Free How the French Won Waterloo (or Think They Did) by Stephen Clarke

from in front – and cause a much uglier wound.’
    The real problem for Napoleon, according to his admirers, was that the other commanders of his army were by no means as sharply focused on the job in hand.
VI
    As a rain-free dawn broke on the morning of the Battle of Waterloo, most ordinary French soldiers seem to have been looking forward to a fight. At least a few explosions might warm things up a bit. Many of them were annoyed to discover that their cartridges were wet – they were carrying large stocks of ammunition in their backpacks because Napoleon had rightly feared that the supply wagons would not keep up. Now, though, the men were apparently afraid that they would run out of dry powder during the fighting. However, the situation must have been very similar over on the other side of the front line, and this ‘damp cartridge’ problem is reminiscent of the frequently repeated French claim about Agincourt – that their crossbowmen couldn’t reply to the English archers because their crossbow strings were wet.
    Meanwhile, the rain-sodden, mud-encrusted young Lieutenant Jacques-François Martin and his men were apparently in astonishing good humour. Martin wrote jokingly that ‘Next morning, bright and early, we jumped out of bed’ – he had slept in the mud, remember – ‘and after preening ourselves, the well-rested soldiers went off in search of everything we needed. Soon we were able to light a fire and grill some beef cutlets that were delicious. And we drank plenty – water was not exactly lacking. Thus refreshed, our weapons cleaned, we waited impatiently for the order to move.’
    Of course the order didn’t come, thanks to the mud. Napoleon – who by all accounts had managed to grab some sleep in his camp bed – had decided that the Prussians would not arrive on the battlefield until 4.30 p.m. He had time to beat the English first. At dawn, around 4.30 a.m., he gave orders for his army to be ready to attack at nine. As he recalled in his memoirs, ‘I saw the weak rays of the sun which, before it went down again, would highlight the defeat of the English army.’ Sadly though, the sun had not yet dried out the fields and his cannons couldn’t be moved.
    Neither, throughout the day to come, could several of his commanders. Their inactivity and lack of decisiveness, or sudden bursts of badly directed energy, are usually given by Bonapartist historians – including Napoleon himself – as the main reason for losing at Waterloo.
    At the re-enactment of the Battle of Brienne le Château in May 2014, I witnessed a scene that illustrates French feeling on this delicate matter. At one of the many bookstalls devoted to French literature on Napoleon and his campaigns, a man was selling a glossy new picture book that contained reproductions of all the paintings depicting the
Empereur
’s famous battles. It was a very tall, very thick book. Two old ladies were leafing through, and suddenly stopped.
    ‘Oh, le voilà!’ one of them exclaimed – there he is.
    The bookseller sidled over to ask whom they had spotted. The women closed the book and one of them explained, just loud enough for an attentive eavesdropper to overhear, that they were sisters, and were descended from one of Napoleon’s marshals, ‘but we don’t like to say his name out loud because he’s not very popular’. The bookseller leaned in close and encouraged them to confide, to no avail. But it occurred to me that it didn’t really matter – almost none of the French commanders came out of Waterloo covered in glory.
    The problems at the top had started even before the battle. At dawn on 15 June, General Louis-Auguste Bourmont deserted to the enemy with his general staff. He wrote a letter to Napoleon explaining that he did not ‘want to play a part in establishing bloody despotism in France’. The only consolation for Bonapartists is that Blücher refused to talk to Bourmont, even though he had donned the white royalist cockade