Prologue

On the morning of the 18th of June, 1815, a French column of 33,000 men marched north in pursuit of the retreating Prussian army. Commanding this French column was Marshal Emmanuel Grouchy.

Grouchy knew that the Prussians were reorganizing to the north; they would probably try to move in support of their ally the Duke of Wellington, who faced Napoleon at Waterloo. Grouchy's orders were to pursue the Prussians; implied in these orders was a request for Grouchy to keep between the Prussians and Napoleon.

Grouchy had gotten off to a slow start that morning; he was now miles behind the enemy.

At about 11:00 that morning, the Marshal and his staff heard guns in the distance, beyond the northwest horizon. Locals confirmed that the noise was coming from the area of Waterloo. General Gerard, commander of the IV Corps, became engaged in a heated altercation with the Marshal; he pleaded for Grouchy to march to the sound of the guns. The unimaginative Grouchy argued that his orders did not allow him to do so. Gerard persisted.

Marshal Grouchy soon came to realize that his mission was virtually lost; further, he must have realized that Napoleon was doomed if the Prussian army could relieve Wellington. History cannot be sure of this; many of those with the Marshal were to perish that day. All we know is what happened after, when Grouchy issued his orders.

The French column turned to the left, toward the distant thunder.

At 6:30 on the fateful afternoon of June 18, 1815, the balance of history teetered precariously. Wellington, having weathered an afternoon of slashing French attacks, was facing disaster; his British troops were fragments of the solid red line they had presented that morning; his allies Hanoverian, Dutch, Belgian, Nassauer, and Brunswick troops -- were wavering. His only comfort was that Marshal Blucher and his Prussian army, having recovered from their defeat at Ligny two days before, were now battering their way into the French right flank, making slow progress.

The French appeared to be losing. Napoleon himself, directing the right, was just barely able to hold Blucher. On the main line, Marshal Ney was returning into French positions with the survivors of his fourth attempt to break the Allied center with unsupported cavalry charges. Napoleon was resolving to mitigate Ney's courageous stupidity by hurling the Imperial Guard into the weakened Allied center, with all available French infantry to follow. Perhaps the Guard could inspire the battered line infantry to break Wellington in one last charge.

Prussians Fall Back

At this juncture -- 6:30 -- the Prussians abruptly began to fall back. As the gunfire slackened the Emperor could hear light artillery pieces thumping behind the Prussians. Within minutes, the word was out on both sides. Grouchy's mud-splattered force had arrived; his lead cavalry units were already slashing deep into the Prussian rear. Behind them, the fiery Gen. Vandamme was throwing in the lead III Corps units without even pausing to deploy; Prussian resistance crumbled.

Within another fifteen minutes, French cavalry had appeared all across the Prussian rear, Grouchy's infantry had broken most of the Prussian left, and a party of French lancers had encountered and killed Marshal Blucher. The Prussians had fought in the face of defeat for three days and might have ralllied even with Grouchy closing in -- but the loss of their beloved commander was too much. With no one to rally them, the Prussian army broke.

Already, large French columns now left the right flank, bringing reinforcement and heartening news to the assault troops in the center. In fact, the main attack was delayed while these men -- much of VI Corps and the Young Guard -- came up and told their story.

Finally, at 7:30 the tall bearskin caps of the Guard began to move forward. The gathering darkness helped the French as they marched into the Allied fire; many Guardsmen were still alive when they began to employ their bayonets in the Allied line. The firs died; others followed. The British stood fast; the other Allied troops, including the Hanoverians, didn't. The day had sorely tried Wellinriton's army -- and the bayonets of the Guard sent them howling up the road to Brussels.

Wellington darted from one place to another closing hole after hole in his line. But the loss of the Hanoverians meant that much of his line was gone along with his reserves. The British - what was left of them - withdrew into the night, still a force in being. Many other Britishers, however, formed one last ghastly line on the field; among them lay much of the Imperial Guard. And Marshal Ney . . .

It is said that he was the first into the British lines; he was last heard shouting, "See how a Marshal of France can die!" Many, in the few minutes they had to live, did see.

And the battle of Waterloo was over. Napoleon had no cavalry left with which to pursue Wellington; the French halted for the night at the Allied headquarters at Waterloo. Grouchy's cavalry thoroughly scattered the Prussians; only the Prussian III Corps, which had not arrived on the battlefield, was able to stand at St. Lambert.

Waterloo proved to be the last major engagement in Belgium. Wellington, with 15,000 British troops -- the last of 100,000 Allied soldiers -- fell back on Antwerp after a series of brilliant delaying actions, and were taken off by the fleet. Gen. Gneisenau, the III Corps, and stragglers from the rest of the Prussians' late army fell back on the Rhineland after uniting with Kleist's V Corps, which had been near Luxembourg. Napoleon himself was content to stage a grandiose "liberation" of Brussels. The Emperor found that, with the collection of his stragglers, and defectors from the Nassau, Dutch, Belgian, and Rhenish contingents of the late Allied armies, French losses were virtually neutralized -- except among the Guard, who were irreplaceable.

The hero of the hour, Marshal Grouchy, was sent off to triumphal acclaim in faraway Paris. (Napoleon, it is said, sent Grouchy off to be rid of him: according to some sources Napoleon thought poorly of Grouchy's lateness and his early failure to stop Blucher. Other historians have thought that Napoleon believed that Gen. Gerard's accidental drowning in the Dyle River, during the hasty march to Waterloo, was due to Grouchy's negligence. All we know for sure is that Napoleon later remarked that Grouchy had been "lucky in spite of himself.") Grouchy was replaced by the highly capable Marshal Davout.

Elsewhere, the war had gone well for France. The uprising in the West had been crushed; this occasioned no surprise. Marshal Suchet in the distant Alps had forced the Austrians to conclude an armistice in the Italian theater; this too occasioned no surprise. The Allied commander-in-chief, Marshal Schwarzenberg (a cautious man by nature), took alarm at these reverses and kept his 200,000 south German and Austrian troops behind the Rhine, waiting for the Russians to come up.

Over the Rhine

Napoleon decided to press matters, and marched on the Prussian provinces in the Rhineland. After easily crushing the remnants of the Prussian army -- almost 60,000 men -- at Trier (July 17-13), Napoleon reinforced his army with troops from the scene of the late rebellion in the west. Leaving the V Corps (under Gen. Rapp) to hold Schwarzenberg, Napoleon took on the Russians; Rapp, out-numbered 8-1, frustrated the feeble Allied attempts to cross the Rhine.

Napoleon engaged the Russians just after they had crossed the Rhine at Mannheim. In the battle of Neustadt, on July 31, Napoleon struck at the Allied center and left, as he had at Waterloo. The Russians were not of the same caliber as the British -- they broke after a hard fight. Napoleon finished them at Mannheim two days later, as they attempted to escape across the Rhine.

Schwarzenberg was powerless. Even though he outnumbered Napoleon, he was still distant, in the upper Rhine; Rapp did a brilliant job of blocking him; and the Bavarians, predictably, began to waver in their loyalty.

In London, meanwhile, the disgrace of Waterloo had its effect. Wellington was ignominiously packed off to command what few troops there were in Canada -- a minor provincial assignment. The government passed into control of the Whigs; after the Neustadt-Mannheim campaign they sued for peace.

The Exchequer had been depleted by lavish gifts to the Allied cause; much of the army filled graves in Iberia, Belgium, and North America. England had had enough. Napoleon was able to extort British recognition of French claims on the Continent; a free-trade agreement was also signed that temporarily hurt British merchantile interests (and had the long-range effect of giving France a headstart over the Continent in the Industrial Revolution).

Throughout the summer of 1815, French conscripts (and returning veterans) continued to pour into Napoleon's armies. When Napoleon, Rapp, and Suchet crossed the Rhine in early September, they totalled 550,000 men; with the recruit depots and quiet sector totals added in, the French nation had around a million men under arms.

On crossing the Rhine, Napoleon proclaimed his intention to restore the south German states with what he had given them under his old Confederation of the Rhine.

The announcement -- and the alarming French numbers -- caused Schwarzenberg to retreat into a suddenly-hostile countryside. But he faced the French in battle. His army devoured itself at Reutlingen (Sept. 26) when the Bavarian and Wurttenburg contingents turned on their Austrian companions in the middle of the retreat.

Enough was enough. Before the year was out, delegates from all the major warring powers signed the Peace of Augsburg (Dec. 21, 1815) in the last great treaty before Versailles, a century later. According to the peace treaty, the war ended and the following territorial changes made:

The Confederation of the Rhine was reimposed over the late German Confederation set up by the Allies; an "independent" Republic of Belgium was created; Wurttemburg and Bavaria got most of the Austrian Tyrol and much of northern Switzerland; Norway was returned to Denmark; and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw was carved anew out of Prussia and Russia. Marshal Murat came out of exile to resume his rule of Naples.

In North America, meanwhile, Wellington cleared his name. After Waterloo, the U.S. Congress prodded Madison into making another attempt to grab Canada. The U.S. Army made a massive "incursion" as the diehards in Washington spoke of a Manifest Destiny to destroy the last of a tottering empire. But Wellington, vastly outnumbered, beat back every thrust in a series of sharp engagements in September and October. However, British forces were too weakened to do anything more offensive than make naval raids; the Treaty of Montreal (January 9, 1816) was quickly concluded. The U.S. lost northern Maine and had to recognize British sovereignty in Canada.

Ended

So ended the Napoleonic wars. When Napoleon died in 1821, he left his successor with control of much of Europe -- control that was to evaporate as new powers began to emerge. Hungary appeared after the 1848 uprisings; Italy won reunification in 1873; they and Denmark, Bavaria, and Warsaw (the future nation of Poland) grew throughout the century as Turkey, Austria, Prussia. and Russia declined. Britain looked to her commerce and industry; the Americans, fingers burned, again looked west; France busied herself with new factories and troublesome new revolutionaries.

The French became a highly developed, proud, and energetic people -- and won the envy and fear of the rest of Europe. After the power vacuums in Germany and the Balkans were assimilated, the wait for Armageddon began. Like so many sticks of dynamite, the arms races and alliances needed only a spark to produce a holocaust. The spark was struck in the Balkans, that day in Sarajevo; a new era began.

One cannot help wonder if, had Marshal Grouchy continued his "wild turkey chase" that day in Belgium, all this might have been avoided. If France had lost Waterloo and there lies its historical significance IF the Congress of Vienna had charted Europe's future, the Twentieth Century's history might have been less bloody. We might even dare to spectulate that the World Wars might have been avoided if the French Empire had fallen in 1815.