It is His Majesty’s intention that you attack whatever force is presently in front of you and after driving it vigorously back you will turn in our direction in order to bring about the encirclement of these enemy troops, though if the latter are defeated first then His Majesty will manoeuvre in your direction to assist you.
In brief, Ney is to hurl the defenders away from Quatre-Bras and march to attack the Prussian right, though if Napoleon has already defeated the Prussians then the Emperor would march to join in the fight against the British–Dutch.
The hostilities at Ligny began in the early afternoon, and the Emperor found he had a much stiffer fight on his hands than he had anticipated. His artillery, as the Duke of Wellington had forecast, did grim work with the exposed Prussian infantry. A French officer recalled that the Emperor’s guns ‘played havoc with the Prussian columns which presented themselves without cover and received all the shot fired by the numerous batteries along our line’. The slaughter those guns made was horrific. Hippolyte de Mauduit, the Sergeant in the Imperial Guard, had seen many battlefields, but after the fight at Ligny he was appalled by what he saw on the long, exposed slopes where the Prussian infantry had waited for the French attack:
A vast number of corpses, both men and horses, were scattered about, horribly mutilated by shells and cannon balls. The scene was different from the valley where almost all the dead preserved a human appearance because canister, musket balls and bayonets were practically the only instruments of destruction used there. Here, as a contrast, it was limbs and scattered body parts, detached heads, ripped out entrails and disembowelled horses.
That was why Wellington used the ‘tired old dodge’ of sheltering his troops on the reverse slope. A brook ran along the valley that Sergeant de Mauduit mentioned, and it was a considerable obstacle to the French, because in that shallow valley was a chain of small villages that served as fortresses for the Prussians. Most of the fighting was in Saint-Amand and in Ligny, the village that was to give the battle its name. An anonymous Prussian officer described Ligny in bucolic terms: ‘a village built of stone and thatched with straw, on a small stream which flows through flat meadows’.
The day’s bright sunshine disappeared as heavy clouds rolled across the sky. Artillery smoke billowed and lingered, and out of that smoke emerged the first French columns marching to attack the battered Prussians. Those columns were greeted with a storm of cannon fire from the Prussian artillery. Their cannon were firing roundshot and shells, their targets the densely packed attack columns of blue-coated French infantry that needed to capture the villages if they were to drive Blücher back. The Prussians defended the villages staunchly and Napoleon, realizing that he needed more troops, sent another message to Ney, commanding him to come at once and fall on the Prussian rear. ‘Do not lose a moment,’ the Emperor wrote to Ney, because Blücher’s army ‘is lost if you act quickly! The fate of France is in your hands!’
The fate of France might be in Ney’s hands, but Quatre-Bras was not. The Emperor still believed that the crossroads had been captured, but Ney could not march to Napoleon’s aid because he was still dithering.
Yet there was other help available. Count d’Erlon commanded those 22,000 men who were still marching to assist Ney. D’Erlon could not, of course, march on the straight road which led from Quatre-Bras to Ligny because both ends were in enemy hands, so instead of that simple five-mile march he was forced to go twice as far on lesser roads, first southwards, then north-westwards. D’Erlon was summoned back to Napoleon’s army, and his men, who had almost reached Ney’s forces, turned round and retraced their steps.
Meanwhile the Prussians and French were in desperate battle. Napoleon’s plan was to hold the Prussian left with assaults from Grouchy’s Corps while his main effort was hurled against the centre of Blücher’s line where the villages were so stoutly defended. Grouchy’s attacks would stop the Prussians from reinforcing their centre with men from their left flank, but the right flank would be left unengaged, thus tempting Blücher to weaken it by drawing reinforcements from that part of his defensive line. Then, when the Prussian right wing was weakened Ney or, more likely, d’Erlon would attack from the west.
But while d’Erlon marched back the rest of Napoleon’s army was thrown against the Prussian defences. Charles François was a Captain in the 30th Regiment of the Line, which was ordered to assault the village of Ligny. ‘Within two hundred yards of the hedges which hid thousands of Prussian sharpshooters,’ he wrote, ‘the regiment took up battle order while still on the march.’ What François means by that is that his battalion went from column into line, and they did it without halting. That showed a fine discipline. The terms ‘line’ and ‘column’ will make frequent appearances in the story of the Waterloo campaign, and deserve some explanation. The basic fighting deployment of infantry was in line, which is simple enough to understand. A battalion made a straight line of, in the French and Prussian armies, three ranks, which faced towards the enemy. The British preferred a line of two ranks.
The line is an efficient way of utilizing a battalion’s firepower, but it is an extremely fragile formation. Attempting to march a line forward across anything except the smoothest parade ground led to disorder. Men straggled, stumbled, wavered, and the line would soon lose all cohesion. Worse, a line was very vulnerable to cavalry attack, especially if the enemy horsemen could attack from either end.
So the preferred method of advancing men across open country was to form a column. That is a slightly misleading term, suggesting a long thin block of men advancing like a spear shaft towards the enemy line. In fact the column was short and squat. A French battalion of around 500 men arrayed in column, such as that in which Captain François approached Ligny, might have a frontage of one or two companies. If the 30th of the Line closed on Ligny in a column just one company wide, then the Prussian defenders would have seen thirty men in the French front rank, and seventeen other ranks behind them. So the column is roughly twice as wide as it is deep. A two-company front (which was probably how François’s battalion attacked) had a front rank of about sixty men and only nine ranks in all.
The column had three advantages over the line. It was much easier to manoeuvre over rough ground, it was much less vulnerable to cavalry because there is no weak point that can be overwhelmed, and the very density of the formation was good for morale. In their haste to raise large armies at the beginning of the Revolution the beleaguered French discovered that large columns were doubly useful. Half-trained men could be marched into battle easily, and enemies were often overawed by the sheer size of the attacking columns. François’s 30th was not alone; his battalion was just one of several closing on the Prussians. In a couple of days the French would deploy a whole Army Corps in column, a massive block of men. A line, especially a British line just two ranks deep, would look very fragile against the advance of a dense column.
Yet if the column was psychologically powerful it also had two weaknesses. A column was desperately vulnerable to cannon fire, and only the men in the outer two ranks and files could use their muskets. If a column has seventeen ranks of thirty men each, totalling 510 men, then only the sixty in the first two ranks, and the two men on the outside of each rank, can actually fire at the enemy. So of the 510 men, fewer than a quarter can shoot their muskets. If they are approaching a line then they will be massively outgunned, because every man in the line can fire.
By 1815 the French are well aware of this weakness. In Spain French columns were mauled again and again by British, Portuguese and Spanish lines. At Busaco, where Ney received his drubbing from Wellington, it was British lines that blasted his columns off the hill. The answer to the problem was to utilize the ease of the column as a means to advance troops over rough ground, and then deploy into line as the columns closed on the enemy. That was what Charles François’s battalion did as they approached the hedges surrounding Ligny. But Captain François’s troubles were far from over:
The charge was so
unded and our soldiers went through the hedges. [We] went down a sunken road obstructed by felled trees, vehicles, harrows and ploughs and we got past these obstacles only after much difficulty and under fire from the Prussians concealed by the hedges. At last we overcame these obstacles and, firing as we went, entered the village. When we reached the church our advance was halted by a stream and the enemy, in houses, behind walls and on rooftops inflicted considerable casualties by musketry, grapeshot and cannon balls which assailed us from in front and from the flanks.
François tells how three battalion commanders, five captains, two adjutants and nine lieutenants were killed in this savage fighting. Out of the two battalions that made the attack close to 700 men were killed or wounded, and it was no surprise that a Prussian counter-attack drove the French back out of the village. Franz Lieber, the seventeen-year-old who had volunteered in Berlin, was part of the counter-attacks:
Our ardour now led us entirely beyond the proper limits; the section to which I belonged ran madly, without firing, towards the enemy, who retreated. My hindman fell; I rushed on … the village was intersected with thick hedges, from behind which the grenadiers fired upon us, but we drove them from one to the other. I, forgetting altogether to fire and what I ought to have done, tore the red plume from one of the grenadiers’ bearskin-caps, and swung it over my head.
Franz Lieber reaches the centre of the village, steps round a house and is faced by a French infantryman just a dozen paces away.
He aimed at me, I levelled my rifle at him. ‘Aim well, my boy,’ said the sergeant-major, who saw me. My antagonist’s ball grazed my hair on the right side; I shot and he fell; I found I had shot through his face; he was dying. This was my first shot ever fired in battle.
The battle is a desperate struggle, reduced to hand-to-hand fighting in the villages. A French officer said the dead in the main street ‘were piled two or three deep. The blood flowed from them in streams … the mud was formed from crushed bones and flesh.’ The clouded sky is thickened with great gouts of powder smoke belched by massive cannon that fill the air with man-made thunder. Prussian advantage of numbers is holding the French at bay, but the superior quality of the French troops is slowly eroding the Prussian defence. After one French counter-attack a Prussian gunner, Captain von Reuter, seeing a skirmish line approach, assumed it was from his own infantry and ordered his gunners to keep firing at the distant enemy cannon. It was his battalion surgeon who noticed that the skirmishers were French. ‘I at once bellowed the order, “grape on the skirmishers!”’ von Reuter recalled:
At the same moment they gave us a volley . . and by that volley, and the bursting of a shell or two, every horse except one belonging to my left flank gun was killed or wounded … in another moment I saw my left flank taken in the rear, from the Ligny brook, by a French staff officer and about fifty horsemen. As these charged us the officer shouted in German ‘Surrender, gunners, for you are all prisoners!’ With these words he charged down with his men and dealt a vicious cut at my wheel driver, who dodged it by flinging himself over his dead horse. The blow was delivered with such force that the sabre cut deep into the saddle and was stuck fast there. Gunner Sieberg snatched up the handspike of one of the twelve-pounders and with the words, ‘I’ll show him how to take prisoners,’ dealt the officer such a blow on his bearskin that he rolled with a broken skull from the back of his grey charger.
As the afternoon shades into a grey evening the battle is still undecided. The Prussians are holding, but of course General d’Erlon’s Corps is coming to fall like a thunderbolt on their exposed right flank.
Or rather it is supposed to fall like a thunderbolt, but instead the hapless General d’Erlon becomes the leading actor in a French farce. Jean-Baptiste Drouet, Count d’Erlon, was the son of a carpenter and as a youth had been apprenticed to a locksmith, but in 1780, aged seventeen, he joined the pre-Revolutionary army and rose to the rank of Corporal. It took the Revolution to reveal his talent, and after that his rise was swift until, in 1815, he is a Marshal of France and Count d’Erlon, commanding the 1st Corps of l’Armée du Nord. He leads almost 17,000 infantry, 1,700 cavalry, a corps of engineers and 46 guns, and his first orders on that fateful Friday had been to march to Ney’s support. His powerful Corps would help Ney clear Quatre-Bras, then swing right on the Nivelles road to fall on the Prussians, but Napoleon realizes he needs help sooner and so sends a messenger to recall d’Erlon, who had almost, at last, reached Ney’s troops.
D’Erlon obediently reverses his march, a cumbersome process which takes time as the guns and their limbers are turned around on the narrow roads. He marches back towards the Emperor, but the orders have been confusing and, instead of taking his men north onto the Prussian flank he arrives on the flank of General Vandamme’s Corps, which is engaged in the brutal fight for the village of Saint-Amand.
It is early evening, the sky is clouded, the terrain obscured by drifting gun smoke, and Vandamme at first believes that the approaching troops are Prussians, or maybe British. He sends an urgent message to Napoleon, who has just massed his Imperial Guard to make a last massive assault on the Prussian centre, and the Emperor, alarmed, delays that attack until he can discover the identity of these newly arrived troops. They are his own men, but in the wrong place, so a messenger rides to d’Erlon ordering him to turn northwards and assault the Prussian flank, but just then yet another courier arrives, this one from Marshal Ney, demanding that d’Erlon return to Quatre-Bras immediately.
D’Erlon assumes that Ney is in desperate trouble and so he turns his Corps around and sets off a second time for Quatre-Bras. The Emperor has launched his great attack, but by the time he realizes d’Erlon is not engaged, the 1st Corps has vanished. Thus did those 22,000 men spend that Friday, marching between two battlefields and helping at neither. D’Erlon arrived at Quatre-Bras too late, the fighting had ended at sundown and his powerful Corps, which could have swung either the battle at Ligny or the fighting at Quatre-Bras, had achieved nothing. It is the French equivalent of the Grand Old Duke of York, except d’Erlon spent his day halfway between two fights, neither up nor down, and his prevarication denied Napoleon the crushing victory he expected.
Because Ligny was a victory. The final assault of the Imperial Guard captures the villages at the centre of the Prussian line and sends Blücher’s army reeling back. The pretty village of Ligny, with its thatched houses, is a charnel house, especially the church and graveyard which saw the severest fighting. Marshal Blücher, despite his age, tried to restore the position by attacking with his own cavalry. He was unhorsed and ridden over by French heavy cavalry, but Blücher’s aide-de-camp, with great presence of mind, draped a cloak over the Marshal’s medals and braid, so obscuring his eminent status, and in the failing light the French cavalry did not recognize him, so that at last he could be rescued by his own men. He was bruised and dazed, and his army was beaten, but it was not destroyed. The ‘ifs’ of history are generally pointless, but there can be little doubt that d’Erlon’s men, if they had done what the Emperor wanted, would have made the difference. The final successful attack would have been made earlier in the evening, giving the French more time to complete the enemy’s destruction, and d’Erlon’s Corps could have rolled up the Prussian right flank and, in all probability, caused such panic and chaos that Blücher’s army might have ceased to exist.
But it did exist. It had been wounded, but the two flanks were still coherent, and Blücher was alive and, though they had been beaten, they managed to withdraw from the battlefield in reasonable order and the French made no effort to pursue in the gathering dark. One Prussian officer recalled:
The men looked dreadfully tired after the fighting. In the great heat gunpowder smoke, sweat and mud had congealed into a thick crust of dirt so that their faces looked like mulattos … and many who had been unwilling to leave the ranks because of a slight wound wore bandages they had made themselves and in a number of men the blood was soaking through. As a result of fig
hting in the villages for hours and frequently crawling through hedges the men’s tunics and trousers were torn so that they hung in rags and their bare skin showed.
Blücher was still recovering, and Gneisenau, the clever Chief of Staff, was temporarily in charge of the Prussians. Sixteen thousand Prussians had been killed, wounded or taken prisoner, and another 8,000 had simply disappeared in the darkness and were heading for home as fast as they could, but General von Bülow’s Corps had never reached the battlefield, and was intact, and the remainder of the army was doing its best to regroup in the wet night. The diary of a senior Prussian officer – sadly his name is not known – records meeting Gneisenau that night:
I found him in a farmhouse. The village had been abandoned by its inhabitants and every building was crammed with wounded. No lights, no drinking water, no rations. We were in a small room where an oil-lamp burned dimly. Wounded men lay moaning on the floor. The General himself was seated on a barrel of pickled cabbage with only four or five people gathered about him. Scattered troops passed through the village all night long, no-one knew whence they came or where they were going … but morale had not sunk. Every man was looking for his comrades so as to restore order.