Trollheart

The tide was beginning to turn in favour of the French. Many of Wellington's officers and generals were killed, his regiments were being decimated, one of his own staging points was being used against him, and darkness was approaching. Edward Cotton, of the 7th Hussars, put in into stark words:

"The banks on the road side, the garden wall, the knoll and sandpit swarmed with skirmishers, who seemed determined to keep down our fire in front; those behind the artificial bank seemed more intent upon destroying the 27th, who at this time, it may literally be said, were lying dead in square; their loss after La Haye Sainte had fallen was awful, without the satisfaction of having scarcely fired a shot, and many of our troops in rear of the ridge were similarly situated."

The French now expected Marshal Grouchy (no, seriously) who was to reinforce them, but when it turned out to be Blucher and the Prussians who appeared, it struck a terrible blow to their morale, despite their having the upper hand. They knew the Prussians had been due to arrive, and it was imperative that Grouchy got there first. With the appearance of Blucher the pendulum began to swing in the opposite direction, as French troops raged at their ill fortune. Wellington, of course, was delighted when the news reached him. He had earlier gloomily prophesied that “Night or the Prussians must come.” To his relief, it had been the latter.

As the reinforcements wreaked havoc on the French lines – though not without serious losses themselves – Napoleon desperately threw his last die, and led the crack Imperial Guard into the fray. Though they bolstered wavering French morale, and did a lot of damage, they were thrown back and when the French soldiers saw or heard of the unimaginable evidence of the Imperial Guard in retreat, they broke and fled, and Wellington urged his army onwards to victory. Napoleon fought a valiant rearguard action, but his men were breaking and running even as he tried to marshal them. Two separate accounts, on from the French side, one from the British, of the end of the battle and the realisation that the day was lost for Napoleon.

"There remained to us still four squares of the Old Guard to protect the retreat. These brave grenadiers, the choice of the army, forced successively to retire, yielded ground foot by foot, till, overwhelmed by numbers, they were almost entirely annihilated. From that moment, a retrograde movement was declared, and the army formed nothing but a confused mass. There was not, however, a total rout, nor the cry of sauve qui peut, as has been calumniously stated in the bulletin."
— Marshal M. Ney.

"In the middle of the position occupied by the French army, and exactly upon the height, is a farm (sic), called La Belle Alliance. The march of all the Prussian columns was directed towards this farm, which was visible from every side. It was there that Napoleon was during the battle; it was thence that he gave his orders, that he flattered himself with the hopes of victory; and it was there that his ruin was decided. There, too, it was that, by happy chance, Field Marshal Blücher and Lord Wellington met in the dark, and mutually saluted each other as victors."
— General Gneisenau

And amid all the glory and self-congratulation, a view of the harsh reality of war:
"22 June. This morning I went to visit the field of battle, which is a little beyond the village of Waterloo, on the plateau of Mont-Saint-Jean; but on arrival there the sight was too horrible to behold. I felt sick in the stomach and was obliged to return. The multitude of carcasses, the heaps of wounded men with mangled limbs unable to move, and perishing from not having their wounds dressed or from hunger, as the Allies were, of course, obliged to take their surgeons and waggons with them, formed a spectacle I shall never forget. The wounded, both of the Allies and the French, remain in an equally deplorable state."

After the battle was lost, Napoleon legged it back to Paris, arriving just as dawn broke on midsummer's day. With perhaps characteristic stubbornness, or a Trumpian refusal to face reality, he believed he could raise another army and counter-attack, but his defeat and humiliation on the fields of Waterloo had stripped him of support, and as his plans to take over as dictator threatened to push France towards civil war, he was forced to abdicate, went on the run (some say) trying to escape to North America, was captured by the British and exiled, for the second time. This time though it was St. Helena, in the Caribbean, from which there was to be no escape. Six years after landing on the island he died.

In November of 1815 the Treaty of Paris was signed, and King Louis XVIII returned to the throne of France. The First French Empire was gone, the monarchy restored and the threat from Napoleon Bonaparte extinguished forever.

Theories advanced for the defeat of Napoleon range from this one, from a general and leading writer on military history:

"In my opinion, four principal causes led to this disaster:
The first, and most influential, was the arrival, skilfully combined, of Blücher, and the false movement that favoured this arrival; the second, was the admirable firmness of the British infantry, joined to the sang-froid and aplomb of its chiefs; the third, was the horrible weather, that had softened the ground, and rendered the offensive movements so toilsome, and retarded till one o'clock the attack that should have been made in the morning; the fourth, was the inconceivable formation of the first corps, in masses very much too deep for the first grand attack."
— Antoine-Henri Jomini.

To those of a Prussian soldier and historian, who had served at the battle:

"Bonaparte and the authors who support him have always attempted to portray the great catastrophes that befell him as the result of chance. They seek to make their readers believe that through his great wisdom and extraordinary energy the whole project had already moved forward with the greatest confidence, that complete success was but a hair's breadth away, when treachery, accident, or even fate, as they sometimes call it, ruined everything. He and his supporters do not want to admit that huge mistakes, sheer recklessness, and, above all, overreaching ambition that exceeded all realistic possibilities, were the true causes."
— Carl von Clausewitz

And even Wellington, unsurprisingly, had his say:

"I should not do justice to my own feelings, or to Marshal Blücher and the Prussian army, if I did not attribute the successful result of this arduous day to the cordial and timely assistance I received from them. The operation of General Bülow upon the enemy's flank was a most decisive one; and, even if I had not found myself in a situation to make the attack which produced the final result, it would have forced the enemy to retire if his attacks should have failed, and would have prevented him from taking advantage of them if they should unfortunately have succeeded"

Why will this battle be remembered?

The defeat of Napoleon was more than just victory in a battle – although a decisive one – or even a war. Waterloo brought to an end wars that had raged across Europe since the French Revolution exploded, and it ushered in a rare era of peace that lasted for about forty years. It broke the power forever of Napoleon Bonaparte, erased the French Empire from history, and established the Duke of Wellington as one of Britain's greatest heroes. It also showcased the co-operation between countries: as the Duke himself admits above, victory would likely never have been possible without the timely arrival of the Prussians under Blucher and Bulow, like something out of a movie, and working together a number of different countries and states were able to remove a threat to all of Europe – indeed, much of the world – in a manner that would not really occur again for another hundred years.

In Britain, the name was commemorated in the names of a bridge, a railway station, a road and even an entire area. The climactic defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo came, for a time, to refer to any inevitable defeat, being known as “facing or meeting one's Waterloo”, though to be honest till ABBA's song popularised it I'd never heard it be used. Napoleon of course was himself caricatured in George Orwell's Animal Farm.

It could be argued that with this great victory Britain had defeated France and proven her military might, but there are several things to consider. First, Britain was not technically at war with France at all. Since the Revolution she had been, but only with the Revolutionary government – the Directory – and soon after with Napoleon. In exile, the French king was an ally of the British and they were working to have him reinstated.

Secondly, Britain had not defeated the forces of Napoleon by themselves. It had been a coalition – explained above – of many countries and states, which had banded together to take on the French emperor, and as already stated, the only reason the British/Coalition forces, having been fought to a standstill by Napoleon, were not defeated at Waterloo was due to the intervention of the Prussians. In effect, and as Wellington himself observed above, though not in so many words, you could almost say it was the Prussians and not the British who won Waterloo, though of course it was a joint effort, while most of the glory back home would be Wellington's.

And thirdly, Britain, along with Europe, was sick of war. Though a victory had been achieved here, British losses during the battle were staggering, and cumulative deaths and injuries throughout the entire period of the Napoleonic Wars must have come close to rivalling those of World War I, to be fought a century later, the two old enemies for possibly the first time standing shoulder to shoulder. There was not the resources, the manpower nor the appetite for further war, and Britain would have been content to have won the peace.

Add to this Queen Victoria's advancing age, and she certainly would have been unlikely to have wished for further conflict in her twilight years. Besides, after the menace of Napoleon was removed, it seems (though for some reason is incredibly hard to confirm) that the last major threat to European peace was removed, and while there were still countries and kingdoms to fight against, unlike in the earlier centuries kings and queens no longer did this for political gain, and so everyone sat back and enjoyed what became known as the Pax Britannia. I would imagine, in the case of France, that the monarchy having been shown up as not god-given nor unshakeable, was probably not as powerful as it had been, and existed in a state of uneasy truce with Republicans until the founding of the French Third Republic after the Franco-Prussian War (1870 – 1871) – a year? A year? Pfft! You call that a war? A minor disagreement! After that, the monarchy was abolished and France has been a republic ever since.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018