Waterloo_ June 18, 1815_ The Battle for Modern Europe - Andrew Roberts [40]
Napoleon certainly missed two important opportunities on Saturday, 17 June, in simultaneously allowing Wellington to retreat from Quatre Bras and in losing all connection with the Prussians as they escaped northwards to Wavre. Grouchy should probably not have been sent off to follow the Prussians at all, but if he was going to be, he needed to be despatched at daybreak, not in the afternoon, by which time the trail had gone cold.6 ‘March together! Strike together!’ was a favourite military maxim of Napoleon’s; another was ‘An enemy should be outflanked, or enveloped, without separating one’s own force.’7 These sensible rules of warfare were emphatically not adhered to by their author during Saturday, 17 and Sunday, 18 June 1815.
At Waterloo the French ought to have attacked Wellington’s position the moment that all their troops had arrived from Rosomme, breakfasted and cleaned their weapons after the previous night’s downpour. It is very doubtful that that cold, windless and largely sunless Sunday morning really dried the ground to any great degree for the artillery. Once again, it was simply time wasted.8
When battle was joined before noon, and the Grand Battery’s eighty-four guns had opened up on the Anglo-Allied position, Grouchy ought to have immediately marched westwards towards the sound of them, as his subordinate General Gérard urged. Yet this would have been to disobey Napoleon’s direct orders, sent at only ten o’clock that morning, to march on Wavre. It is also unlikely that even if Grouchy had taken Gérard’s advice and marched towards Plancenoit he would have got there in time to affect the outcome of the battle, because he would have soon encountered the Prussian divisions of Pirch and Thielmann, which would have held up his advance, while those of Bülow and Zieten could have carried on to help Wellington.9
On the battlefield itself, the French failure to use any artillery to batter and breach the walls of Hougoumont was a palpable error, as was the perhaps unimaginative divisional formation adopted by d’Erlon’s corps in its attack on the Anglo-Allied line. Napoleon and Ney’s decisions to attack with infantry under-supported by cavalry and artillery, and later with cavalry under-supported by infantry and artillery, must also be regarded — for whatever tactical reason they were made — as grave errors. (Equally, Uxbridge was gravely at fault for allowing his cavalry counterattack against d’Erlon so disastrously to overreach itself.)
The timing of Ney’s great cavalry charge is similarly open to criticism, as taking place too early and going on for too long after it had failed in its objective to overwhelm the Anglo-Allied infantry, which had formed into squares. If, as seems to be the case from the new evidence presented in Appendix II, the charge happened largely by accident, this cannot really be laid at Napoleon’s door. By the time the Imperial Guard was committed towards the end of the battle, Napoleon cannot be blamed for rashness; there was virtually no other choice for him at that stage. The Guard was well-supported, but it still adopted a columnar formation that the British Peninsular infantry had turned back again and again over six years of continuous campaigning.
It is easy enough to enumerate the errors made on both sides during the Waterloo campaign, yet the difficulties that the commanders were acting under ought to be recalled. Communications could go no faster than a man on horseback, and by the time messages arrived they could be out of date. Commanders could see no further than topography and telescopes allowed them — indeed one of Wellington’s wisest sayings was: ‘All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don’t know by what you do; that’s what I call “guessing what was at the other side of the hill".’ Sometimes commanders even had to guess what was directly in front of them, since the huge quantities of thick smoke emanating from the constant firing of cannon and muskets could wreathe and envelop a battlefield, cloaking large