Battle of Quatre Bras, 1815: holding the crossroads

On 16 June 1815, two days before Waterloo, Napoleon fought two battles at once. With his right wing and the Guard he attacked Blücher's Prussians at Ligny. To the west, his left wing under Marshal Ney was to take Quatre Bras, a crossroads with a farm and a handful of houses, where the main road from Charleroi to Brussels crossed the road that linked Wellington's army to Blücher's.²

Background: the race for the crossroads

Napoleon had returned from Elba in March 1815 and, facing a new coalition, struck first at the two allied armies in Belgium before the Austrians and Russians could arrive. His plan was to drive between Wellington around Brussels and Blücher to the east, with his army in two wings and a reserve.³ › Napoleon Bonaparte

The French crossed the border on 15 June and took Charleroi. That afternoon Marshal Ney, who had only just joined the army, was given the left wing, the I and II Corps with cavalry: about 47,000 men in Tsas's count, 43,000 in Napoleon's own later account as quoted by Ropes. In the evening his advance guard pushed up the Brussels road to Frasnes, where it ran into Dutch-Belgian troops in front of Quatre Bras.⁴

Those troops were there by accident of good judgment. Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar had gathered his brigade of Perponcher's Dutch-Belgian division at the crossroads on the first news of fighting, without orders. Late that night an order from Wellington arrived to concentrate the division at Nivelles, to the west. Perponcher kept the whole division at Quatre Bras instead, backed by his corps commander, the Prince of Orange. Ropes points out that had Wellington's order been obeyed, Ney would have found nobody at the crossroads the next morning; Libert judges that Perponcher's presence undoubtedly saved the day for the allies.⁵

Armies and commanders

Michel Ney was one of the best known of Napoleon's marshals, a marshal since 1804 whom the emperor had called the bravest of the brave after the retreat from Moscow. In 1814 he had sworn loyalty to the restored Bourbon king, and when Napoleon landed in March 1815 he was sent to stop him, but went over to him instead. Britannica notes that he was famous for courage under fire but known as a touchy commander, impulsive to the edge of insubordination when orders did not come from the emperor himself.⁶

Wellington, the victor of the Peninsular War, commanded a mixed army of British, King's German Legion, Hanoverian, Brunswick, Dutch, Belgian and Nassau troops, spread over a wide area of cantonments. Command at the crossroads fell first to the Prince of Orange, a brave young officer whom Ropes rates as having no remarkable abilities.⁷ › The Duke of Wellington

The ground favored the defender who could hide. The field was small. West of the crossroads lay the dense Bossu wood; to the south the ground fell to the farm of Gemioncourt by a stream and rose again toward Frasnes; to the southeast stood the hamlet of Piraumont. The fields were full of tall rye, which concealed how few men the Prince of Orange had.⁸

The battle, in phases

Morning: six hours lost. Through the morning the Prince of Orange had only Perponcher's division at the crossroads, about 7,000 infantry and 16 guns, without cavalry. Ney had two infantry divisions and his cavalry at hand, and Libert writes that he enjoyed a six to one advantage. But Napoleon's written orders reached him only around eleven, Reille's II Corps was still strung out on the road from Gosselies, and Ney waited. Ropes blames him for not bringing his divisions forward at dawn; Tsas answers that the emperor's own habit was to rest the troops until ten, and that the left wing's real task that day was to avoid a serious fight.⁹

Wellington rode up from Brussels in mid-morning, saw only a few French in front and went on to meet Blücher at the Bussy windmill near Ligny. He returned to find his position under attack.¹⁰

Two o'clock: the first attack. At about two Ney sent in Bachelu's and Foy's divisions, covered by Piré's lancers and chasseurs. The Dutch-Belgians fought well but lost Gemioncourt and Piraumont and fell back into the Bossu wood, which they held. Jérôme Bonaparte's division arrived at about three and brought Ney to roughly 21,000 men.¹¹

Afternoon: the reinforcements arrive. Just as Perponcher's line was cracking, Picton's British division came down the Brussels road, followed by the Brunswick corps; Dutch-Belgian light cavalry under Van Merlen arrived from Nivelles and was thrown back by Piré's horsemen. The timing differs by source: Siborne has Picton arriving between half past two and a quarter to three, Libert at about three, Ropes at half past three. Wellington, now in command, sent Picton's brigades forward with the bayonet, and they drove the attacking French columns back down the slope.¹²

West of the road things went worse. The young Brunswick troops, pressed by infantry and cavalry, broke, and their commander, the Duke of Brunswick, was shot from his horse while trying to rally them near the crossroads. French lancers then fell on the 42nd and 44th Regiments, which beat them off only after heavy losses.¹³

Five o'clock: Alten's division. At five or soon after, two more brigades, Halkett's British and Kielmansegge's Hanoverians of Alten's division, reached the field. Wellington now had the advantage in numbers, while Ney had received no fresh infantry since Jérôme's division.¹⁴

Turning point: the corps that never came

Ney's reserve was d'Erlon's I Corps. During the afternoon it was turned off the Brussels road near Frasnes and sent toward Ligny, on a pencilled note shown to d'Erlon by an imperial aide. In the meantime Napoleon's orders from Ligny reached Ney: the first, written at two, told him to drive off what was in front of him and then turn on the Prussians; the second, of a quarter past three, demanded that he fall on the Prussian rear at once, because the fate of France was in his hands. Tsas calls the second order impossible to carry out with the enemy still at the crossroads.¹⁵

When Ney learned that his reserve was marching away, he was beside himself, and sent a peremptory order for d'Erlon to come back. The corps turned around and spent the evening on the road, reaching Frasnes after nine, when the fighting was over. It had fought neither at Ligny nor at Quatre Bras.¹⁶ › Battle of Ligny, 1815

With no infantry to spare, Ney threw in his cavalry. At about six, according to Tsas and Ropes, he sent Kellermann forward with his cuirassiers; Ropes, following Charras, says only one brigade went in, while Siborne describes two separate cavalry attacks. The charge cut up the 69th Regiment, routed the 33rd and carried the horsemen almost to the crossroads. There, without infantry behind them, they ran into close-range artillery and musket fire and broke. Kellermann's horse was killed and he got away on foot.¹⁷

At about half past six Cooke's division of British Foot Guards arrived from Nivelles, just as French skirmishers were emerging from the north end of the Bossu wood. Wellington went over to the attack along the whole line. The Guards cleared the wood, the allies retook Gemioncourt, and as darkness fell Ney drew his exhausted troops back to the heights of Frasnes, the ground he had started from that morning.¹⁸

Aftermath and consequences

The figures vary. Siborne puts the allied loss at about 4,463 killed, wounded and missing, about 1,000 of it Dutch-Belgian, and the French at about 4,000; Ropes at nearly or quite 4,500 against more than 4,000; Libert at about 4,800 against 4,300 killed and wounded; and Tsas at 5,600 allied and 4,400 French, 17 and 21.5 percent of the men engaged. By the evening Wellington had over 31,000 men on the field in Siborne's count as cited by Ropes, about 32,000 in Tsas's and 37,000 in Charras's; Ney had brought fewer than 22,000 into action.¹⁹

Wellington had held the crossroads, but Blücher had lost at Ligny. When the news reached him on the morning of 17 June, Wellington retreated north along the Brussels road. The French followed in the afternoon in torrential rain and a thunderstorm, with a sharp cavalry fight at Genappe, and by evening the allied army stood on the ridge south of Mont-Saint-Jean, where the Battle of Waterloo was fought the next day.²⁰

Ney had at least done one thing that mattered: he had kept Wellington from sending any help to Blücher, a service Ropes calls important. But his recall of d'Erlon had also kept a whole French corps away from Ligny, where Libert believes it could have destroyed half the Prussian army.²¹ › The Battle of Waterloo, 1815

Legacy and memory

The battle started an argument that has never ended: who lost the chance of 16 June? Ropes lays it squarely on Ney, for leaving his corps scattered in the morning, for halting Kellermann's cavalry and d'Erlon's corps short of the field, and for disobeying orders that told him to unite them. Tsas, writing for the Fondation Napoléon, turns the charge against Napoleon, who gave the left wing more than a third of the army when its task should have been to avoid battle, and then took half of it away. Both cite letters from the strategist Jomini to Ney's son; in the one Tsas quotes, dated 1841, Jomini calls a serious fight at Quatre Bras a real misfortune at that hour.²²

Siborne, whose history of the campaign appeared in 1844, saw Quatre Bras above all as a feat of the British, Hanoverian and Brunswick infantry, who bore the brunt of the day for hours with almost no cavalry support. Ropes, too, credits the steadiness and courage of the British infantry, which no efforts of Ney's could overcome. Elizabeth Thompson's painting of 1875 at the top of this page shows that view: the 28th Regiment kneeling in square as French cavalry ride at it.²³

Ney did not long survive the campaign. After Waterloo and the second return of the Bourbons he was arrested for treason, tried before the Chamber of Peers and shot in Paris on 7 December 1815.²⁴ › The Greatest Napoleonic Battles