Waterloo_ June 18, 1815_ The Battle for Modern Europe - Andrew Roberts [38]
CONCLUSION
THE WATERLOO CAMPAIGN, like almost any military engagement, was compounded of strategic and tactical errors on both sides, including serious communications and intelligence blunders, tragic friendly-fire incidents, and occasionally an indictable lack of initiative. Few but the Emperor’s most chauvinistic acolytes will deny that many more mistakes, both in quantity and gravity, were made by the French side than by the Anglo-Allied-Prussian coalition.
Wellington, it is true, was caught largely unawares by Napoleon’s incredibly swift deployment of the Armée du Nord. He was, by his own admission, ‘humbugged’. It is on balance unfair to criticise Wellington for leaving his army too widely dispersed before Napoleon attacked, since he had a huge area of operations to patrol and did not know where that attack might fall — or even if Brussels, rather than, say, the Channel ports was in fact the Emperor’s prime objective. (He also had a duty to protect Louis XVIII’s exiled court in Ghent.)
Yet Wellington’s immediate troop dispersals after he had coherent and trustworthy word that Napoleon was on the offensive have been very severely criticised, particularly in recent works by the historian Peter Hofschröer. It is also undeniable that in a despatch written at 10.30 a.m. on 16 june — the day of Ligny and Quatre Bras — Wellington misled Blücher about the exact position of some of his troops. Other historians such as Jac Weiler and John Ropes argue that this was unintentional and the result of the ‘muddle’of Wellington’s Quartermaster-General Colonel Sir William De Lancey, whose papers were subsequently lost after he was mortally wounded at Waterloo.1 It is difficult to accept that Wellington misled his ally on purpose, but this debate will doubtless continue. Nor is the blame all one-sided: the intelligence that Gneisenau and Zieten gave Wellington has been described by one distinguished historian of the campaign as ‘incomplete and late’.2
The criticism made of Wellington that at such a crucial moment as the evening of 15 June he went to the Duchess of Richmond’s ball is more easily dealt with. By attending — if only relatively briefly — he calmed the fears of the Brussels populace, put heart into his assembled colonels, showed that Sir Francis Drake was not the only British hero to display insouciance in the face of danger, and lost little by it, since not much serious fighting — perhaps 3,000 casualties incurred by the French and the Prussians — had taken place that day.
The accusation that Wellington left too many troops at Hal, covering an attack from Napoleon that never transpired, does not fully take into account Napoleon’s track record, something that Wellington took great pains never to underestimate. Among several other French historians, General Jomini argued that Napoleon should indeed have chosen the more open route to Brussels via Möns, employing wide circling movements on the extreme left flank, not least to avoid the bottleneck before the Forest of Soignes. By the time it was clear that Napoleon had no extra troops to effect this it was far too late to bring the Hal detachment over to Waterloo, even supposing that Wellington had not intended them to help cover his retreat to Ostend were he defeated.3 It was an error of Napoleon’s — one attested to by Soult, Reille, Foy and indeed Wellington himself — to have adopted the frontal assault tactic at Waterloo, but, crucially, it was not one that Wellington could have known was going to be made. Hence, Hal was an acceptable insurance policy.
Both General Picton and Napoleon criticised Wellington’s choice of battlefield at Waterloo, but few have agreed with them. The folds in the ground,