The Project Gutenberg EBook of Waterloo, by Hilaire Belloc
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Title: Waterloo
Author: Hilaire Belloc
Release Date: May 11, 2010 [EBook #32332]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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WATERLOO
[Illustration]
By HILAIRE BELLOC
LONDON
STEPHEN SWIFT AND CO., LTD.
16 KING STREET, COVENT GARDEN
WEST CENTRAL
MCMXII
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. THE POLITICAL OBJECT AND EFFECT OF THE
WATERLOO CAMPAIGN 9
II. THE PRELIMINARIES: NAPOLEON'S ADVANCE
ACROSS THE SAMBRE 24
III. THE DECISIVE DAY: FRIDAY, THE 16TH OF JUNE--
LIGNY 63
QUATRE-BRAS 84
IV. THE ALLIED RETREAT AND FRENCH ADVANCE UPON
WATERLOO AND WAVRE 129
V. THE ACTION 158
I
THE POLITICAL OBJECT AND EFFECT OF THE WATERLOO CAMPAIGN
It must continually be insisted upon in military history, that general
actions, however decisive, are but the functions of campaigns; and that
campaigns, in their turn, are but the functions of the political energies
of the governments whose armies are engaged.
The object of a campaign is invariably a political object, and all its
military effort is, or should be, subsidiary to that political object.
One human community desires to impose upon the future a political
condition which another human community rejects; or each is attempting to
impose upon the future, conditions irreconcilable one with the other.
Until we know what those conditions are, or what is the political
objective of each opponent, we cannot decide upon the success of a
campaign, nor give it its true position in history.
Thus, to take the simplest and crudest case, a nation or its government
determines to annex the territory of a neighbour; that is, to subject a
neighbouring community to the laws of the conqueror. That neighbouring
community and its government, if they are so old-fashioned as to prefer
freedom, will resist by force of arms, and there will follow what is
called a "campaign" (a term derived from the French, and signifying a
countryside: for countrysides are the theatres of wars). In this campaign
the political object of the attempted conquest on the one hand, and of
resistance to it on the other, are the issue. The military aspect of the
campaign is subsidiary to its political objects, and we judge of its
success or failure not in military but in political terms.
The prime military object of a general is to "annihilate" the armed force
of his opponents. He may do this by breaking up their organisation and
dispersing them, or by compelling the surrender of their arms. He may
achieve success in this purely military object in any degree. But if, as
an end and consequence of his military success, the political object be
not achieved--if, for instance, in the particular case we are considering,
the neighbouring community does not in the future obey laws dictated to it
by the conqueror, but remains autonomous--then the campaign has failed.
Such considerations are, I repeat, the very foundation of military
history; and throughout this Series they will be insisted upon as the
light in which alone military history can be understood.
It is further true that not only may a campaign be successful in the
military sense, and yet in the largest historical sense be a failure, but,
quite evidently, the actions in a campaign may each be successful and yet
the campaign a failure; or each action may, on the whole, fail, and yet
that campaign be a success. As the old formulæ go, "You can win every
battle and lose your campaign." And, again, "A great general does not aim
at winning battles, but at winning his campaign." An action results from
the contact of the opposing forces, and from the necessity in which they
find themselves, after such contact, of attempting the one to disorganise
or to capture the other. And in the greater part actions are only
"accepted," as the phrase goes, by either party, because each party
regards the action as presenting opportunities for his own success.
A campaign can perfectly well be conceived in which an opponent,
consciously inferior in the field, will avoid action throughout, and by
such a plan can actually win the campaign in the end. Historical instances
of this, though rare, exist. And there have even been campaigns where,
after a great action disastrous to one side, that side has yet been able
to keep up a broken resistance sufficiently lengthy and exhausting to
baulk the conqueror of his political object in the end.
In a word, it is the business of the serious student in military history
to reverse the popular and dramatic conception of war, to neglect the
brilliance and local interest of a battle for the larger view of the whole
operations; and, again, to remember that these operations are not an end
in themselves, but are only designed to serve the political plan of the
government which has commanded them.
* * * * *
Judged in this true light, we may establish the following conclusions
with regard to the battle of Waterloo.
First, the battle of Waterloo was a decisive action, the result of which
was a complete military success for the Allies in the campaign they had
undertaken, and a complete military defeat for Napoleon, who had opposed
them.
This complete military success of the Allies' campaign was, again,
equivalent to a success in their immediate political object, which was the
overthrow of Napoleon's personal power, the re-establishment of the
Bourbons upon the French throne, and the restoration of those traditions
and ideals of government which had been common to Europe before the
outbreak of the French Revolution twenty-four years before.
Had the effect of this battle and that campaign been permanent, one could
speak of their success as complete; but when we discuss that largest issue
of all, to wit, whether the short campaign which Waterloo so decisively
concluded really effected its object, considering that that object was the
permanent destruction of the revolutionary effort and the permanent
re-establishment of the old state of affairs in Europe, we are compelled
to arrive at a very different conclusion: a conclusion which will vary
with the varying judgment of men, and one which cannot be final, because
the drama is not yet played out; but a conclusion which, in the eyes of
all, singularly modifies the effect of the campaign of Waterloo.
It is obvious, at the first glance we take of European history during,
say, the lifetime of a man who should have been a boy in Waterloo year,
that the general political object of the revolutionary and Napoleonic
armies was not reversed at Waterloo. It was ultimately established. The
war had been successfully maintained during too long a period for the
uprooting of the political conditions which the French had attempted to
impose upon Europe. Again, those conditions were sufficiently sympathetic
to the European mind at the time to develop generously, and to grow in
spite of all attempted restriction. And we discover, as a fact, democratic
institutions, democratic machinery at least, spreading rapidly again after
their defeat at Waterloo, and partially victorious, first in France and
later elsewhere, within a very few years of that action.
The same is true of certain secondary results of the prolonged
revolutionary and Napoleonic campaigns. Nationality predominated over the
old idea of a monarch governing his various "peoples," and the whole
history of the nineteenth century was a gradual vindication of the
principle of nationality. A similar fate awaited institutions bound up
with the French revolutionary effort: a wide and continually expressed
suffrage, the arming of whole nations in defence of their independence,
the ordering of political life upon the new plan, down even to the details
of the revolutionary weights and measures (the metre, the gramme,
etc.)--these succeeded and in effect triumphed over the arrangements which
that older society had fought to restore.
On the other hand, the advance of all this was much slower, much more
disturbed, much less complete, than it would have been had Napoleon not
failed in Russia, suffered his decisive defeat at Leipzig, and fallen for
ever upon that famous field of Waterloo; and one particular
characteristic, namely, the imposition of all these things upon Europe by
the will of a government at Paris, wholly disappeared.
We may sum up, then, and say that the political effect of the battle of
Waterloo and its campaign was an immediate success for the Allies: that
their ultimate success the history of the nineteenth century has reversed;
but that the victory of Waterloo modified, retarded, and perhaps distorted
in a permanent fashion the establishment of those conceptions of society
and government which the Revolution, and Napoleon as its soldier, had set
out to establish.
There is a side question attached to all this, with which I shall
conclude, because it forms the best introduction to what is to follow:
that question is,--"Would Napoleon have ultimately succeeded even if he
had triumphed instead of fallen upon the 18th of June 1815?" In other
words, was Waterloo one of these battles the winning or losing of which by
_either_ side, meant a corresponding decisive result to that side? Had
Wellington's command broken at Waterloo before the arrival of Blucher,
would Napoleon's consequent victory have meant as much to _him_ as his
defeat actually meant to the allies?
The answer of history to this question is, No. Even had Napoleon won on
that day he would have lost in the long run.
The date to which we must affix the reverse of Napoleon's effort is not
the 18th of June 1815, but the 19th of October 1812, when the Grand Army
began its retreat from Moscow; and the political decision, his failure in
which was the origin of his fall, was not the decision taken in June 1815
to advance against the Allies in Belgium, but the decision taken in May
1812 to advance into the vast spaces of Russia. The decisive action which
the largest view of history will record in centuries to come as the defeat
which ruined Napoleon took place, not south of Brussels, but near the town
of Leipzig, two years before. From the last moment of that three days'
battle (again the 19th of October, precisely a twelvemonth after the
retreat from Moscow had begun), Napoleon and the French armies are
continually falling back. Upon the 4th of April in the following year
Napoleon abdicated; and exactly a month later, on the 4th of May, he was
imprisoned, under the show of local sovereignty, in the island of Elba.
It was upon the 1st of March 1815 that, having escaped from that island,
he landed upon the southern coast of France. There followed the doomed
attempt to save somewhat of the Revolution and the Napoleonic scheme,
which is known to history as the "hundred days." Even that attempt would
have been impossible had not the greater part of the commanders of units
in the French army, that is, of the colonels of regiments, abandoned the
Bourbon government, which had been restored at Paris, and decided to
support Napoleon.
But even so, the experiment was hazardous in the extreme. Had the
surrounding governments which had witnessed and triumphed over his fall
permitted him, as he desired, to govern France in peace, and France alone,
this small part of the revolutionary plan might have been saved from the
general wreck of its fortunes and of his. But such an hypothesis is
fantastic. There could be and there was no chance that these great
governments, now fully armed, and with all their organised hosts prepared
and filled with the memory of recent victory, would permit the restoration
of democratic government in that France which had been the centre and
outset of the vast movement they had determined to destroy. Further,
though Napoleon had behind him the majority, he had not the united mass of
the French people. An ordered peace following upon victory would have
given him such a support; after his recent crushing defeat it was lacking.
It was especially true that the great chiefs of the army were doubtful.
His own generals rejoined him, some with enthusiasm, more with doubt,
while a few betrayed him early in the process of his attempted
restoration.
It is impossible to believe that under such circumstances Napoleon could
have successfully met Europe in arms. The military resources of the French
people, though not exhausted, were reaching their term. New levies of men
yielded a material far inferior to the conscripts of earlier years; and
when the Emperor estimated 800,000 men as the force which he required for
his effort, it was but the calculation of despair. Eight hundred thousand
men: even had they been the harvest of a long peace, the whole armed
nation, vigorous in health and fresh for a prolonged contest, would not
have been sufficient. The combined Powers had actually under arms a number
as great as that, and inexhaustible reserves upon which to draw. A quarter
of a million stood ready in the Netherlands, another quarter of a million
could march from Austria to cross the Rhine. North Italy had actually
present against him 70,000 men; and Russia, which had a similarly active
and ready force of 170,000, could increase that host almost indefinitely
from her enormous body of population.
But, so far from 800,000 men, Napoleon found to his command not one
quarter of that number armed and ready for war. Though Napoleon fell back
upon that desperate resource of a starved army, the inclusion of militia;
though he swept into his net the whole youth of that year, and accepted
conscripts almost without regard to physical capacity; though he went so
far as to put the sailors upon shore to help him in his effort, and
counted in his effectives the police, the customs officials, and, as one
may say, every uniformed man, he was compelled, even after two and a half
months of effort, to consider his ready force as less than 300,000, indeed
only just over 290,000.
There was behind this, it is true, a reserve of irregulars such as I have
described, but the spirit furnishing those irregulars was uncertain, and
the yield of them patchy and heterogeneous. Perhaps a quarter of the
country responded readily to the appeal which was to call up a national
militia. But even upon the eve of the Waterloo campaign there were
departments, such as the Orne, which had not compelled five per cent. of
those called to join the colours, such as the Pas de Calais and the Gers,
which had not furnished eight per cent., and at the very last moment, of
every twenty-five men called, not fifteen had come.
Add to this that Napoleon must strike at once or not at all, and it will
readily be seen how desperate his situation was. His great chiefs of the
higher command were not united in his service, the issue was doubtful, and
to join Napoleon was to be a rebel should he fail,--was to be a rebel,
that is, in case of a very probable event. The marvel is that so many of
the leading men who had anything to lose undertook the chances at all.
Finally, even of the total force available to him at that early moment
when he was compelled to strike, Napoleon could strike with but a
fraction. Less than half of the men available could he gather to deliver
this decisive blow; and that blow, be it remembered, he could deliver at
but one of the various hosts which were preparing to advance against him.
He was thus handicapped by two things: first, the necessity under which he
believed himself to be of leaving considerable numbers to watch the
frontiers. Secondly, and most important, the limitations imposed upon him
by his lack of provision. With every effort, he could not fully arm and
equip and munition a larger force than that which he gathered in early
June for his last desperate throw; and the body upon the immediate and
decisive success of which everything depended numbered but 124,000 men.
With this force Napoleon proceeded to attack the Allies in the
Netherlands. _There_ was a belt of French-speaking population. _There_ was
that body of the Allies which lay nearest to his hand, and over which, if
he were but victorious, his victory would have its fullest effect. _There_
were the troops under Wellington, a defeat of which would mean the cutting
off of England, the financier of the Allies, from the Continent. _There_
was present a population many elements of which sympathised with him and
with the French revolutionary effort. Finally, the allied force in Belgium
was the least homogeneous of the forces with which he would have to deal
in the long succession of struggle from which even a success at this
moment would not spare him.
From all these causes combined, and for the further reason that Paris was
most immediately threatened from this nei...
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