The Sun of Waterloo

Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM

The Sun of Waterloo [Revised]

Waterloo was a damned near run thing. I am going to monkey with the result to do a variant of what a perfect Napoleonic victory would mean. One part [Berthier] may be taken as ASB depending on how one views his death/suicide/murder. The rest could clearly have happened.

The two big changes initial changes are that Berthier is alive and back in his position as Chief of Staff. The easiest way to accomplish this is to say he was in the south of France by accident when Napoleon landed. He immediately rallies to the Emperor instead of getting Louis XVIII to safety and dieing for his pains. The other change is that Murat’s premature attack on the Austrians will in this TL have Napoleon’s favor so that the fugitive Murat will be in the Emperor’s good graces.

So when the Army of the North forms it has no new troops but a major change in command arrangements. Berthier is Chief of Staff. This frees Soult to take the Left Wing. Grouchy gets the Right Wing but not the Reserve Cavalry. The Cavalry Reserve goes to Murat. Politics dictated that Ney be given a major command. As Ney had been a disaster repeatedly as an army commander in 1813-14, he is given the Guard.

The first immediate change is that the Army jumps off on time and with proper orders. The fights of the 14^th and 15^th will go marginally better but of more importance with Murat running them, the cavalry keep Napoleon very well informed as to Wellington and Blucher’s concentration and positions.

Quatre Bras under Soult is the holding action it was supposed to be instead of the botch Ney made of it. This means than D’Erlon’s First Corps comes into the Prussian left rear at Ligny instead of waundering in circles as it did in OTL. Blucher loses half his army and half the rest are driven up the road to Liege instead of exiting north to the road to Wavre as in OTL.

The big change on the 17^th is that the pursuit towards Wavre is under the command of Murat. He has one fewer infantry corps [IVth] and an extra cavalry division [give him the Young Guards]. He will hound Blucher’s remnants on the 17^th and intercept their march on the 18^th.

The opening round of the battle at Waterloo on the 18^th will be handled far more skillfully by Soult than it was by Ney in OTL. By better combined arms Wellington will be slowly attrited. Wellington will also know that Blucher has been intercepted. As his line hemorages casualties in late afternoon, Wellington will pull off the field from left to right, retiring on the 15 thousand men he left at Nevielles and from there to the Channel ports of Ostend and Zeebrudge. Soult and Grouchy will pursue as best they can but the terrain favors rear guards so the best they will do is gobble up masses of Belgian and German deserters as the core of Wellington’s army makes its escape.

This leaves Napoleon and Ney to lead the Guard and VIth Corps to Murat’s aid. By early evening the 55,000 remaining Prussians are essentially blown apart as an organized force. Blucher is dead and the Prussian remnants will be a month reforming beyond the Rhine. Napoleon enters Brussels on the morning of the 20^th to enthusiastic crowds. He spends a day in accessing the situation.

Presume that the fighting has cost him some 30 thousand casualties. As this is a pro-Napoleonic fantasy scenario we will have him recoup the entire difference between enlisting deserters [many of the Belgian and German troops against him were old veterans of his and less than happy at their new uniforms] and imposing conscription on the presumed to be enthusiastic Belgians.

Suchet has by this time won a smashing set of victories in northern Italy but it is doubtful Napoleon knows this yet. Napoleon should know that the small Vendee revolt has about played out freeing up 15 thousand more troops for use elsewhere. Davout is being his usual useful self as Minister of War in Paris. Napoleon can presume that with the news of Waterloo the wavering conscripts and National Guards will rally to the colors.

His problems are Kleist with 40 thousand Prussians and Germans in Luxembourg, Benningsen bringing up 175 thousand Russians through Germany and Schwarzenburg with 250 thousand Austrians and Germans in the slow hesitant process of crossing the Rhine in Alsace. Even if Napoleon needs no garrisons in Belgium [presume he can recruit Belgian National Guards for this], he will need to send 15 thousand men to take Holland [assign Grouchy this task] and 25 thousand to see Wellington off. So he can rush back towards Lorraine with 85 thousand men. Picking up fortress garrisons and rallying National Guards/conscripts along the way would put him at about 125 thousand by the time he linked up with Rapp’s twenty thousand in Alsace or Lorraine, having detached 20 thousand of the least fit under Vandamme to shadow Kleist [see below]. We will presume a skirmish sends Kleist packing back over the Rhine. Kleit’s troops were mostly 2^nd rate and I see zero chance he will stand and fight. So presume Napoleon is now sitting with 145 thousand men facing Schwarzenburg. Schwarzenburg will not stand. He will scamper back across the Rhine as fast as his usual disorganized style will permit. Let Napoleon bloody his nose in a rear guard action or two, again scooping up some ten thousand Confederation of the Rhine deserters to make up for his losses.

This is the Napoleonic dream scenario. He has the Low Countries and North Italy back. He has an unbroken string of victories. He has firmed up his political position in Paris [presume he uses it to arrest Foche and the other potential conspirators]. The question becomes now what.

Britain will fight. Wellington’s veterans will come back from North America and the RN can always move Portuguese from Iberia to the UK or where ever Wellington is sent.

Prussia will fight once it puts an army together. However putting a new Prussian army together will not be easy. The Prussian army of 1813-14 was always short of cadre, arms and organization. All three have been pretty well chewed up. And there is no Blucher to command. Kleist and York are at best adequate corps commanders. Prussia will not be much use for the rest of the year except as add ons to another army. As there will probably be much ill will between the Prussians and British over the results of this campaign my guess is they will serve under the Russians even if paid by the British.

Russia will probably fight. The Czar faced major resistance from his nobility in the winter of 1812-13 and again in the period just before the armistice in the summer of 1813. They would have preferred settling for Warsaw and perhaps East Prussia to fighting Alexander’s crusade to Paris. The nobility was also very upset at the direction the Vienna peace conference had taken. The Polish-Saxon settlement had satisfied none of the three Eastern powers.

What Austria would have done is a most interesting question. They had avoided total disaster in the Polish-Saxon dispute but did not trust either half of the Russo-Prussian coalition. They were facing a major disaster in Italy thanks to Suchet’s victories. A continued war could weaken them against the Russo-Prussians. Finally Napoleon was their relative by marriage and might prove more manageable than he had 1809-13. However Metternich would have pushed for them to finish Napoleon and without British subsidies Austria could not continue to keep their army in the field. They are the wild card in the scenario. My guess is that they dither. Schwarzenburg had a perpetual case of the slows in the manner of Little Mac in the USCW. If not pushed by the Austrian Emperor he probably takes the balance of the summer summoning the nerve and energy to recross the Rhine in any strength.

Napoleon would have known this. So presume he moves against the Russians. Based on past history they would have straggled badly. However presume their straggling losses are made up by Prussians forwarded from Kleist and the rump remains of Blucher’s army. So sometime in late July or early August some 160-175 thousand Russians and Prussians come up against 150-160 thousand French and rallied Belgians and Germans under the Emperor. The fight would come somewhere in the Rhineland. With only marginally greater numbers the chances of Benningsen beating Napoleon are laughable. Napoleon would get a field victory. Unlike the ones in 1813 there would not be other Allied armies to pull him off the defeated foes. Unlike 1813 Napoleon would have had a mass of first rate cavalry for the pursuit. I doubt Benningsen would let himself be destroyed so no Austerlitz but better than Borodino, Bautzen, Dresden or Lutzen. The Russo-Prussian army gets smashed and driven back across the Rhine. The moment Napoleon sends any major force from there to Alsace, Schwarzenburg would have evacuated his bridgeheads and scampered back across the Rhine.

So continuing the dream scenario, Wellington has been sent back to the continent, probably into North Germany. Have him retake Holland with Soult screening north of Antwerp. If the British, Alexander and Metternich can keep the Austrian Emperor, the German princes and the Russian nobility in the war a slow campaign of 1815-16 has a decent chance of doing 1813-14 on a grand scale. Retreat in front of Napoleon, beat his marshals and attrit the French. It will be much harder than 1813-14. The team Napoleon is using: Soult, Grouchy, Vandamme, Murat, Rapp, Suchet, Davout is MUCH better than the cast of clowns who kept losing in 1813-14 [Macdonald, Oudinot, Ney, Marmont, Augereau, Mortier]. So beating the marshals will be more work. However betting the big British wallet, the big battalions and French war weariness is the more probable outcome. Replacing Schwarzenburg with Archduke Charles might well have been key. However Russia is in a much weaker position than after Waterloo. The nobility will be even more disillusioned with Alexander’s interventionism and messianic crusading impulses. The war will have been won by British money and all will be even more aware of it than OTL.

The less likely outcome is that Austria splits off from the alliance and does a deal. The Italian situation had them badly spooked. So did the Saxon-Polish arguments. If Austria splits, Alexander would not have been able to hold the Russians in the war. He either makes peace or Russia suffers yet another coup/regicide. In this variant sometime in the autumn of 1815 the alliance unravels. Napoleon gets the Rhine frontier, Holland, Switzerland, and some large part of Italy. He gets an effective condominium with his Austrian in-laws in Germany on the old Confederation of the Rhine states. If British money keeps Spain in the war for another year he probably gets Navarre, Aragon and Catalonia out of Ferdinand VII.

When and if the British make peace is debateable. However we have a lion/whale situation where the British and French cannot get at each other. Note that other than Berthier none of it is impossible. It is just the dice going his way. The Napoleon of 1805-06 could have pulled this off. Whether the tired Napoleon of 1815 could have…

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