposed to defend against an attack coming out of France. Furthermore, while the armies kept in contact with each other, physically they were many miles apart. If they were to combine, they would outnumber anything that Napoleon might be able to muster, but if they could be attacked separately, before they had a chance to join, then they could be defeated separately. It was a huge gamble – but then Napoleon had always been a gambler: it would either re-establish Napoleonic France as the dominant power in Europe, or it would bring everything crashing down around him. Napoleon had a very great deal to gain, and nothing to lose.
The armies that would fight the campaign of June and July 1815 were very similar in some respects, and very different in others. By the time the Austrians and the Russians were close enough to take part, the fighting was all but over, so the armies that actually fought the campaign were those of the French, the Prussians and their associated German states, the Dutch and the British with their own Germans. As the British army was the only one that had been neither taken over nor utterly defeated by revolutionary or Napoleonic France at some stage in the wars, it is apposite to consider it first.
Unlike the armies of any of the other players, the British had no conscripts. In many European countries a period of military service was (and until very recently still was) part of the process of becoming a citizen, but in modern times conscription had never been levied for the regular army in the United Kingdom. It had, briefly, been tried by both sides in the English Civil War, found not to work and swiftly abandoned. Conscription would have been regarded as an unacceptable imposition on the liberties of a freeborn Briton, and British soldiers were volunteers who signed on ‘for life’ (in reality twenty-one years). Because it was a wholly professional army, it was highly skilled at what it did. British soldiers spent hour after mind-numbingly boring hour, day after day, week after week, loading and firing their weapons, moving from column into line into square, back into column, route marching and drilling. Unlike European armies, who restricted firing practice in peacetime because of the expense, the British soldier was required to fire thirty live and sixty blank rounds in training every year, as well as to carry out daily dry practice. By the end of the Peninsular War in 1814, the British army was probably professionally the most capable army in the world, but as a professional army it was inevitably an expensive, and therefore a small, army, accustomed to cooperating with allies and using technology as a force multiplier – that is to say, as a means of compensating for lack of manpower.
All armies of the time relied on the smooth-bore musket as the personal weapon of the infantry, the men who fought on foot and were the backbone of all armies of the period. The British musket, known familiarly as the ‘Brown Bess’, had been in service in various models since standardization in 1716 and would remain in service until superseded by the rifled musket with a percussion lock in the 1840s. In 1815 there were two types of musket in use in the British army: the ‘Short Land Service’, first issued in 1768, which weighed 10½ pounds and was 4 feet 10½ inches long with a 42-inch barrel; and the India Pattern, 1½ pounds lighter, 3 inches shorter and with a 39-inch barrel. These latter were originally manufactured for the armies of the East India Company, but on the outbreak of war in 1793 the batch was taken over by the British government before it could be shipped to India. Both weapons were of the same calibre, 0.76 inches, and fired the same ammunition, and both could be fitted with a 17-inch bayonet.* Both had the same flintlock firing mechanism, such that, when the trigger was pulled, a piece of flint or iron pyrites held in the ‘cock’ was released and sprang forward, striking the frizzen, a serrated piece of metal hinged to the pan cover. The frizzen was pushed forward, opening the pan and at the same time drawing sparks from the flint. The sparks ignited a small amount of powder in the pan and the flame ran through the touch-hole into the bottom of the barrel, igniting the main charge and firing the musket.
Loading the musket was a complicated business. The soldier had to cant (tilt) the musket forward, holding it at the point of balance in his left hand. With his right hand he pulled the cock back to ‘half cock’ so that the pan was open. He then took a cartridge from a box-like pouch on his belt, also with his right hand. The cartridge consisted of a lead ball, weighing just over an ounce with a diameter of 0.71 inches, and black powder, the whole wrapped in paper – ‘cartridge paper’ – and sewn closed with thread. The soldier opened the paper end of the cartridge with his teeth and poured a tiny amount of powder into the pan, and closed the pan cover. He then brought the butt of the musket to the ground with the barrel vertical and poured the rest of the powder down the barrel. Next he dropped the ball down the barrel and pushed the screwed-up cartridge paper into the muzzle.† He now withdrew the ramrod, secured under the barrel, and rammed the whole lot down the barrel, before returning the ramrod to its keepers. The point of including the paper – the wad – was that it prevented the ball from rolling out of the barrel if the musket was pointed downwards. To fire the weapon, the soldier first pulled the cock back to ‘full cock’, placed the butt against his shoulder, aimed along the barrel (there were no sights) and squeezed the trigger. The whole process of loading was then repeated.
As the diameter of the barrel was 0.76 inches and that of the ball 0.71 inches, the difference of 0.05 inches – called the ‘windage’ – made for easier loading, but also made the weapon inherently inaccurate. As the ball did not fit tight to the barrel, it rattled up it when fired and – depending on which part of the barrel it rattled against before exiting the muzzle – went above, below, right or left of the aiming line. One authority said that a soldier would probably be hit by a musket aimed at him from 80 yards away, but be very unfortunate indeed to be hit by a musket at 150 yards, provided his antagonist aimed at him, and that ‘as to firing at a man at 200 yards with a common musket, you may as well fire at the moon’.3 The way to make use of the musket in war was to line men up shoulder to shoulder and fire in volleys, as close to the enemy as possible, for only in that way could effective fire be brought down, and provided the men aimed low (as the musket tended to kick high, they were told to aim for the waist belt), great holes would be torn in the opposing ranks.
Unlike the infantry of every other European power, the British regiment was a purely administrative unit, not a tactical one. A regiment might have two, three or even four battalions, but they did not necessarily fight together and, while wearing the same cap badge and facings of the same colour, might be stationed at opposite ends of the world. The fighting unit was the battalion, commanded by a lieutenant colonel, which had ten companies, each commanded by a captain with two subalterns, two sergeants and eighty junior NCOs and privates. Two of the companies were ‘flank’ companies. One, which always took post at the right of the line, was the ‘grenadier company’, which was originally intended to be made up of grenade throwers, and thus the tallest and strongest men in the battalion. That tactical role had long disappeared, however, and by 1815 the grenadier company performed exactly the same tasks as any other company, although it was occasionally extracted for what might now be termed special operations. The other flank company, with a very definite tactical role, was the ‘light company’, which consisted of men who had been specially trained to act as skirmishers. Skirmishers, who could form as much as a quarter or even a third of a British army in defence, were deployed in loose order in front of the main defence line, in order to persuade the enemy to deploy early and fire its first volley (which, loaded when not under fire, would be the most accurate). The skirmishers would aim to cause as much mayhem as possible before the advancing enemy closed with the British main body. Having fulfilled their task, the light company, armed and equipped as any other company, would then retire and fall in on the left of the battalion line. By 1815, in addition to the light companies, there were whole battalions of light infantry, who could be used either to skirmish or to stand in the line, or both.
At full strength, therefore, a battalion of line infantry would be over 800 strong, although in practice most were well below that. Operationally, two, three or four battalions were combined into a brigade, commanded by a colonel (with the appointment, but not the rank, of brigadier general) or a major general. Two or more brigades formed a division, commanded by a major general or lieutenant general. The British army was never large enough to form corps, each of two or more divisions, except at Waterloo when, as we shall see, the Anglo-Dutch army was divided into three corps.
The small British army, while perfectly capable of fighting an attacking battle, preferred to find a piece of ground that suited it and take up a position where the enemy would have to attack it, and then make use of superior British musketry to blow approaching French (and it was nearly always French) infantry away. British musketry was superior not because of the musket, which fired only a marginally heavier bullet than its French equivalent, but because British soldiers’ training was better. Although most armies in line stood in three ranks, the British stood in two, and thus were able to bring every musket to bear. Statistically about one shot in every seven was a misfire, whether because the flint broke or the powder was damp or in the heat of battle the soldier had failed to load properly. Given that the British preferred to stand in defence and allow an enemy to attack them, and then to be destroyed by British musketry, it was vital that fire was continuous. As the rate of fire of the Brown Bess was two rounds a minute (claims of three or even four rounds a minute are nonsense), if the men of a battalion in line all fired at once, there would be a delay of thirty seconds while they reloaded – ample time for an advancing enemy to close with the bayonet. The answer was ‘platoon firing’, where smaller bodies fired in sequence, so that a proportion of the battalion always had its weapons loaded and ready to fire. In a ten-company battalion the fire unit – the ‘platoon’ – was the half-company of forty men. The company commander – a captain – would command one half and his senior subaltern or a sergeant the other half. There were thus twenty fire units, and while there were various sequences of firing, the simplest method, and that used most often, was for the two outside fire units, those on the extreme right and left of the battalion, to fire, followed by the next two in, and so on until the two fire units in the centre fired, by which time the extreme outside half-companies had reloaded. The procedure could then be repeated until the enemy were all dead or gave up and ran away, or had taken so many casualties that they were unable to continue.
This system of platoon firing at a rate of two rounds a minute for each firer depended upon there being a pause of three seconds between each firing. Stop watches had not been invented, so half-company commanders had various ways of calculating three seconds: ‘One thousand and one, one thousand and two, one thousand and three – Fire’; ‘Officers’ wives get pudding and pies, sergeants’ wives get skilly – Fire’, and the like.
If we assume that a British battalion in line, with 800 men in two ranks, is being attacked by a French regiment of 1,800 men in three battalions in column, then the column frontage is forty men across. Most exchanges of fire did not take place at a range of more than 150 yards, so if the advancing French are to close with the British line, then – marching at the standard pace of seventy-five 28-inch paces to the minute – they will take just over two-and-a-half minutes to cover the distance, during which time they will have 4,800 rounds (six shots from each defender) fired at them, or 120 rounds per yard of front. In reply only the front two French ranks can deliver fire, and they cannot reload on the move, so they return but one round per ten yards of front. Even allowing for misfires and faulty loading, it is small wonder that attackers never got anywhere near a British line that was prepared to receive them. Even where the French did manage to deploy into line when advancing, they still invariably failed, simply because the professional British soldier knew that if he stood in line and carried out the drills he had practised over and over again, then – short of running out of ammunition – nothing could withstand him.*
Contrary to popular belief, the British army was not (and is not) opposed to technology, for if you have a small army that regularly takes on far larger ones, you need to make use of every possible development to substitute for flesh and blood. The British experimented with rockets (and used them, briefly, at Waterloo), tried out various patterns of cavalry sword and, most effective of all, made much use of the rifle.
As we have seen, the smooth-bore musket is, by its very design, inaccurate because the bullet is unstable. If the bullet could be stabilized, then it could travel farther and more accurately than one fired from the Brown Bess, and the way to stabilize it is, first, to ensure that it fits tightly in the barrel and, second, to impart spin to it. This is done by a rifle, a weapon that has spiral grooves inside the barrel that grip the bullet and make it spin. The British had used rifles in the American wars, against the French and the rebellious American colonists, but it was thought that they were not suitable for European warfare, being either not soldier-proof or taking too long to load, until there was a change of mind in the 1790s. Gunsmiths all over the United Kingdom were invited to tender to supply the British army with a rifle, and after extensive testing by the Board of Ordnance in early 1800, the rifle chosen was that submitted by Ezekial Baker, a gunsmith of Whitechapel, London.4 His rifle was a flintlock weighing nine pounds; it had a calibre of 0.61 inches and fired a lead ball weighing 0.8 ounces. The barrel had seven grooves, giving the ball a quarter-turn, and being only 45¾ inches long with a 20-inch barrel, the weapon could be loaded lying down. The loading procedure was similar to that of the musket, except that the ball was wrapped in a greased leather clover-shaped patch before being rammed down the barrel, the patch being gripped by the grooves. Owing to the need to wrap the ball and to the tight fit that meant that ramming took longer, the loading procedure was slower than that of the musket, and the rate of fire was probably no more than three shots every two minutes. The rifle was sighted up to 200 yards, but it was accurate to a much greater distance in skilled hands,* and its possession meant that riflemen could kill soldiers armed with the musket long before the latter could get close enough to reply.
The regiments selected to use the rifle had their origins in the Experimental Corps of Riflemen, set up at Shorncliffe in 1800. Under Colonel Coote Manningham, a 35-year-old enthusiast, it was to be manned by infantry regiments in the UK sending one officer and fourteen soldiers to be trained as riflemen. Commanding officers rubbed their hands and off went the drunks, the welfare cases, the debtors, the useless and the ill-disciplined. By complaining to the commander-in-chief, the Duke of York, Manningham had the unpromising material removed and replaced by men with good records. It was harder to get rid of fat and idle officers, with some of whom he had also been burdened, but a regime of daily runs from the beach to the officers’ mess before breakfast soon persuaded them to transfer to posts where soldiering was taken with less seriousness.* The Experimental Corps eventually became the 95th (Rifle) Regiment (later the Rifle Brigade), of five battalions each of eight companies; the existing 60th Foot was converted to a rifle regiment; and various Allied units such as the Brunswick-Oels Regiment, the King’s German Legion light companies and the Portuguese Cacadores were issued with the Baker, of which around 30,000 were manufactured during the wars. Dressed in a camouflage uniform of black and dark green, riflemen would skirmish, ambush and snipe. Their particular targets would be officers, fanniers – bearers of small flags who were stationed on the extreme left and right of a French formation and were responsible for keeping direction – and drummer boys, these last because on the battlefield, where shouted orders would be drowned out by the ambient noise, signals were given by beat of drum. That many of the drummers were boys of twelve or thirteen was a pity, but if they did not have a sense of humour, they should not have joined. The intention of all this was to disrupt the enemy chain of command and control, and when their task was done, the riflemen would retire behind the main body, as their rate of fire was too slow for them to stand in the line.
British cavalry were probably the best mounted of all the armies in 1815, mostly on hardy cob types of between fourteen and fifteen hands for the soldiers, and light or medium hunters for the officers, who, having to range farther and wider around the battlefield, needed a faster horse. British cavalrymen were more caring of their horses than most, getting off and leading their mounts with girths slackened where possible – something that a French cavalryman would have considered beneath him. Despite the wide variety of titles – horse guards, life guards, dragoons, light dragoons, hussars – the British mounted arm was divided into heavy and light cavalry. The Royal Horse Guards (the Blues) and the Life Guards – generically the Household Cavalry because of their traditional role as the king’s personal troops and guardians of his person – and the dragoon regiments were heavy cavalry, on generally heavier horses, intended for shock action – that is, charging as a formed body against enemy cavalry or infantry – and equipped with a straight heavy sword (but not, like their French equivalents, partially armoured with metal cuirasses and back-plates). Light cavalry – light dragoons and hussars – were intended for outpost duty, reconnaissance, piquets, escorts and pursuit of a beaten enemy. The men were unarmoured and equipped with a curved sabre. The titles bore no resemblance to their 1815 roles – dragoons were originally mounted infantry who rode to the battlefield and then dismounted and fought on foot, while hussars were Hungarian light cavalry, noted for the splendour (and impracticality) of their uniforms – and many British light dragoon regiments had changed their titles to hussars, for reasons of fashion alone. Both types of cavalrymen were equipped with a carbine, a cut-down version of the infantry’s musket, for use when on dismounted sentry duty, and some heavy cavalry also carried flintlock pistols (‘horse pistols’).
Despite being better mounted than their enemies, British cavalry did have a reputation, sometimes deserved, for delivering a magnificent charge and then disappearing over the horizon in search of loot and not reappearing until tea-time. Partly this was because the cavalry did have a better chance of acquiring such loot as there might be, but it was also because of the problems of finding training areas in England. The battles of Hyde Park and Hounslow Heath had been fought many times over, but most English farmers were not keen to see the cavalry gallop over their land, and in any case the fields, much smaller than today’s and enclosed with thick hedges, did not lend themselves to the rehearsal of wide-ranging cavalry actions. The result was often that, when the cavalry found themselves on wide open spaces, control was lost.*
British artillery was divided into horse and foot artillery, the former to support the cavalry, the latter the infantry. Horse artillery troops (modern batteries) were established for five six-pounder guns (although at Waterloo some had nine-pounders) and one 5½-inch howitzer. The maximum effective range of the nine-pounder gun was 520 yards, and of the howitzer around the same, or slightly less.† Each weapon was pulled by eight horses, and as the guns had to move at the same speed as the cavalry it was supporting, all the gun crew members were mounted, as were the farrier, the surgeon, the trumpeters (actually buglers) and everyone else with any task intended to keep the guns in action. In total one troop fielded the perhaps surprising total of 220 horses and six mules. Guns could fire round shot (solid iron balls), spherical case and canister. Spherical case, often called shrapnel after its inventor, Major (later Lieutenant General) Henry Shrapnel, was a hollow iron ball packed with musket balls and a bursting charge. Provided the fuse was set correctly – and this was critical – the shell burst in the air and showered the target with musket balls.* A canister round – of the sort most probably used by Napoleon at the Tuileries in 1795 – was a cylindrical tin packed with musket balls which when fired burst open and had a buckshot effect on the target. At up to 300 yards it was highly effective. The howitzer could ‘lob’ and was used against targets that were entrenched or behind natural or artificial cover. It fired common shell – that is, a hollow iron ball with a bursting charge, which when it exploded sent bits of iron flying around to deadly effect. Foot artillery companies (batteries) were equipped with nine-pounder guns with a maximum effective range not much greater than the six-pounder on soft ground – about 600 yards – but up to 900 yards on hard ground where the shot could be ‘skipped’ – that is, bounced once or twice, taking out targets on each bounce.
The French army had evolved from a mix of the old pre-revolutionary army and the volunteers and militias of the Revolution, welded together and turned into a formidable military machine by Napoleon and those who thought like him. The French musket, the 1777 pattern, was 5 feet 2 inches long, weighed just over 9½ pounds and fired a lead ball of 0.8 ounces. As it was smaller than the British calibre, British troops could, in extremis, fire French ammunition, whereas the reverse was not the case. The musket could be fitted with a 15-inch bayonet, often of inferior steel and more for show and its psychological effect than of any real use. Dominique Jean Larrey, Napoleon’s chief surgeon and a pioneer of military medicine, in an analysis of wounds received in battle, found that for every 119 bullet wounds there were but five from the bayonet.
In the old royalist army the men of the regular army were, in theory at least, career soldiers who enlisted for twelve or twenty-five years, with augmentation by conscription when needed. The Revolution was suspicious of standing armies as instruments of potential oppression, and at first tried to fight its wars with volunteers, attempting, often successfully, to substitute enthusiasm and patriotism for training and experience. As the wars went on, it became clear that a formally constituted army, rather than a citizen militia, was essential,* and Napoleon’s army was a mix of regulars and conscripts, in numbered regiments with a laid-down establishment. There were many reorganizations, but by the time of the Waterloo campaign a French infantry regiment of the line was officially established for four service battalions, each of six companies (one of which was grenadier and one light infantry), each company being of 130 all ranks. In addition, each regiment had a depot battalion, much smaller than a service battalion and intended to train recruits. As it was, by the time of Waterloo many regiments had only two or three battalions and were training their men on the march.
Unlike the British infantry, a French regiment of two, three or four battalions was a tactical unit that fought under a regimental commander, usually a colonel, with each battalion commanded by a chef de bataillon, or major. Tactically, in the attack French infantry approached in column – that is, with each company in line in three ranks, one company behind the other – and then deployed into line just before the final charge. Manoeuvre in column was easier to control without losing cohesion, while line allowed maximum firepower to be brought to bear. The trick was in knowing when to deploy from column into line. To do it too early meant loss of control – anyone who has served in the armed forces knows how difficult it is to keep in line on a flat tarmac parade ground with the band playing, never mind doing it over uneven scrub with shot and shell whistling past one’s ears. To deploy too late meant being caught between formations and unable to take any offensive action. Commanders had to be able to judge the right moment to order companies to form a battalion line and bring all 600 muskets to bear. That at least was what was supposed to happen. In practice, as the long wars wore on, the dilution in the quality of men and skimping in training meant that French infantry regularly attacked as a column, without deploying into line. This often worked: the sight of a great mass of men, advancing seemingly inexorably, with cries of ‘En avant!’ and ‘Vive l’empereur!’, flags flying and the drums beating the pas de charge, was enough to persuade a frightened Italian, Austrian, Spanish or Russian conscript to fire one un-aimed shot and then flee. It did not work against the British.
The result of French infantry deployment in line and in three ranks, combined with lack of training, was that the soldiers fired by ranks, rather than adopting the more sophisticated British methods of platoon firing. As the rate of fire was rather less – often much less with inexperienced troops – than two rounds a minute, even properly controlled firing by ranks meant a pause of at least ten seconds between firings, long enough for a determined enemy to close up to an uncomfortable distance. Fire from the third rank was never very effective, due to the difficulty of firing over and past the two ranks in front, and Larrey, who analysed 3,000 hand injuries, found that most were caused to men in the front two ranks by fire from the third.5
On Napoleon’s return from Elba, he found that most of his old cavalry had been disbanded and had to be re-formed. Given the difficulties of finding horses and training men, it is greatly to the credit of the French that they managed to produce the numbers of cavalry that they did for the 1815 campaign – and, although it was often badly handled, it proved generally competent. French cavalry, like the British, had a plethora of titles but was divided into heavy and light. One component in the French cavalry arm, and in that of most other European powers, that the British did not have was the lancer. Lancer regiments, originally all Polish but by 1815 recruited from Frenchmen as well, were armed with a ten-foot-long lance with a steel spike on the end. Unlike the lance in general use by the First World War, which was light and had a shaft made of bamboo (British) or steel (German), this earlier weapon had a heavy ash shaft and required considerable training to develop the muscle power needed for the lancer to couch his lance and hold it steadily as he charged at and speared an enemy. Only the lancer had any chance of injuring determined infantry in square, or a soldier lying down, but if a mounted enemy managed to get past the lance point to where he could use his sword, then the lancer was in real trouble.
As Napoleon started life as an officer of artillery, it is not surprising that French artillery was generally very good, although not always as overwhelming as claimed. At Waterloo there were 246 French guns of various calibres against 157 of the Allies, but in many battles of the Napoleonic Wars there were fewer guns per division in the French army than in that of their enemies – it was just that French guns were better handled. French field artillery was based on the Gribeauval twelve-pounder and eight-pounder, although there were also some six-, four- and three-pounders. Given that the French pound weighed a little more than the English equivalent, the twelve-pounder was actually a thirteen-and-a-quarter-pounder by British measurement and the eight-pounder only very slightly smaller than the British nine-pounder.* Heavier though the twelve-pounder field gun was, its maximum effective range was still only around the same as that of the British nine-pounder – 600 yards – although it did of course fire a heavier projectile.
The Prussian army of 1815 was not the all-conquering army of Frederick the Great, nor the formidable machines of 1870, 1914 and 1939. The Frederician system was finally shown to be obsolete by the overwhelming defeat of the Prussians at the twin battles of Jena and Auerstädt on 14 October 1806, which led to the loss of Prussian territory east of the Elbe, the imposition of a massive indemnity and the occupation of Prussian towns by French troops until it was paid. Outdated tactics, obsolete equipment and officers who were far too old were the main factors that led to the Prussian debacle, and in the ensuing years the Prussian state and army poked into every tiny corner of its military system to see what had gone wrong and how it could be put right. Under reformers such as the Hanoverian Scharnhorst and the Saxon Gneisenau, nearly every aspect of the Prussian military system was examined and brought up to date or abolished.
Commissions were now open to all comers, not just the nobility; universal military short service replaced conscription for life or wholly professional recruitment; promotion was based on merit rather than seniority; regimental equipment and accoutrements would henceforth be the property of the state, not of the regimental colonel; a more liberal disciplinary code was introduced and flogging was abolished; a properly organized logistic service was founded; a new 1809 pattern musket was introduced; officer training, and particularly staff officer training, was brought up to date; an army reserve was established (in secret, to get around maximum strengths imposed by the French); and the standing army was to be backed up by a Landwehr, a part-time militia, and the Landsturm, a home guard. Organizationally the infantry was to be composed of regiments, which as in the French army would be tactical units, each with two battalions of musketeers, one battalion of light infantry skirmishers and two companies of grenadiers. Battalions had four combatant companies and a training company. The combatant companies had an establishment of five officers and 185 men, but in peacetime 120 private soldiers were on long leave, available for recall when required, and only fifty remained with the colours.
The cavalry was also overhauled – the type and size of horses were standardized and the organization of a regiment settled at four squadrons each of six officers and 162 Other Ranks, of whom seventy-two would be on long leave. Reform of the artillery was more protracted as the equipment was more expensive and took longer to obtain, but it was eventually formed into foot batteries of six-pounders and horse batteries of six-pounders and howitzers. Some of the guns were British, others of Prussian manufacture. By the time of Waterloo some twelve-pounder guns were also in service.6
The result was that, by the time of the Waterloo campaign, although the Prussian army was made up very largely of recruits and inexperienced Landwehr units, their men were of high morale and genuinely motivated by patriotism and hatred of the French, and there were enough experienced officers and NCOs to provide a cadre of real leadership and tactical know-how.
Holland had been the French-dominated Batavian Republic from 1795 to 1806 and then the Kingdom of Holland, ruled by Napoleon’s brother Louis, the father of Napoleon III, until incorporated into metropolitan France in 1810. Belgium, having been the Spanish Netherlands and then the Austrian Netherlands, was absorbed into France in 1795. In November 1813 French troops had withdrawn from Holland, leaving garrisons in Antwerp, Bergen op Zoom and Arnhem, and William of Orange, who was declared sovereign prince, with his capital in Amsterdam, began the difficult task of forming a national army. As most Dutch units were away serving in the French army, the initial recruits were a motley bunch: a battalion in England formed from Dutch prisoners of war was hastily incorporated, and when the Prussians captured Arnhem, it was discovered that the 5th Battalion of the French 123rd Regiment of the Line was composed of Dutchmen, who were also enrolled. After Napoleon’s first abdication in 1814, Holland and Belgium together became the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the Allied camp and a member of the Seventh Coalition. The formation of a national army continued, and the intention was to have thirty battalions of infantry, ten squadrons of cavalry and ten batteries of artillery backed up by a militia and a home guard. By 1815 the Dutch-Belgian army consisted mainly of units that had served Napoleon until a year previously, some of them in the Imperial Guard, the elite of the French army, and was thought to be of doubtful loyalty. It was accustomed to using French equipment and tactics, although some French artillery was being replaced by guns of British manufacture. Many regiments still wore their French uniforms, with an orange cockade in their hats to indicate the change of allegiance, and some of the newly raised units had a bewildering array of weapons, firing ammunition of different calibres. In fact, the summer of 1815 caught the army of the Netherlands in mid-reorganization, and only two divisions of infantry and three cavalry brigades would be available to Wellington for front-line duties, although others would man garrisons to release regular troops for combat duties.
These, then, were the armies that would fight Waterloo – the campaign that would decide the future of Europe.
* Louis XVIII because the son of Louis XVI was considered to be Louis XVII, although he never ruled and died in prison.
† And a pretty miserable exile it must have been, with only one hundred servants to look after him.
* A French infantry battalion was around 600 men and a cavalry regiment 400, but as all were under-strength, the total was probably around 12,000 infantry and cavalry regulars. The exact numbers of former soldiers and/or hangers-on is not precisely known but was perhaps around 10,000 to 12,000. These were equipped with a variety of weapons or, in some cases, none at all.
* The logo of today’s British infantry is the bayonet. Some years ago it was proposed to remove it as not being representative of what the infantry did. There were heart attacks in the shires and the suggestion was dropped.
† Despite the excellent Sharpe series, nowhere in any drill book is there mention of the soldier retaining the ball in his mouth and spitting it into the barrel.
* The British soldier carried sixty rounds of ammunition and it would be rare indeed for him to fire that many rounds in one battle. Only once – in the case of Abercrombie’s brigade at Albuhera in 1811 – is there a record of men running out of ammunition.
* The classic example, often quoted, is that of Rifleman Thomas Plunket, of Dublin and the 95th Rifles, who shot and killed Brigadier General Colbert at Cacabelos in Spain during the retreat to Corunna in January 1809. Most modern histories give the range as 800 yards. This author has paced it out and it is nearer 400 yards, but this was an example of excellent marksmanship against a moving target nevertheless – and still would be with a modern rifle.
* The barracks at Shorncliffe is still there, it still houses a (Gurkha) rifle regiment, and the run from the beach to the mess is just as exhausting as it was in 1800.
* The problem remained until at the behest of Prince Albert the army bought a large chunk of Salisbury Plain. Thought at the time to be far larger than would ever be required, it is now far too small for anything other than short and small-scale exercises, and major British army formation training now takes place in Canada, Poland and Kenya.
† Maximum effective range was the range at which 100 per cent of shots would take effect. The maximum range was around 1,200 yards, but very few shots would land where they were wanted (or not wanted, if on the receiving end).
* Shrapnel shells of very similar manufacture and effect were used during and until well after the First World War. Today the results of an exploding high-explosive artillery shell are often referred to in the vernacular as ‘shrapnel’ when they should properly be called ‘shell splinters’. Shrapnel spent a great deal of his own money developing his shell (and numerous other inventions) and received little compensation from an ungrateful government.
* Trotsky came to the same conclusion during the Russian civil war following the 1917 revolution there.
* The French pound, the livre usuelle, introduced in 1812, was defined as being equal to 500 grams. The British pound was (and is) 453 grams.