The story of Waterloo starts with an explosion 7,000 miles away.
The sun was setting over the Bali sea on 5 April 1815, when the long dormant Mount Tambora on the remote Indonesian island of Sumbawa exploded, throwing millions of tons of ash 18 miles into the stratosphere. It was heard by Thomas Stamford Raffles, the colourful British governor of Java, 800 miles away. He thought the distant rumbling was the sound of naval gunfire, but when it rained ash in Java, Raffles realised that a volcano had exploded somewhere in Indonesia.
The eruptions rumbled on for a month, spewing pumice into the sea, but there was an even more violent explosion at about 7 p.m. on 10 April that blew the top off the mountain. The 4,300m Tambora peak disappeared, leaving a crater 7km across. Volcanologists calculate it was the biggest eruption in recorded history, greater than Krakatoa, in 1883, and Vesuvius that buried Pompeii and turned its people into pumice stone in the year AD 79.
Within twenty-four hours an ash cloud 2,600 miles across, roughly the size of Australia, spread from Tambora, affecting weather patterns across the globe. The ash cloud from Tambora is estimated to be 1,000 times greater than the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland, which grounded civil airlines in 2010. Around the archipelago of Indonesia, the ash cloud eclipsed the sun, turning day into night. Crops in fields 100 miles away were covered in ash 8 to 10in deep.
But that was only its local impact. The eruption was to have a far wider impact around Planet Earth. The blast ejected an estimated 55 million tons of sulphur-dioxide gas into the middle of the stratosphere, where it formed an aerosol cloud of sulphuric acid. The gas was picked up by the jet streams that cross the earth high above the atmosphere, reflecting the sun’s rays like a mirror, and reducing temperatures on the ground. Within a fortnight it covered the girth of the Earth at the equator, then slowly spread out north and south to the poles, bringing cold weather as temperatures dropped, and with the low pressure, cataclysmic storms.
Plaster model of the lion on top of the monument by J-L Van Geel. (Musée d’Art Ancien, Brussels)
Tambora today is thought to be the cause of even worse weather that followed in 1816. It was the so-called ‘year without a summer’ – temperatures plummeted, hail stones like canister shot fell in July, crops failed, and the weather brought misery to people across Europe, who were already living on the bread line. The decade from 1810 to 1819 was to become the coldest since the bitter 1690s, when the Thames froze in London. In Britain the bad harvests increased social unrest. But in the summer of 1815 the bad weather that Tambora had unleashed across the world brought rain – heavy, sheeting, torrential rain. On Saturday, 17 June 1815 thunderstorms driven by a low pressure system brought slashing rain across the rolling countryside to the south of Brussels, where around quarter of a million men were lining up to do bloody battle the next day.
The Horse Artillery officer, Captain Alexander Cavalié Mercer, described how the clouds turned ‘inky black, their lower edges hard and strongly defined, lagging down, as if momentarily about to burst, involving our position and everything in it in deep and gloomy obscurity’. They exploded with the deafening boom of thunder and lightning. Meteorologists believe he was describing cumulo-nimbus clouds typically associated with thundery outbreaks and unstable conditions pushed by a cold front sweeping across Belgium from the west.1
Wellington’s bedraggled soldiers were drenched, hungry, and tired when they squelched through the fields and up the hill to the ridge at Mont St Jean, where the Duke of Wellington had decided to fight.
On Friday 16 June, Napoleon had attacked Blücher at Ligny, while his left wing, under the red-headed Marshal Ney, attacked the Prince of Orange’s forces, supported by Wellington’s hurriedly assembled force, at the Quatre Bras crossroads. Had Marshal Ney attacked in the morning, when he had 18,000 men against the Dutch holding force of 8,000 infantry, the Allied force would have been badly mauled, but he delayed until the afternoon, when Wellington’s troops arrived. Wellington’s men suffered – the Highlanders were decimated after being run down by cavalry in a field of tall corn – but they held the position overnight. At daybreak on Saturday 17 June, Wellington sent his chief ADC, Sir Alexander Gordon, with a troop of cavalry to find out how Blücher had fared. He had warned Blücher’s staff when he rode over to Ligny before the battle that Blücher was leaving his men dangerously exposed on a hill in full view of Napoleon’s guns. Gordon returned about 7 a.m. with the grim news that Blücher’s army had been mauled just as Wellington had feared. Blücher, 72, had been unhorsed and ridden over twice by enemy cavalry, and was only saved by a quick-thinking aide who threw a coat over him to hide his medals. Blücher had fallen back to Wavre but there was one piece of good news – the indefatigable Prussian field marshal had promised Gordon he would stay in close contact and join Wellington’s forces in battle against Napoleon. Wellington ordered a planned withdrawal to the ridge at the hamlet called Mont St Jean on the Charleroi–Brussels road.
Torrential rain storms began to sweep across the fields on Saturday afternoon, as the allied army fell back, and the rain became Wellington’s ally. The curtains of rain and low black cloud shrouded his army’s retreat and slowed the heavy French 12-pounders, which sank up to their axles; it took a superhuman effort for Napoleon’s gunners to heave them through the mud.
William Wheeler, a private in the 51st Regiment of Foot, described the retreat from Quatre Bras in Wagnerian terms in a letter home:
The rain beating with violence, the guns roaring, repeated bright flashes of lightning attended with tremendous volleys of Thunder that shook the earth … the night came on, we were wet to the skin … It would be impossible for any one to form an opinion of what we endured that night. Being close to the enemy we could not use our blankets, the ground was too wet to lie down, we sat on our knapsacks until daylight without fires, there was no shelter against the weather – the water ran in streams from the cuffs of our jackets. In short we were as wet as if we had been plunged over head in a river.
When they reached the wet slopes of the ridge, many collapsed where they stood. Sixteen-year-old Ensign George Keppel, of the 3rd Battalion of the 14th Regiment of Foot, said: ‘It was like lying in a mountain torrent.’ But before settling down, Keppel had piled up his arms with his comrades and lined up for a regimental gin ration: ‘Every officer and man was, in turn, presented with a little tin-pot full. No fermented liquor that has since passed my lips could vie with that delicious Schnapps.’ It could not stop the rain but it helped to ease the discomfort.
As night closed in, Wellington and his staff officers commandeered beds in the inn and nearby cottages in the village of Waterloo, but most of his senior officers shared the misery of the men in the fields, farms, and primitive houses around Mont St Jean. The rain ran in torrents along ditches, down banks, and trickled into their boots. The rain turned sunken roads into small rivers and the rich grey Belgian earth into a cloying mud, just as it had almost exactly 400 years before at the battle of Agincourt; only this was worse.
Waterloo literally means, ‘Wet meadow’ according to the guide to the official celebrations for Waterloo 200, but muddy meadows and hollows of the gently rolling hills around Mont St Jean had rarely been this wet. The rain relented before sunset but it came on with more violence after nightfall. The rain drenched everything – men, horses, cannon, and muskets. Men grabbed what shelter they could under hedgerows, in roadside ditches, under fruit trees in the orchards at Hougoumont. Some held their rough woollen pitching blankets over their heads to form makeshift tents. In the orchard at the farm of Mont St Jean, Captain Mercer sheltered by the 6-pounder guns of his G Troop of the Horse Artillery, under his trusty umbrella, ignoring Wellington’s order banning brolleys from the battlefield as ‘unmilitary’ and enjoyed a cigar before trying to get some sleep.
As Keppel and his battalion tried to find shelter on the slopes, they heard the thunder of guns in the dark from below their position. It was part of the rearguard action from Quatre Bras. Keppel recalled:
Looking to the south, in the direction of the ground we had lately traversed, we heard heavy firing to our left. This proceeded from La Haye Sainte [a farm 200yds below them] where Picton had ordered two brigades of artillery to play upon the French infantry, which was pressing upon the Anglo-Allied forces in retreat upon Waterloo from Quatre Bras. It was probably then that Napoleon, who was with this portion of his army first understood that Wellington was in position, and prepared to receive him on the morrow.
The gunfire in the dark told the emperor what he wanted to know. He halted his men on a slope facing Wellington’s rain-sodden army, barely a mile from their front line. Here, near an inn called La Belle Alliance, he established his grand battery of eighty guns. Napoleon, now knowing where Wellington intended to fight, retired for the night to a farm house called Le Caillou, 2 miles back along the Charleroi road, confident of victory in the morning.
Keppel, later to become a Whig MP and 6th Earl of Albermarle, slept soundly – helped by the gin – until two in the morning when he was shaken awake by his soldier servant, Bill Moles. Moles – Baldrick to Keppel’s Blackadder – had scouted out some drier quarters, in a small cottage in the village at Merbe-Braine, near a ravine just north of Hougoumont. They trudged through the dark to the cottage and found three officers there drying themselves in front of a blazing fire with their coats hanging up to dry on the backs of their chairs. They were burning bits of furniture, tables, broken window frames and doors, which had been smashed up for firewood. The officers squeezed up to make room for the young Ensign and his grubby servant, and they spent the rest of the night dry and warm. In the morning, the young Ensign realised he had been sharing the space with some of Wellington’s most distinguished officers, including Colonel Sir John Colborne, the six-foot-three-tall commander of the 52nd Light Infantry. Colborne offered to share his breakfast with the sixteen-year-old Ensign but Keppel was over-awed and politely declined before walking back to the ridge with Moles, looking for the rest of his soaking-wet battalion of the Buckinghamshire Regiment of Foot. The next day, Keppel was nearly killed when he was stroking the face of a horse to calm it down and a cannon ball smashed into the mare’s head. Keppel, who was inside a defensive hollow square of infantry waiting to be attacked by cavalry, was pitched head over heels on the ground with the drum. The horse plunged about in agony but was killed by his comrades with their bayonets.
Along the ridge, bivouacking in village buildings, Captain Hastings Brudenel Forbes complained to his friend and fellow-officer, Ensign Charles Lake of the Third Guards, that his servant had forgotten his cloak and he was getting soaked. Forbes asked Lake to let him share a corner of his large cloak and they sheltered together under it. ‘Poor fellow!’ said Lake. ‘It was his last sleep for he was shot through the breast early on the morning of the eighteenth.’ The Ensign found a miniature portrait concealed on his friend’s body the next day. It was ‘of the lady to whom he was engaged’ and whom Lake had seen dancing with Forbes only a few days before at the Brussels balls.
Close to where Lake and Forbes grabbed what cover they could from the rain, General John Byng, commander of the 2nd Guards Brigade, ‘slept covered with nothing but straw and bellowed lustily at one of our officers accidentally treading on him’.
Some older veterans who had fought with Wellington through Portugal and Spain recalled over spluttering fires that there had been just such a terrible storm the night before the Battle of Salamanca on 22 July 1812, and Wellington had won a great victory over the French the next day.2 If that did not lift the dampened spirits of the men, they also had gin. Private Wheeler wrote he and his friends were ‘wet and comfortable’ after sharing a bottle of gin in torrential rain. When they landed at Ostend with their horses and guns, the men had found that gin was far cheaper than in London, to the consternation of their officers. ‘Gin here is so cheap that we are obliged to keep a very sharp look out to keep our men,’ Lieutenant George Hussey Pack wrote home to his father in Manchester Square, London after disembarking at the port. ‘What they charge in England 1/- you get here for a penny; my man has got drunk once since he has been here and I think myself pretty lucky he is not drunk day and night.’3 Drink was the curse of a fighting army, but that night before the battle it helped the men blot out the pain, and the thoughts of what greater horrors the morning would bring.
In the fields to the south of the bucolic ancient farmhouse and chateau called Hougoumont, covering Wellington’s right flank, the Coldstream Guards could hear the French moving around during the night, barely 300yds away. They had the solace of knowing at least their enemy was suffering just as much discomfort as they were.
Charles O’Neil, the roguish Irish private in the 28th Regiment of Foot, was jolted awake by a fellow Irishman who said he had a premonition he was going to be killed in the morning and wished to make an arrangement with O’Neil to tell his parents how he died. He offered to do the same for O’Neil, if he was killed:
We then exchanged the last letters we had received from home, so that each should have the address of the other’s parents. I endeavoured to conceal my own feelings, and cheer his, by reminding him that it was far better to die on the field with glory than from fear; but he turned away from me, and with a burst of tears that spoke the deep feelings of his heart, he said, ‘My mother!’ The familiar sound of this precious name, and the sight of his sorrow, completely overcame my attempts at concealment, and we wept together.
His friend’s foreboding was justified. ‘We had not been in action 25 minutes when he was shot down by my side.’ O’Neil was injured but survived to keep his promise and tell his friend’s parents how he died.4
There were tens of thousands of horses on the two hillsides, from thoroughbred cavalry mounts to cart horses, and they were terrified by the thunder and lightning. Some horses bolted down the hill from the allied lines to the farm at Hougoumont, 500yds in front of Wellington’s lines, and they had to be chased and caught by the soaking men in the steepling rain. Infantry were also spooked, as they bivouacked in the open fields, by the commotion in the dark into thinking they were under attack.
Ensign Charles Short, aged 16, of the Coldstream Guards 2nd Battalion recalled, ‘We formed a hollow square and prepared to receive Cavalry twice but found it was a false alarm both times.’ He added:
We were under arms the whole night, expecting the attack and it rained to that degree that the field where we were was half-way up our legs in mud; nobody, of course, could lie down. The ague got hold of some of the men. I with another officer had a blanket and with a little more gin we kept up very well. We had only one fire, and you cannot conceive the state we were in.
At Hougoumont, Private Matthew Clay was soaking wet and muddy, after slipping into a water-filled ditch that he had tried to jump across in the dark: slimy ground and the increased weight of my wet blanket made me slip and being neck-deep in the ditch, I found it very difficult to get out.’ When dawn broke, damp and drizzling rain across the fields, some had more gin to lift their spirits for breakfast. Ensign Short wrote to his mother: ‘Soon after daylight, the Company sent up with the greatest difficulty some gin, and we found an old cart full of wet Rye loaves which we breakfasted upon. Everybody was in high spirits …’
Private Clay, like many soldiers that morning, had more mundane matters on his mind. He checked the flintlock of his musket to see if it would still fire. Muskets were notorious for misfiring when it was wet: ‘The flint musket then in use was a sad bore from the effects of the wet,’ Clay later noted in his pay book. ‘The springs of the lock became wood-bound and would not act correctly and when in action the clumsy flints also became useless.’
As the rain eased, Clay bit off the end from a paper cartridge, opened the frizzen, poured some dry powder into the pan, rammed the rest of the powder and the ball down the muzzle, cocked the hammer, and fired at an object he had put on a bank of earth. ‘The ball embedded in the bank where I had purposely placed it as a target.’
The Land Pattern Musket had been in service since 1722 and it had helped Britain win the empire, but, despite being affectionately known as ‘Brown Bess’, ballistic tests have shown that it was inaccurate over more than 100yds. In fact, muskets like those carried at Waterloo were inferior in range, accuracy and rate of fire to the longbow that Henry V’s archers used to defeat the superior French force at Agincourt, 100 miles away, on 25 October 1415. Muskets were deadly when fired in volleys at close range but that would test the discipline of the men Wellington had called ‘the scum of the earth’.
Specialist sharp shooters, including Sir John Kincaid’s* green-jacketed rifle brigade carried variants of the Baker rifle developed by a London gunsmith, Ezekiel Baker. It had grooves down the barrel that could spin the shot through the air, making it far more stable, and more accurate than the standard musket. It was still muzzle-loaded, and slower than the musket because wadding had to be placed around the ball to make a tight fit. A well-trained soldier could fire about two shots a minute with a Baker rifle, compared to four-a-minute with the musket – but a marksman could drop a man over 300 paces with a Baker rifle. That was an important advantage when defending the farms at La Haye Sainte and Hougoumont, where the defenders were vastly outnumbered.
Wellington awoke at around 3 a.m. at the Brabant inn in Waterloo, which he had made his headquarters, and dealt with some paperwork. It is remarkable that he found the time to write a hurried note to Lady Frances Webster in Brussels to reassure her she would be safe:
My dear Lady Frances. We fought a desperate battle on Friday (Quatre Bras) in which I was successful though I had but very few troops. The Prussians were very roughly handled and retired last night which obliged me to do the same to this place yesterday. The course of the operations may oblige me to uncover Bruxelles for a moment for which reason I recommend that you and your family should be prepared to move to Antwerp at a moment’s notice. I will give you the earliest information of any danger that may come to my knowledge; at present I know of none.
The reference to leaving Brussels ‘uncovered’ is significant. He clearly still feared a flanking attack on Brussels by Napoleon through Mons but he may also have had a contingency plan – as many suspected – to fall back to the coast, through Hal, where he had stationed 15,500 troops, if he failed to hold Bonaparte at Waterloo, leaving Brussels at the mercy of the French. This also suggests that he was not as confident of victory as he had led Creevey to believe. Whatever his doubts, he kept them to himself.
After dealing with his mail, he breakfasted lightly on tea and toast at the inn, assuring the landlady that she would be safe, and then rode out on his chestnut charger, Copenhagen, at the head of a cavalcade of about forty of his staff officers, foreign liaison officers and their aides.
Copenhagen was 15.1 hands high, and had two great attributes for a war horse: he was unflinching under fire, and had stamina. He would need both that Sunday. Copenhagen was sired by a famous racehorse, Meteor, but never quite made the grade, though he was fast enough to win a couple of races. His dam was called Lady Catherine, which had been sired by ‘John Bull’, winner of the 1792 Epsom Derby. Colonel Thomas Grosvenor of the 65th Foot took the mare with him to Copenhagen in 1807 for a brutally effective campaign led by Wellington to stop the Danish fleet falling into French hands. When his mare gave birth to a leggy chestnut foal, Grosvenor named the colt after the action. Grosvenor sold him as a mount for the army to General Sir Charles Stewart, then Adjutant General to Wellington in Spain. When Stewart was invalided back to Britain in 1812, he offered Copenhagen to Wellington, who bought him for 400 guineas: ‘There may have been many faster horses, no doubt many handsomer, but for bottom and endurance, I never saw his fellow,’ said Wellington. It was a partnership that was to endure through roundshot and riot for the next twenty-four years.
Wellington was dressed for battle as a gentleman should be – not in a bright scarlet uniform, but in civilian clothes that he habitually wore as Commander-in-Chief of the allied forces: a cocked hat (worn fore and aft), white cravat, dark-blue coat with a cape against the rain, white leather breeches, and hessian boots. He wore a black English cockade with three small cockades about an inch in diameter, for Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands, as a token of holding rank in their armies.
As he rode out past the soaking wet bivouacs of his men, he had the air of a huntsmen off to find the fox, with his personal staff, including Lord FitzRoy Somerset, his military secretary, and eight ADCs.
Wellington’s ADCs were a band of dashing young blades, a privileged elite, drawn from the nobility and the Guards regiments. They were his ‘family’, and acted as his ‘eyes and ears’, riding across the battlefield carrying his urgent orders, as well as standing by Wellington as the shot and shell flew past. They were expected to show sang froid under fire to inspire confidence among the troops, and two would be killed that day.
In addition to FitzRoy Somerset, his military secretary, later Lord Raglan, who had been the Duke’s right-hand man in Portugal, Wellington had five ADCs on the army pay. They were all well-connected, as well as being well-heeled: his chief ADC, Sir Alexander Gordon, 29, was the third son of Lord Haddo, and his brother was the Tory Lord Aberdeen, a diplomat who had been with Wellington at the Congress of Vienna and would become prime minister; John Fremantle had been given the honour of bringing home the despatch from Vitoria and laying war trophies at the feet of the Prince Regent (his uncle William was an MP and close friend of Lord Buckingham, the Army Paymaster General); Charles Fox Canning was the first cousin of the future prime minister George Canning and brother of the diplomat Stratford Canning, who had personally asked Wellington to take Charles on his staff for Waterloo; Lord George Lennox was the second son of the Duke of Richmond, an old friend and army veteran who had taught the Duke drilling in Ireland when he was a young officer; and the Prince of Nassau, the young son of Duke Bernard of Nassau, who paid for his inclusion by sending a contingent of Nassau troops to fight at Waterloo.
Wellington had a further three extra ADCs who were added at his own expense: the Honourable Henry Percy, son of the Earl of Beverley, Lord Arthur Hill – later Lord Sandys, and George Cathcart, son of a viscount who was later killed in the Crimea at the Battle of Inkerman.
They were joined by the Prince of Orange and his six ADCs; staff officers including Adjutant and Quartermaster Generals, each with a suite of half-a-dozen officers; the commanding officers of engineers and artillery; and liaison officers embedded in Wellington’s headquarters, Baron von Müffling, the Prussian liaison officer; the Spanish aristocrat, Ricardo Álava; and Louis XVIII’s trusted aide, Pozzo di Borgo. As they rode jangling the mile or so from Waterloo to the front line, Captain Rees Howell Gronow, a Welsh Grenadier Guards Officer, thought the ‘glittering staff seemed as gay and unconcerned as if they were riding to meet the hounds in some quiet English country.’
Captain Mercer, drying himself out in the orchard at Mont St Jean, noticed bizarrely there were three civilians, who rode past his gun troop to the front line. They including the Duke of Richmond, whose wife had thrown the glittering Brussels ball on the eve of Quatre Bras. Richmond, a seasoned soldier who had been Wellington’s secretary in Ireland, had wanted a post in the army but Wellington turned him down. Instead he decided to go as a spectator. He galloped after Wellington’s cavalcade with two young sons, including 15-year-old, William, who had an arm and an eye bandaged up – he had broken his arm and been blinded in one eye in a fall from his horse in the park at Brussels a few days before. The boy had been taken on by General Sir Peregrine Maitland, commander of two battalions of Grenadier Guards, as an extra ADC, probably as a favour to his father. When Wellington saw the boy all bandaged up, he acted with fatherly concern: ‘William you ought to be in bed.’ He told the boy’s father: ‘Duke, you have no business here.’ Father and son ignored his order and stayed on the field of battle as spectators until about 5 p.m. Richmond had two older sons who were in the thick of it: Lord George Lennox on Wellington’s staff and Charles Gordon-Lennox, ADC to the Prince of Orange, who became the 5th Duke of Richmond.
At Le Caillou, about 3 miles from Wellington’s lines, Napoleon was served breakfast off silver salvers with his marshals. He was confident of beating Wellington because he was sure that Blücher and the Prussians could not come to his aid, but Napoleon was testy over the eggs and bacon. General Maximilien Foy felt he had a duty to tell him – ‘as an old soldier’ – ‘you are now in front of an infantry, which, during the whole of the Spanish war, I never saw give way.’5
Marshal Soult supported Foy and urged Bonaparte to recall the 33,000 troops who had been sent east towards the town of Wavre under Grouchy to hold back the Prussians. Napoleon ridiculed him: ‘Just because you have been beaten by Wellington, you think he’s a good general. I tell you, Wellington is a bad general, the English are bad troops and this affair is nothing more than l’affaire d’un dejeuner [a picnic].’
Bonaparte turned to Marshal Honoré Reille, another of his generals who had been defeated by Wellington in the Peninsular War, and asked him what he thought of Wellington’s army. With remarkable candour, Reille told the emperor it was well-posted as Wellington knew how: ‘Attacked from the front, I consider the English infantry to be impregnable owing to its calm tenacity and its superior aim in firing.’ Before Napoleon could react, the emperor’s younger brother, Jérôme Bonaparte, arrived at the farmhouse with disturbing rumours that Wellington had met up the night before with Blücher and got a promise that the Prussians would support him. In fact, the promise was given by Blücher to Wellington’s ADC, Sir Alexander Gordon. Napoleon dismissed his brother’s report: ‘Nonsense – the Prussians and the English cannot possibly link up for another two days after such a battle [Ligny].’
It was so nearly true. Napoleon assumed the Prussians would retreat east to Liege, after their beating at Ligny, while Ney attacked Wellington’s forces at Quatre Bras. In fact, that had been the strong view of Blücher’s chief of staff, von Gneisenau. Wellington’s liaison officer in Blücher’s camp, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Henry Hardinge heard the row as he was lying in pain on straw in Blücher’s ante-room, after having had his left hand amputated. His hand had been smashed by shot at Ligny and he lay listening to Blücher and his generals arguing as they passed by. Hardinge recalled:
Blücher sent for me, calling me Lieber Freund etc and embracing me, I perceived he smelt most strongly of gin and rhubarb. He said to me, ‘Ich stinke etwas’, that he had been obliged to take medicine, having been twice rode over by the cavalry, but that he should be quite satisfied if in conjunction with the Duke of Wellington he was able now to defeat his old enemy.6
Hardinge added:
I was told there had been a great discussion that night in his rooms and that Blücher and Grolmann [Karl Ludwig von Grolmann] had carried the day for remaining in communication with the English army, but that Gneisenau had great doubts as to whether they ought not to fall back to Liege and secure their own communication with Luxembourg. They thought that if the English should be defeated, they themselves would be utterly destroyed.7
Wellington described it as ‘the decisive moment of the century’, though he played down the importance of the Prussians to the outcome.
Napoleon had planned to begin the battle shortly after daybreak with a ferocious two-hour barrage from his grand battery of cannon to smash Wellington’s centre. The emperor delayed because his bedraggled troops were still arriving on the battlefield. He was also concerned about the rain, which was continuing though it had now slowed to a soaking drizzle from the torrential downpours during the night. As a former gunnery officer, Napoleon knew the lethal power of his guns to destroy Wellington’s infantry would be reduced by the soft ground; cannon balls would get stuck in the mud, rather than ricocheting through Wellington’s ranks. He concurred with Antoine Drouot, his artillery commander: the mud would require enormous effort for his men to wheel their guns around the battlefield into position. Confident that Blücher was out of the picture for a day or more, the emperor decided to let the ground dry out. He ordered that the main barrage should be delayed until 12 noon. It was a fatal mistake. By delaying the onslaught, he gave Blücher more time at the end of the day to join Wellington, as he had promised. Napoleon made other errors that day that contributed to his defeat, but the weather was to become an important factor in Wellington’s great victory.
The logs of Royal Navy warships, HMS Alert, Erebus, Foxhound, Sharpshooter, Swan and Wrangler all reported the atrocious weather conditions.* Low pressure was recorded across England and the Low Countries on 17 June, which was dominated by a cold front advancing from the west, causing heavy overnight rain. Force-6 winds of 24 knots in the Channel were reduced to little more than a gentle breeze across the battlefield, but the thick low cloud caused ‘murky’ conditions with poor visibility even after the rain stopped. It may have been the brightening skyline in the west, after the worst of the rain storms had passed, that may have encouraged Napoleon to accede to Drouot’s request for a delay to allow the ground to dry out. The weather was a factor in determining the outcome of the battle, according to two meteorologists, Dennis Wheeler and Gaston Demaree, who reconstructed the weather of 16–18 June for a paper for the Royal Meteorological Society, though it was not the only reason Napoleon lost.8
A respected British geologist, the late Kenneth Spink linked the rain storms over Waterloo that weekend to the Tambora eruption. Spink told a conference at Warwick University in 1996 less than 3 inches of rain normally would be expected in the month of June: ‘Enormous rainstorms developed before and during the series of battles leading to the major conflict at Waterloo. With the benefit of hindsight, it can be seen that these were caused by the eruption of Tambora … This bad weather was almost entirely to Wellington’s advantage.’9 Victor Hugo lamented, ‘Had it not rained in the night 17–18 June 1815, the future of Europe might have been different. A few drops of water, more or less, were what determined Napoleon’s fate.’ The writer claimed: ‘Had the ground been dry, so that the artillery could move the battle would have begun at six in the morning; it would have been over and done with by two, three hours before the Prussians could turn the scales.’
The writer was excusing the emperor’s mistakes by heaping the blame on the weather. In 1816, far worse weather was to shape events across the globe. The ash spread around the earth, reflecting sunlight, causing the climate to change by lowering temperatures. In London, people witnessed remarkable sunsets, because the volcanic dust was acting like a curtain on the sun’s dying rays. The year after Waterloo, 1816, ‘the year without a summer’, deepened the distress and unrest in Britain while it was still celebrating victory; unseasonal rain ruined the crops and made the crushing poverty even harder to endure. When Wellington’s ‘scum of the earth’ returned home, they found their country at war with itself.
But first they had a battle to fight.
* Captain Johnny Kincaid was a real-life version of Richard Sharpe, but the author of the Sharpe novels, Bernard Cornwell, denies he was the inspiration for his fictional hero.
* The Met Office was not created until 1854.
1. Dennis Wheeler and Gaston Demaree, Weather, Royal Meteorological Society, June 2005, vol. 60, no. 6.
2. Julian Paget and Derek Saunders, Hougoumont Waterloo (Battleground Books), p. 32.
3. Gareth Glover (ed.), The Waterloo Archive Vol. lV: British Sources (Barnsley: Frontline Books, 1999), p. 98.
4. Charles O’Neil, Private O’Neil: The Recollections of an Irish Rogue (Leonaur Books, 1997).
5. Andrew Roberts, Waterloo – Napoleons Last Gamble (London: Harper Perennial, 2005), p.41.
6. Ibid., p. 110.
7. Ibid.
8. Dennis Wheeler and Gaston Demaree, Weather, Royal Meteorological Society, June 2005, vol. 60, no. 6.
9. K. Sping, ‘Geological Constraints at the Battle of Waterloo’, Applied Geoscience Conference, 15–18 April 1996, Warwick University.