Waterloo and All That

Jun18

On this day of 18 June two hundred years ago men were dying in their thousands in a corner of the one-time French Empire that is now Belgium, near a town named Waterloo. Having escaped Elba, Napoleon had landed in France on 1 March and begun raising new armies to face the Seventh Coalition of Britain, Netherlands, Prussia and several German states. Moving rapidly north, Napoleon drove the Prussians from Charleroi on the Sambre River on 15 March and moved up the Chaleroi-Brussels road, inserting himself between them and the British and their allies. The following day he defeated the Prussians again at Ligny, while fighting a smaller battle at Quatre-Bras just to the west in order to prevent the British from coming to their aid. Instead of fleeing east the Prussians retreated north to Wavre, chased by Marshal Emmanuel de Grouchy, and Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, also moved north to take up defensive positions south of Waterloo. Napoleon met Marshal Michel Ney at Quatre-Bras, and two days later the climactic struggle at Waterloo took place.

Blücher

The Boss

Grouchy

Wellington

Wellington had 68,000 troops and 156 guns present, with 50,000 Prussians under Prince Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher just off to the east. Napoleon brought up 73,000 men and 252 guns, a large proportion of them veterans, whereas many of the best British infantry were still in North America. Wellington established his line, two and a half miles in length, on the reverse slope of an east-east ridge, and in the open ground before him were three strong points that he fortified and garrisoned. On his far right was the sturdy country château of Hougoumont, which could be safely resupplied and reinforced by a sunken road. On the far left was the tiny village of Papelotte, which not only guarded the Allied left flank but covered the road along which Prussian reinforcements would come. In the center, on either side of the road north, was another walled farmhouse, La Haye Sainte, and a sand pit, into which Wellington placed riflemen. His line could not be easily attacked or outflanked unless these points, at least Hougoumont or Papelotte, could be taken.

La Haye Sainte

Hougoumont (rebuilt)

Sometime between 10:30 and 11:30 AM the French artillery opened up, and an infantry attack was launched against Hougoumont. Both Napoleon and Wellington apparently saw the château as the key. The Corsican wanted Wellington to weaken his line feeding in reinforcements, but as it happened the French were also compelled to send in more and more troops. In the afternoon the château was set afire by French artillery hits, but the chapel survived and was held by the British until the battle ended.

d’Erlon

At around 1:00 in the afternoon Napoleon launched an infantry attack at the center of Wellington’s line, sending a division of the I Corps under Jean-Baptiste Drouet, comte d’Erlon, against Le Haye Sainte. The attackers were unable to dislodge the King’s German Legion from the farmhouse, but they surrounded it, and at 1:30 d’Erlon sent his other three divisions against Wellington’s left. The outnumbered Dutch brigades, the focal point of the attack, were reinforced, but by 2:00 the left of the Allied line was giving way. Napoleon was winning.

La Haye Sainte

At this moment Wellington’s cavalry commander, Henry Paget, Earl of Uxbridge, personally led a charge of two brigades of heavy cavalry (2000 horse), including the famous Scotts Greys, through the line at the French infantry. The charge completely disrupted the French assault, but as usual the “charge everything” cavalry went too far and found itself milling around with blown horses in front of the French lines. They suffered heavy casualties, and a counterattack by French cavalry drove them back. Nevertheless, the Allied line had been saved, and d’Erlon’s Corps had suffered immense losses.

William of Orange, Dutch commander

Scotts Greys

Uxbridge

Around 4:00 Ney, who had a much better view of the battlefield than his boss, saw Allied casualties being moved from the center of the battle line and mistakenly assumed the entire army was retreating. In response he launched a massive cavalry charge, some 9000 horse, but lacking available infantry reserves, he led them off alone. The British immediately formed squares, and while they suffered from the distant French artillery, they had no problem fending off the repeated French charges. Wellington had his artillerymen take shelter in the squares, and since the French did not spike the unattended guns, they could dash out and harry the cavalry in between charges. Getting nowhere, Ney brought up what infantry he could, but he could not break the squares. Nevertheless, the French infantry finally took La Haye Sainte because the German Legion had exhausted its ammunition.

British squares

Ney rides.

Ney

For all that Ney’s magnificent charge had failed to break the Allies Wellington was still in trouble. French guns in La Haye Sainte were now taking a heavy toll on his center, and many of the Dutch units were wavering. A number of his officers were now dead, and caught inside one of the squares, he had a very limited appreciation of the big picture. Foremost in his mind: where were the Prussians? “Night or the Prussians must come,” he said.

They were on the way, actually. Blücher had left his III Corps, 17,000 infantry under Johann Adolf Freiherr von Thielmann, in Wavre to hold up Grouchy and marched westward with the other three corps. Grouchy’s original orders, necessarily vague, on 17 June were to pursue and harry the Prussians and generally keep them from joining Wellington, but they beat him to Wavre, from which they could march to support the British and Dutch. Grouchy realized this, and on the morning of the following day he could hear the artillery at Waterloo and was urged by his officers to “march to the sound of the guns.” But there were no roads between his army and the battlefield fourteen miles away, and he decided to continue to Wavre, eight miles distant along a good road, in order to prevent as many Prussians as possible from joining the battle.

Thielmann

Thinking that Grouchy’s force was much smaller, Thielmann was in the process of sending troops west when he realized he was facing an entire corps. He could not recall all of them and thus faced 33,765 French with only 15,200 men when Grouchy attacked around 4:00. The Prussians put up fierce resistance, and while Grouchy took the town and got his army across the Dyle River, it was too late. At 6:00 he received orders, dispatched almost five hours earlier, to come to Napoleon’s aid, but by 11:00 he had only reached Limal, a short distance from Wavre. The Battle of Wavre continued until the next morning, when Grouchy finally learned the result of Waterloo. Thielmann had likely saved the Allied victory.

Meanwhile, back at the main event the long-awaited Prussians were arriving. By 4:30 IV Corps under Friedrich Wilhelm Freiherr von Bülow was emerging from the Bois de Paris and threatening the French right flank. Units took positions on the Frichemont heights to protect Papelotte and the Allied left, and Bülow began approaching Plancenoit, from which village he could attack the French flank and rear. Napoleon sent VI Corps under Georges Mouton, comte de Lobau to meet him, and a fierce battle for Plancenoit developed, compelling him to reinforce Lobau with eight brigades of the Young Guard and two of the Middle/Old Guard. To the north Hans Ernst Karl, Graf von Zieten’s I Corps was pushing the French back from Papelotte and shoring up Wellington’s left flank, allowing him to move units to his critical center.

Bulow

Zieten

Lobau

Napoleon now had to win the battle before the Prussians completely turned the tide. At 7:30 he tapped his last reserves and sent five battalions of the Middle Guard and three of the Old Guard at Wellington’s weakened center, hoping to break through and roll up the line. Ney led the charge, but smashed into the right-center, which was marginally stronger, and after an epic battle the hitherto undefeated Imperial Guard was thrown back. Wellington ordered a general advance, and the entire army began pursuing the retreating French. The surviving Guard rallied for a last stand near La Haye Sainte, but were rapidly overwhelmed and retreated further south, during which move they were asked to surrender and of course refused. Legend has it that their commander, Count Etienne Cambronne, replied “La Garde meurt, elle ne se rend pas!” – “The Guard dies, it does not surrender!” Heroic, but many believe he instead gave a pithy one word answer: “Merde!”

The Old Guard

Cambronne

“Merde!”

The battle and Napoleon’s career were over. The Hundred Days and Waterloo seize the imagination, but this bit of imperial self-indulgence did not come cheap. At Waterloo alone the French suffered some 25,000 killed and wounded, the Allies 22,000; almost 20,000 combatants went missing. It was glorious, but only from a distance – the screams of the wounded and the sight and smell of thousands of dead men and horses could only move a normal person to disgust.

Did this guy survive?

Still, who could resist heroic anecdotes such as the defiance of the Imperial Guard? Or consider the story of Uxbridge’s leg. Late in the day the cavalry commander was on his horse next to Wellington when a cannonball hit his leg. He is believed to have exclaimed “My god, sir, my leg is off!” to which Wellington replied “My god, sir, it is!” He survived the amputation of his lower right leg (!), commenting that a victory like Waterloo was worth a leg. Less well known is the fact that the leg, which was buried in the garden of the farmhouse where it was amputated, was later disinterred by the owner and put on display as a tourist attraction.

And if Napoleon had won at Waterloo? It is difficult to believe history would be significantly different, since the British, Dutch and Germans would simply form another coalition, and France, exhausted by thirteen years of warfare, would have trouble just collecting enough warm bodies.

It might be said the defeat of Napoleon was a defeat for progressivism and a victory for regressive royalty. There is some to truth to this, but the fact is that royalty was already doomed, and while Revolutionary France was culturally a harbinger of the future, so was Napoleon’s dictatorship, which might strike one as a bit less than progressive.

Reports from the Front #1: the West – August 1914 to May 1915

May23

(OK, it took me a long time to get around to this. In any case, this is the first of a series of pieces following the course of the Great War as it happened a century ago – assuming I live another four years. I should have begun this last July, but the idea only now occurred to me, and consequently this first two articles carry the war up through May 1915. Note: “Casualties” includes dead, wounded, missing and captured, and “dead” typically includes accidental and disease related deaths. Military deaths through disease may have been a third of the total, but that is partly due to the influenza pandemic of 1918-1920, and in earlier European warfare disease inevitably accounted for the vast majority of deaths. The ratio of dead to wounded would have varied dramatically from one theater to another but it appears 1-2 to 1-3 was the average for the war. The official figures are not always accurate, and accounting varied; e.g., British figures did not include colonial troops.)

One hundred years and 296 days ago the Great War began when on 1 August Germany declared war on Russia because the Czar, who had pledged to defend Serbia against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, refused to cease mobilizing his army. On 2 August the Germans invaded Luxemburg and the next day declared war on France, which had refused to declare neutrality and was also mobilizing. On 4 August the Germans also declared war on Belgium, which had denied them passage through its territory, and in response Great Britain joined the Entente and entered the war against the Central Powers. Train schedules, lust for glory and willful stupidity had brought the European great powers to the brink of the abyss, into which they all leaped with no little enthusiasm.

Russian Czar Nicholas II

Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph

German Kaiser Wilhelm II

The greatest cataclysm in European history since the barbarian invasions of the fifth century had begun, all because a Serbian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, took it upon himself to shoot the heir to the Austrian throne and provide the Austrians with an excuse to make impossible demands of Serbia. Certainly the fate of Serbia was of some importance to the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, but the partition of the Balkans was a peripheral concern for Britain, France and Germany. Yet all these powers, little understanding how industry and technology had changed the nature of warfare, jumped eagerly into a conflict that would slaughter millions upon millions of young men, destroy three dynasties and exhaust the economies of even the victors. To what end? A peace that would lead in two decades to an even greater catastrophe.

French PM Rene Viviani

British PM Herbert Asquith

Serbian Assassin Gavrilo Princip

“Paris/Berlin by Christmas” was the cry, as both sides expected a short war. The German plan was to seek a decisive victory in the west while much smaller forces in the east were on the defensive before the notoriously cumbersome Russian army and the Austrians were crushing tiny Serbia. Helmuth von Moltke, the Chief of the German General Staff, intended to employ a variation of the so-called Schlieffen Plan, which in fact was a thought exercise for a single-front war with France. Weak German forces in the south would remain on the defensive and even retreat, while the immensely powerful right wing in the north would sweep through Belgium and the Netherlands and then turn southwards west of Paris, trapping the French armies. Whether the Schlieffen Plan could have worked is certainly debatable (the problem was not so much German transport capabilities as the state of Europe’s roads), but inasmuch as this was a two-front war and sufficient forces had to be sent east, the western army was simply not strong enough to carry out the aggressive strategy.

Helmuth von Moltke

The Germans swept through Belgium and northeastern France, generally overwhelming the opposing forces, but in September the exhausted troops were stopped some 40 miles from Paris at the First Battle of the Marne. Repulsed by the French under Joseph “Papa” Joffre and the British (BEF) under Sir John French, the Germans withdrew north of the Aisne River, and both sides then stretched their lines northwards, establishing a fortified line that ran 460 miles from the North Sea to the Swiss frontier. The essentially static Western Front was now in place.

Sir John French

Joseph Joffre

Western Front 1915

Meanwhile, the offensive-minded French, whose basic war aim was to avenge their defeat in 1871 and recover Alsace-Lorraine, promptly invaded those provinces, but the advance was soon thrown back with immense casualties, as generals learned – not very well, it seems – what happened when masses of infantry assaulted fortified positions. In just two months the French had suffered 360,000 casualties, the Germans 241,000; by way of comparison the Roman Empire at its greatest extent (early second century) was secured by perhaps 250,000 troops.

1914 ended with complete stalemate in the west. Unwilling to change their tactics, both the Allies and the Germans would continue to throw men into the meat grinder of fruitless assaults, looking for the elusive breakthrough that would end the war. But at Christmas a startling event had taken place. During the unofficial truce soldiers on both sides began entering no-man’s land and fraternizing with one another, singing carols, swapping souvenirs and drink and playing football. There could be no greater evidence that the men actually fighting the war bore one another no particular grudge, at least at this early stage of the war. This was of course anathema to the generals and politicians of both sides, who quickly put an end to such unpatriotic behavior.

Christmas Truce

Joffre’s strategic plan for 1915 was to pinch off the Noyon (near Compiègne) salient, a huge westward bulge marking the limit of the German advance, by attacking its flanks. As part of this on 10 March the British, who occupied the far northern section of the trench line, launched an attack on Neuve Chapelle. They achieved a tactical breakthrough, but the Germans counterattacked the next day, and though fighting continued, the offensive was abandoned on 15 March with no significant changes in the line. General French blamed the failure on insufficient supplies of shells, which led to the Shell Crisis of May and the creation of a Ministry of Munitions that could feed the growing mania of all the belligerents for artillery barrages. Although this was a very minor operation, the British (including Indians) and Germans lost over 20,000 killed, wounded, missing and captured.

On 22 April the Germans took their shot, initiating a series of battles that would be known as the Second Battle of Ypres (or “Wipers,” as the British troops called it). The First Battle of Ypres had taken place from 19 October to 22 November of the previous year and while indecisive had resulted in more than 300,000 combined casualties, leading Erich von Falkenhayn, who had succeeded Moltke as Chief of Staff, to conclude the war could not be won. Unfortunately, when on 18 November he proposed seeking a negotiated settlement, he was opposed by Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg and his Chief of Staff Erich Ludendorff and Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, condemning millions to die in the next five years.

Erich Ludendorff

Erich von Falkenhayn

Paul von Hindenburg

This time around the Germans began their offensive – after the inevitable artillery barrage – with poison gas (chlorine), the first use of this new technology on the Western Front. The surprise and shock opened a gap in the British line, which the Germans, themselves surprised, were unable to exploit, and soon the development of gas masks rendered the new weapon far less effective. The main struggle for the Ypres salient would go on until 25 May, by which time the Germans had pushed less than three miles westward. It cost them 35,000 casualties, but the Allies suffered twice as much. And Ypres was destroyed.

Ypres

Second Battle of Ypres

Meanwhile, on 9 May some 30 miles to the south in the Arras sector the French 10^th Army launched an offensive against the Vimy salient, attacking Vimy ridge, while the BEF attacked a dozen miles to the north at Aubers. This was the Second Battle of Artois and would last until 18 June. Joffre’s strategic goal was to cut a number of vital German rail lines, which would require an advance of ten or more miles beyond Vimy Ridge, something that might have struck a competent general as highly unlikely, given the experience of the last nine months. And sure enough, the initial attack took Vimy Ridge, but lost it to a German counterattack, and a month later when the battle ended, the French line had moved less than two miles eastward. The initial British assault was a disaster, allowing the Germans to send troops south, and in the end the Tommies had gained almost two miles. The cost? Officially, 32,000 British casualties, 73,000 German and 102,500 French. During the offensive the French alone had fired 2,155,862 artillery shells.

See a trend in these battles? If the generals did, their response was simply more of the same, producing even more casualties as defensive measures became more elaborate. A continuous line from the sea to Switzerland, the western front offered no possibility of outflanking the enemy, and the weaponry of the time – machine guns, rapid fire artillery, mortars – made frontal infantry assaults very costly, if not suicidal. Inasmuch as the breakthrough weaponry – tanks, motorized infantry and artillery and ground support aircraft – did not yet exist, remaining on the defense and negotiating or at least awaiting developments on other fronts seemed the reasonable course of action. But with Germany holding almost all of Belgium and a huge and economically important chunk of France the Allies were not about to bargain from a position of weakness, and the reasonable expectation that the Central Powers would sooner or later crush the Russians and ship more troops west goaded the Entente, especially the French, into offensives.

Already in the spring of 1915 defensive systems and tactics were rapidly improving. A more elastic defense was being adopted: rather than a single heavily fortified line, there would be a series of trench lines (three was a standard number), separated by strong points and barbwire entanglements. This meant the attacker had to cross multiple killing grounds just to get to grips with the enemy, often out of the range of their own guns. The clever response to this by the “chateau generals” was longer periods of artillery bombardment and sending larger numbers of men over the top, approaches that were both ineffective and extremely costly. The storm of shells, besides alerting the enemy to an attack, hardly damaged the wire, and defenders simply took cover in their dugouts, ready to pop out and kill when the shelling stopped. A rolling barrage with the troops following was more effective but very difficult to manage without blowing up your own men. And gas was extremely hard to control and use effectively, which is why it has been so rarely used, even by the seriously nasty creeps who have appeared in the last hundred years.

French trench

British trench

German trench

British-German Trench Lines

Gas attack

Gassed British trench

Australians in gas masks

One final noteworthy event in the west during this period. On 1 April French aviator Roland Garros shot down a German plane. Both sides had been using aircraft for reconnaissance, and in September 1914 a Russian pilot had taken out an Austrian plane by ramming it. Soon pilots and observers were using pistols and rifles, but it was clear that only a machine gun could be at all effective in bringing down another plane. The problem was the propeller. “Pusher” aircraft (the propeller mounted in the rear) were too slow, and placing the gun on the upper wing of a biplane made it very difficult to deal with the frequent jams, as well as producing too much vibration for accurate fire. Garros’ approach was to attach metal plates to the prop in order to deflect rounds that actually hit it, and he shot down three aircraft before the strain placed on the engine by the prop being pummeled by bullets brought his own plane down behind German lines. This crude solution would not work with steel-jacketed German ammunition, and the engineers at Anthony Fokker’s aircraft plant produced a synchronization device that allowed a Maxim machine gun to be mounted directly in front of the pilot and shoot through the prop. On 1 July Kurt Wintgens, flying a Fokker E.I., became the first pilot to score a kill with a synchronized gun. Suddenly the Germans had the first air superiority in history.

Wintgens’ Fokker E.I.

Roland Garros

Anthony Fokker

Je Suis Charlie (Mais Non Est Obama)

Jan14

What is wrong with Barack Obama? On January 11 1.6 million people, including more than forty presidents and prime ministers, gathered in the Place de la République in Paris for a show of solidarity against Islamic terrorism. But unless you recognized the face of the American ambassador in Paris you would search in vain for a representative of the United States among the heads of state marching with linked arms. The American Attorney General happened to be in France, but did not attend the rally.

Surely the American President, the leader of the global anti-terror war, had no business more important (a fund raiser?) than showing his face in Paris. The White House then added another insult by bringing up concerns about the President’s safety (though the Secret Service was never consulted), suggesting that the French security forces are inept, an opinion apparently not shared by the leaders who did show up. Since the President may presumably ignore the concerns of his advisors, Obama ends up looking a bit like a coward or an aloof jerk, especially since the very first national leader to hurry to the US after 9/11 was Jacques Chirac, the President of France.

Je suis Barack

One leader who did show up, apparently against the wishes of the French President, Francois Hollande, was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, prompting Hollande to immediately invite Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority. Netanyahu proceeded to make a fool of himself, waving to the crowd, unlike the others in the somber march, and inviting French Jews to emigrate to Israel, where they would be safe, a completely outrageous statement for a guest of the French to make. Of course, the presence of people like Vladimir Putin and the representative of Saudia Arabia was a study in hypocrisy as they memorialized the Charlie Hebdo journalists, all of whom would be in prison in their countries.

Slaughtering innocents, especially children, is certainly barbaric, but the assault on the writers and cartoonists of Charlie Hebdo was a blow against what I believe to be the most important of our rights, that of free expression. If one cannot say what one pleases, short of creating an immediate physical danger, all other political freedoms become meaningless. Limiting free speech because someone, be it an individual or an entire group of people, may be offended is tantamount to eliminating free speech. Freedom of expression comes with a sometimes onerous responsibility: tolerating the offensive or inane speech of others. “Hate” speech and certainly stupid speech are unfortunately facets of free speech.

Islamic extremism, at least when it targets what it considers offensive expression, might be considered a sort of political correctness gone wild. Instead of facing censure or job loss because of criticism of some group, you now face death threats and violence. There are well meaning-people who believe that if we do not insult these individuals by criticizing or lampooning their bizarre and brutal interpretation of Islam, they will not be moved to such barbarous behavior, a ludicrous idea. And there are far less well-meaning people (see for example the official Turkish press), who suggest this sort of violence is happening because of excessive free speech, implying that the victims at Charlie Hebdo deserved what they got. Well, all governments (and university administrations) are uncomfortable to some degree with real free speech, and it is a never ending struggle to secure our right to say what we will.

Free speech aside, these jihadi scum are reminiscent of a violent group that has actually contributed a common noun to the English language – the Thuggees or Thugs. The Thugs were a criminal/religious association plaguing India since at least the fourteenth century, until they were virtually eliminated by the British in the nineteenth. The Thugs originally traced their roots back to seven Muslim tribes, but their theology was Hindu during their reign of terror. They were essentially a criminal underclass, specializing in strangling and robbing travelers, but they believed themselves (Muslims notwithstanding) to be the children of the violent goddess Kali, consort of Shiva, thus providing a kind of religious justification for their murderous activities. The Thugs were at root thieves, but they inevitably murdered their victims, making them something more than just another robber band. Estimates vary wildly, but the Thugs may have killed as many as two million people during their centuries of terror.

Kali, unofficial deity of Isis

Thugs

And what to do about the wave of Muslim fanaticism that is rolling around the planet? I wish I knew. These deluded jihadists are like the Terminator: they can’t be reasoned with, they can’t be bought off and they can’t be intimidated. The British were able to turn many Thugs by sparing them the death penalty, but how can one do this with someone who believes that getting blown up is a good thing?

Killing them is the only immediate answer, but without an effective army actually engaging ISIS in Syria and Iraq this will be a long and difficult process. Cutting off the supply of new recruits means improving living conditions, including education, for young Muslim men, a tough enough challenge in Europe, especially France, where there is a rising tide of Islamaphobia, and perhaps impossible in the Middle East. Of course, droning innocents in Pakistan and Yemen is not helping the cause, although the ISIS fanatics would likely still be trying to build their caliphate even if the West had no history of colonialism in the Middle East and no war on terror.

Perhaps western leaders need to begin thinking outside the box. Declare that Syria is a province of the Israeli empire and let them take care of the situation. Or make it clear to the jihadists that if captured they will be put in stocks and pelted with pork and forced to listen to historians and theologians explaining Islam to them. Or send in attorneys and administrators to help ISIS construct a true bureaucratic state, in the wake of which they will be unable to get anything done. Just saying.