But, caught up in his own desperate struggle to survive, Wellington had not sent any troops to help his Prussian allies, deepening their suspicion of his leadership. More than fifteen years later, when he came to make his Model, William Siborne would discover the depth of the distrust in which the two allies held each other. On the Prussian side such feelings were, perhaps, understandable. From the east, there could be heard a faint rumble of thunder, the sound of guns at Ligny. A few miles beyond the horizon, they were dying in their thousands.
On the night of the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, as Wellington’s men hurriedly took to the roads towards Quatre Bras, the Prussian army had marched urgently to support its forces which had been chased east by Marshal Grouchy and the right wing of the French army. The next day, as the two sides readied themselves for battle, it became clear that the French had seized the best position: they were on the high ground overlooking Fleurus, while the Prussians had spread out through the villages in the bottom of a valley, from Ligny in the west to Wagnelée in the east, placing them within range of the French artillery.
For seven long hours, in the scorching sun, the two sides waited for battle, the yellow cornfields dazzling their eyes in the harsh summer light. The two armies were evenly matched, some 84,000 Prussians, with 226 guns, against a French army with 78,000 men and 242 guns. Then the French advanced. Their infantry marched in columns towards St Amand, while their artillery launched a fearsome cannonade on Ligny. Their skirmishers spread out quickly in the ground between the villages, fighting for possession of the Ligny stream. Prussian musket-fire rattled out from the loopholes cut into the walls of every house on the front line, from hedges and orchards and from behind stone walls, but still the French pressed forward, and soon the village of St Amand fell. When Pirch, the leader of the Prussian 2nd Corps, sent his men out from Bry to counterattack, they were slaughtered by French artillery, or destroyed by musket-fire. Each time the Prussians, bravely, wrested the shattered buildings on the front-line from the French, superior enemy firepower rained down on them and forced them back. The fiercest fighting was at Ligny, where the bodies were piled up in doorways and alleys, and where the cobbled road ran with blood.
As they fought, the Prussians hoped that Wellington might come to their rescue, but he was too hard pressed at the crossroads of Quatre Bras. The French, too, were hoping for support from General d’Erlon, commanding I Corps, but because of a communication breakdown, he had spent fruitless hours galloping between the battlefields of Quatre Bras and Ligny in utter confusion as to whether he should be fighting the Anglo-Allied army or the Prussians. By crossing the River Sambre so swiftly, Napoleon had achieved his aim of dividing the two armies so that he might tackle each in turn. The irony was that a tactic intended to give him a greater chance of success, had also, in effect, divided his own army, reducing his chances of a quick victory.
But even without d’Erlon, the French were winning the battle. By nightfall, the Prussian defences could hold out no longer. They were short of ammunition while Napoleon had ten thousand men in reserve, and now they swarmed forward towards Ligny, forcing the Prussians to retreat. For Blücher, staring at defeat, there was only one response he could make: he would attack, heroically, and go down fighting with his men. He ordered his cavalry to form into line and led the charge himself, on the fine stallion which had been a present from the Prince Regent of England. A shot rang out, tearing into the horse’s flank, and suddenly Blücher was falling, pitching forward onto the ground, the horse on top of him. Then darkness: he remembered nothing more. It was left to Blücher’s deputy, his chief of staff, Lt.-Gen. August von Gneisenau, to signal the retreat.
It was a long, dark night of confusion for the shattered Prussian forces, their only solace the fact that the French were too exhausted from their efforts to pursue them through the dark. Men were scattered across the countryside in no formation, and the Prussian commanders had to try to round them up, to create order out of chaos. The plan was to make for Tilly but this was changed after the intervention of Lt.-Col. Ludwig von Reiche, the chief of staff of I Corps, who noted that, although it was almost dark, he could see that the place was not marked on his map. He realised that, if other officers had the same map, there would be confusion, so he proposed that another town further back, but on the same line of march, should be named as the assembly point. ‘I found that Wavre was just such a place.’
The Prussians had failed to hold their own against Napoleon, and, separated by miles of countryside, they could not easily link up with the Anglo-Allied army. But the distance between the allies was not just a physical separation, for it reflected too the gap between the two armies’ thinking, and the ambiguous relationship they had forged. Gneisenau was a leading critic of the Duke, and had previously accused him of being a ‘master in the art of duplicity’ because of his ability to ‘outwit the Nabobs’ during his time in India. Now he thought Wellington had reneged upon a commitment to send help to the Prussians at Ligny, and he blamed the Duke for the defeat. He recorded bitterly that ‘on the 16th of June in the morning the Duke of Wellington promised to be at Quatre Bras at 10 o’clock with 20,000 men … on the strength of these arrangements and promises we decided to fight the battle.’ Gneisenau, so long as he remained in charge, would not offer any further help.
Fifteen years later, William Siborne came to realise that the distrust still ran deep, and that it was mutual. Wellington claimed that the Prussians had been defeated because they had chosen the wrong position. ‘I told the Prussian officers that according to my judgement, the exposure of the advanced columns and, indeed, the whole army to cannonade was not prudent. The marshy banks of the stream made it out of their power to cross and attack the French, while the latter had it in their power to cannonade them, and shatter them to pieces, after which they might fall upon them by the bridges at the villages. However, they seemed to think they knew best, so I came away very shortly. It all fell out exactly as I had feared …’ There was no reflection that he, himself, might have precipitated their problems through the late deployment of his troops.
That night, the two armies were fighting a common enemy whose aim was to divide them. And they were falling into the trap.
While the French were masters of the battlefield, there was still hope for the Anglo-Allied forces. Napoleon was fearful that the Prussians were regrouping and so he decided he could not throw the weight of his full army against Wellington’s forces, lest the two enemies encircle him. And in doing so he let his enemies off the hook.
It was not until midday the next day, 17 June, that Grouchy received orders to follow the Prussians north. He then sent out cavalry to try to find out where the Prussians had gone and whether they had managed to reassemble as one force. By then it was nearly too late. Grouchy was unsure, he told his Emperor by messenger, of the location of the Prussians, though he thought, correctly, that they must have taken the road to Wavre. But he also thought, wrongly, that some of their army had moved even further east, so he divided his forces for the chase. By now, however, the weather had turned against the attacking army, clouding over and raining hard, making reconnaissance impossible.
And, by a miracle, Blücher was not dead. He had been carried from the field of battle to survive an ordeal which would have killed a lesser man. Gneisenau found him propped up on a camp bed in some farm buildings at the village of Mellery, north of Ligny. His right shoulder was very sore, and he smelled strongly of the medicaments which had been rubbed into his bruises, including brandy, gin, rhubarb and garlic. A British liaison officer, Sir Henry Hardinge, later to be Secretary at War, witnessed a fierce debate between the two men, as Blücher resisted pressure to resign because of his injuries. With firsthand experience of fighting Napoleon, he saw his old adversary as the enemy, and not the Anglo-Allied army. He told Hardinge ‘he should be quite satisfied if in conjunction with the Duke of Wellington he was able now to defeat his old enemy.’ Gneisenau, having successfully