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    Zack White
    Jun 05, 2020

    Could Napoleon have won at Waterloo?

    in Waterloo Remembered

    Here's a fun question to kick off the discussion for #WaterlooRemembered. Was Waterloo actually a battle Napoleon could have won? As we deliberately have to indulge in counterfactuals here, we have to be careful, but it might be interesting for people to share their thoughts on what would have had to have been different for Napoleon to win the battle. I'll keep quiet with my thoughts initially, but remember to tune in to the Napoleonicist each day, as the turning points of the campaign is one of many topics I am discussing with experts over the course of the Waterloo Remembered series.

    91 comments
    91 Comments

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    Charles Esdaile
    Jun 07, 2020

    In my view, the performance of the Guard was pretty mixed at Waterloo: the Young Guard did very well at Plancenoit while the last attack was clearly pressed home with enormous courage. However, the last stand of the Old Guard was a non-event: the three battalions concerned stood firm for only a short time before retiring from the field.

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    Andrew Field
    Jun 07, 2020
    Replying to

    @Hans - Karl Weiß I apologise, I do seem to have made myself clear; I meant that one of the squares of the Old Guard was charged by British cavalry (18th Hussars) during the ‘last stand’ and the cavalry were given a bloody repulse; I believe one of their squadron commanders was killed. The lesson was, not everyone had given up the fight.


    I have all the references you supply. Not many people know that Mauduit, although a sergeant in the 2nd Battalion 1st Regiment of Grenadiers, was only 21 at Waterloo. He had joined the Gardes d’Honneur (cavalry) in 1813 and only transferred into the Guard after Napoleon’s first abdication. He had had no campaign experience in the infantry, let alone the Guard, before the Waterloo campaign.


    I applaud the excellent work that Paul Dawson has done in the French archives, but I don’t agree with all his interpretations of the data he has amassed. I would love to know when the casualty returns that he presents in ‘The Truth at Last’ were taken. This is a fundamental requirement for interpreting them and even without this information it is clear that there are some fundamental issues with what they tell us. Sometimes the officer casualties from Martinien (a list of officer casualties of the French army across the whole of the Napoleonic wars) exceed the unit returns presented by Paul and some of the returns for killed are frankly unbelievable. Now I’m not suggesting that large numbers of the Guard were not captured or did not surrender (a less than subtle difference between the two), just that we should be wary of how we interpret them.

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    Hans - Karl Weiß
    Jun 07, 2020
    Replying to

    @Andrew Field



    I applaud the excellent work that Paul Dawson has done in the French  archives, but I don’t agree with all his interpretations of the data he  has amassed.

    I totally agree, I miss with a lot of works by Paul, just a good discussion with open minds, and yes Mauduit is a classical example how much the Guard could be watered down, a sergent in the 1er Régiment Grenadiers à Pied - with that limited experience.



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    Charles Esdaile
    Jun 09, 2020
    Replying to

    Just a line to say that I completely agree with the criticism of Mauduit. Those passages which reflect the fellow's own experiences are interesting enough, but a great deal of his account of the last hours of the battle is frankly fictionalised. As for Paul Dawson's work, this has as many flaws as anybody else's (even mine!), but the general picture he paints is very plausible: indeed, in so far as the battalion in which Mauduit was serving is concerned, it is pretty much confirmed by what the latter says in his book.

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    Andrew Field
    Jun 06, 2020

    David: your points are interesting and could provoke hours of discussion; there is also the prospect that we are moving away from the question.


    I have been taking a more detailed look at Wellington’s allies recently; a fascinating subject. After Waterloo many British eye-witnesses damned them as cowards; the Belgians came in for more than their share of abuse. More recently, attitudes seem to have swung to the other extreme and many are extolling their virtues. The truth probably falls somewhere in between.


    As you point out, many of the cadres were good and experienced, but the soldiers were young and very inexperienced. I read somewhere that most of the Nassau soldiers had only been in uniform for five weeks; the 1st Regiment were unable to deploy into line or square and stood most of the day in closed column and were shot down by French artillery. They stood against the French cavalry charges in closed column. Their attempt to advance to silence some French guns resulted in two companies being slaughtered by cuirassiers. As far as the fighting was concerned, they contributed virtually nothing.


    There is a difference between courage and military effectiveness as I know you are aware; I’m sure every unit on the battlefield saw examples of individual bravery, but that does not reflect the effectiveness of the unit.


    That the French army was brittle was proven on the day, but don’t forget their performance at Ligny against a much larger Prussian army if you doubt their fighting ability. I think Paul Dawson has pretty much concluded that three quarters of the infantry had only been in the army since 1813, but at least they had fought in that campaign and through the terrible conditions of 1814.


    I’m surprised at your dismissal of élite troops; the Guard of 1815 was not the Guard of many previous years and its performance at Waterloo reflected this. However, there are too many examples when the Guard of previous years performed marvels against very experienced troops, even in 1814. The brittleness of the 3rd and 4th Regiments at Waterloo merely reflected the problems of the whole army and the most senior regiments generally held well as the army collapsed around them and they faced a wall of advancing victorious infantry and cavalry.

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    david Tomlinson
    Jun 06, 2020
    Replying to

    @Andrew Field I think you are right, the pendulum swings left and right on each contingent through the ages. The issue of national bias though is very germain to the question of whether Napoleon could have won. It depends to some extent on your opinion of the ability of the armies to react to an energised Napoleon. Of course, there are differences in unit training, experience and cohesiveness. But so are morale and material. Some of these are attributed to being an ‘elite’ and are seen as being almost permanent. I’m less convinced, but perhaps I have a less romantic soul. In this period training on the march was the norm. Veteran/Elite units could often do lots of things well. They often have more stable orbat. Being a less experienced militia does not mean that you necessarily do everything badly. The Anglo-Allied army was required at Waterloo to fix, and at best limited counter-strike. It therefore needed a limited repertoire, most of which was within the grasp of a landwehr. The French however had the more challenging role, to launch a combined arms attack, and simultaneously block. As to the Nassauers it should be remembered that they had been the ones on point on the 15th. They were required early on the 16th to stand alone. Casualties and fatigue must have had an effect, and they went on to be victims of friendly fire. Yes, the Guard could fight hard, but so could most units. There is some value in the view though that stripping out the cadre of line units did them considerable damage.

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    Andrew Field
    Jun 06, 2020

    Hans-Karl: I agree with much you say, and your previous point about Napoleon, and hence Lobau, not expecting the arrival of the Prussians is an important one. You are also right that Napoleon’s halo and laurels had certainly slipped!! Without going back to re-read Clinton, my impression was that he said the Hanoverians were ‘fine looking men’, but they lacked instruction and important equipment. He was also unimpressed (I believe) with some of the commanding officers and one brigade commander in particular, so it is difficult to be able to measure their potential performance on the battlefield. Not many of the Hanoverian landwehr were involved in the heavy, close fight, so we will never know. And of course, the performance of Wellington’s allies is a different subject and could be discussed for many hours!

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    Michael-Andreas Tänzer
    Jun 07, 2020
    Replying to

    @Hans - Karl Weiß There were some rest copies still available directly from the Bomann-Museum Celle when I asked. For more on the book and how to order see our website: http://www.akhmg.de/HannoverscheMilitaergeschichte/publikationen/waterloo/publikation_waterlooD.htm


    If you cannot get a copy from the museum, please contact me directly.

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    Hans - Karl Weiß
    Jun 07, 2020
    Replying to

    @Michael-Andreas Tänzer


    Thanks, send them an e - mail - let's see.

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    Hans - Karl Weiß
    Jun 08, 2020
    Replying to

    @Michael-Andreas Tänzer


    Ordered it and the museum will send it directly to my address without much bureaucratic fuss. 😀



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    david Tomlinson
    Jun 06, 2020

    @Andrew Field but there wasn’t such a great disparity as it might appear on paper. Yes, the British were not all peninsular hands, and the Brunswick contingent was young and they had just lost their beloved Duke. Many of the Armée du Nord ‘veterans’ though had more years service on paper, but many of them had been in British hulks or holed up in besieged garrisons. Many of the Dutch-Belgian, Nassau and Brunswick officers had considerable experience. Many express concern that this was serving Napoleon, so was less valid in some way. I contend the opposite, they had served in the French army, and they knew that it’s invincibility was a myth. Most memoirs betray a great trust and affection between officers and men. It is worth noting the lack of any notable defections, they all came the other way. I think we underestimate the moral and morale components. Both in the Armée du Nord were fragile. I don’t think we should get too suckered in by the wargamer’s romanticism and dice modifiers. An elite veteran Guard unit (+4) in the presence of a General Officer (+2) was seen off, a company effectively captured en mass as well as said General. This feat was achieved by a fatigued (-2) Landwehr (-4) unit, namely the Osnabrückers. That’s why re-fights almost always end up in a French victory. I remember at the height of the Cold War how the professionals mocked the TA. Later, I also had an MC winner work with me, who was a bus driver from Glasgow. I don’t think the ambushers who ran in to him faired any better because he was “militia’. I really believe this elite/veteran guff is just that, peddled to bolster morale but marginal in effect. If it wasn’t, Isandlwana wouldn’t have been a massacre, Caen would have fallen on 6th June, Saigon would still be the capital of an independent South Vietnam and Operation Eagle Claw would have been a resounding success. They were all conducted by forces who were by most measures superior and extremely confident. I believe Wellington was right when he said most of Napoleon’s enemies were defeated before a shot was fired. Napoleon agreed, the moral is to the physical as three is to one. Hence the fragility when “La Garde recule!”. They got a rather nasty shock when they ran into an enemy that did not flee at the sound of “la Carousel” or the sight of some blue greatcoats and bearskins. I think ultimately the allies won because they thought they could. In an age where the entry level was marching shoulder to shoulder, loading and firing a musket and threatening the enemy with the pointy thing on the end, that counts for a lot. From the playground on up, my experience is that the winner is not necessarily the best fighter, but the one who believes that he can be.

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    david Tomlinson
    Jun 07, 2020
    Replying to

    @Andrew Field Your last paragraph is probably the clue as to the interleaving of nationality and formations. Having been let down by foreign allied armies, it became his usual practice. To be fair, it’s how we integrate reserve units and augmentees today. Also hard to critique too much, as it worked!

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    Charles Esdaile
    Jun 09, 2020
    Replying to

    @Andrew Field Re the foreign contingents, there are two issues to consider, the one military and the other political. In brief, it is perfectly true that many of them lacked experience and training and were actually recently mobilised militia, the result being that at least some of them performed very badly on the battlefield, but the question of political reliability is something else entirely: it simply cannot be stressed too strongly how much Napoleon was hated across le grand Empire by the time he fell in 1814, and, Belgian sulks about being handed over to Holland or, for that matter, Saxon ones about being handed over to Prussia, are neither here nor there - there is no way that anybody was going to rally to Napoleon and no evidence of any serious desertion to his forces. This is not to say that there was much enthusiasm about going to war - for most men, conscription into the forces fighting Napoleon was as hateful as conscription into the ranks of his armies - but this just takes us back to the question of military reliability effectively, whether the men concerned would stick with the colours and do their job if it came to fighting). So, was Wellington right so far as he could to split up the non-British units and mix them in with the redcoats? On military grounds certainly, while such were the general fears that were being expressed that the decision can also be defended on political grounds. However, the fact that he did so does not mean that the danger of defection was in any sense a real one.

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    Andrew Field
    Jun 09, 2020
    Replying to

    @Charles Esdaile Charles, I agree with almost all you say, but at the end of the day, or should I say on the field of battle, it was military effectiveness that was of overriding importance. I do not believe any one of the foreign contingents was likely to defect, but I do wonder how some of them would have performed toe-to-toe with the French. Reading their eye-witness accounts I get the impression they were generally brave and enthusiastic soldiers, but of course, this is not the same as well-trained, disciplined, experienced and determined soldiers with the morale and cohesion to stick it out to the bitter end. Wellington skilfully organised and deployed his army and with his confidence in the appearance of the Prussians ensured that not many of them had to prove whether they were up to it or not.

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    Andrew Field
    Jun 05, 2020

    Hans-Karl; Lobau, and the Young Guard, and Domon, and Subervie. If they had all been available to attack Wellington the result might well have been very different (and this from a Brit!) .


    The French army certainly wasn't the Grande Armee of 1805-6, but I am still not sure that the Nassau, Brunswick or many of the Hanoverian, landwehr had the training or experience to stop the armee du nord. Given how long many of them had been in uniform, I do not mean any disrespect, but that is my belief.

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    Hans - Karl Weiß
    Jun 06, 2020
    Replying to

    Andrew, I am not denying that there would have been more units for an attack, but Napoleon wouldn't have thrown in all those units at once, he had to run a campaign, he had to keep intact units to preserve his potential for the offensive.

    Boney would have tried to win the battles with minimum cost of engaging units. He was under the illusion to have all the time in the world - the Prussians were beaten and why should he haste and waste men for a certain victory, only to achieve it 2 hours earlier?

    This was the crucial mistake - which of course he successfully covered up as being a master liar - for ages.

    In case he had known the Prussians would appear in his rear and right flank - already at the morning of the 18th - and in case he would have known at the eve of the 17th that Wellington would made a stand, he would have managed the battle differently, but in what way?

    So best for him would have been, being ignorant that the Prussians would arrive late on the 18th and Wellington would make a stand.

    But Boney had lost his wits - it should have rung loud alarm bells - that Wellington made a stand with his motley army - at the 18th of June.

    But let's speculate, Boney is pushing back Wellington's army, but then the Prussians would arrive even more in the rear and flank and could attack to devastating effect and roll up the whole French army, a lot more units would have been already used up against Wellington's army.

    In case Boney attacks at 09:00 - Wellinton is concentrating all this army and calls in the not so small detachments - what then?

    By the way Clinton was quite fond of the Hanoverians and regarded them as one of the best troops Wellington had at hand, his reports are quite revealing.



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    Andrew Field
    Jun 05, 2020

    Hans-Karl; I agree that Wellington was a flexible commander, but his army did not have sufficient dependable troops to have won if Napoleon hadn't been forced to detach so many to confront the Prussians.

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    Hans - Karl Weiß
    Jun 05, 2020
    Replying to

    Andrew, I don't see Wellington's Army so badly, neither Boney's so heroically - we cannot know how Wellington would have reacted - moreover, Boney had at least 5 to 6 hours to achieve a brake through - which he didn't - before the Prussians interfered in force.


    But I agree Lobau attacking Wellington instead of being stopped in his tracks by the Prussians would have caused a dire situation for Wellington.

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    Andrew Field
    Jun 05, 2020

    Hans-Karl, I believe he could not start before he did because his whole army was not in position. But as we are speaking hypothetically I feel that if he had been ready to attack at 9am he had the time and the troops to beat Wellington before the Prussians arrived. No doubt the Prussians would have beaten Grouchy if he was alone, but with a victorious, if exhausted, French army in front and Grouchy coming up behind, they would have been in a tricky situation.

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    Hans - Karl Weiß
    Jun 05, 2020
    Replying to

    I agree, in case he would have started at 09:00 - his chances to beat Wellington's army would have been greater, the later he starts the more his chances dwindle, still one would have to take into account Wellington's flexible responds.

    I agree also that his army wasn't in position.

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    Hans - Karl Weiß
    Jun 05, 2020

    But Boney couldn't start the battle at 09:00 because he did not reckon that Wellington did accept battle, he had no plan, nothing, he had to pull it out of his sleeve, therefore the delay.


    The Prussians would have crushed Grouchy 😉 - maybe.

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    Andrew Field
    Jun 05, 2020