Waterloo_ June 18, 1815_ The Battle for Modern Europe - Andrew Roberts [9]
Darkness turned the defeat into a rout. Sixteen thousand Prussians were killed or wounded at Ligny, and around 8,000 Rhinelanders deserted the colours that night and simply returned home. Nonetheless the decision was taken by Blücher’s chief of staff General August von Gneisenau — in Blücher’s absence, because the marshal could not be found — that the army should act in a completely counter-intuitive way. Instead of retreating eastwards towards Liège and Prussia, the Prussians would instead go north to Wavre, where they could stay in touch with the Anglo-Allied army. Gneisenau was an Anglophobe, but he had nevertheless made the crucial decision of the campaign, one that Wellington himself hardly exaggerated when he described it as ‘the decisive moment of the century’.
If Gneisenau had returned to Prussia, Wellington would probably have had to retreat north towards Antwerp and the Channel ports and probably re-embark the British army back to the United Kingdom, as had happened on so many other equally humiliating occasions over the past quarter-century. The Royal Navy were used to shipping defeated British forces back from a Napoleondominated Continent, and this time would have been no different. Yet with the Prussians still in the field, and liaising closely, there was still the prospect that they could pull off the coup that Napoleon missed at Ligny, that of bringing a fresh force onto the battlefield at the psychologically vital moment.
The Prussian retreat northward necessitated Wellington making a similar manoeuvre, giving up the crossroads that had been so hard fought over only the previous day. He could not risk having the combined forces of Napoleon and Ney fall upon him, so Saturday, 17 June was spent retreating to a highly defensible position some miles to the north, on the slopes of Mont St Jean, which — despite the best efforts of generations of French historians — will always be generally known as the battlefield of Waterloo. Old Blücher has had a damned good licking and gone back to Wavre, eighteen miles,’ Wellington said. ‘As he has gone back, we must go too. I suppose in England they’ll say we have been licked. Well, I can’t help it.’It had happened enough in the past; whenever Wellington had made tactical retreats in the Peninsula there had never been a shortage of those he termed ‘croakers’, especially among the radical Whigs in the parliamentary opposition, keen to suggest that he had been defeated.
The French, too, were happy to argue that Wellington had been ‘licked’. Napoleon sent back a report of the battle of Ligny to be printed in the official government newspaper Le Moniteur which suggested that the united Prussian and Anglo-Allied armies had been defeated. The propaganda sheet duly obliged and there were celebrations in the French capital.
For a man responsible for several maxims about the importance of never losing a moment in wartime, Napoleon’s relative inactivity on 17 June was almost inexplicable. He spent the day dictating letters, surveying the battlefield of Ligny and then breaking another of his favoured maxims by splitting his force just before a major engagement.
Napoleon detached his most recently-created marshal, Emmanuel de Grouchy, to follow the Prussians with 30,000 infantry and cavalry and ninety-six guns, a large force that he would desperately need the following day. The bad staff work and mutual misunderstandings that had ensured that d’Erlon had spent the previous day marching between battlefields without firing a shot further conspired to keep Grouchy away from Waterloo, where he might have made a huge difference. Added to inferior staff work was the inherently unimaginative personality of Grouchy himself. Only raised to the marshalate that April, he believed that ‘inspiration in war is only appropriate to the commander-in-chief’, and that ‘lieutenants must confine themselves to executing orders’. So he interpreted Napoleon’s orders to him in their most literal possible sense, and