Qualla: Ligny to Wavre to Waterloo: The Forty-Eight Hours That Lost an Empire

Ligny to Wavre to Waterloo: The Forty-Eight Hours That Lost an Empire: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit William Siborne and engraved by J. Kirkwood in Dublin, Public domain. It is possible to lose a war while winning a battle. On the evening of 16 June 1815, in the wheat fields outside the Belgian village of Ligny, Napoleon Bonaparte did exactly that. He had just smashed a Prussian army of eighty-four thousand men. Blucher himself, the seventy-two-year-old field marshal, had been ridden over by his own cavalry. The road to Brussels lay open. And yet in the two days that followed - rain-soaked, miscommunication-plagued, hinging on roads churned to swamp and despatches that arrived too late - Napoleon would manage to convert that victory into the loss of his throne. The story of how he did it is the story of three armies marching in the wrong directions, of a single French general who would not turn toward the sound of the guns, and of a Prussian retreat that, against every military convention, headed not away from its ally but toward him.

Image: William Siborne and engraved by J. Kirkwood in Dublin | Public domain

Ligny to Wavre to Waterloo: The Forty-Eight Hours That Lost an Empire: The Wrong Assumption

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit William Siborne and engraved by J. Kirkwood in Dublin, Public domain. After every defeat, a beaten army retreats along its line of supply. This was military gospel in 1815. The Prussians had been driven from the field at Ligny; therefore the Prussians would fall back east, toward Liege and the Rhine, away from Wellington's Anglo-allied force strand...

Image: William Siborne and engraved by J. Kirkwood in Dublin | Public domain

Ligny to Wavre to Waterloo: The Forty-Eight Hours That Lost an Empire: Grouchy's Long Morning

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. Marshal Emmanuel de Grouchy was not, by general consensus, a great commander. He was a competent cavalry officer who had been promoted to the marshalate by Napoleon only weeks before. On the morning of 17 June he was given an enormous detachment - III and IV Infantry Corps, II Ca...

Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Ligny to Wavre to Waterloo: The Forty-Eight Hours That Lost an Empire: Sart-lez-Walhain

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Author: William Mudford, engravers and artists: George Cruikshank, James Rouse, artist: C. C. Hamilton, Public domain. At eleven thirty on the morning of 18 June 1815, Marshal Grouchy sat down to breakfast at the house of a notary named Hollaert in the village of Sart-lez-Walhain. He had ridden ahead of his main column. The rain had finally stopped. From somewhere to the northwest came a low, con...

Image: Author: William Mudford, engravers and artists: George Cruikshank, James Rouse, artist: C. C. Hamilton | Public domain

Ligny to Wavre to Waterloo: The Forty-Eight Hours That Lost an Empire: Through the Defiles of Saint-Lambert

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit EmDee, CC BY-SA 3.0. While Grouchy was deciding not to march to the guns, the Prussians were marching to them. Three of Blucher's four corps were already pushing west from Wavre toward the battle. The route they had chosen led through the narrow valley of the Lasne, a small stream that the previous n...

Image: EmDee | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ligny to Wavre to Waterloo: The Forty-Eight Hours That Lost an Empire: The Battle of Wavre

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit William Siborne and engraved by J. Kirkwood in Dublin, Public domain. Meanwhile, at Wavre itself, Grouchy was fighting an entirely separate battle. He arrived in front of the town in mid-afternoon on 18 June and attacked the Prussian rearguard - one corps under Thielmann, about 17,000 men, holding the bridges over the Dyle. The fighting was savage ...

Image: William Siborne and engraved by J. Kirkwood in Dublin | Public domain

Ligny to Wavre to Waterloo: The Forty-Eight Hours That Lost an Empire: What Was Won and Lost

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit William Siborne and engraved by J. Kirkwood in Dublin, Public domain. The forty-eight hours between Ligny and Waterloo decided the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon's strategic error - assuming the Prussians would behave conventionally - was compounded by a tactical error he made on the morning of 18 June, when he failed to send patrols east to discover Bu...

Image: William Siborne and engraved by J. Kirkwood in Dublin | Public domain