Book review: On Wellington: A Critique of Waterloo

While Carl von Clausewitz's classic work On War has been in print in its original German from its first edition in 1932 to its nineteenth, from the same Berlin publisher, in 1980, and in four different English translations, the same cannot be said of Clausewitz's critique of the allied performance at the Battle of Waterloo. On September 10, 1840, Charles C.C. Jenkinson, 3rd Earl of Liverpool wrote to Lieutenant Colonel John Gurwood, the editor of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington's dispatches, to notify him that he had translated Clausewitz's Waterloo analysis into English. Liverpool sent one copy to Wellington, but did not get a reply for nearly two years. The manuscript was never returned to him, and it has remained unexamined among Wellington's papers ever since – or at least until long-recognized Napoleonic scholar Peter Hofschröer got his hands on it.  His translation into English brings an important essay to light more than 150 years after a jealous Wellington stopped its publication in England. 

Wellingon's unwillingness to respond to Clausewitz's On Wellington: A Critique of Waterloo was largely due to the latter's criticism of the British army's deployment in Belgium. According to Clausewitz, there were two junction points were Wellington should have concentrated his forces in case Napoleon invaded Belgium: Nivelles or Quatres Bras. While the Prussians were able to concentrate their army around Ligny in two days, Wellington had dispersed his forces so much that it required four to five days to concentrate them around Quatre-Bras. If Wellington had acted immediately when he received news of Napoleon's move, the campaign might have been finished at Ligny.

Clausewitz analyzes very carefully the reasons why someone should have expected the newly restored French emperor to move on Belgium. Napoleon succeeded in mobilizing an active army of 217,000 soldiers. Of that number, 130,000 men faced the Netherlands. The force should have been 20,000 men stronger, but Napoleon had been forced to send them to the Vendée under the command of Général de Division Jean Maximilien Lamarque. The idea of raising to 3,000 national guard battalions remained a paper effort for many reasons – ultimately only 248 battalions were drafted and sixteen of them were sent to reinforce the V Army Corps under Général de Division Jean Rapp in Strasbourg. Sooner or later the French army would have to face the total of 665,000 allied troops still in Europe. For Napoleon, it became a matter of crucial urgency to win a great victory against the armies of Wellington and Feldmarschall August Leberecht von Blücher in order to shatter the morale of his other opponents. 

Clausewitz makes the important statement that in wars between civilized societies, where the armed forces and methods they use are not significantly different, numbers are the most reliable factor in determining the war's outcome in advance.  Napoleon's decision to deploy 25,000 soldiers to the Vendée may well have cost him his chances of victory at Waterloo. Furthermore, Clausewitz believes that if Napoleon had continued the pursuit of Blücher's Prussians after Ligny with his entire army, he surely would have achieved another, more thorough victory that would have decided the campaign even if Wellington occupied Charleroi. Instead, Napoleon made the same mistake he did in 1814, when he stopped pursuing Blücher after four successive victories and turned his attention to Generalfeldmarshall Karl Philipp Fürst zu Schwarzenberg's Austrian army – a statement that Clausewitz echoes in On War.
Another argument in Clausewitz's Waterloo critique that one will find in On War is that his launching of his Middle Guard division in a final attack against the British position with Blücher's regrouped army facing him was the act of a lunatic. Clausewitz believed Napoleon should instead have used the division as a rear guard. Wellington, for comparison, believed it wise to position his army with the woods behind him, so that if the British soldiers were defeated they could have avoided a rout by escaping through the forest pathways.

Clausewitz's essay on Waterloo includes a description of the battle of Wavre between Maréchal Emmanuel de Grouchy and Lt. Gen. Johann Adolf Freiherr von Thielemann, as well as operations after Waterloo and the political situation in Paris. In On Wellington: A Critique of Waterloo, Clausewitz argues that war can never be regarded as an independent action, but rather as a modification of political activity and the implementation of political plans and interests by military means – yet another argument he famously made in On War.

Although known in military circles, Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) did not achieve fame in his own lifetime. It is interesting to note that while Captain William Siborne, adjutant of the Royal Military College, corresponded with the historical section of the Prussian General Staff to discuss the details of the Waterloo campaign, and other published Prussian accounts come into discussion, no mention was ever made of Clausewitz's important work on the subject. One reason was probably the relatively low regard afforded him by brother Prussian officers because of his Polish origins. Today, however, all military circles know him. The long-delayed emergence of On Wellington: A Critique of Waterloo provides an additional reason why.