AAR
Napoleons Last Gamble
Quatre Bras battle
A DISASTROUS DAY
Historical Background
The real Quatre Bras ran almost opposite to the way our table did. Where our French pressed too hard and lost their corps at nightfall, the historical Marshal Ney is faulted for the reverse — hesitation, piecemeal commitment, and a fatal slowness off the mark. The account below follows David Chandler’s The Campaigns of Napoleon, the standard history, supplemented where noted.
The Strategic Situation
Napoleon escaped Elba in March 1815, and by mid-June his Army of the North some 130,000 men had crossed into Belgium. Against him stood two separate Allied armies: Wellington’s Anglo-Dutch-German force and Blücher’s Prussians. The whole French plan rested on keeping them apart in classical Bonaparte style; beat Blücher in the east at Ligny while Ney, commanding the left wing, blocked Wellington from marching to his aid. The two battles of 16 June were fought a few miles apart and decided one another.
Why the Crossroads Mattered
Quatre Bras-2016
Quatre Bras was a farm hamlet about ten miles north of Charleroi, astride the junction of the Brussels road and the Nivelles–Namur highway. That lateral road was Wellington’s only direct route to reinforce Blücher. Hold the crossroads and the two Allied armies could cooperate; take it, and Napoleon could destroy each in turn.
The Forces — A Race Ney Lost
Chandler’s figures show how badly the French wasted their advantage. At 2 p.m. the Allies had only 8,000 men and 16 guns at the crossroads, while Reille’s corps alone numbered about 20,000 troops and nearly 60 guns, with d’Erlon’s 20,000 coming up behind. For much of the afternoon a force of just 7,800 infantry, 50 cavalry and 16 guns held off 19,000 veteran French infantry, 3,000 cavalry and 60 guns. But Wellington’s strength climbed all day — roughly 17,000 by 3 p.m., then 21,000, then 26,000, and finally 36,000 men and 70 guns by evening. The battle was, in effect, a race against time — and Ney lost it before noon. In Ney’s defense, he had just been given this command late the night prior. He had no time to assess readiness, capability or meet his Generals. Plus, we know Ney had fought Wellington in Spain, and seen how devious he was at close range.
The Battle, 16 June 1815
Reille opened the attack only after 2 p.m. and moved with extreme caution a Peninsular veteran, he feared blundering into one of Wellington’s hidden “Spanish battles,” and the head-high corn hid the enemy’s true weakness. Step by cautious step the French rolled forward: Bachelu took Piraumont, Foy took Gemioncourt, and Prince Jerome’s fresh division cleared Pierrepoint and fought into the Bois de Bossu. Just as Perponcher’s line was cracking, the first Allied reinforcements arrived — van Merlen’s cavalry, then Picton’s division — and the crisis passed.
About 4:15 p.m. French lancers caught and mauled Kempt’s brigade before it could fully form square. Then came the day’s most famous charge: Kellermann’s cuirassiers, sent in at 5 p.m., caught the 69th Foot in line (the Prince of Orange had countermanded its colonel’s order to form square), broke it, took the King’s colour, and rode clean to the crossroads — only to be destroyed by a concealed King’s German Legion battery and the volleys of the 30th and 73rd, because Ney had failed to support them with infantry. By 6:30 p.m. Wellington, now 36,000 strong, counterattacked all along the line. By nine o’clock the Allies had retaken nearly all of Perponcher’s original ground. The day ended a draw.
The Missing Corps: d’Erlon
The great might-have-been was d’Erlon’s I Corps — 20,000 men and 50 guns. Diverted toward Ligny by an order carried in the Emperor’s name, then recalled toward Quatre Bras by Ney, it spent the entire afternoon marching and countermarching between the two battlefields and fought at neither, arriving at Quatre Bras only around 9 p.m. when all was decided. Chandler’s judgement is blunt: thrown into either field, those men “would have resulted in a major French victory.”
Where Ney Went Wrong
Chandler’s verdict: “Ney’s mistakes are largely to blame.”
First — the wasted morning. Ney issued no orders at all until 11 a.m., and Reille did not march until 11:45. “Six precious hours were allowed to slip past” when, in Chandler’s words, “indubitable victory was within his grasp.” Failing to ready Reille’s attack or bring d’Erlon up he calls “pure negligence.”
Second — he never grasped his role had become secondary. Until 6:30 p.m. Ney did not realise that releasing d’Erlon to clinch the victory over Blücher at Ligny was now his most important task. A confusion deepened when a flustered aide forgot to hand over Napoleon’s 3:15 p.m. dispatch.
Third — the d’Erlon fiasco (which Chandler stresses was “in no way Ney’s fault”): the corps was diverted, recalled, and wasted between the two fields.
And late in the day, his judgment slipped. He flung Kellermann’s lone cuirassier brigade in unsupported — “The fate of France is in your hands” — then “forgot his true position… and plunged into the fighting like a grenadier,” so that “control of the overall French battle inevitably collapsed.”
From History to My Table
Here is the irony our game turns on. The historical Ney lost Quatre Bras by doing too little — dithering all morning, feeding his attacks in piecemeal, never massing his strength while the crossroads lay open. Our French lost it by the opposite fault! Pressing relentlessly into the evening at poor odds with no reserve in hand, until exhaustion at nightfall handed Wellington the counterstroke that gutted II Corps. Both failures break the same two maxims of Napoleon’s own: “collect your whole force — a single battalion sometimes decides the day” (the d’Erlon lesson), and never commit your reserves “except in the last extremity, and even then… preserve some support behind which the broken corps may rally.” One crossroads; two ways to lose it.
Sources
Principally David Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon (the definitive scholarly account). Supplemented by the Warfare History Network article “Battle of Quatre Bras: First Blood at Waterloo” and the napoleonistyka battle account. Casualty figures converge across all three — roughly 4,000–4,140 French and about 4,800 Allied (including some 2,400 British) killed and wounded. Napoleonic doctrine quoted from Chandler’s edition of The Military Maxims of Napoleon.