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

to avoid getting shot at as he approached enemy lines. Blücher is said to have explained his snub in delightful soldierly language: ‘Hundsfott bleibt Hundsfott!’ – literally ‘once a dog’s vagina, always a dog’s vagina’.
    Napoleon would probably have agreed, though perhaps he ought to have had his doubts about Bourmont’s loyalty much earlier. The man was a royalist who had fought against the Revolution and served as an envoy to the King-in-exile Louis XVIII. Bourmont had also been imprisoned for plotting against Napoleon at the start of his reign. He had then been reinstated as a soldier and served in Italy, but without a command of his own. Napoleon had even written a letter to the Minister of War asking ‘what would our troops think about being commanded by such a man?’ Despite all this, Napoleon made Bourmont a general, and here he was defecting instead of leading his troops into battle.
    Napoleon ought to have had similar doubts about Ney, but the man who wanted to put the Emperor in a cage was recalled to duty just a few days before Waterloo. This had immediate consequences, as Ney’s new aide-de-camp Colonel Heymès remembered: ‘The troops were exhausted after a 20-hour march. The marshal [Ney] didn’t know the names of his generals or colonels. He didn’t even know how many men were in each regiment.’
    Michel Ney was a grand figure in 1815, a tall, forty-six-year-old red-headed cavalry officer who had risen through the ranks because of his fearlessness, and earned the affectionate nickname ‘tomato head’. He had distinguished himself in Austria, Prussia and Russia, and survived being hit in the neck by a Russian bullet. But he was hot-tempered, and had fallen out so badly with his fellow marshals during the Spanish campaign that Napoleon had brought him back to Paris to train troops.
    Ney was the first marshal to defect to the royalists in 1814, but had returned to Napoleon’s camp even before Louis XVIII fled France in March 1815. There was no doubting his courage or his patriotism, but by June 1815 he was a battle-weary and politically confused man who had apparently warned Napoleon face to face not to ‘play the tyrant’. Not exactly a reliable brother-in-arms.
    One of the men Ney had fallen out with in Spain was Marshal Jean-de-Dieu Soult. The two were the same age, but never got on. Soult had fought under Napoleon to win the great victory at Austerlitz in 1805 but, like Ney, quickly turned royalist in 1814. He then called Napoleon a ‘usurper and opportunist’ and became Louis XVIII’s Minister of War, during which time he actually implemented a policy to reduce numbers in the army. Not a natural Bonapartist, it would seem. Even so, Napoleon appointed him chief of staff of his army, one of his closest advisers and aides-de-camp.
    Meanwhile, in preparation for Waterloo, Napoleon entrusted the job of keeping the Prussians at bay in the east to Emmanuel de Grouchy, a marshal about whom almost all French historians are scathing. One of his subordinates, a certain Colonel Chapuis, is often quoted as saying: ‘It was clear that providence had condemned us, and chosen Marshal Grouchy to punish us.’
    The story about Grouchy that has gone down in French legend is the tale of his carefree strawberry breakfast on 18 June: while he should have been scouring the countryside in an attempt to pinpoint Blücher’s exact position, he broke camp at eight a.m. (several hours after the usual wake-up call of Napoleonic commanders) and enjoyed a leisurely meal of fresh fruit with a local solicitor, Maître Hollert, who was a veteran of the French Revolutionary army. It’s a breakfast that Napoleonic historians have never been able to digest. fn6 Grouchy was by all accounts an excellent sword-fighter and a brave cavalryman, very obedient when given precise orders, but when left to his own devices, he was lost. He had previously commanded cavalry units, but never a whole army. According to Dominique