Conversations with the
Duke of Wellington
Dörnbergs Account of the
Start of the Waterloo Campaign
by John Hussey, UK
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Major-General Sir Wilhelm von Dörnberg's account of the opening moves in the Waterloo campaign is so full of insight and is so transparently fair-minded and honest that it deserves to be more widely known. The following translation is, I believe, the fullest yet published in English.
The Writer
In 1815 Sir Wilhelm Caspar Ferdinand, Baron von Dörnberg, then aged 47, served Wellington in a dual capacity: first, during the waiting period, he was seconded from line command to act as a collector of Intelligence based in Mons, just outside French territory; then, upon the outbreak of hostilities, he reverted to his command of the Duke's 3rd Cavalry Brigade (1st and 2nd Light Dragoons of the King's German Legion, and 23rd LD). The 1815 Army List records him as a Major-General in the British Army with effect from 1 January 1812, and a KCB. He fought at Waterloo where he was severely wounded in the lung, receiving the British Waterloo Medal.
In later life he represented the court of Hanover at St Petersburg, Britain and Hanover being ruled by the same sovereign until Victoria's accession in 1837. He died in Münster, 19 March 1850. The circumstances of his earlier history bear on our story. [1]
Dörnberg had been born near Hersfeld in Hesse, 14 April 1768, and was commissioned into the Hessian army in 1783, serving against the French in the Revolutionary wars. He transferred into the Prussian service in 1796, where he remained until the capitulation after Jena, serving under Blücher in 1806. The Napoleonic conquest of the German states and the creation of the puppet Confederation of the Rhine in 1806 and the Kingdom of Westphalia in 1807 resulted in several German states and their forces coming under the rule of Napoleon's youngest brother Jerome.
Dörnberg received command of Jerome's regiment of Westphalian chasseurs-carabiniers in May 1808, but he had always maintained contact with the Prussian reformers and plotters Gneisnau, Katt, Scharnhorst and Schill, and when the Tyrolean revolt began in 1809 he fomented an anti-Bonapartist rising in Hesse in April. Like Katt's and Schill's similar risings, it failed, and Dörnberg fled to Bohemia. When in the summer of 1809 the Duke of Brunswick-Oels led a force from Bohemia to the Elbe mouth (whence the British evacuated him and his men) Dörnberg went with him and joined the foreign corps in British pay. He was colonel commandant of the Brunswick Hussars from 1809, serving under Wellington. He went to Russia in 1812 and fought in the War of Liberation in 1813-14.
Having broken his personal oath of allegiance to Jerome, Dörnberg was a 'wanted man' for the Napoleonic regime and this gave point to Wellington's insistence in 1815 that he was to take care to avoid capture by the French. One cannot admire Dörnberg's decision to swear loyalty to Jerome in order to suborn Jerome's troops, though it was not unique in the circumstances of Germany at this period,
[2] but it does appear to be the only time when Dörnberg swerved in his duty; in the long period from 1792 until 1807 and from 1809 until 1815 he was a consistent opponent of the French and the Bonaparte family.
Thus by the 1815 campaign Dörnberg was personally known to, had worked with, and was on easy face-to-face terms with the three principal Allied leaders, Blücher and Gneisnau and Wellington. He also understood and spoke German, French and English. This gives particular significance to his observations.
Conversations with the Duke of Wellington Dörnbergs Account of the Start of the Waterloo Campaign
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