Waterloo

THE COMMANDERS

The results of the Waterloo campaign would hinge on the decisions of three great men: Napoleon Bonaparte, Arthur, Duke of Wellington and Gebhard von Blücher.

We have already seen how Napoleon rose through the ranks of the French army before becoming emperor in 1804, and while he undoubtedly had a global perspective politically and a strategic one militarily, he understood the common soldier too. Today all armies award medals to all ranks. These are either decorations, in recognition of good service or leadership in action or for a specific act or acts of gallantry, or they are campaign medals. The latter are awarded to every soldier (or sailor or airman) who has served in a particular theatre, campaign or battle. These are a source of great pride and worn, in most armies, on the left breast. On formal occasions the actual medal will be worn, suspended by a ribbon unique to that medal; otherwise the recipient will wear the ribbons only, arranged in a row or rows. Thus, what is displayed on a man’s chest is his history – where he has been on active service and whether or not he has been decorated.

Not only are medals highly prized, they are also cheap to produce, thus for governments they are an easy way to reward and recognize service. Napoleon, as first consul, introduced the Légion d’honneur to award meritorious service. It was divided into five classes and entitled the recipient to wear a medal, with a star or sash, depending on the grade, and it also came with a pro rata monetary award. By the time of the Bourbon restoration in 1814 there were around 40,000 members of the Légion and Louis XVIII did not risk alienating them by scrapping it, but he did try to devalue it and replaced Napoleonic and revolutionary symbols with Bourbon ones. Campaign medals were issued for all of Napoleon’s major battles, and some of the minor ones, usually those where the consul or emperor was personally present. When an intimate derided the medals as mere baubles, Napoleon is quoted as saying, ‘It is by baubles that men are led… the soldier needs glory, distinction and reward.’ He was quite right. All other nations copied the Napoleonic medals system, including, eventually, the British.

Napoleon was unquestionably imbued with strong natural leadership qualities, but he was also a consummate actor who made full use of the tricks of showmanship. Before inspecting a body of troops, he would enquire of the commander which of the soldiers had served in a Napoleonic battle. He would be told that, say, the third from the left in the rear rank and the sixteenth from the right in the front rank had been with him at a particular battle. Then, strolling along the line of men drawn up to receive him, Napoleon would suddenly dive into the ranks and seize the relevant soldier by the cheek: ‘You were with me at Austerlitz – Jean-Claude, is it not? What a day that was – how have you fared?’ The more intelligent would have realized that the emperor could not possibly remember the thousands of private soldiers who had passed under his command, but it went down well all the same. There is no question that Napoleon’s soldiers loved him and most would have happily died for him. He loved them too, up to a point, but he was often profligate with their lives. Apart from his first Italian campaign and the abortive expedition to Egypt, when the small numbers of his forces made him husband them carefully, he thought little of hurling his divisions into a frontal attack if that was the quickest way to achieve victory. If he lost 42,000 men killed, wounded and taken prisoner, as he did at the two-day battle of Wagram in July 1809, he had the whole of Europe whence to conscript more. By 1815, however, those great reserves of manpower were no longer available to him, and he could rely only on those troops that could be raised from mainland France.

Napoleon’s British adversary in the campaign was Arthur Wellesley, first duke of Wellington. Born in 1769, Wellington was a younger son of an Irish peer, the second baron and first earl of Mornington, a composer and professor of music at Trinity College, Dublin. The name had originally been Colley, or Cowley, but Arthur’s grandfather had changed it to Wesley (or Wellesley) on inheriting the estates of a cousin, Garret Wesley (or Wellesley). Like most of the Anglo-Irish, the Wellesleys owned vast tracts of land, most of it incapable of supporting anything other than a few very hungry goats and a donkey or two and mortgaged up to the hilt. They owned a property in County Meath – Dangan Castle, more a large country house than a castle and now an overgrown ruin – and a house in Merrion Street, a fashionable quarter of Dublin, just behind what is now the Irish parliament.* Garret Wellesley died when Arthur was twelve years old and the family then moved to England, taking Arthur out of the diocesan school in Trim, County Meath, and placing him in a seminary in Chelsea. In 1781 he went to Eton, where he seems to have achieved little or nothing scholastically, although he did say in later life that it had taught him two things: never to get involved in something he knew nothing about, and never to speak in Latin.* Family money soon ran out and Arthur was removed from Eton to make room for his academically much more promising younger brother. Thereupon his mother took him to Brussels, in what was then the Austrian Netherlands, where he learned to speak French, albeit with a Belgian accent, before he was sent off for a year to a military finishing school in Angers in France. There, in the last years of the ancien régime, in what was in effect a finishing school for the sprigs of the minor nobility and where a large number of the pupils were British, he was taught equitation, military fortification, drawing and dancing, and learned to speak French with a French accent.

After spending the year 1786 in Angers, young Arthur was now ready to find a way of earning a living. As a younger son, the family estates, such as they were, were not his birthright; as a gentleman, trade was out of the question (even if he had known anything about commerce, which he did not), and enquiries as to posts in politics or the administration of government failed to elicit offers of employment. Finally, in March 1787, two months short of his eighteenth birthday, he joined the army, not through any soldierly vocation, but because there seemed to be nothing else open to him: his mother is reported to have said that her ‘ugly duckling’ was ‘fit only for powder’. At this stage he was thought to be socially awkward, gauche even, of delicate health, dreamy, musical and indifferently educated. Commissions then were purchased, as were subsequent promotions (this system will be looked at in detail in chapter 4); suffice it to say that Arthur had to borrow the money and in his early years he was constantly in debt, although he was always careful not to become dangerously so.

Arthur Wesley (as he then spelled it) was commissioned into the 73rd Highlanders, a regiment in which he never served as family influence secured him a post as aide de camp (ADC) to the Lord Lieutenant (governor general) of Ireland. Nor did he ever grace the officers’ messes or the parade grounds of the 76th Foot, the 41st Foot, the 12th Light Dragoons, the 58th Foot or the 18th Light Dragoons, on the books of all of which regiments he was held as he purchased his way up the ranks of the army. A lieutenant nine months after he was first commissioned and a captain in June 1791, he spent the entire time based in Dublin Castle as one of a number of ADCs. The purpose of an ADC, then and now, is to ensure that his master can get on with the job for which he is trained (or not trained) and paid to do without having to worry about his own personal administration. In peacetime the requirements were not onerous. An ADC had to be unmarried, in order to devote his full attention to the job, socially adept in order to assist with entertaining, have a good memory and an eye for detail, be tactful and be able to think on his feet and smooth away any obstacles to his master’s progress. At worst he might be employed as little more than a dog walker and social ornament; at best he might be taken under his master’s wing and initiated into the art of higher command and administration.*

It was while he was an ADC that Arthur made his entry into politics, when he became the MP for Trim in the Irish parliament.^† Trim was a ‘pocket borough’ with a restricted electorate, which nevertheless had to be cosseted and cajoled. Arthur did little of note as an MP but was not, unusually for the time, susceptible to bribery; and he was sympathetic to the majority Roman Catholic population, which suffered under severe restrictions including the requirement to pay tithes to the established (Anglican) church of which they were not, of course, members. It was during this time too that he began to mature, and went through a brief period of misbehaviour and riotous living not untypical of youth then and now. He was a relatively successful gambler, liked a drink and is supposed to have been fined five shillings by the Dublin magistrates for beating up a Frenchman in a brothel (as one would). In April 1793 he purchased the rank of major in the 33rd Regiment but, despite this elevation, a proposal of marriage to Kitty Packenham was turned down by her family, on the not unreasonable grounds that Arthur had no money and fewer prospects. While Arthur did eventually marry Kitty (and the marriage was not a happy one), the spurning of his overtures at this stage had a salutary effect on him. He is reported to have burned his violin and sworn never to play it again, and at last joined a regiment for duty.*

By the time he joined the 33rd Foot in Cork as a major in 1793, Arthur had acquired some social polish and some understanding of the rumbustious world of politics, was heavily in debt, mainly to his elder brother Richard but to others also, had been turned down as a prospective husband, and had done no soldiering worthy of the name. He had little understanding of how a battalion of infantry actually worked, nor any understanding of what the army calls ‘interior economy’ – the administration of stores and funds. Sparsely educated in the formal sense though he may have been, Arthur had considerable wit and innate intelligence. As a newly arrived major in the regiment, he was fortunate in that the other major of the 33rd (battalions were established for two) was John Coape Sherbrooke. Sherbrooke was described as ‘a short, square, hardy little man, with a countenance that told at once the determined fortitude of his nature. Without genius, without education, hot as pepper, and rough in his language, but with a warm heart and generous feelings; true, strait forward, scorning finesse and craft and meanness.’⁷ He was five years older than Arthur, had been commissioned eight years before him, but was six months his junior in the rank of major. He had been on active service abroad and had commanded a company for ten years. If he did resent the arrival of Wesley as his senior, he was quickly won over, for he became the newcomer’s mentor and helped him greatly as Arthur tried to pick up in weeks and months what Sherbrooke had taken over a decade to absorb.

Arthur’s first task in the battalion was to sort out its accounts, which had been allowed to get into a dreadful state, largely as a result of the lack of interest in matters administrative shown by the Colonel of the Regiment, Lord Cornwallis, who was in India.* Tedious and painstaking though the task of going through several years of imperfectly kept paperwork was, it taught the young officer a great deal about the internal workings of a battalion – something that enabled him to avoid being bamboozled in later years. In September 1793 Arthur bought the lieutenant colonelcy of his battalion. He was now the commanding officer at twenty-four years of age and perforce learning very quickly indeed.^† Youth is not and was not a barrier to competence in high rank, but unlike Arthur Wesley, those who achieved it had generally started learning their trade a lot earlier than he.

Lieutenant Colonel Wesley’s first taste of active service, after a few false starts when various planned forays were cancelled, was when the 33rd Foot formed part of the Duke of York’s abortive expedition to Flanders in 1794. For all sorts of reasons, many not the fault of the ‘Grand Old Duke’, the campaign was a disaster: it failed to capture the port of Dunkirk and ended in retreat, during one of the worst winters until then recorded, across Holland to Bremen, where the Royal Navy was once again called upon to remove a beaten British army for deployment elsewhere. During the retreat Wesley commanded a brigade of three battalions, including his own, not because of any perceived ability but simply because, young though he was, he was the senior lieutenant colonel of the three. At this time and briefly thereafter, battalions were established for two lieutenant colonels, and John Sherbrooke, who had purchased that rank earlier in the year, could safely be left to command the 33rd. Despite his lamentable lack of experience, Arthur did well as a brigade commander – possibly because many of the other officers were well below par – and it began to dawn on those who cared to look (and to himself) that here was some inherent military talent. Years later he was quoted as saying about the Flanders expedition that at least he had ‘learned how not to do it, which is always something’. One should be wary of extrapolating backwards, for many of the statements attributed (some of them correctly) to Wesley/Wellesley/Wellington were made in his later years with the benefit of hindsight, but there can be little doubt that he must have pondered long and hard on the lessons of the campaign and his first experience of war.

After he had embarked his battalion and himself aboard troopships bound for the West Indies in the autumn of 1795 – a posting cancelled after weeks of being tossed about by heavy seas and gales in the Atlantic – the 33rd were disembarked to Lymington. Arthur was doubly lucky: he had escaped drowning in the storm, a fate that befell a number of his contemporaries as ships of the expedition sank, and he did not go to the West Indies, where the chances of surviving yellow fever were not great. Then, in 1796, the 33rd were ordered to India. It was at this point that Arthur made a decision that would shape the history of Great Britain, Europe and indeed the world. Up to now he had not committed himself wholly to a military career. He retained his seat in the Irish parliament and his appointment as an ADC at Dublin Castle, and still put out feelers for a post in the administration of government. As the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland was no longer Lord Westmorland, the friend of the Wellesleys, the only job that he was offered was Surveyor General of Ireland, but as that office was already occupied by Kitty Packenham’s uncle, he turned it down. If he stayed with his battalion and went to India, he would have to abandon any hope of political preferment and could only pursue a military career in the long term. And that is what he did. He resigned his seat in parliament, settled his affairs, and set off on a frigate to catch up his battalion, which had departed on slower troopships two months before, rejoining it at Cape Town in September 1796. This commitment is sometimes painted in damascene terms, but it was more probably good, sound pragmatism. Arthur needed gainful employment and had failed to find it elsewhere, so he would have to settle for the army; and given that he had no alternative, he would take the army seriously and soldier to the best of his ability.

Promoted to colonel just before leaving England, Arthur and the 33rd reached Calcutta in February 1797 after an eight-month journey. Fifteen months later, in May 1798, Arthur’s eldest brother Richard Wellesley, Earl of Mornington, arrived in India as governor general, and Arthur changed his name from Wesley to Wellesley to conform. Had we never heard of Arthur, Richard would still merit a paragraph or three in British history – perhaps even a page. He was academically bright – brilliant, some said – and, although shortage of money, his father’s death and his own succession as the second earl had made him leave Oxford without taking a degree,* he was highly thought of by influential English politicians. After a short time in the Irish House of Lords, he was successively MP for the English constituencies of Bere Alston, Windsor and Old Sarum.^† Appointed early to office, first as Junior Lord of the Treasury and then to the Indian Board of Control, he was a Pittite and in favour of free trade, a friend of William Wilberforce and opposed to slavery, and in favour of Catholic emancipation. He also had a rather jolly French mistress, whom he eventually married.

At this time British India was divided into three presidencies: Bengal, Madras and Bombay, each with its own governor. The governor of Bengal was the senior and also governor general of the whole, with the right to overrule the other two governors if necessary. Richard was a believer in the forward policy – that is, that Britain should become the dominant power in India and should either enter into treaty relationships with those native states that were prepared to be guided by the British, or defeat militarily those who were not, drive out their French advisers and annex their territory. He laid the foundation for the British Raj.

The eight years that Arthur Wellesley served in India were the making of him as a soldier and as a commander. Between his first battle prior to the storming of Seringapatam, where he became lost and disorientated during a night attack on an outlying water course and village – and when, had his brother not been the governor general, he might have ended his career in court martial and disgrace – to the subjugation of Mysore and the final pacification of the Mahrattas, he had risen from colonel to major general, had repaid his debts from prize money awarded as a result of successful sieges, had been knighted, and had received numerous presentations and loyal addresses. Far more importantly, he had learned the significance of coalitions and how to work with difficult allies, how to administer an army in an undeveloped country where terrain and climate conspired against him, and the importance of health and hygiene (and in an age of stupendous overindulgence in the demon drink, he himself was by now but a moderate imbiber). All these lessons would be put to good use against the French in Portugal and Spain.

After a six-month voyage, Arthur arrived in England in September 1805. He was seventy-fifth in seniority as a major general – although many of those above him on the Army List had not held an appointment for some time and were unlikely to do so again – and the best that he could be offered was command of a brigade on the south coast.* It is sometimes alleged that Wellesley was regarded with some disdain as being only a ‘sepoy general’ and that those who had served in India were generally looked down upon by the military establishment, but this was not necessarily so.^† While most of the full generals on the Army List may well have had little regard for experience that they lacked, generals who were still active, like Craig, Bentinck, Clarke and Cornwallis, had served in India – Cornwallis returned and died there in October 1805 – as had many of the younger lieutenant generals. The only criticism – if it was a criticism – that might have been levelled at ‘Indian’ officers was that, owing to distance, they were unable to dabble in domestic politics or benefit from or exercise patronage. Certainly Castlereagh – then the Secretary for War and the Colonies and a member of the Board of Control for India, whose great-uncle had been governor of Bombay – respected Wellesley and frequently sought his advice, not just on matters Indian but across a broad spectrum of military planning and international relations.

After a brief foray into politics when he was returned as the member for Rye in the House of Commons and a stint as Chief Secretary for Ireland, Wellesley commanded a division in the expedition to Copenhagen in 1807. Napoleon had just signed the Treaty of Tilsit with the Russian Tsar and the Baltic was now a French lake. The Danes, although neutral, had a small but modern and efficient fleet, which if snaffled by the French could undo the maritime supremacy that the Royal Navy had underlined at Trafalgar. The British made an offer to hire the Danish ships and, when this was turned down, demanded that they be handed over for the duration of the war. After another refusal – an indignant one this time – the British burned Copenhagen and sank the Danish fleet. They had done it once before, in 1801, and on both occasions it was certainly illegal, but – as in the sinking of the neutral Vichy French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir in June 1940 – necessity makes criminals of us all.

Next, in 1808, Lieutenant General Wellesley was sent off to Portugal, and it was his two campaigns here, in 1808 and again between 1809 and 1814, that saw him emerge not just as the foremost British general but as the only one in all the Allied coalitions who had consistently beaten the French. From a junior lieutenant general in 1808, he emerged from Iberia as a field marshal and a duke, taking the name Wellington after lands that the family was thought to have once held in Somerset.

It is tempting to draw parallels between Napoleon and Wellesley. Both were born in the same year, and both were the product of feckless fathers and domineering mothers; both were born in the outer fringes of their nations, and both rose through sheer ability and a minimum of patronage. But in reality they were very different. Napoleon was an opportunist, a gambler, a taker of chances and, for all that his soldiers loved him, he was careless with their lives. He was not only the head of the army but the head of state too, so there could be no conflict of interest. Wellington, by contrast, knew that Britain only had one army and that, if he broke it, there was not another to be had. He planned meticulously and well understood the importance of logistics – of being able to feed, house, tend and transport an army. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not look down on intelligence as being somehow underhand; rather, he made full use of it, and if no intelligence service existed, he created one. Despite a scanty formal education, he was a thinker, forever pondering on what the enemy was doing or might do. He always understood the political imperatives within which a military commander had to act. Unlike Napoleon, who saw no reason why a conquering army should pay for anything, Wellington knew that an army could be kept in the field in a foreign land only if the population tolerated it. Here was the big difference in the Peninsula: the French became an army of occupation rather than an army fighting a war; the British, by treating the locals properly and paying for what they wanted, had the wholehearted support of the vast majority of Spaniards and could concentrate on fighting the war rather than having to watch their backs.

Because Wellington, despite some reverses in Spain, had been consistently opposed to and generally victorious over the French, he was the obvious commander for the Anglo-Dutch army for the Waterloo campaign, and this was the view not only of the British government but of the Allies too. After Napoleon’s abdication in 1814, Wellington had been briefly British ambassador in Paris, and then part of the British delegation to the Congress of Vienna, where the victorious powers met to decide the future shape of Europe. He was given the choice of remaining in Vienna or taking command in the Netherlands. Unsurprisingly, he chose the latter and arrived in Brussels on 11 April 1815.

The commander of the Prussian army in Flanders, Field Marshal (Generalfeldmarschall) Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, Furst (prince) von Wahlstatt, was cut from very different cloth. The description ‘larger than life’ is much overused, but it does fit Blücher admirably, and if he appeared as a character in a novel, he would be considered a gross exaggeration. Wild in his youth, energetic and full of vitality until the day he died in 1819, subject to extraordinary hallucinations that nevertheless did not detract from his ability to command troops, he was born into genteel poverty in December 1742 in Rostok on the Baltic, then part of the Duchy of Mecklenburg. He was a younger son, so the family’s infertile lands were not for him and at the age of sixteen he joined the Swedish cavalry. Captured by the Prussians during the Seven Years War, he made a marked impression, for his captors invited him to join their army and for the rest of the war he served as a captain (Rittmeister) in the Prussian Red Hussars. He then fell out with King Frederick II (‘the Great’), largely for delivering judgements that were often sound but given in an intemperate manner and totally lacking in tact. Out of the army, he took to farming, becoming reasonably successful, until Frederick died in 1786 and Blücher was recalled as a major.

By 1801 Blücher was a lieutenant general, and, although captured in the disastrous retreat from Auerstädt in 1806, he was exchanged for the French Marshal Victor, who had been captured by the Prussians. He was violently opposed to peace with France and a vocal supporter of the reform and modernization of the Prussian army that followed. When Prussia returned to the fray in 1813, Blücher played a prominent part and defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig in October of that year, his fourth battle against the emperor and the first that he had won. Promoted to field marshal and created a prince after Napoleon’s abdication in 1814, he was furious on arriving in Paris to find that the French had named a bridge over the River Seine after their victory over the Prussians at Jena and announced that he would blow it up, only relenting under extreme pressure from the other Allied commanders.

A quaffer of copious quantities of gin and brandy, Blücher would swig coffee, munch raw onions and smoke a huge meerschaum pipe as he rode along. His nickname among the troops was ‘Marschall Vorwärts’, a tribute to his liking for constant, immediate and headlong attacks. His addiction – and the consumption of gallons of coffee every day does produce an addiction – led to short hallucinatory episodes, and on occasion he would announce that he was pregnant, once telling Wellington that he was carrying the foetus of an elephant and that the father was a grenadier of the French Imperial Guard. But Blücher was brave, often to a fault, loyal and a man of his word, and the Waterloo campaign could not have been won without him.

The commander of the other Allied army at Waterloo was considerably less experienced in either war or battle. As we have seen, the United Kingdom of the Netherlands had been created after Napoleon’s 1814 abdication by combining the French imperial province of Holland (previously the Kingdom of Holland ruled by Napoleon’s brother Louis), Belgium (previously part of France and before that the Austrian Netherlands) and the prince-bishopric of Liège. The 43-year-old William, Prince of Orange-Nassau, became King William I in March 1815. William was a despot, of the reasonably enlightened variety, and one of his first acts as king was to assure Wellington, on the latter’s arrival from Vienna, that the entire Netherlands army would be at his disposal. There was one condition: the crown prince of the Netherlands, also William, would command the Dutch-Belgian troops and was also to have a senior Allied command.

The Orange-Nassau princely house had fled Holland when the French invaded, and the younger William had been educated in Berlin before joining the British army in 1811, when he was instantly promoted to lieutenant colonel and appointed aide de camp to Wellington in the Peninsula. A full colonel the same year, he returned to England in 1812 to become an ADC to the Prince Regent and be promoted to major general in 1813, at the tender age of twenty-one. It is probably unnecessary to say that his military abilities were limited to looking smart at dinner parties and balls, and he was known as ‘Slender Billy’ or ‘Sweet William’ to those who liked him and as ‘Stinking Billy’ or ‘the young frog’ to those who did not. Unfortunately he had deluded himself that he was a real general, with unfortunate consequences during the campaign for some of those nominally under his command.*

No commander, however competent, can command an army all by himself: he needs a staff. The purpose of the staff, or staff officers, is to put the commander’s ideas into practice. Napoleon decides to march on Moscow. The staff work out how many troops are required to be supported by how many guns; how many wagon loads of kit must be collected; what routes the various units are to use; how much spare ammunition will be needed; where the rations are to come from; where hospitals should be established – and all the other myriad details that need to be resolved before a single man can move. The staff have always come in for criticism, usually unfairly, for when things go wrong it is easy to blame the anonymous ‘them’, sitting in their comfortable tents, chateaux, caravans or dugouts, rather than accepting a portion of the blame oneself.^† The staff have a number of branches dealing with various aspects of war – operations, movement, stores, medical, promotions and appointments, manning, intelligence and the like – with officers dedicated to each of those branches. Heading the staff is, under varying titles depending on nationality, the chief of staff. Responsible for seeing that all aspects of the army work efficiently, the chief of staff is the commander’s right-hand man, and it is essential, if the business of the army is to be conducted as it should be, that the commander and the chief of staff have complete trust in one another, and if possible complement each other.

Until 1814 Napoleon’s chief of staff was the incomparable Louis Alexandre Berthier. Born in 1753 and one of the few senior officers of the Bourbon army to remain in France and to survive the Revolution, he had joined the royalist army in 1766, initially as a surveyor responsible for making maps, and then successively as a cavalry and an infantry officer. Singled out as having a good eye for detail, from 1787, as a lieutenant colonel, he was mainly employed as a staff officer and was the equivalent of a brigadier general staff when the Revolution broke out. He was suspended for a time by a Directorate suspicious of why this well-bred, albeit not actually aristocratic, officer should want to serve the republic, but reinstated in 1795. He came to the attention of Napoleon in the first Italian campaign and was the first to be made a marshal of the empire after Napoleon’s coronation in 1804. From 1805 until the first abdication he was Napoleon’s chief of staff, turning the emperor’s broad strategic direction into clear and detailed directives. While Napoleon gave him little credit for it, it was Berthier’s efforts that played a large part in Napoleon’s victories and mitigated the results of his defeats. He would never allow the emperor to write directly to a subordinate – Napoleon’s handwriting was notoriously bad and almost unreadable, which would have a direct effect on the result of the Battle of Ligny during the forthcoming campaign – but would rewrite the emperor’s instructions and then send them by two or three different routes to their recipients. In his final exile, Napoleon admitted that ‘No one could replace Berthier’. Like most of his colleagues, Berthier swore allegiance to Louis XVIII at the first restoration. Unlike them, however, he did not turn his coat yet again and rejoin his old master, but accompanied the king as he fled to Ghent, and then went to his wife’s castle at Bamberg in east Germany. There, on 1 June 1815, he was leaning out of a third-floor window watching Russian cavalry moving west when he fell to his death. Both suicide and murder have been suggested. The truth almost certainly is that he simply slipped and overbalanced.

The loss of this superb staff officer, with his prodigious capacity for hard work and his ability to reduce the fog of war to the essentials, was severe. Had Berthier been at Napoleon’s side, the campaign might well have been waged in a different way, and, although Napoleon could – probably would – have still lost the war, he might have been able to arrive at a negotiated peace rather than the complete and utter defeat that he actually suffered. As it was, for the Waterloo campaign Napoleon chose as his chief of staff Marshal Nicolas Jean de Dieu Soult. He was born in 1769, the same year as both Napoleon and Wellington, but there any resemblance ends, for Soult had little education and enlisted as a private soldier in the Bourbon infantry at the age of sixteen. At the outbreak of the Revolution he was a hard-bitten sergeant. With the execution or exile of so many of the officers of the army, the opportunities for Soult and men like him were immense, and he was soon commissioned and showed considerable tactical cunning in the early campaigns of the French republic. By 1794 he was brigadier (général de brigade) and by 1799 major general (général de division), and he was created a marshal, the seventh in seniority, by Napoleon in 1804. In Italy and later in the Iberian Peninsula he proved a perfectly adequate field commander, and an inveterate plunderer; he also possessed the ability to re-form remarkably quickly a beaten and dispersed army – something at which he had lots of practice in Spain and Portugal, where he was regularly defeated by Wellington. He fought a good delaying campaign in the Pyrenees and southern France in 1814, and on the restoration joined most of the other marshals by signing up for King Louis and becoming his minister for war, until declaring for Napoleon once again on the emperor’s return from Elba.

Soult was, though, a totally unsuitable choice as chief of staff. He was competent as a field commander, but through no fault of his own he had never been trained as a staff officer, nor did he understand the management of a campaign – something quite different from the mere fighting of it. His inexperience in an unfamiliar appointment would show up starkly during the coming campaign.

Wellington, too, was without his long-time chief of staff and had to make do with what he could get.* His first choice would have been the man who had been at his side for most of the Peninsular War, George Murray, chief of staff from 1809 to 1814 with only one year out. Murray had served with Wellington in Denmark, had been John Moore’s chief of staff as a lieutenant colonel in the retreat to Corunna, and was delighted to serve Wellington in the same capacity, as a colonel in 1809, a brigadier general in 1811 and a major general in 1812. A man of great ability who could motivate and enthuse those under him, Murray was punctual in an age when many were not, had a good eye for ground and was said to have a memory like an elephant’s.* He was completely in Wellington’s confidence and had the rare ability to see inside his chief’s mind and anticipate his wishes, turning them into unambiguous operational orders and then ensuring that they were carried out. Alas, despite his wishes and those of Wellington, Murray was not available in 1815, for he had been sent to Canada as a lieutenant general at the close of hostilities in 1814 and could not return in time.

As it was, on his arrival in Flanders Wellington found that the chief of staff of the Anglo-Dutch army was Major General Sir Hudson Lowe. Lowe was an immensely experienced officer, both operationally and on the staff, but Wellington had little time for him, considering him to be ‘a damned old fool’ (he was the same age as Wellington) who couldn’t read a map. Lowe was despatched to Genoa, to take command of a scratch force that was to cooperate with the Austrians, and replaced by Colonel Sir William Howe DeLancey. While we cannot comment on his map-reading ability, Wellington does seem to have been rather unfair to Lowe, who had been favourably reported on by, among others, John Moore and who seems to have fulfilled every task he had so far been given in a perfectly satisfactory manner. But Lowe had not served Wellington before whereas DeLancey had, and Wellington always liked to surround himself by those he knew – those who understood the great man’s way of working and whom he had trained to operate in the way that he wished.^†

DeLancey was born in New York in 1778, but as his family had been royalists, their land and property were confiscated by the victorious rebels and they had had to flee to England. DeLancey joined the army at the age of sixteen as a cornet (a cavalry rank equivalent to second lieutenant) in the 16th Light Dragoons and became a lieutenant the following year and a captain in the 80th Foot the year after that. Having survived yellow fever in the West Indies, he became a cavalryman once again, in the 17th Light Dragoons this time, and then a major in the 45th Foot in 1799, aged twenty-one.* With a keen intellect and good organizational abilities, DeLancey was soon spotted as suitable for the staff, and from 1802 until his death at Waterloo he was employed solely in that capacity. He was on Wellington’s staff in the Peninsula from 1809 until the end of the war as, successively, Deputy Assistant Quartermaster General, Assistant Quartermaster General and Deputy Quartermaster General.^† For those few readers who may be unfamiliar with nineteenth-century staff appointment titles, this meant that DeLancey worked for George Murray and moved up from being three steps below him as a major, to two steps as a lieutenant colonel and finally as his immediate deputy as a colonel. He was knighted at the close of hostilities in 1814 and sent to Flanders as deputy to Sir Hudson Lowe, before succeeding to the post of Quartermaster General (chief of staff) when Lowe was effectively sacked.

Meanwhile, the appointment of chief of staff to Blücher was a brilliant decision by King William of Prussia. The old field marshal was an inspirational leader, full of energy despite his years and raring to have a go at the French. What was needed as a chief of staff was a cooler head, one that could translate Blücher’s Vorwärts into practicality and act as a restraining hand on his master’s enthusiasm, should that get out of hand. August Neidhart, Graf (count) von Gneisenau had just the qualities needed to counterbalance the army commander’s sometimes unconsidered aggression. He had considerable experience both as a field commander and as a staff officer. He had served in a German regiment in the British army in North America during the revolution there, after which he transferred to the Prussian service and was an influential member of the movement to reform the Prussian military system after the defeats of Jena-Auerstädt. He became Blücher’s chief of staff as a major general in 1813 and their relationship was an excellent example of how the commander–chief of staff symbiosis ought to work: each trusting the other totally, each reinforcing the other’s strengths and compensating for their weaknesses. Unlike the British system, Prussian army regulations stipulated that, should the army commander be incapacitated, the chief of staff would succeed him, and Gneisenau was well capable of discharging the functions of a commander-in-chief, as would be demonstrated during the campaign.

In addition to a commander’s personal staff, it was normal to attach a liaison officer to Allied armies. At Wellington’s headquarters was Major General (Generalmajor) Philipp Friedrich Carl Ferdinand Freiherr von Muffling,* while his opposite number at Blücher’s side was Colonel Sir Henry Hardinge. Both men were eminently suitable for their role, which was to keep each commander aware of the doings and views of the other. Muffling, another Saxon aged forty in 1815, had entered the Prussian service at the age of fifteen and joined the general staff in 1804 in the survey department, responsible for mapping. He moved to the operational staff in 1806, when he served Blücher in the campaign of that year, and he served him again in 1813, by which time he was a major general. He did not get on with Gneisenau, partly because the latter blamed the defeat at Jena on poor mapping, but as he spoke English, was highly experienced and had established an excellent relationship with Wellington, he was well equipped for the job.

The thirty-year-old Henry Hardinge was equally capable, and the right candidate to liaise with Blücher. The son of a rector, he had joined the Queen’s Rangers in Canada as an ensign in 1799 at the age of fifteen,* before transferring to the 4th Foot as a lieutenant in 1802. A captain in 1804, he attended an eighteen-month course at the senior department of the Royal Military College at High Wycombe from 1806. This was the recently established forerunner of the staff college, to which very few officers went, not least because it was not compulsory – it was also fee-paying and many of the lectures and items on the reading list were in French. Having passed the final examination at High Wycombe, Hardinge joined Wellesley (as he still was) in Portugal as a staff officer under Murray and then served Moore in the same capacity all the way to Corunna. After a short spell in England, he was promoted to major and then joined the staff of the Portuguese army – which was commanded by a British officer, William Carr Beresford – and became a (Portuguese) lieutenant colonel. On Wellesley’s return to Portugal in the spring of 1809, Hardinge was detached to him to act as his Portuguese staff officer and was then promoted to lieutenant colonel in the British army. Present at most of the major battles of the Peninsular War, he stayed on the staff until 1814, when he took command of a Portuguese brigade for the last few battles in southern France. He was one of the military representatives with Wellington at the Congress of Vienna and was knighted in January 1815.

These, then, were the men who would plan and direct the coming campaign.

* The Dublin house is now a very smart hotel, and residents are told with pride that the room they are staying in is the one in which the future Duke of Wellington was born. At one time or another virtually every room in the hotel has been so described, but you can’t blame them for trying.

* Although when he was appointed Chancellor of Oxford University in 1834 – despite a very obvious lack of any academic credentials – his acceptance speech had to be delivered in Latin, which he almost certainly had someone else write for him.

* Officers of the British army (and probably everybody else’s too) are reported on by their superiors every year. The report assesses the officer’s progress during the past year and makes recommendations as to their fitness for promotion and suitability for employment in certain roles, including that of ADC. This author’s reports generally reported on him favourably, until it came to the question of suitability as an ADC, when all reports said ‘No’. On one occasion the ‘no’ was underlined. He never wanted to be an ADC anyway.

† Surprisingly, perhaps, it has only been since 1928 that officers have been forbidden to stand for parliament or become involved in politics in any way. Officers of the Territorial Army are still permitted to stand for parliament and are not required to resign if elected.

* It is, however, difficult to see what relevance violin playing could have had on his prospects – unless of course he was a very bad player and insisted on playing in the company of others.

* The Colonel of the Regiment was (and still is) a senior officer, usually one who has served in the regiment, with the remit of looking after its interests. At this time he was enormously powerful, effectively the proprietor, paying the officers and men and providing their uniforms and other necessaries out of grants from the government for that purpose. He had the final say on such matters as dress and appointments of officers. By 1815 his powers had been considerably reduced, and peculation and personal profiteering almost eliminated. Today he has no dealings with public money but still has the final say on officers joining and directs policy in regard to private, regimental, funds.

† In today’s British army an officer could expect to be a senior lieutenant or recently promoted captain at twenty-four, but that is the penalty of a peacetime army with a laid-down career pattern. In both world wars it was not unusual for battalion commanders to be in their twenties. In the First World War Harold Alexander, later Field Marshal Earl Alexander, commanded a battalion of the Irish Guards at the age of twenty-four, was a lieutenant colonel aged twenty-six and a brigadier general at twenty-seven, while in the Second, Michael Carver, later Field Marshal Baron Carver, commanded a regiment of tanks (battalion equivalent) at twenty-eight and a brigade at thirty.

* Although in his first year he won the chancellor’s prize for Latin verse.

† He could sit in the House of Commons in Westminster because his earldom was in the Irish, rather than the English, peerage.

* The Army List, published annually (sometimes six-monthly) by government, contained (and contains) the names and details of all the officers in the army by regiment, rank and seniority.

† A sepoy is an Indian private soldier of infantry. The derivation is Persian and variants are found in Arabic, Hindi, Urdu and Nepali.

* William was a closet homosexual, or possibly a runner under both rules, and was blackmailed for it. He later proved a popular and effective king as William II from 1840.

† This author has been both a staff officer and at regimental duty. While on the staff he fulminated that the units had no understanding of the wider picture, and when commanding troops he raged that the staff had no conception of the conditions at the sharp end. He was usually wrong in both incarnations. It has ever been thus.

* The title of the senior staff officer in many armies of this period, including the British and Prussian, was Quartermaster General (QMG). This is confusing to modern ears as the QMG today deals with the procurement of supplies and equipment, rather than with operations. Originally there was no operations staff officer, his duties being discharged by the commander, but as the QMG’s responsibilities included movement, and getting troops to the right battlefield at the right time was bound up with fighting the battle, the QMG became responsible for operations as well. To avoid confusion this book uses the modern ‘chief of staff’.

* As elephants spend most of their time eating or defecating, this author has never understood why they should be thought to have superb memories. What is it that they have to remember?

† Lowe married DeLancey’s sister after the Waterloo campaign, by which time DeLancey was dead. He would have a more favourable place in military history had he not upset Napoleon, and almost everyone else, as governor of St Helena during Napoleon’s exile there.

* In today’s British army a really bright boy who was clearly going places could be a substantive major at thirty. Most achieve that rank between thirty-two and thirty-four.

† In modern terminology, SO3 G3, SO2 G3 and DCOS.

* Roughly equivalent to the British ‘baron’ (and sometimes addressed as such), Freiherr is the second order of German nobility, ranking above Ritter (equivalent to a knight) and below Graf (earl in Britain, count elsewhere), and is normally hereditary.

* The minimum age for a commission was sixteen, but this did not apply to colonial regiments.