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The Failure of the French Reserve Cavalry at Waterloo

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The Failure of the French Reserve Cavalry at Waterloo The Napoleon Series ‘Too soon by an hour’: The failure of the French Reserve Cavalry at Waterloo By Stephen Millar Many nineteenth-century sources cited below use archaic or unfamiliar forms of English. Therefore, in order to clarify several passages, a small degree of editing was required. Main ideas, however, remain intact. “The spectacle was imposing, and if ever the word sublime was appropriately applied, it might surely be to it. On they came in compact squadrons, one behind the other, so numerous that those in the rear were still below the brow when the head of the column was but at some sixty or seventy yards from our guns. Their pace was a slow but steady trot. None of your furious galloping charges was this, but a deliberate advance, at a deliberate pace, as of men resolved to carry their point. They moved in profound silence, and the only sound that could be heard from them amidst the incessant roar of battle was the low thunder-like reverberation of the ground beneath the simultaneous tread of so many horses.”1 “As they ascended the ridge, the French artillery suspended their fire, and the Allied batteries commenced pouring a destructive shower of grapeshot amidst their devoted ranks. Fiercely and fatally did this iron hail rattle against the helmed and steel-clad cuirassiers, here glancing off, there penetrating the armour; wounding or laying prostrate many a gallant warrior at the very moment when the brightest visions of glory had opened on his ardent imagination. This iron sleet, however, caused no perceptible check to their progress; and, with shouts of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ they accelerated their pace until, having arrived within about forty yards of the guns, they received the last and well-prepared discharge. Its effects were terrific; but though their order was somewhat broken, their courage was not shaken. The charge was sounded, a cheer followed, and, in the next instant, they rushed up to the very cannon’s mouth.”2 There were moments of supreme crisis during the Napoleonic Wars when the Emperor’s Reserve Cavalry – his massed regiments of cuirassiers, dragoons and carabiniers – had to be thrown into battle. One of these desperate moments came on 8 February 1807 during a snowstorm in East Prussia; led by Marshal Joachim Murat, the regiments of the Reserve Cavalry charged in a ‘death or glory’ attack to cover the shattered French centre at the bloody Battle of Preussisch-Eylau. Another crisis came on 7 September 1812 at the sprawling Battle of Borodino. There, on the road to 1 Mercer, General Cavalie. Journal of the Waterloo Campaign kept throughout the Campaign of 1815, Volume 1. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1870. 319. 2 Siborne, William. The Waterloo Campaign, 1815. Birmingham, 1894. 444. Moscow, II, III and IV Reserve Cavalry Corps charged in support of the final French infantry assault on the Russians’ Great Redoubt. The attack succeeded, but at a fearful cost on both sides. But the most celebrated Reserve Cavalry charge of them all occurred in the late afternoon of 18 June 1815 at the Battle of Waterloo – the single most crucial day of the entire Napoleonic Wars. This attack, which began as the result of Marshal Michel Ney’s tactical confusion, eventually grew into a series of massed charges which, for two hours, battered the already-weary Allied infantry regiments. But by 6pm, the Emperor’s heavy cavalry regiments had been decisively defeated; in another two hours, the battle – and the First Empire -- was lost. In the aftermath of Waterloo, these great attacks have been described as being completely void of any military merit; glorious, but futile, manoeuvers which only helped Ney and Emperor Napoleon to lose this crucial battle: “A more inconsiderate and reckless purpose has seldom been formed in the annals of war; it was, we repeat, a violation of positive orders; it was the third great error of the tactics of the French at Waterloo. The attack, as it was to be conducted, was to be made by horsemen, exposed on a considerable space to the destructive fire of the Allied guns; it was to be made without the support of infantry in force. It was to be made, too, against Wellington`s right centre, exactly where his line was strong, and could be easily reinforced; for at this point, the crossroad from Ohain to Braine l’Alleud did not present the obstacles which had proved so fatal to the luckless cuirassiers a few hours before; and it was to be made against masses of infantry still unbroken, capable of being greatly increased in numbers, and in a large part, at least, composed of men of proved constancy and worth. No wonder that experienced British officers, as they saw the preparations being made for this waste of military strength, felt that the effort was premature, and was doomed to failure.”3 Given the confusion of the battle, it is not completely clear how many individual charges the Reserve Cavalry made between 4 and 6 pm – Houssaye says four charges,4 while French historian Louis-Adolphe Thiers says Ney led 11 charges of 10,000 cavalrymen.5 This later figure is likely an exaggeration, because “…by degrees, every charge became weaker and weaker; the French horsemen, their battle steeds exhausted, their officers having fallen in scores, slowly losing heart, brave men as they were, began to feel they could not overcome their enemy.”6 In all, there were probably four main charges: the first and second charges undertaken by Milhaud’s IV Cavalry Corps and Lefebvre- 3 Morris, William O’Connor. The Campaign of Waterloo: Ligny, Quatre-Bras, Waterloo. London: Grant Richards; New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1900. 257-8. 4 Houssaye, Henry. 1815: Waterloo. Trans. S.R. Willis. Kansas City: Franklin Hudson Publishing Company, 1905. 197. 5 Thiers, Louis Adolphe. History of the Consulate and the Empire of France under Napoleon, Volume 12. Trans. D. Forbes Campbell and John Stubbing. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Company; London: Chatto and Windus, 1894. 125. 6 Morris: 269. Desnoettes’ Guard Light Cavalry Division; Kellermann’s III Cavalry Corps and Guyot’s Guard Heavy Cavalry Division reinforced the third and fourth charges. ‘On the spur of the moment’ By 4 pm on June 18, French efforts against Wellington’s Allied army had ground to a halt. General de Division (GdD) Jean-Baptiste Drouet, Count d’Erlon had failed with his great infantry assault in the early afternoon; both Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte stubbornly remained unconquered. The French artillery, however, continued its ceaseless bombardment against the Allied lines: the 80 guns of Napoleon’s Great Battery (the reserve artillery of I, II and IV Corps) continued to hammer the centre of Wellington’s position. It was through this dense cloud of smoke – and the additional smoke from the opposing Allied batteries – that Ney, the Emperor’s tactical commander, thought he had seen the turning-point of the battle. In one of the great miscalculations of military history, Ney thought he saw the beginning of Wellington’s retreat. His confusion was the initial spark which would eventually lead to the destruction the Emperor’s Reserve Cavalry: “Wellington had, we have seen, withdrawn a considerable part of his army behind the ridge to escape the effects of the tremendous cannonade; there were movements of the impedimenta in his rear; some of his auxiliaries were already flying from the field. Ney thought he saw the signs of retreat at hand. On the spur of the moment, without reflection, and in contravention of Napoleon’s commands, he resolved to attack the enemy with a mass of cavalry, and to change a retrograde movement into defeat – nay, rout.”7 Ney’s mistake was easily to make in the smoke; already impetuous by nature, Ney, by late afternoon, was likely suffering from effects of ‘battle fatigue’. While it was true that some British units had performed a limited withdrawal to protect themselves from the French artillery fire, these regiments remained unbroken: “Some battalions of the first English line retrograded a hundred steps in order to shelter themselves behind the crest of the plateau. At the same time, groups of wounded, convoys of prisoners, empty caissons, and crowds of fugitives streamed towards the Forest of Soignes. Ney, who saw with difficulty through the smoke, mistook these movements for the beginning of a retreat, and thought of establishing himself upon the plateau with the cavalry. He summoned immediately a brigade of cuirassiers.”8 Ney sent an aide-de-camp to General de Brigade (GdB) Pierre Farine du Creux, an officer in the 14th Cavalry Division. Farine was told to prepare his brigade, six squadrons of the 5th and 10th Cuirassier Regiments, to charge the ridge in the centre of Wellington’s position. This order had scarcely been issued when GdD Delort – Farine’s 7 Morris: 257. 8 Houssaye: 187-8. immediate superior – halted the cuirassiers’ advance.9 The resulting argument between Ney, Delort and Milhaud eventually dragged the whole of IV Cavalry Corps into Ney’s attack: “The aide-de-camp addressed himself to General Farine, who put his two regiments on the march. But General Delort, commanding the division, arrested the movement. ‘We take orders only from [GdD Edouard-Jean-Baptiste] Count Milhaud’ he said. Ney, impatient, hasted to Delort. The Marshal was greatly irritated by this disobedience. He not only reiterated the orders concerning Farine’s brigade, but he ordered the other six regiments of Milhaud’s corps to advance. Delort having again remonstrated against the imprudence of this manoeuvre upon such unfavourable ground, Ney invoked the instructions of the Emperor.
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