I tremble to imagine what the Duke would have made of a woman writing about his battle, but to my mind the best account of Waterloo is that which concludes Elizabeth Longford’s Wellington, The Years of the Sword. I used Lady Longford as my source for the Duke’s direct quotations, but also for very much more, and I doubt that anyone can ever again write about Wellington or Waterloo without relying on Lady Longford’s marvellous book.
Hundreds of contemporary accounts’exist of the battle, yet still there is controversy. Even at the time of the battle men did not always see what they thought they saw, which is why Britain now has a regiment called the Grenadier Guards. That is the regiment which defeated the larger column of the Imperial Guard, and they were convinced that they had beaten the Grenadiers of the Guard and, to mark their victory, took their enemy’s name. In fact they opposed and beat the Chasseurs of the Guard, but it seems a little late to make the correction now.
There are other mysteries. Did the Prince of Orange really expose infantry in line to cavalry three times? I remain convinced he did, though some say he was not responsible for the debacle at Quatre Bras. Nor is there agreement about what really happened in front of the smaller column of the Imperial Guard. Undoubtedly some redcoats ran away, but no two accounts agree quite how they were rallied to defeat the Guard, just as no two accounts agree on how many times the French cavalry charged the squares; men who survived those assaults gave figures as various as six or twenty-six. At least one French officer bequeathed historians a fine tale of breaking one of the British squares; riding over and over its remains until it was red ruin, but fine as the account is, there is not a scrap of evidence to support it.
There is, however, much evidence to support the story of the fattest officer in the Prussian army being entrusted with the news of the French invasion, just as it is sadly true that General Dornberg intercepted a despatch to Wellington and refused to forward it on the grounds that he did not believe it. Thus was Wellington humbugged by Napoleon, whose concentration of forces and the speed with which he advanced them across the Dutch border was one of his greatest feats of war.
So who, then, won Waterloo? Or who lost it? The questions are still argued. The Prince of Orange, in a letter to his parents written on the night of the battle, had no doubts: `My very dear Parents. We have had a glorious affair against Napoleon this day, and it was my troops who bore the brunt of the fighting and to whom we owe the victory.’ He then goes on to say that it was the Prussians who really won the battle, thus fuelling the debate between supporters of Blcher and Wellington. The truth is very simple; Wellington would not have fought at Waterloo unless he believed the Prussians to be marching to his aid, and the Prussians, despite Gneisenau, would not have marched unless they believed that Wellington intended to make a stand. In brief it was an allied victory, and Blcher’s suggestion of La Belle Alliance as the battle’s name was surely more appropriate than the oddly named Waterloo upon which Wellington insisted simply because he slept there on the nights before and after the conflict.
It is an irony that Gneisenau’s quite unreasonable distrust of Wellington probably made the victory complete. If the Prussians had come to the field in the early afternoon, when they were expected, Napoleon would undoubtedly have retired behind a tough rearguard action. His army would have been preserved to fight another day among the screen of fortresses that awaited the allies just across the French frontier. As it was, the Emperor’s army was so mauled by the evening of Waterloo, and was so deeply committed by the time the Prussians arrived, that Napoleon could not extricate it, and thus his men went down to utter defeat, a defeat so dire that the morale of the fortress garrisons and every other soldier in France collapsed at the news.