I've been away with work and not had a chance to attend to the project, so by way of substitution I thought I would publish this essay, which I wrote last year.
In many ways Waterloo was an aberration, an unexpected coda to a war that had
seemingly reached a decisive climax the year before. Napoleon had been
defeated and dispatched to his exile on Elba. Europe was rid of the
Corsican ogre. The Russian, Austrian and Prussian monarchs would put a
stop to Jacobin excess. Britain would be free to reap the profits of its
maritime and economic power, its strategy of limited continental liability
vindicated. France would strive for a settlement between Royalists,
Bonapartists, Republicans and Liberals.
The
return of Napoleon threw all this in the air. Unlike the slower-burn
events of 1789-1792, the 100 Days arose from nothing and demanded urgent
answers, with armies mobilised and policy created on the hoof.
It is
against this background that the relevance of Waterloo must be determined, for
there is something different about the campaign of 1815 that marks it out from
what went before.
This essay will examine Waterloo from various perspectives, each of which informs our
understanding of how war developed in its aftermath. It will start with a
consideration of political freedoms and constraints; it will turn to the
determination of strategy; it will review the organisational challenges of the
armies; it will examine the impact of technology; and it will then consider the
part that the Napoleonic Wars played in the design of modern operational art.
There
are many extraordinary things about Napoleon, but one of the most startling is
that he is the only great man of history to have staged not just one, but two
successful coups d’etat. His return from Egypt in 1799 and his subsequent
seizure of power on 18 Brumaire were audacious in the extreme. While he
was hardly unknown in 1799, he was viewed as something of a novelty: a young
man who could be controlled by other, more experienced figures such as the Abbe
Sieyes and Talleyrand. This proved to be a significant miscalculation on
their part.
While
his return in 1815 superficially bore resemblances, in one critical respect the
Emperor Napoleon of 1815 was a long way from the General Bonaparte of
1799. Nine campaigns and a million casualties had left France scarred and
suspicious of her former hero.
From
1799 to 1814 Napoleon had exercised increasing powers to tax, spend, mobilise
and fight with the unconstrained resources of his empire. By contrast,
his return in 1815 was met with unease by the Parisian elite. In
consequence, Napoleon could not fight the Hundred Days through Clausewitzian
absolute means: he could not properly conscript the class of 1815, nor recall
previous classes, he could not mobilise the National Guard, and he could not
guarantee enough money to equip his troops.
He
could not even guarantee the reliability of the regular army, many parts of
which were uncertain about what his return meant for France. Key figures
such as Fouche doubted his ability to consolidate power and hedged their bets
by maintaining avenues of communication to the Bourbons. And Napoleon was
forced to dissipate the limited troops at his disposal dealing with a Royalist
insurgency in the Vendee and guarding borders on secondary fronts.
Therefore,
in many ways, the politics of France in 1815 meant Napoleon was doomed to
failure from the outset. Once the campaign began, this conditional
acceptance of his return quickly manifested itself. Napoleon had survived
setbacks before: the Syrian fiasco, Eylau in 1807, Aspern-Essling in 1809,
Russia in 1812, the Spanish Ulcer and Leipzig in 1813 were not enough to cause
his political support to collapse. But in 1815, there was a brittle
quality to Napoleonic power that could not survive a defeat like Waterloo,
despite Napoleon’s initial hope in its aftermath that it could.
This,
it would seem, is a profoundly modern problem. Increasingly in modern
war it is the perception of defeat as much as its reality that determines the
outcome of a given military venture. Whether or not Napoleon could
have reconstituted an Army after Waterloo is beside the point: his position
was, in political terms, untenable and his second exile the result.
Given
this political vulnerability, Napoleon’s strategic choice in 1815 was either to
sit on the defensive or seize the initiative; by first taking on Britain and
Prussia in Belgium, Napoleon calculated that he could knock out, not only the
Coalition paymaster, but also his most inveterate foe, Prussia. Some have
characterised his decision as a gamble, but the alternative of fighting on the
defensive in a repeat of 1814 would not only have had the same result, but been
alien to his character as the high priest of offensive action.
Britain,
too, faced a strategic problem in 1815 that informs our understanding of the
modern world. She had fought the Napoleonic Wars through three
traditional means: the establishment of a maritime stranglehold on the
continent; the funding of her allies’ continental armies; and the conduct of
peripheral campaigns such as the Peninsular War.
The
speed with which the crisis of 1815 developed partially invalidated this
approach. The shock of Napoleon’s return, coupled with war weariness,
meant Britain had to involve itself directly in the rapid termination of the
problem on the Continent, rather than allowing the usual indirect strategy to
take its slow course.
Under
Wellington, Britain therefore committed to command a continental army that
would be as central to the outcome as Marlborough a century before and Haig a
century later. But with many of her best troops still in America, or
worse, simply demobilised, Britain was not militarily balanced to meet the
challenge. Again, this seems to be a very modern phenomenon, and one with
which today’s strategists must again wrestle: should a modern country have an army
preparing for ‘the’ continental war, deterring war in Europe, or an army
scanning multiple horizons in the Middle East, North, West and East Africa, or
elsewhere, for ‘a’ war?
I
shall not dwell at length on Prussian objectives in 1815, except to stress that
the trauma of 1806 informed at a profound level her national psyche from 1813
to ‘15. If unconstrained, Prussia would have fought a war of revenge and
of annihilation, which would not have stopped simply with the execution of Ney,
without the moderating influence of England. How many other times in the
modern age has Britain found itself with an ally with different and potentially
alarming strategic objectives? Managing
the expectations of allies is a critical part of any coalition.
COALITION
WARFARE
This
observation leads naturally to another reflection on modern war, namely the
challenge of Coalition politics. General Maurice Sarrail, the French
commander at Salonika in the Great War remarked sardonically that “since I have
commanded a Coalition, I think less of Napoleon”. In fact, Napoleon’s
armies from 1809 to 1813 were very much coalitions. But they were
coalitions under one dominant partner, in much the same way that the US
coalitions operated in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 1815, less a Polish
lancer squadron and a Swiss unit, Napoleon’s army was exclusively French.
In
contrast, the Allied coalition of 1815 was cobbled together at short notice,
had no dominant power, and was unable to agree effective command and control
arrangements. More profoundly, Wellington and Blucher made different risk
calculations, based on their own national interest. If defeated, the
Prussian instinct would be to withdraw back along her lines of communication
eastwards. Wellington, by contrast, feared being turned from the West and
cut off from the Channel Ports, so kept a significant number of troops out of
the fight to deal with such an eventuality.
The
two armies were therefore destined by instinct and policy to diverge rather
than concentrate. The fact that they continued to cooperate resulted as
much from character as intellect. Certainly, some Prussians distrusted
British motives, but Wellington’s willingness to stand and fight, Gneinenau’s
decision to put his head before his heart, and Blucher’s stout determination to
effect a link-up despite his battered condition after Ligny, ultimately
determined the outcome of Waterloo. Recent Coalitions abound with
examples of technical solutions to inter-operability, but mutual trust and
mutual interest are the true guarantees of success.
The
question of Coalition politics does, however, go deeper than the Anglo-Prussian
relationship, or indeed the macro combination with the other Great Powers,
Russia and Austria. Much as he had in the Peninsula, Wellington found
himself commanding a micro-coalition, a polyglot Army of smaller partners, one
of which, the Netherlands, was also host to the coming denouement.
Wellington presided over this complex weave of Dutch, Belgian, Hanoverian,
Brunswick and Nassau troops, few of whom he knew well and some of whom had
fought previously for Napoleon.
He
called it an infamous army, but in truth, this has been more the norm than not
for the British way in war. In 2015, the British army has every
expectation of going to war under Allied command, and with allies under
command. In Helmand the British fought not only in a macro coalition
under US command, but in a micro-coalition of Danes, Estonians and French
troops, as well as Afghans.
y way of example, in
1815, the 3rd Division was commanded not by Sir Thomas Picton (who
had led it through the Peninsula), but by Sir Charles Alten, (or to give him
his proper name, Karl von Alten, the only German to have commanded this
Division). Within its order of battle sat only one British formation alongside
KGL and Hanoverian brigades. Infamous or not, Wellington’s army at
Waterloo proved remarkably resilient and there is no reason to believe that a
future coalition, properly prepared, with commanders who trust each other, and
with unity of purpose, could not achieve a similar end.
ARMY
ORGANISATION
It is
worth examining the organisational characteristics of the three armies and
their relevance today. The rank and file of all Napoleonic continental
armies was founded on the principle of mass conscription. Indeed, the
dominance of the French Army in the period 1792 to 1813 owed much to France’s
large population (increased substantially as the Empire grew). Carnot’s
levee en masse was the initial means of exploitation, and developed into the
Napoleonic annual class conscription. Austria, Prussia and Russia
followed suit and, by 1813, were using mass armies not only as military
instruments, but as expressions of nationalism. Britain’s approach was the
exception to this rule and mirrored its policy of limited liability.
The
armies of developed nations in the 21st Century have all reverted to
18th Century small professional forces, in which manpower is at a
premium. Does this mean that the large conscripted armies that dominated
Europe from 1789 to 1989 are now a thing of the past? It is interesting
to note that we are now at the same remove from the destruction of the Berlin
Wall as the armies at Waterloo were from the storming of the Bastille.
The
extraordinary pace of change in both instances suggests that we should beware
complacency about the likely direction of strategic travel. A hundred years
ago a perfect little British army, designed in the aftermath of the Boer War,
was almost annihilated by the gigantic challenge of a continental war and then
rebuilt at huge cost as a mass citizen army. The British army of the
future should not repeat this mistake and should retain a platform from which a
larger force can once again be formed.
Napoleon’s
system of war grew out of access to an extraordinary reserve of manpower. The
traditional view is that he saw manpower as a commodity he could spend freely.
Without the need for expensive support, he could unshackle his troops from the
inhibitions of the logistic chain and move them faster than his
opponents. In consequence, he could concentrate mass on the battlefield
to overwhelm his enemies. Certainly, there is no smoke without fire to
this point of view: while Ulm, Austerlitz, Jena and Friedland were all enabled
by manoeuvre, Eylau, Aspern, Wagram, Borodino, Lutzen, Bautzen, Dresden and
Leipzig all showed Napoleon’s willingness to expend the lives of his men.
This
trend followed its disturbing course through the 19th Century to the
Clausewitzian schlacten of the Great War. But in an age in which
the value placed on human life has risen substantially, such profligacy seems
deeply alien to Western practitioners of war in the 21st Century,
even if the leaders of ISIS, AQ and the Taliban think otherwise.
A nuanced
study of the Napoleonic Wars does however show a more variegated picture.
We have twice mentioned Britain’s strategy of limited liability, which led to
Wellington’s careful husbandry of his manpower. There is nothing very
different in this to Montgomery’s ‘teeing up’ of battles to preserve Britain’s
diminishing manpower in the Second Word War, or to the country’s reaction to
casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And
even Napoleon himself was not deaf or blind to the consequences of excessive
bloodshed. Much work has gone into studying Napoleon’s various physical
illnesses, but perhaps not enough attention has been paid to the possibility
that he suffered from that very modern, (or is it timeless?) phenomenon,
PTSD. What else explains his increasingly erratic behaviour in the late
Empire, his bouts of energy and lethargy, anger and optimism? Setting
aside the cumulative psychological effect that the deaths of friends and
commanders such as Desaix, Lannes, Lasalle, St Hilaire, Bessieres and Duroc had
on him, the frequent exposure to the shock of battle and mass casualties, must
have taken its toll. Napoleon’s apparent paralysis on the morning of the
17th June after Ligny, touring the wounded when he should have been pursuing
his enemies, seems deeply human.
A
similar human dimension can be seen in the otherwise cool impression that
Wellington liked to present to the world: the evening of Waterloo - deafened by
incessant gunfire, traumatised by the death or injury of most his personal
staff, giving his bed to a dying officer, and writing the famous Waterloo dispatch,
with its agonizingly long list of casualties, is another profoundly human
vignette. A recent review of an
exhibition of Goya’s portraits at the National Gallery suggested in his
portrait of Wellington, Goya knew of underlying trauma.
Napoleon
went to significant effort to improve the logistical services of his
Army. Baron Larrey’s medical innovations took the French Army beyond the
primitive first aid that had previously prevailed. Extraordinary
logistical efforts were made for the invasion of Russia. Napoleon’s
voluminous correspondence show that not even the smallest aspect of administration
went unnoticed.
And
while Napoleon’s army was founded upon younger officers and soldiers, it also
relied upon a cohort of long service veterans, both inside and out of the Imperial
Guard, many of whom served as long as modern soldiers, often longer.
COMMAND
AND CONTROL
It is
this professional cohort that marks out the Napoleonic Army as a modern
institution and upon which we will now concentrate. Central to the idea
of a professional officer corps, is the concept of a General Staff. The
British Army has re-established its General Staff as the driver of professional
standards. The present G1-9 staff system is often described as
‘Napoleonic’. In fact, the arrangement is a 1917 American derivation of
the French 3rd Republic’s Bureau system and owes nothing to
Napoleon.
In
contrast, the staff organisation in use by the British Army until the 1980s
would have been, to a large extent, recognisable to Wellington, and was only
then supplanted by the present system. It is of course not the British or
French, but the Prussian model upon which 19th and 20th
Century General Staffs drew their inspiration.
But if
the French Napoleonic staff system was an organisational dead end, this does
not invalidate its conceptual relevance to the modern world. At its
heart, lay the relationship between Napoleon as commander and Marshal Berthier
as Chief of Staff. Soult’s replacement of Berthier, following the
latter’s death, is the exception that proves the rule and shows the essential
nature of a competent staff to the successful outcome of a campaign.
Soult’s
staffing mistakes during the Waterloo campaign are well documented:
the
lack of command and control clarity regarding D’Erlon’s Corps on the day of
Ligny and Quatre Bras led to D’Erlon shuttling pointlessly between the two
battlefields, failing to intervene decisively in either.
On the
day of Waterloo, the failure to give Reille clear orders not to allow his Corps
to be fixed needlessly at Hougoumont;
the
failure to grip Ney, whose erratic tactical decisions led the entire Reserve
Cavalry into the attack against unbroken Infantry;
and,
of course, the vague nature of the late instruction to Grouchy, which failed to
energise the latter, leading to his non-appearance at Waterloo.
These
are lessons that continue to resonate with commanders and staff in the 21st
Century: timeless reminders of the consequences of staff imprecision.
But
whatever its imperfections, first and foremost, the French Army was a
meritocracy, formed of battle-hardened commanders who had fought throughout the
Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It was also a surprisingly broad
church in which talent was the common denominator. Milhaud had been a
Jacobin, Grouchy was an aristocrat; Foy a liberal; Kellerman had made his name
at Marengo; Mouton at Aspern, Vandamme at Austerlitz; D’Erlon and Reille in the
Peninsula.
But
like any large institution Napoleon’s army had to deal with its own internal
politics. Many of the Marshals owed promotion to their Republican power
base: Augerau, Bernadotte, Brune, Jourdan, Victor and others were brought into
the tent, others such as Moreau were left out. Napoleon extended that
same tent towards reconciled Royalists, such as Caulaincourt. The best
example in 1815 was General Bourmont, who had fought as a Bourbon insurgent in
the Vendee, was reconciled with Napoleon, but whose Royalist instincts got the
better of him: he defected to the Allies in the opening stages of the
campaign.
And
while meritocratic principles generally prevailed, Napoleon could never quite
avoid the temptation to employ his family: Jerome Bonaparte’s appointment to
command a division owed nothing much to talent.
What
is interesting about Napoleon’s Army in 1815 is just how difficult it was to
reconstitute the best of what had been available before: Desaix, Lannes,
Bessieres, Berthier and Poniatowski were dead; many such as Marmont had changed
sides; many more were retired or ambivalent. Murat fought his own quixotic
war to secure Naples.
Those
who did rally came with their own baggage: Ney was damaged by the years of
campaigning; Soult too proud to roll his sleeves up; the cavalry officer,
Grouchy, inexperienced as a combined arms commander.
At
first sight, it seems odd that highly competent and loyal commanders such as
Davout and Suchet were used in other roles, but their work serves to highlight
the sheer breadth of problems Napoleon faced in June 1815 outside the campaign
theatre. This is much the same for a modern Army, which cannot afford
simply to concentrate on operational activity, but must cover all lines of
development.
TECHNOLOGY
The
question of technology plays a surprisingly peripheral part in most studies of
the Napoleonic Wars. Despite the turmoil of the Revolution, it was in
technological terms, a conservative period. Napoleon himself was partly
responsible: as a gunner he took a keen interest in Marmont’s modernisation of
the Gribeauval artillery system, but beyond this, he embraced little by way of
genuine innovation: he showed no interest in Britain’s development of spherical
case-shot, or of rockets. He failed to see the potential of rifled
technology, despite his mass use of skirmishers. The use of balloon
technology, begun before the Revolution, never developed momentum. Part
of the problem was that France was not as industrialised as Britain and even
Britain was still some years away from the wholesale introduction of
railways.
There
are also practical reasons why new technology failed to make its mark.
Despite the impressive use of shrapnel, it was the massed employment at
Waterloo of French artillery firing solid round-shot that caused the most
casualties. Wellington viewed his rocket troop as a nuisance that would
scare his horses more than it would harm his enemies. And La Haye Sainte
fell because of logistic friction when its defenders ran out of their
specialist rifled ammunition.
OPERATIONAL
ART
It is,
however, in the analysis of the gaps that we gain the best insights into the
conduct of modern war. Perhaps the most interesting gap was the lack of
means to communicate. Fifty years before wire telegraphy and 100 years
before wireless telegraphy, Napoleon’s ability to command and control his army
was remarkable. The explanation of his success is, of course, not
technological, but procedural, and is his principal contribution to the conduct
of modern war.
The
central organising principle around which Napoleon’s army was created was its
separation into divisions and corps. Napoleon did not invent the
division, but he recognised its tactical value, enshrining it as the primary
unit of tactical action.
While
Napoleon never used the term, the invention of the operational level of war, as
the critical layer between the tactical and strategic, was his defining
contribution to the art of war. Central to the Napoleonic model was the
Corps system. The corps d’armee, a combined arms force of two or more
infantry divisions, a cavalry division, guns, engineers and other formation
troops, was able to operate independently of other corps and flexible enough to
exploit different, often parallel avenues of advance. Once engaged, each
corps was powerful enough to hold the ring until other corps could
concentrate.
In an
age without the technical means of direct communication over distance except by
semaphore, the corps system stressed the doctrinal need for initiative,
offensive spirit and mutual support. The system relied on competent corps
commanders, but it also necessitated strong command and control from the
centre: when Napoleon allowed his commanders genuinely independent command or
tried to group corps in, to use another anachronism, armies or army groups, it
invariably failed.
At
Waterloo, Napoleon used a far more coherent corps system than Wellington, who
was forced to mix up his formations to underwrite the risk of the highly
inexperienced Prince of Orange, whose presence was as unhelpful to Wellington
as Jerome’s to Napoleon, but necessitated by Coalition expediency. Napoleon
wasted this advantage by allowing Grouchy and Ney to act as subordinate
commanders of groups of corps, without giving them the staff or time to bed in,
frequently changing their responsibilities, and either reaching over their
heads, or leaving them for too long to their own devices.
Slim’s
famous comment in the opening paragraph of Defeat into Victory that: ‘A
division is the smallest formation that is a complete orchestra of war’
isn’t really true in 1815. The Napoleonic division was not a fully
combined arms formation in the British, French or Prussian armies. The
British 3rd Division at Waterloo contained three infantry brigades, some
artillery and no cavalry. By the Great War, the 3rd Division
had evolved into a more complex structure, but again without cavalry. On
D Day, the 3rd Division contained an Armoured brigade, but the British still
shied away from genuine combined arms cooperation, until the expense of
Goodwood and the other Bocage operations forced change. It was only at
this stage of the war that Slim’s dictum was realised.
While
the French and British, to varying degrees, corrupted the purist Corps and
divisional system during the Waterloo campaign, the Prussians had quietly
copied the best of the Napoleonic system and made it their own: the resilience
of the Prussian army after Ligny owed much to the quality of their formations,
quality that would endure throughout the rest of the 19th and half
the 20th Centuries.
Stalin’s
famous joke: “The Pope? never mind the Pope! How many divisions
does he have?” illustrates his definition of military
power – the Soviet Union had 491 divisions by April 1945. In the Great
War, the British Army created ninety divisions, but manpower shortages and
other priorities in the Second World War meant the Army raised only 46
divisions between 1939 and 1945.
When
Stalin made his quip, the notion of the division as the defining metric of land
power was at its apogee. But less than fifty years later, the Soviet
Union would cease to exist and a Polish pope would wield considerable influence
without recourse to a single division. Today, Britain has one deployable division.
The
received wisdom of the decade of campaigning in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya is
that success or failure can be attributed to the value placed upon influence
as the engine of change. Well directed violence can support the
achievement of influence, but violence alone has ceased to be the primary
activity around which military planning should coalesce. In effect, the
‘vital ground’ is now in people’s minds. Therefore, modern operations at both
the Corps and Divisional levels are not just a binary contest between friendly
and enemy forces, but about getting multiple actors and audiences to alter
their behaviour in support of political objectives.
To
some extent Napoleon, a great communicator in so many ways, failed to
understand the consequences of war among the people: his emphasis on physical
manoeuvre in the Peninsula from 1808 to the end, in Russia in 1812 and in the
German campaign of 1813, ignored the consequences of popular opinion.
These wars presaged the true age of modern war. The Waterloo campaign,
played out among a francophone people in Belgium, never lasted long enough to
test these extra dimensions.
In the
final analysis, Napoleon was a profoundly contradictory figure: cultivated,
highly intelligent and well read, he personified the rationalism of the
Enlightenment, and yet his belief in his destiny was highly romantic and at
odds with the modern world. His ruthlessness was matched by his humanity,
his egoism by his sense of the common good. His contribution to the
conduct of war was enormous, with commanders striving for the next 150 years to
recreate the manoeuvrist magic that underpinned his approach to operational
art.
For
some, his contribution to physical manoeuvre seems suddenly less relevant in
the age of manoeuvre in the virtual and cognitive as well as physical
dimensions. With its short duration and absence of people, the Waterloo
campaign has more in common with Gulf War 1, than with Gulf War 2 and all that
has followed since. Despite these reservations, the impact of Waterloo on
Europe was profound and shaped the conduct of war for 150 years.
Perhaps
we have entered a new age in which influence is more important to war than destruction.
But the arrival of the age of multi-dimensional manoeuvre does not invalidate
the skills necessary to manoeuvre effectively in the physical domain.
In the
British Army in 2015, just as in the British Army of 1815, a long period of
conflict may now have ended, and with, in some minds, no prospect of general
war in our lifetimes. A young generation of Peninsular and Waterloo
commanders carried on their careers in the Army and applied their experiences,
not just in the practical domain of small-scale imperial conflict, but also in
the blizzard of military publishing that followed the Napoleonic Wars.
Yet despite the efforts of these thoughtful and capable officers, the Army
remained in thrall to one dominant individual, the Duke of Wellington, whose
insistence on viewing the future through the lens of the past, blighted efforts
at reform. Wellington was not wholly successful in blocking important
technological change and improvements to the Army’s disciplinary system. But
it was still an army that, in large part, failed to grasp the Napoleonic system
of war and paid the consequences in the Crimea.
Waterloo campaign may have ended in disaster for Napoleon, but in its opening
stages he displayed all of his old manoeuvrist skills. How many
commanders today could, in a matter of days, concentrate an army of 120,000 men
almost without detection, advance at speed along parallel but supporting
routes, hint at envelopment, but deliver a rapier thrust to divide two
opponents from a central position? There is much, therefore, still to be learnt from the master of
manoeuvre.
