Napoleon Victorious!
Napoleon Victorious!
For Patty, the love of my life – my wife, dearest friend, conscience, counsellor, and the mother of three wonderful children!
Napoleon Victorious
AN ALTERNATE HISTORY OF THE
BATTLE OF WATERLOO
Peter G. Tsouras
Napoleon Victorious: An Alternate History of the Battle of Waterloo
Greenhill Books, c/o Pen & Sword Books Ltd,
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Copyright © Peter G. Tsouras, 2018
The right of Peter G. Tsouras to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.
CIP data records for this title are available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78438-208-7
eISBN 978-1-78438-210-0
Mobi ISBN 978-1-78438-209-4
Prologue
12 May 1821 – Notre Dame, Paris
I was barely 10 when I buried my father. Notre Dame glittered with uniforms of all the marshals of France, a battalion’s worth of generals, and a regiment of colonels, not to mention the jewels and high fashion of their wives. The clergy added even more colour along with clouds of incense. The choir was perfect. The funeral itself had even been delayed long enough for the Pope to arrive to officiate. Nothing was spared. My regal mother’s false tears were convincing to everyone but me.
Every eye seemed focused on the gilded bronze sarcophagus in front of the altar with the tricolour draped over it. On top of it rested his sword and simple black campaign hat. From corners of the coffin eagles flashed. All so regal, yet so cold. But my tears were warm and real. He called me his little eagle, and he loved me. I shall miss him till the day they lay me out in the same spot.
When the service was finished, his marshals flanked the coffin as official pallbearers while it was carried out by a dozen of the strongest members of the Old Guard. Mother and I followed, the mass of mourners rippling in bows as we passed. Outside, the Old Guard was massed. Our carriage rode past their ranks, and I could not miss the tears streaming down countless faces, as warm as mine.
Long after I was supposed to be asleep, I found my secret way, as 10-year-old boys are wont to do, to the garden and the moonlit bench in the arbour where Father and I would go to be alone. I could feel him still there, an invisible yet powerful presence. I remembered all the hours we spent there as he regaled me with stories of his wars, and – as I would realize later – much wisdom on the leading of men. The sergeant of the guard found me sound asleep. Through the haze of my sleep, I heard, ‘Ah, Eaglet, what are you doing here?’ as he gently scooped me up in his arms.
The next night I slipped out again and forced myself to stay awake until the sergeant made his rounds. This time he bowed as he said, ‘Your Majesty should not be here alone. May I escort you back to your rooms?’
‘My father said a little time alone was the most precious gift a monarch could have.’
‘Ah, that sounds like the Emperor,’ he replied.
He was an old soldier, grey in the service of my father, his moustache long and drooping, de rigueur for one of the Old Guard. Countless men had served my father, but how many had known him? ‘Tell me,’ I asked, ‘where did you serve with my father?’
The sergeant laughed quietly and said, ‘It would be a shorter list to say where I did not serve him, Majesty.’
‘Were you at Mont St Jean?’
‘Indeed, Your Majesty. I was with him when he broke the English.’
Extract from the memoirs of Napoleon II,
Emperor of the French
Contents
List of Illustrations
Maps
Introduction
1 ‘What a Canary!’, 26 February–31 March 1815
2 Forging the Sword, 1 April–29 May 1815
3 ‘Napoleon Has Humbugged Me, by God!’, 30 May–16 June 1815 47
4 ‘La Ball Commence’, 16 June 1815
5 Hougoumont, 12:15 a.m.–12:00 Noon, 17 June 1815
6 La Haye Sainte, 12:00 Noon–3:00 p.m., 17 June 1815
7 Pas de Charge!, 3:00 p.m.–5:00 p.m., 17 June 1815
8 The Storm of Mont St Jean
9 Fin
Notes
Illustrations
1 Napoleon escapes from Elba
2 Napoleon reviews the Old Guard the the great parade
3 The Red Lancers of the Imperial Guard
4 The army renews its oath to Napoleon
5 Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult
6 Marshal Adolphe Edouard Mortier, Duke of Treviso
7 Marshal Emmanuel Grouchy
8 Marshal Louis Davout
9 General Jean-Baptiste Drouet, Comte d’Erlon
10 General Dominique Rene, Comte Vandamme
11 Prince Jérôme Bonaparte
12 Marshal Louis Alexandre Berthier, Prince of Neuchâtel and Wagram
13 General Étienne-Maurice Gérard
14 The Duke of Wellington
15 Lieutenant General Henry William Paget, first Marquess of Anglesey and second Earl of Uxbridge
16 Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Picton
17 Richard Hussey Vivian, first Baron Vivian
18 John Cameron, commander of the 92nd Foot at Waterloo
19 William, Prince of Orange
20 General David Hendrik Chassé, ‘General Bayonet’
21 Field Marshal Prince Gebhardt von Blücher
22 General Count Neidhardt von Gneisenau
23 Hans Ernst von Zieten
24 The Prussian attack at Ligny
25 Gneisenau covering the retreat at Ligny
26 The Duchess of Richmond’s Ball
27 A Prussian general at Waterloo
28 A sub-lieutenant breaks through the courtyard gate at Hougoumont
29 The French counterattack at Hougoumont
30 The Scots Guards counterattack at Braine l’Alleud
31 Vive L’Empereur! The attack of French hussars at Braine l’Alleud
32 Sergeant Charles Ewart capturing the eagle of the French 100th Regiment of the Line at the Battle of Waterloo
33 French soldiers presenting captured colours to Napoleon at his headquarters on Ronsomme Hill
34 Early use of a French balloon in 1795
35 ‘To the last bullet’ – the defence of La Haye Sainte
36 The loss of a British colour in the collapse of Wellington’s left flank
37 Napoleon’s forward headquarters at the inn at La Belle Alliance
38 A general leading the charge against Wellington’s right at Waterloo
39 Charge of the Red Lancers of the Guard through the gap in the British line
40 The final cavalry attack at Mont St Jean
41 Napoleon before the storm of Mont St Jean
Maps
Introduction
Grafenwöhr, the US Army Europe’s tank gunnery range, was a strange place in which to become an admirer of Napoleon. There I was, a brand-new second lieutenant, in a very cold, snowy German February in 1971, down with pneumonia and ordered to quarters for three days. Quarters was a very general term for a long one-room cinder-block building with concrete floors, a barely working heater, and steel cots with no mattresses. I was curled up in my sleeping bag, gingerly trying not to impale myself on loose metal springs, when our company clerk brought in the mail. Lo and behold, there was a book – The Campaigns of Napoleon by David Chandler, all 1,093 pages of it, from the History Book Club. I devoured it in three days.
Years later I was finally to meet Chandler, that master of Napoleonic history and director of War Studies at Sandhurst. He had generously written a foreword to my first book, Warriors’ Words, and invited me to Sandhurst after reading my account of how I had come across his book, where he devoted a day to showing me around. It would be difficult to find a kinder gentleman or a more eminent scholar. I encourage the reader to explore his numerous excellent books on the Napoleonic Wars. You will be richly rewarded.
That book sparked an admiration for the first soldier of Europe, whom Churchill would refer to as the ‘Old Emperor’ as he baulked at any comparison with Hitler. ‘I certainly deprecate any comparison between Herr Hitler and Napoleon; I do not wish to insult the dead.’1 Napoleon, like Alexander and Caesar, had the priceless ability to win men’s hearts and propel them to incredible feats on the battlefield. He had the equally valuable ability to pick good men and reward them accordingly. Like Alexander he simply breathed the art of war and military glory. He dominated an era, and his reputation is still strong. Even Hitler, his sordid imitator, fell under its spell. It is no wonder that after the fall of France in 1940 Hitler gazed for two hours on Napoleon’s sarcophagus in the Invalides. Thereafter, he ordered the body of the Emperor’s son brought from Vienna and reinterred in the Invalides.
Napoleon’s reputation ironically was transformed into myth by his defeat at Waterloo and his subsequent exile on St Helena. He presciently declared that by sending him to that bleak rock in the South Atlantic his vanquishers had fastened a crown of thorns on him. Even the British were to be ashamed of the insulting pettiness of the jailer they had assigned to him as governor of St Helena, thus spurring his transformation into a figure of heroic myth.
All of this hinged on his defeat at
Waterloo. Had he been victorious the world would have become a far different place from what it is now, as imagined in Chapter 9. One predictable outcome would have been in the very name of the battle. The winner gets to name his victory. The French to this day disdain the name of Waterloo and refer to the battle as Mont St Jean. That likely would have been Napoleon’s choice as well since the village of Waterloo was not part of the battlefield he had fought over. This book will therefore refer to the battle as Mont St Jean.
Napoleon Victorious is the fourth of my quartet of alternate histories on seminal battles that cover Gettysburg, Stalingrad, and D-Day. These three almost begged for Waterloo to be included among them. Not only is Waterloo a pivot of history as are the others, but like them its decision trembled on a knife edge. There was nothing inevitable about the outcome. If anything, the opening of the campaign that led to Waterloo was a tour de force by Napoleon in strategic conception and execution, causing Wellington to exclaim, ‘Napoleon has humbugged me, by God!’ In the battle itself, Napoleon tested Wellington as he had never been before. Repeatedly Napoleon was on the point of victory, yet it eluded him again and again. The Great Duke would later remark most rightly that Waterloo was ‘the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life’.
How, then, did Napoleon fail? Since returning to power from Elba in February 1815 Napoleon had worked wonders in putting the French army back together after its reduction and shameful neglect by the Bourbons. The rank and file and junior officers were deeply and personally loyal to Napoleon, but many of the senior officers had compromised themselves by serving the Bourbons, which engendered intense distrust among their subordinates. Simply put, the soldierly did not trust many of their generals – hardly the way to create unity of purpose. The army Napoleon took to Waterloo may have been the most experienced he every commanded, but it was brittle.
Most of Napoleon’s marshals were unavailable for one reason or another, but he misused the best of those that remained. As the army was moving to contact, he gave Marshal Michel Ney, a man now assumed to be suffering from post-traumatic stress, the major roles of holding off Wellington at Quatre Bras and managing the battle at Waterloo. Marshal Louis Davout, without doubt his most lethal marshal, he left in Paris as Minister of Defence. His next best, Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult, he made his chief of staff instead of giving him a combat command. The French general staff had been the creation of Marshal Louis Berthier and was the mother of subsequent military staffs the world over. Berthier retired to his estate in Bavaria and fell to his death from a window. Napoleon had first appointed Gen. François Bailly de Monthion, Berthier’s highly capable deputy, as chief of staff. Reportedly, he did not warm to the man and replaced him with Soult, who did not understand the finely tuned instrument of the general staff. Events were to show that it did not perform well in inexperienced hands. Without it, the army did not work as smoothly or as quickly as it had in the past.
Neither did Napoleon take advantage of the considerable and often painful experience many of his commanders had in fighting Wellington and British troops. He asked their opinion but did not appear to incorporate their input into his decisions. This is all the more surprising since he had followed Wellington’s campaigns with great interest and considered him to be the only general who approached his own abilities.
These problems taken together made it difficult for the French to apply breaking pressure on a number of the weaknesses in Wellington’s own heterogenous army which spoke four languages – English, French, Dutch, and German. The British troops were in the minority, and by the end of the battle more of the Allied troops on the field were speaking German than English. Half of his troops were from the new Netherlands army, which included both Dutch and French speakers. Many of them had served in the French army and were of doubtful loyalty, especially the francophone Belgians. The Allied artillery was inferior in both numbers and ability to the French, and the cavalry was no match for the French in an open fight. Wellington famously distrusted the British cavalry, the domain of the aristocracy and relentlessly unprofessional. He also had to finesse the fact that the commander of one of his corps was the pretentious young heir to the Netherlands throne, William, Prince of Orange, foisted upon him by the necessity of alliance politics.
Yet, Napoleon’s difficulties were not all pre-ordained. The essence of history is its contingent nature. It is a shifting kaleidoscope of human and natural interactions and chance, where opportunities quickly open and close. The opening of one such opportunity was in the American Civil War, on the second day of the Battle of Chickamauga in September 1863. A misunderstanding among Union generals resulted in a division pulling out of the line without a replacement available. Confederate Lt. Gen. James Longstreet’s attack coincidently launched straight into the opening in the Union line, collapsing the entire flank and resulting in the flight of the Union army. Had there been more precise coordination among the Union generals, the Confederate attack would have run into formidable defence by experienced troops, and then it is highly likely that the battle would have resulted in a drawn affair or even a Union victory. In reality, Chickamauga was a terrible defeat for the Union, the first time that a major army in the Civil War had been routed. The difference between victory and defeat was a simple matter of careless coordination.
Make one change here, and its repercussions ricochet through all subsequent events. Replace a diffident o, cer with a dynamic one, and it becomes a completely different story. A chance encounter sets off a train of alternative decisions. The synergy of changes drives history in new and unexpected directions. Victories become defeats and defeats become victories. Few great battles offer more examples of the opening and closing kaleidoscope of opportunity and chance than Waterloo/Mont St Jean. For one man, it would mean a world of difference between being chained to that Promethean rock in the South Atlantic and being remembered as Napoleon Victorious.
Note. An alternate history, by its very nature, would have generated its own literature and works that in themselves give indications of how history took different courses. These sources will be reflected in the notes and are marked with an asterisk to preclude the reader from a fruitless search for new, interesting sources.
CHAPTER 1
‘What a Canary!’
26 February–31 March 1815
‘They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.’ Voltaire’s comment on the Spanish Bourbons applied equally to their French relatives. The restoration of the Bourbon royal house to the French throne after Napoleon’s defeat and abdication in 1814 had confirmed that intelligence was not a family trait. The grotesquely fat Louis XVIII himself did not inspire confidence either. The Duke of Wellington’s comment was damning: ‘A perfect walking sore, not a part of his body sound; even his head let out a sort of humour [odour].’1 He was escorted by remnants of Napoleon’s Old Guard, ‘The wolf-bred offspring of the Revolution’, in seething anger into a Paris still occupied by the Allied armies.2 A witness wrote:
I do not believe that human figures had ever expressed anything as menacing and as terrible. The grenadiers, covered in wounds, conquerors of Europe, who had seen so many thousands of bullets pass over their heads, who had smelt the fire and the powder. These same men, deprived of their chief, were forced to salute an old king, an invalid from age, not war, under the eyes of the armies of the Russians, Austrians and Prussians . . . Some, wrinkling the skin of their foreheads, worked their large bearskins down over their eyes as if not wishing to see, others turned down the corners of their mouths in scorn and rage, others again, below their moustaches, bared their teeth like tigers. When they presented arms, there was a crash of fury and the noise made one tremble.3
Things were to get worse quickly. Louis appointed his son, the Duke of Artois, a man of no military ability or experience but of great pretensions, as commander of the French army, aided by his two equally pretentious sons, the dukes of Angoulême and Berry. In every possible way, they insulted the French army in their attempt to purge it of memories of the Revolution and Empire. They had no idea of the bonds of brotherhood forged on countless battlefields. To them the French army was not a living institution with its own character and pride but a collection of peasants. A flood of incompetent émigré officers, many of whom had fought with France’s enemies, flooded into the army. Such was their vast military experience that they suggested that, to prevent desertion, the trousers of the troops be collected in the evening and only returned in the morning. It ‘was a strange new world where a man who possessed a title need not have earned it by charging through a crossfire of grapeshot or escalading heavily defended ramparts sword in hand’.4