Wellington and Blucher
Meet 16 June 1815:
Before the Battle of Ligny
Pflugk-Harttung’s Version
by Gary Cousins, Germany
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According to Pflugk-Harttung, the only people present at the meeting were Wellington, Müffling, Gneisenau and Grolman, Hardinge, Dörnberg, and Blücher; with the discussions handled only by Wellington, Müffling, Gneisenau and Grolman. 13
He believed that the most reliable accounts of the meeting were those of Grolman, Müffling, and Dörnberg. 14
He saw the different accounts not as competing with each other, but as completing each other – for each person brought his own personal agenda to the meeting, and afterwards remembered the things most important to him, and there was undoubtedly room for misunderstanding due to the language differences. 15
Pflugk-Harttung sifted through these accounts, in order to try to reconstruct what happened – including how the different options by which Wellington could support the Prussians were discussed, and what was finally agreed. Space precludes the reproduction of the whole here, but he summarised his findings thus: “If we summarise the result of our research, it indicates that Wellington’s plan from
the beginning was not to give up the Brussels road, but, by driving forward along the same, to bring first indirect, finally, through a flank- and rear-attack, direct support to the allies. Under the impression of the advancing enemy, and Gneisenau’s clear exposition, for a short time he tended towards a movement leftwards, towards outright assistance, at least with a part of his army.
But even now, only on the condition that he was not attacked himself, i.e. that the Brussels road did not appear to be threatened in any way. Even at this moment, when he came closest to the Prussians’ wishes, he made no unconditional, but only a conditional promise, one which through Ney’s attack was overtaken by events.”
16
In this version, reconstructed by Pflugk-Harttung in the early 1900s, there is no definite, but only a conditional, promise to provide direct assistance.
In Pflugk-Harttung’s opinion, rarely was it as possible for a historian to restore the truth about an event, when it had been so completely obscured by subsequent retellings of the story, as it was in the case of the history of the meeting at Brye. He traced the development of the story of the meeting at Brye by authors in the 19th century German literature - from Plotho in 1818, through to Treitschke in the last quarter-century.
He concluded that the further in time one got from the actual events, the more grave and specific the claims in these “histories” became, and the further one got from the likely truth; that their versions were greatly influenced by the viewpoint of the Prussian Staff, under whose auspices many were written; and that as chief-of-staff to the Prussian army in 1815, Gneisenau’s views were influential on that viewpoint.
Wellington and Blucher Meet 16 June 1815 Before the Battle of Ligny
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