Wellington and his Staff at Waterloo (NAP0029)

Wellington at Waterloo: the staff under the tree

A group under a tree, a telescope, a dispatch being read, a young officer sitting on a stump because he has been awake for two days, horses held, and the red line of the infantry drawn across the background. There is no charge in this plate and no smoke. It is the part of a battle that decides it and never gets painted: half a dozen men, a map, and messages arriving.

An army nobody would have chosen

Wellington’s force in June 1815 was not a British army. Fewer than half the men were British; the rest were King’s German Legion, Hanoverians, Dutch-Belgians, Nassauers and Brunswickers, several of whom had been fighting for Napoleon two years earlier. In a letter of May 1815 he called it an infamous army, very weak and ill-equipped, with a very inexperienced staff — writing privately, and about the tools he had been given. The uniforms in this picture are the point: they do not match because the army did not.

A commander who does not stand still

The contrast with the other side is exact. Napoleon commanded Waterloo from a fixed observation point and sent orders outward. Wellington spent the day riding from one threatened point to another and giving instructions on the spot, because an army speaking four languages could not be run by dispatch alone. Both methods work; they suit different armies. The one in this plate suits an army that needs to be seen to be commanded.

The staff was the instrument, and it was wrecked

These men were not decoration. They carried orders in person, at a gallop, into the places where the orders were needed — which is why the staff took casualties out of all proportion to its size. De Lancey, the quartermaster-general, was struck down and died of it; Fitzroy Somerset lost an arm; Alexander Gordon was killed. By evening Wellington had lost a large part of the men through whom he had been giving orders since morning.

The men in the picture

Look at the mixture: an officer of light dragoons in a fur-crested helmet, a Highland officer in tartan trews, a staff officer in the plain blue of headquarters reading a dispatch, and — on the right, holding a horse — a man in a civilian coat and a top hat. Waterloo was fought a day’s carriage ride from Brussels, and the field was not sealed off the way a modern one would be.

Holding was the entire plan

Wellington was not trying to win in the morning; he was trying to still be there in the evening, when the Prussians arrived. The whole of the day is a calculation about time — the ridge, the infantry kept out of sight behind it, the farms held to the last man at Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte. It is the least romantic way to win a battle and one of the hardest, because it requires an army to accept punishment all day without being allowed to answer it.