Read Online How the French Won Waterloo (or Think They Did) by Stephen Clarke - Free Book Online

says that ‘if it hadn’t rained on the night of 17-18 June, the future of Europe would have been different. A few raindrops more or less felled Napoleon.’
    Dominique de Villepin backs this up, saying that ‘when men didn’t compromise his [Napoleon’s] battle plans, the elements did’. Villepin, like other Bonapartist historians, quotes
Grande Armée
veterans complaining about the atrocious weather. One of these is the chief of staff to General Maximilien Foy, an officer called Marie Jean Baptiste Lemonnier-Delafosse (though for obvious reasons the ‘Marie’ is usually omitted when discussing his military career). Captain Lemonnier-Delafosse, like so many Waterloo veterans, wrote his memoirs, in which he was scathing about the conditions of Belgium’s roads in the wet.
    After beating the Prussians at Ligny, Lemonnier-Delafosse notes, Napoleon wanted to regroup his armies and send all his men against Wellington, who was retreating towards Waterloo. But ‘the road was a veritable river … already full of potholes thanks to the English army that we were following. Infantry, cavalry, artillery, etc., all on the same road, leaving those at the back in the most terrible mud.’ As other armies have found out since, Flanders can play havoc with military footwear.
    Lemonnier-Delafosse goes on to complain about the drenching he got in the hours that followed: ‘The night of the 17th to the 18th June seemed to foreshadow the misfortunes of the day. An uninterrupted violent downpour meant that the army could not enjoy a single minute of rest. To make things even worse, the bad roads hindered the delivery of supplies, and most of the men – both common soldiers and officers – were deprived of food.’
    As we all know, the Almighty can inflict no worse hardship on humankind than to deprive a Frenchman of his dinner, but Lemonnier-Delafosse seems to have had faith in a higher power – Napoleon: ‘As dawn broke, catching sight of the Emperor, [the men] called out to him, announcing that they were ready to rise to another victory.’ The trouble was, though, that the heaven-sent deluge had clearly put victory out of even Napoleon’s reach. The mud made all manoeuvres impossible, and Lemonnier-Delafosse concludes that ‘If the Emperor had been able to start the battle at five in the morning, by mid-day Lord Wellington would have been beaten.’ fn3
    Sergeant Hippolyte de Mauduit told a similar story: ‘While marching backwards and forwards during that terrible night, everything was confusion … We searched in vain for our generals and our officers in the darkness and pounding rain. We had to climb through hedges and across ravines … Our overcoats and trousers were dragging two or three pounds of mud; many men had lost their boots and arrived at the bivouac with bare feet.’
    Thousands of French soldiers were forced to sleep out in the open. Lieutenant Jacques-François Martin painted a surprisingly humorous picture of what must have been a hellish night for him: ‘It was as black as the inside of an oven, the rain was falling in torrents, and, to make us even happier, the regiment was posted in a ploughed field that had become totally flooded. And it was here that we were supposed to get some sweet repose. No wood, no straw, no food, and no way of getting any. But at least we couldn’t complain about the bed. No one could say it was hard. As soon as we lay down, we sank softly into the mud … It was a little chilly, but we had the satisfaction of knowing that every time we turned over, the rain would wash the side of our uniform that had been lying in the mud.’
    Captain Pierre-Charles Duthilt, a battalion leader, was on the right flank of Napoleon’s army, near a coal mine, and had similar problems. He remembered that the road was ‘covered by black mud that had been diluted and turned into ink. It made our cavalry unrecognisable. The uniforms, the men and the horses were stained from head to foot, just a mass