Who won the Battle of Wavre?
Marshal Grouchy's French won the battle but lost the campaign. On 18 and 19 June 1815 his 33,000 men forced Johann von Thielmann's single Prussian corps back from the Dyle at Wavre, but by then Napoleon had already been beaten at Waterloo, about nine miles away, by Wellington and the rest of Blücher's army.1
While Napoleon fought Wellington at Waterloo on 18 June 1815, a third of the French army was somewhere else. Marshal Emmanuel de Grouchy, with about 33,000 men, spent the afternoon storming the bridges of a small Belgian town on the river Dyle against one Prussian corps, whose task was to keep him busy while the rest of the Prussian army marched to Waterloo. The Battle of Wavre is the answer to one of the most famous questions in military history: where was Grouchy? For the whole campaign, see the guide to the Waterloo campaign; the battles that led to it were Ligny and Quatre Bras.2
Why was Grouchy chasing the Prussians?
Two days earlier, on 16 June, Napoleon had beaten Blücher's Prussians at Ligny, but he had not destroyed them, and during the night and the next morning the Prussian army fell back north towards Wavre. On 17 June Napoleon gave Grouchy the right wing of the army: the corps of Vandamme and Gérard, Teste's division and the cavalry of Pajol and Exelmans, and sent him after the Prussians.3
The pursuit started late and went slowly. Grouchy was only allowed to set off around midday on 17 June, in heavy rain, and like Napoleon he assumed that the Prussians were falling back east towards Namur and the Meuse. He reached Gembloux that evening and reported to the emperor that the Prussians seemed to have split, one column heading for Wavre; if the mass went that way, he would follow it so that it could not reach Brussels, and to separate it from Wellington.4
His instructions became a lasting quarrel. An order Napoleon dictated to General Bertrand on 17 June told Grouchy to go to Gembloux, pursue the enemy, find out what it intended and keep his two infantry corps together. For years Grouchy denied having received any written order that day; the Bertrand order was first printed in 1842, and only then did his family acknowledge it. Historians still argue over which orders really existed and when he got them.5
What were Thielmann's orders at Wavre?
Blücher and his chief of staff Gneisenau had taken the decision that shaped the campaign: instead of retreating towards their own supply lines, the Prussians would gather at Wavre and march west to help Wellington. On the morning of 18 June Bülow's IV Corps set off for Saint-Lambert, followed by Pirch's II Corps, while Zieten's I Corps took a northern road towards Wellington's left. Clausewitz judged Blücher's decision worthy of the highest praise.6
Thielmann's III Corps was to leave last. Its orders were to follow the army towards Waterloo, but to hold Wavre if the enemy appeared there in force. Johann Adolf von Thielmann's chief of staff was Carl von Clausewitz, the military theorist. The corps had fought at Ligny, and most of its battalions were Landwehr, Prussian militia, from the Kurmark regiments.7
By the afternoon much of the corps had already started for Saint-Lambert when, around four o'clock, Vandamme's guns opened fire from the heights across the Dyle. Thielmann halted his troops and turned them back to defend the river. One brigade, Borcke's, misunderstood the order and marched on towards Saint-Lambert, so Thielmann fought with only about 15,000 men against more than twice that number.8
The ground favored the defender. Wavre lay on the left bank of the Dyle, joined to a small suburb on the right bank by two stone bridges; upstream there were wooden bridges at the mill of Bierge, at Limale and at Limelette, and the rain had swollen the river. Thielmann barricaded the bridges, loopholed the houses on his bank, held the river with light troops and kept his reserves back on the heights. Clausewitz could scarcely imagine a stronger position.9
Gérard's advice: why didn't Grouchy march to the guns?
Grouchy's columns left Gembloux on the morning of 18 June along a single road, slowed by mud and narrow defiles. Around half past eleven, at Sart-à-Walhain, where Grouchy had stopped to breakfast in a notary's house, his officers heard a heavy cannonade to the west. It was the opening of the Battle of Waterloo.10
General Étienne Gérard, commander of IV Corps, urged him to march towards the sound of the guns, and offered to go with his own corps alone. Grouchy refused. His orders, he said, were to pursue the Prussians, and splitting his force across a swollen river would leave each half unable to support the other. The march on Wavre went on.11
His critics never forgave him, and Napoleon, in his memoirs, laid the defeat at his door. Clausewitz, who fought against Grouchy at Wavre, defended the refusal itself: to leave Blücher and march to another battle against a different enemy would, he wrote, have been contrary to all theory and experience. Grouchy's real mistake, in his view, came earlier at Gembloux. A Prussian move to Wavre could only mean a junction with Wellington, so Grouchy should have placed himself on the Dyle between Blücher and Napoleon.12
18 June: the fight for the bridges of Wavre
Vandamme's III Corps reached Wavre between three and four in the afternoon and attacked at once, without proper reconnaissance and without waiting for the rest of the force. His skirmishers took the suburb on the right bank, which the Prussians did not try to hold, but at the river they met a murderous fire from the loopholed houses and the bridges.13
The struggle lasted until late at night. Vandamme fed in fresh battalions again and again, and the defenders beat back thirteen assaults; once the French crossed the main bridge and took houses on the far bank before the Prussian reserves drove them out. Those reserves waited in the side streets parallel to the river and charged whenever a French column reached the bridge.14
Upstream, the attacks on the mill of Bierge failed one after another. Grouchy dismounted and led a battalion forward himself; Gérard was shot in the chest and carried from the field. Clausewitz rejected the idea that the French lacked energy: if mistakes were made, he wrote, they came from clumsiness rather than lack of effort.15
Between six and seven in the evening Grouchy received a dispatch that Marshal Soult, Napoleon's chief of staff, had written at one o'clock on the field of Waterloo: Bülow's corps could be seen at Saint-Lambert, and Grouchy was to move towards the main army and attack it without losing a moment. It was far too late. Grouchy sent troops upstream to Limale instead, where the Prussian flank guard had failed to barricade the bridge. Pajol's cavalry took it, the French gained a foothold on the left bank, and a Prussian counterattack in the dark failed.16
Blücher learned in the afternoon that Thielmann was under heavy attack and might not hold. He did not turn back: Thielmann was to hold on as best he could while the main army kept marching to the decisive point. That evening Bülow's and Pirch's corps fell on Napoleon's right flank at Plancenoit, and Zieten's arrived on Wellington's left.17
19 June: a French victory that came too late
During the night an officer sent out by Thielmann brought word that the allies had won a complete victory at Waterloo. Grouchy had no such news and still believed that Napoleon had beaten Wellington, so at dawn he attacked again from Limale with Gérard's corps and Teste's division.18
Thielmann, expecting the French to retreat, attacked first, but the stronger French columns drove his right wing back through the woods of Rixensart, and by about nine Teste's division had taken Bierge, the key to the position. At about ten Thielmann ordered a retreat towards Louvain and gave up Wavre.19
Grouchy had won. Between half past ten and eleven he learned that Napoleon's army had been routed the evening before, and that his own force was now the only intact part of the French army, with the victorious allies between it and France.20
Wavre casualties: how many died?
Thielmann's corps lost about 2,500 men killed, wounded and missing over the two days, 2,476 by Siborne's count. No French returns survive. Kelly estimates French losses at about 2,200 and Libert at about 2,600 killed and wounded, while Siborne thought they could not have been lower than the Prussian ones.21
The armies were very unequal. Kelly counts 33,611 men and 96 guns under Grouchy after the losses at Ligny, and Siborne 33,765; Thielmann had about 15,000 to 18,000 men by Libert's estimate, 15,200 by Siborne's once Borcke's brigade had marched off.22
Who won the Battle of Wavre?
On the battlefield, the French: on 19 June Grouchy held Wavre and the heights, and Thielmann retreated. In the campaign, the Prussians. Thielmann had held more than twice his numbers on the Dyle through the afternoon and evening of 18 June, the very hours in which Grouchy might still have mattered at Waterloo. His German biographer Herman von Petersdorff wrote that by holding Grouchy there he prevented his intervention at Waterloo and so sealed Napoleon's defeat.23
Siborne judged that the battle brought Napoleon no advantage on 18 June and did him real harm on the 19th, when it exposed his last intact force to the risk of being cut off. Libert's verdict is shorter: the victory meant nothing any more.24
Where was Grouchy? Could he have saved Napoleon at Waterloo?
Grouchy spent the whole afternoon of 18 June at Wavre, about nine miles east of Waterloo, attacking a single Prussian corps with a third of the French army while the three other Prussian corps marched to Waterloo. Whether he could have changed the result has been argued for two centuries.25
The American historian John Codman Ropes thought he could. Had Grouchy followed Gérard's advice, Ropes argued, he could have been across the Dyle by four o'clock with 30,000 men marching on Saint-Lambert, and Bülow and Pirch would have had to halt and fight him instead of attacking Napoleon at Plancenoit. William Hyde Kelly, writing in 1905, agreed that a little more foresight and energy would have made Napoleon's great stroke a success.26
Clausewitz thought he could not. Wherever Grouchy stood on the Dyle at midday, he wrote, he would at best have tied down two Prussian corps; the other two would still have reached Waterloo, and they were enough to decide it. Grouchy would only have been drawn into the disaster. Siborne agreed that by the time Grouchy reached Wavre, the chance to help Napoleon had already passed.27
Grouchy's own defense rested on his orders, and the argument over them never ended. Napoleon's memoirs claimed that orders had been sent telling him to close in on the main army; Grouchy answered that the only letters he ever received on 17 and 18 June were the ones of 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. on the 18th. Libert concludes that he did what he was told, pursue the Prussians, but with little speed or initiative, and was simply the wrong man for the task.28
What happened after Wavre? Grouchy's retreat
Grouchy now saved his command. He withdrew south on 19 June by way of Namur, where on 20 June Teste's division held the town against Pirch's pursuing Prussians while the rest crossed the Sambre; Siborne called the retreat skilful and masterly. By way of Dinant and Philippeville, then across northern France, his troops reached Paris on 29 June; Kelly reckons they lost about 4,000 men and 16 guns on the way.29
It made no difference to the war. Napoleon had abdicated on 22 June. Kelly's verdict was that Grouchy, who had stained his reputation in the great operations of the campaign, partly restored it in the retreat.30
Where was the Battle of Wavre fought?
Wavre is a town on the river Dyle in Belgium, on the old road from Namur to Brussels, about nine miles east of the Waterloo battlefield. The fighting ran along the river from Bas-Wavre below the town, through Wavre itself and the mill of Bierge, to Limale and Limelette upstream, and on 19 June into the woods of Rixensart to the west.31
For the battle that Wavre made possible, read the Battle of Waterloo; for Napoleon himself, Napoleon Bonaparte, and for the wider war, the Napoleonic Wars. Test what you remember in the Napoleonic battles quiz.
