The Shadow of Ligny:
Hindsight and the Wellington-Pfuel Interview:
Tuesday 13 June 1815
The Mission, As Recounted
From The Prussian Archives
by John Hussey, UK
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General von Lettow-Vorbeck's Napoleons Untergang (1904), a volume of the German General Staff history of this campaign, is on an altogether higher level than Wagner’s or Damitz’s works; he has had access to the Prussian archives, has checked his predecessors' accounts and is careful to quote sources and discuss previous interpretations of evidence. He points out that on 9 June Gneisnau considered
that the French would ‘fall back’ to concentrate as far south as ‘the Aisne, Somme and the Marne’ (i.e. some 80 or more miles south of Charleroi), and that as late as Monday, 12 June, Gneisnau wrote to Hardenberg in Berlin that ‘the danger of an attack is fast disappearing’; 11 words which show that over-confidence was apparent in Blücher's Namur as much as in Wellington’s Brussels. Here is Lettow-Vorbeck’s account of the Pfuel mission, in which round brackets contain his own comments and his references [square brackets being mine].
Having described the relative optimism of the Prussian high com-mand in Namur as late as 12 June: The news which arrived [in Namur] on the 13th was not such as to change current views. On the 14th Müffling [at Wellington's headquarters] replied (archive reference VI C 3 II Bl. 25) to a letter from Gneisnau (nicht vorhanden) [not available or not extant], brought by Colonel von Pfuel on the previous day
(LV adds in a footnote: Since the distance to Brussels is some 70 km and Pfuel was back in Namur on the 14th he must at least have ridden to Brussels the day before.) which was accompanied by an official letter from Schwarzenberg [the Austrian who was supreme commander, now in Germany] and a confidential one from Knesebeck [the Prussian King’s ADC in Berlin] (neither letter available or extant).
Having read these out Müffling put these questions to the Duke: (1) on which day should hostilities open? (2) whether the Duke had expressed a wish for Russian support via Trier and Luxembourg [the Moselle route into France]?
The Duke replied to (1) that he thought it met the purpose if we started moving four to five days later so as to cross the frontier by Mons on 1 July. (2) He was of opinion that we [sic] were strong enough without the Russians and therefore they should march directly [to the middle Rhine and not through Trier and Luxembourg].
[At this point LV quotes a letter from Müffling of 14 June 1815 to Namur:] “According to the reports of last night [in a footnote LV here refers his readers to his Appendix 6, a table of daily reports, under the date 13 June - this is to Dörnberg’s 8 a.m. report in WSD, x, 470] up to today the entire enemy army has been assembling at Maubeuge. Colonel von Pfuel will give Your Excellency further information - Müffling.” The Colonel's communication is said [soll] to have been based on an assurance from the Duke that within 22 hours of the first cannon-shot he would have concentrated his army around either Quatre Bras or Nivelles, according to circumstances. However, he did not believe that the Prussian army would be attacked. 12
General von Lettow-Vorbeck’s researches were carried out long before the destruction of the archives in the bombing raids of the Second World War. Where he finds a document he cites its reference with care and in full. We should note the following facts from his account quoted above:
2. The object of his mission is to agree upon the timetable and zones for an inter-Allied invasion of France. Blücher and Gneisnau want the Duke's opinion on this. The Austrian and Prussian letters are entirely taken up with these matters, as are the Duke's replies - he repeats these opinions in his letter to the Tsar on 15 June. 13 He is convinced that ‘we’ - the Anglo-Allied and Prussian armies - are quite ‘strong enough’ for the task in hand.
3. The idea, floated by Wagner and spelt out by Damitz, that Wellington is offering or is being asked to give massive support to the threatened Prussians by promising to concentrate at Nivelles or Quatre Bras at very short notice - and that this is the object of the mission - can be seen as wrong. Both authors’ views were conditioned by later events, by the shadow of Ligny.
4. Because the Duke speaks French but no German and Müffling is fluent in French, Pfuel hands the German letters to the latter to read out. Any comment the Duke makes which Pfuel is to carry back will have been heard and probably translated into German by Müffling.
5. Müffling's letter of reply (which Lettow-Vorbeck dates to the morning of the 14th) shows the extent to which he and others in Brussels rely upon Dörnberg's reports, this one of the 13th saying that
the ‘entire’ French army is now (‘up to today’) concentrated at Maubeuge, only 12 miles south of Wellington's garrison at Mons and 48 from Brussels, but some 25 miles from Ziethen at Charleroi.
What we can legitimately conclude from Müffling’s actual words is that if enemy proximity signifies anything at all then any French threat points primarily towards Wellington’s zone. Those historians who say that the French deception plan had already been exposed forget what Dörnberg here reported and Müffling believed.
6. But what is so striking is that Müffling, as quoted by Lettow-Vorbeck, writes nothing about any Wellingtonian remarks on forthcoming operations in the event of a French attack. Look how you will at each phrase in Lettow-Vorbeck's account through to the conclusion of Müffling's written report, there is merely a bald comment on intelligence reports - but a comment without any deductions drawn from them, and a brief remark that Pfuel can fill in any other items of interest. Of such little importance does Müffling consider this matter of what to do in the event of a French attack that either (a) he does not use the occasion to ask the Duke about it, or (b) it is not deemed worthy of record. 14
7. Lettow-Vorbeck is careful to state that Pfuel’s communication upon his return to Namur cannot be checked against anything more than tradition: ‘it is said to have been based’ on a verbal remark
of the Duke’s but in a situation where the latter did not believe the Prussians to be in danger of attack. Lettow-Vorbeck never suggests that he himself had seen any document or that Wagner or Damitz had seen a document ‘now lost’. This reduces the value of Pfuel’s verbal communication very considerably.
8. None of the documents brought to Brussels by Pfuel passed out of Prussian hands. That they should be untraceable by 1904 cannot be blamed on the later bombing raids. What we have seen is a major change in the terms of the historical discussion of what occurred in Brussels on Tuesday, 13 June 1815, for Lettow-Vorbeck reduces Wagner and Damitz to nearly nothing. He gives documentary evidence for a new and quite different interpretation from theirs, with different questions for the Duke to answer, and a commentary by Müffling that cannot be reconciled with the two Majors’ accounts. Since 1904 it has been impossible for historians to take Wagner and Damitz at face value on this. However, Lettow-Vorbeck did not investigate such testimony as there is from the Duke and the Prussian liaison officer and this omission I shall now make good.
The Shadow of Ligny: Hindsight and the Wellington-Pfuel Interview Tuesday 13 June 1815
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