“Thank God for the Prussians then,” Harper said grimly.
“Thank God, indeed.”
Because the Prussians had promised, and were coming.
Marshal Prince Blucher, Commander of the Prussian army, had promised he would march to fight beside Wellington, but Blcher’s Chief of Staff, Gneisenau, did not trust the Englishman. Gneisenau was convinced that Wellington was a knave, a liar and a trickster who, at the first sniff of cannon-fire, would run for the Channel and abandon the Prussians to Napoleon’s vengeance.
Blucher had scorned Gneisenau’s fears and ordered his Chief of Staff to organize the march to Waterloo. Gneisenau would not directly disobey any order, but he was a clever enough man to make sure that his method of obedience was tantamount to disobedience.
He therefore commanded that General Friedrich Wilhelm von Billow’s Fourth Corps should lead the advance on Waterloo. Of all the Prussian corps the Fourth was the furthest away from the British. Making the Fourth march first would inflict a long delay on the fulfilment of Blucher’s promise, but Gneisenau, fearing that von Billow might show a soldier’s haste in marching to the expected sound of the guns, further ordered the thirty thousand men of the Fourth Corps to march by a particular road that not only led through the narrow streets of Wavre, but also crossed a peculiarly narrow and inconvenient bridge. The Fourth Corps was also commanded to march through the cantonments of Lieutenant-General Pirch’s Third Corps, which was instructed to leave its guns and heavy supply wagons parked on the road. Once von Billow’s thirty thousand men had edged past those obstructions, Pirch was permitted to begin his own march in von Billow’s footsteps. Lieutenant-General Zieten’s Second Corps, which was only twelve miles from Waterloo and the closest of all the Prussian Corps to the British, was firmly ordered to stay in its cantonments until the Fourth and Third had passed it by, and then the Second was to take a circuitous northerly route that would still further delay its arrival on the battlefield.
It needed a masterful piece of staff work to create such chaos, but Gneisenau was a master and, proving that fortune will often favour the competent, an extra delay was imposed when a burning house blocked a street in Wavre so that von Billow’s men were stalled almost before their march had begun. The soldiers just grounded their muskets and waited.
Somewhere to the south a French Corps was blundering about in search of the Prussian army, but Gneisenau was not worried by that threat. All that mattered was that the precious Prussian army should not be sucked into the huge defeat that the Emperor was about to inflict on the British, and Gneisenau, confident that his skill had averted such a disaster, ordered his breakfast.
A single horseman rode to the solitary elm tree. The horseman wore a blue civilian coat over white buckskin breeches and tall black boots. About his neck was a white cravat, while on his cocked hat were four cockades, one each for England, Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands. A blue cloak was rolled on the pommel of his saddle. His staff closed in behind as His Grace the Duke of Wellington stared through a spyglass at the tavern called La Belle Alliance. The military commissioners of Austria, Spain, Russia and Prussia attended the Duke, and like him trained their telescopes at the far ridge. Some civilians had also ridden from Brussels to observe the fighting and they too crowded in behind the Duke.
The Duke snapped his glass shut and looked at his watch. Nine o’clock. “Baggage to the rear,” he said to no one in particular, but two of his aides turned their horses away to carry the order down the line.
The battalions shrugged off their packs which were piled onto the carts that had brought up the extra ammunition. The men were ordered to keep nothing but their weapons, cartridges and canteens. The carts struggled through fetlock-deep mud to carry the baggage back to the forest’s edge where it joined the carriages of the military commissioners and the artillery wagons and the portable forges and the farriers’ carts,” and where the supernumeraries of battle – the shoeing smiths, the wheelwrights, the commissary officers, the clerks, the drivers, the harness makers and the soldiers’ wives – would wait for the day’s decision.