Battle of Waterloo

Battle of Waterloo, final and decisive action of the Napoleonic Wars, that effectively ended French domination of the European continent and brought about drastic changes in the political boundaries and the power balance of Europe. Fought on June 18, 1815, near Waterloo, in what is now Belgium, the battle ranks as a great turning point in modern history.

BACKGROUND OF THE BATTLE

After raising France to a position of preeminence in Europe from 1804 to 1813, Napoleon met defeat in 1814 by a coalition of major powers, notably Prussia, Russia, Britain, and Austria. Napoleon was then deposed and exiled to the island of Elba, and Louis XVIII was made ruler of France. In September 1814, the Congress of Vienna, with delegates from most of the nations of Europe, convened to discuss problems arising from the defeat of France. On February 26, 1815, however, while the congress was in session, Napoleon escaped from Elba and returned to France. There many veterans of his former campaigns flocked to his standard, and on March 20, 1815, he again ascended the throne. The Congress of Vienna, alarmed by Napoleon's return to power, had reacted quickly to the crisis. On March 17 Austria, Great Britain, Prussia, and Russia each agreed to contribute 150,000 troops to an invasion force to be assembled in Belgium near the French border. A majority of other nations present at the congress also pledged troops for the invasion of France, which was to be launched on July 1, 1815.

MOBILIZATION AND STRATEGY

In Paris, Napoleon, learning of the invasion plan, quickly determined to attack the allies on their own ground before their army could take shape. With characteristic energy and decisiveness, he mobilized within two months an army of 360,000 trained soldiers. He deployed half of these troops within France as a security force and grouped the remainder into attack units. On June 14, 1815, Napoleon, moving with the utmost speed and secrecy, reached the Franco-Belgian border with 124,000 of his troops. Another 56,000 men were left behind in secondary or supporting positions.

Napoleon's grand strategy for the coming campaign was typically audacious. Facing him beyond the Belgian border were two separate allied armies. The larger army, a force of 116,000 Prussians and Saxons, led by the Prussian field marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, was based at Namur. Advance elements of Blücher's army were stationed as far west as the towns of Gilly and Charleroi. A force of 93,000 British, Dutch, and German troops was based at Brussels, with an outpost in the village of Quatre-Bras. The leader of this army, the British general Arthur Wellesley, 1st duke of Wellington, was also commander in chief of the allied forces. Napoleon planned to attack both armies with the aim of splitting and destroying them. He intended then to deal with Russian and Austrian armies approaching France from the east. To carry out this plan he divided his forces into two attacking wings and a strategic reserve, which consisted of trusted veterans known as the Old Guard.

On June 15, 1815, Napoleon moved across the border of Belgium, and his sudden arrival caught the allied command unprepared. After crossing the Sambre River, the French routed a Prussian advance guard at Charleroi. Napoleon then ordered his left wing, under Marshal Michel Ney, to attack a brigade of Wellington's cavalry at Quatre-Bras, 19 km (12 mi) north of Charleroi. He next ordered the right wing, under General Emmanuel de Grouchy, to move eastward against a Prussian brigade stationed in the town of Gilly. By late afternoon on June 15, Grouchy had completed his mission and pressed forward to a point near the village of Fleurus, where a corps of Blücher's men was concentrated. By nightfall on that first day of fighting, Napoleon's armies held the strategic advantage. The emperor had succeeded in placing his army between the advance elements of the armies of both Wellington and Blücher, and his main force was in a position to swing either left against the Anglo-Dutch army or right to engage the Prussian forces.

On June 16 Napoleon moved with his reserve from Charleroi to Fleurus. There he assumed command of Grouchy's army and easily defeated the Prussian corps. He then drove north to the Ligny area to engage Blücher, who with his army had hastened west from Namur hoping to intercept the French.

LIGNY AND QUATRE-BRAS

In the action at Ligny, Napoleon's strategy was to coordinate his attack on Blücher with Ney's offensive at Quatre-Bras. The reserve would then swing east or west to aid either wing as circumstances dictated; if all went well, the reserve would finally march northwest, join Ney at Quatre-Bras, and advance on Brussels to split the two allied armies.

Early in the afternoon of June 16, Napoleon heard the sound of Ney's artillery at Quatre-Bras. He then brought his force of 71,000 into action against Blücher's army of 83,000. After an hour of bloody and inconclusive fighting, Napoleon dispatched an urgent message to Marshal Ney ordering him to send his First Corps, a force totaling 30,000 men, to the battlefield at Ligny. Instead of delivering the order through Marshal Ney's headquarters, Napoleon's courier took it directly to General Jean Baptiste Drouet, comte D'Erlon, the First Corps commander. D'Erlon left immediately for Ligny. When Ney later learned of D'Erlon's departure, however, he dispatched a message ordering the corps back to Quatre-Bras. The message was delivered to D'Erlon just as he reached the Ligny battlefield. Again D'Erlon obeyed instructions, with the result that he took part in neither of the battles. Napoleon was able, however, to defeat Blücher after a sanguinary action lasting three hours. At twilight the Prussians withdrew, leaving 12,000 troops dead or wounded. Because of D'Erlon's failure to enter the fighting, however, the main body of Blücher's army, about 70,000 men, was able to retreat in good order.

Meanwhile, at Quatre-Bras, Ney had unaccountably waited several hours to begin his attack on the Anglo-Dutch position, and this delay enabled Wellington to reinforce Quatre-Bras with several divisions of cavalry and infantry. Ney finally attacked at 2 pm but was sharply repulsed. Successive onslaughts on the Anglo-Dutch positions were similarly unsuccessful; throughout the afternoon Ney was severely handicapped by the absence of D'Erlon's corps. At about 7 pm Wellington counterattacked vigorously and drove Ney back to the town of Frasnes, a few miles south of Quatre-Bras. Ney lost 4300 troops and Wellington 4700 in the action. D'Erlon, however, joined Ney in Frasnes at 9 pm.

MONT-SAINT-JEAN

Early in the morning of June 17 a courier from Blücher reached Wellington at Quatre-Bras and informed him of the Prussian defeat at Ligny. Wellington, realizing that Napoleon had outflanked him, promptly dispatched a message to Blücher suggesting that he swing to the northwest and join the Anglo-Dutch army for a united stand against Napoleon near the village of Mont-Saint-Jean, just south of the town of Waterloo. Several hours later Wellington retired unobstrusively from Quatre-Bras, leaving behind a brigade of cavalry as a decoy to mislead Marshal Ney.

At Ligny, that same morning, Napoleon ordered Grouchy to take 30,000 troops and pursue Blücher's retreating army. Napoleon then sent messages to Ney at Frasnes ordering him to engage Wellington immediately. Ney, who was not aware of Wellington's retreat, failed to obey these orders. Napoleon arrived at Frasnes that afternoon, assumed command of Ney's forces, brushed aside the token force guarding Quatre-Bras, and set off with his army in pursuit of Wellington. Early that evening Napoleon caught sight of the Anglo-Dutch army dug in along a high plain south of Mont-Saint-Jean. Both sides began at once to prepare for battle.

In the meantime, Grouchy had failed to overtake Blücher's army. At about 10 pm on June 17, Grouchy's scouts informed him that the Prussians, instead of retreating east to Namur, had turned northwest, seeking apparently a juncture with Wellington. Grouchy's message of warning to Napoleon brought the reply, sent at 10 am on June 18, that Grouchy should keep trying to make contact with the Prussians. Grouchy's pursuit was slovenly and unhurried, and he failed to locate the enemy.

On the morning of June 18, the French and Anglo-Dutch armies were in battle position. The Anglo-Dutch forces, facing south, comprised 67,000 troops with 156 cannons, and Wellington had received assurances from Blücher that strong reinforcements from his army of 70,000 would arrive during the day. Wellington's strategy was therefore to resist Napoleon until Blücher's forces could arrive, outflank the emperor's right wing, and so overrun the whole French line. Napoleon's army, facing north, totaled 74,000 troops with 246 cannons. The emperor's battle plan was to capture the village of Mont-Saint-Jean and thus cut off the Anglo-Dutch avenue of retreat to Brussels. Wellington's army could then be destroyed at Napoleon's leisure.

ULTIMATE DEFEAT

The battle began at 11:30 am with a feint by Napoleon at Wellington's right. This maneuver, which proved unsuccessful, was followed by an 80-gun French bombardment designed to weaken the allied center. At about 1 pm Napoleon saw advance elements of Blücher's army approaching from the east. Once again the emperor dispatched a message to Grouchy, apprising him of the situation and ordering him to overtake and engage the Prussians.

Fierce cavalry and infantry engagements were being fought meanwhile along the ridge, south of Mont-Saint-Jean, that sheltered Wellington's main force. In each instance the French attacks were savagely repulsed. At 4 pm Blücher's advance troops, who had been awaiting an opportune moment, entered the battle and forced the French to fall back about 0.8 km (about 0.5 mi). A counterattack restored the French lines and pushed the Prussians back 1.6 km (1 mi) to the northeast. Shortly after 6 pm Ney drove deep into the Anglo-Dutch center and seriously endangered Wellington's entire line. Wellington rallied, however, and Ney was driven back.

Napoleon then mounted a desperate general offensive, during which he committed all but five battalions of his Old Guard to an assault on the allied center. Allied infantrymen, formed into hollow squares, inflicted severe losses on the French, crushing the offensive. Although Napoleon regrouped his shattered forces and attacked again, the French situation became increasingly hopeless. At about 8 pm the Prussians, who had taken up positions on the extreme left of Wellington's line, drove through the French right wing, throwing most of Napoleon's troops into panic. Only valiant rearguard actions fought by a few Old Guard battalions enabled the emperor to escape. As Napoleon's routed army fled along the Charleroi road, Wellington and Blücher conferred and agreed that Prussian brigades should pursue the beaten French. During the night of June 18 the Prussians drove the French from seven successive bivouacs and finally forced them back across the Sambre River.

AFTERMATH

Napoleon signed his second abdication on June 22; on June 28 King Louis XVIII was restored to the throne of France, thus ending the so-called Hundred Days. British authorities accepted the former emperor's surrender on July 15; he was later exiled to the island of Saint Helena. So complete was Napoleon's downfall that Waterloo, the name given to his last battle, became a synonym for a crushing defeat.

In his reminiscences about the Waterloo campaign, Napoleon severely criticized General Grouchy for his failure to intercept the Prussians after their retreat from Ligny. Another lapse was Ney's failure to attack Wellington on June 17 and thus prevent his withdrawal from Quatre-Bras; Ney also erred in ordering D'Erlon's corps to turn back from Ligny on June 16, thus depriving Napoleon of the chance to destroy Blücher's army. Finally, Napoleon himself erred in massing only 124,000 men before Charleroi when he might easily have marshaled more by drawing on reserve troops left in secondary positions.

CASUALTIES

The Battle of Waterloo was one of the bloodiest in modern history. During the fighting of June 18, French casualties totaled about 40,000, British and Dutch about 15,000, and Prussian about 7000; at one point about 45,000 men lay dead or wounded within an area of 8 sq km (3 sq mi). Additional thousands of casualties were suffered by both sides during the three-day campaign that preceded the final battle.

THE BATTLE IN LITERATURE

The Battle of Waterloo figures prominently in literature. It is an important feature of the epic poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1818) by the British poet Lord Byron, and the poetic drama The Dynasts (1908), by the British author Thomas Hardy. The battle is also an event in the plots of the novels The Charterhouse of Parma (1839), by the French writer Stendhal; Vanity Fair (1848), by the British author William M. Thackeray; and Les Misérables (1862), by the French writer Victor Hugo.