26
NEY AT QUATRE BRAS
By Bill Fawcett
Maybe Napoleon should have assigned the corps to the Brightest of the Bright rather than to the Bravest of the Brave.
Here is a thought to wrap your mind around: Napoleon Bonaparte did not lose the Battle of Waterloo. The French lost the battle, but the man who lost it was Marshal Michel Ney. This noted French officer had unquestioned courage. In France, he was often called the Bravest of the Brave. Marshal Ney commanded the rear guard on the disastrous march out of Russia. He started that duty commanding twenty-five thousand men and, when they marched over the Vistula into Poland and safety, only five hundred remained. Yet behind Ney they formed up and crossed the bridge in good order. It was during that tour of duty that his famous red hair turned completely gray. Napoleon trusted Ney and there was no question that men would follow him into battle. Bonaparte could normally count on him to be his most aggressive corps commander. Ney loved to lead his men into a battle, preferring to be at the head of his troops in a charge to remaining in his headquarters. It took Michel Ney three major mistakes in two days of battle to guarantee a French defeat.
In 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte returned from exile on Elba to an enthusiastic welcome in France. Every unit sent by the king of France to arrest him joined his ranks instead. The marshals from Napoleon’s regime had retained their positions under the reinstated king. One of the royal army’s units was commanded by Ney, who boasted to the king that he would bring Napoleon back in a cage. When Ney faced his former emperor, he was at the head of an army of soldiers who had already changed sides and joined Napoleon, and there was a tense moment or two. Some said that Ney even ordered the line of infantry to fire, but no one obeyed. What is certain is that, within minutes, Ney approached Napoleon, who greeted him with great enthusiasm. Ney saluted—and rejoined his emperor. To a man, his fifteen hundred soldiers formed up behind the two of them and began to march to Paris. A few days later, the king fled France. In short order, Bonaparte had regained control of the country and was emperor again.
The allies, primarily England, Prussia, Austria, and Russia, had spent twenty years fighting against or being occupied by Bonaparte’s armies. With his return to power, each immediately called up their armies and marched on France. But the allied armies were setting out from locations hundreds of miles away from each other. The Austrian and Russian armies would take weeks to reach France. But two of the allies were closer to France and soon were within a few days’ march of each other. These were the English-Dutch army under the Duke of Wellington and the Prussian army commanded by Marshal Blücher. Blücher had been fighting the French for more than twenty years and was old, fat, and infirm enough that he often commanded in the field from a wagon rather than from horseback. Still, he had lost none of his fire. Wellington’s army was located near Brussels and Blücher’s was marching toward it from Germany. Wellington had about seventy thousand men and fewer than half of these were his veterans from Spain. In addition, there was the worrisome fact that many of the Dutch troops he led had served under Napoleon only a few years earlier. On the other hand, Blücher had eighty thousand men, but nearly all of them were new recruits and inexperienced. Napoleon had about a hundred and ten thousand men following him north to meet these two armies. In typical Napoleonic manner, he managed to surprise both opponents and place himself between them.
Napoleon led seventy-one thousand of his troops toward Blücher and the Prussians on his right. To his left was the vital crossroads of Quatre Bras. He sent Ney, leading twenty-five thousand soldiers, to take Quatre Bras. He also sent orders for a second corps, that of the comte d’Erlon, to move to support the advance. If Napoleon held that junction, no matter what happened, it was unlikely that the British and Germans could join together without leaving Brussels open. On the night of June 16, he gave Ney verbal orders to take the town. That was when Ney made what was his first mistake. Returning to his command, he went to sleep without issuing any orders. It took a few hours just to form up camped troops to move, so this guaranteed that the morning would be lost before Ney’s troops could reach their objective. In fact, it was not until about eleven a.m. the next day that his first divisions were on the march toward Quatre Bras. That morning, the Dutch generals Jean Victor de Constant Rebecque (actually a Swiss officer in service to the Dutch) and Hendrik George, count de Perponcher Sedinitzky, had realized the location’s strategic value and rushed their lone division to defend the crossroads. Other British and Dutch units were ordered to reinforce the position, but all were hours away.
For his part, Napoleon spent the day fighting the entire German army with his other corps. The battle had degenerated into a slugging match, which Blücher’s army was taking the worst of.
When his division finally reached Quatre Bras, Ney discovered it was already held. At two p.m., the allies had only eight thousand men and twelve guns. Ney’s lead division had twenty thousand men and sixty guns, so he should have been able to push the British out with a single strong attack. But Ney made the mistake of hesitating. While he saw only about eight thousand British supported by fifty cavalry and twelve guns, all French marshals had learned on the peninsula that what you could see was often not all Wellington had nearby. For that reason, even though the attack started at two p.m., the advance was cautious and slow-moving. Ney sent a messenger asking that d’Erlon and his corps hurry to the battlefield, then pressed slowly forward. When they approached a wooded area on one side, the entire advance slowed until it could be determined that the trees did not hold hidden Englishmen waiting to jump on their flank. At two p.m., the French marshal received a written order from Napoleon stressing the importance of seizing the crossroads. Ney pushed the attack forward and began to drive into the thin British line. Wellington arrived at three p.m. and saw his line splintering. Then an entire Belgian-Dutch cavalry brigade arrived to aid the British, and the line held. Even when the brigade was lost, through inept leadership by the Prince of Orange, it bought enough time for eight thousand more men under Picton to reach the battle at about three thirty. When the French next attacked, they were met by a second line of fresh, veteran infantry and thrown back.
Ney then pulled back and waited for d’Erlon’s corps, which was following his, to arrive. With them, he would again greatly outnumber Wellington, and be able to overwhelm and outflank the town. Unfortunately, this, too, was a mistake. D’Erlon had encountered one of Napoleon’s aides, General de la Bédoyère, who knew of the situation at Ligny and ordered d’Erlon to turn about and march to attack the Prussian flank. D’Erlon had no choice but to obey someone speaking with Bonaparte’s authority. So he marched away from Quatre Bras to Ligny.
When d’Erlon did not appear, Ney, rather than press the attack, sent an aide to d’Erlon with specific orders to hurry to Quatre Bras. Then he made his second mistake. He still had more men and many more guns than Wellington, but he waited for d’Erlon. A few hours later, d’Erlon did arrive at Ligny—but in the wrong place. Instead of appearing on the German flank, he arrived at the end of the French line. Fearing the large force appearing in the distance on their left, General Dominique Vandamme’s Third Corps reacted with panic, and a vital attack by the guard was delayed for over an hour, until it could be determined that the troops were French and not Wellington’s Brits. As a result, d’Erlon’s corps did not fight at Ligny, even though they were in sight of the enemy.
At Quatre Bras, the English mounted a counterattack. This, combined with an order arriving from Napoleon reminding him how important the crossroads was, sent Ney into a fit of temper. He immediately sent riders to inform d’Erlon that, no matter where he was, his corps was to hurry to Quatre Bras. So the French army at Ligny saw an entire corps arrive at the battle, then saw it march away, without firing a single shot. Then the French marshal waited for d’Erlon to arrive. By the time orders from Napoleon arrived demanding he take the crossroads, it was six p.m.—too late. Before the French could strike, the British (now reinforced to thirty-six thousand to Ney’s twenty thousand) counterattacked. In the next three hours, the outnumbered French were driven back beyond Perponcher’s original lines. With more than eight thousand casualties split evenly between both sides, the result was a draw.
Had Ney moved on the morning of June 16 with speed in the face of the enemy, perhaps actually getting his corps moving three hours after dawn, he would have arrived at Quatre Bras first. Even if he had just dithered that morning long enough to have his lead elements arrive before noon, there would have been so few British in the vital town that they could have been thrown out easily. But Ney moved with no sense of urgency, even with the enemy nearby, and missed the opportunity for a nearly bloodless and decisive victory. The mistake he made in a fit of temper—ordering d’Erlon to countermarch, yet again—meant that Napoleon had no fresh troops with which he could press the retreating Prussians. Ney’s waiting two hours for d’Erlon’s troops to arrive before attacking again that day meant he lost his numerical superiority. The vital town and its roads remained in British hands. Two mistakes on the first of two days of battle. One, a failure to act with a reasonable sense of urgency when about to face the enemy. The second, an order to d’Erlon’s corps demanding their return to Quatre Bras, without enough information and in contradiction to Napoleon’s orders—because he was angry. Ordering the corps to countermarch, with no regard for why it was marching, toward Napoleon and to a major battle. Yet both these battle-losing mistakes were to be overshadowed by the one that Ney made the next day at the Battle of Waterloo itself.
Had Ney taken Quatre Bras, the British would have had to fall farther back, toward Brussels. If the Prussians, who arrived only in the nick of time, had arrived later or not come at all, knowing Wellington’s Anglo-Dutch army was retreating, the Battle of Waterloo would be known by whatever name Bonaparte chose to give it. Battles are named by the victors and it would have been not a “near-run thing” but a French victory.
The Battle of Waterloo wasn’t actually fought in Waterloo. The names Quatre Bras and Hougoumont were deemed by Wellington to be too difficult for Englishmen to pronounce, so he instead used the name of a nearby town, Waterloo.
Despite his failure to capture Quatre Bras, Napoleon kept his faith in the Bravest of the Brave. As the day progressed, the emperor became ill. Unable to ride among the troops, he placed Marshal Ney in direct command during the second day of the battle, the Battle of Waterloo.