Why Did Napoleon Really Fail At Waterloo? | Battlefield Detectives | Our History

[Music] thank you it's 7 30 on the evening of June the 18th 1815. these are the final moments of the Battle of Waterloo one of the most decisive military Encounters in history after hours of heavy fighting Napoleon sends forward the Imperial Guard in one last desperate bit to defeat the Allied Army under the Duke of Wellington Napoleon hadn't really been defeated in a greater cataclysmic battle there was a sense that somehow he'd been cheated that somehow he was still the master of the battlefield Waterloo ends that myth Waterloo has always been seen as a tactical victory for the Duke of Wellington his small but highly trained Allied Army out fighting the veteran soldiers of Napoleon's Grand Army but was there more to Napoleon's defeat than the tactics and fighting prowess of the allies [Applause] now the latest scientific techniques are shedding crucial light on Napoleon's campaign and a dramatic archaeological Discovery is helping answer the central question what went wrong for Napoleon at Waterloo [Music] in 1815 Europe had been at War for more than 20 years out of the chaos of the French Revolution Napoleon Bonaparte had forged an Empire on the battlefields of Europe Victory had followed Victory and Napoleon seemed Unstoppable but by 1815 time and War had taken their toll and the great powers of Europe had finally United to rid themselves of Napoleon once and for all as the massed armies of Britain Austria Prussia and Russia closed in Napoleon launched a desperate preemptive strike foreign the clock really is ticking he desperately eats peace he can't get it and what he's got to do is he's got to defeat the prussians and the British but particularly the British before the huge mass armies of the Russians and the austrians descend upon them because once they descend upon Paris napoleons have it on the night of the 17th of June 1815 the Duke of Wellington prepared his troops to face Napoleon's Grand Army [Music] taking up position at Waterloo on the southern outskirts of Brussels the 90 000 British and Allied Soldiers awaited the attack of Napoleon's 120 000 strong French army heavily outnumbered the Allies Only Hope was to link up with blusha's Prussian Army stay dawned on the 18th the prussians were still several hours March from Waterloo Napoleon could move swiftly the odds would be stacked in his favor but the longer he delayed the greater the chance of the prussians coming to the Allies Aid for Napoleon the Clock Was ticking the battlefield today seems miraculously unaffected amidst the suburban sprawl of Brussels in the tense days building up to the battle Wellington would have surveyed this scene and identified the ideal defensive position to stop Napoleon and throughout the period that Wellington is in Flanders he is constantly thinking if Napoleon comes where will he come which Roots will he adopt where therefore can I stop him Wellington had an expert eye for terrain he drew up his army along the crest of a ridge where the main Brussels Road crossed the Waterloo Valley but today it's difficult to tell precisely how good Wellington's position was because contrary to appearances the landscape has changed it's now dominated by a giant artificial Hill called The Lion Mound thousands of tons of soil were scraped away to create this 40 meter high mind a huge Earth Monument to the Dutch and Belgian troops who died at Waterloo Wellington was furious at how the construction of the mound destroyed his Battlefield Wellington went back to the battlefield of Waterloo and he saw that mount and he said to one of his companions Colonel gerwood he said dummy goard they've ruined it them hollanders have room a battlefield or was to that effect he was Furious but why was Wellington so incensed what was it about his Waterloo position that construction of the lion Mound destroyed what made the position so effective was the ridge with his troops lined along its Crest Wellington knew that the forward slope provided a clear Field of Fire and a steep natural obstacle against attack whereas the reverse slope sheltered his troops from incoming fire so how much did the removal of topsoil for the lion Mound change this distinctive Ridge [Music] landscape archaeologist Paul Hill suspects the bridge is now much lower than it would have been in 1815. contemporary prints of the area prior to the man's construction provide Paul with valuable Clues as to what has changed roads are usually depicted as having steep embankments on either side but to the east of the lion Mound the o'hane road now has an embankment on only one side [Music] it's very clear that there has been a major change in the land formation here I'm standing on top of a large Bank on the north side of the main ohane road the East-West Road if we look further to South on the other side of the road you can see there isn't a bank at all and there should be one there at least as high as this one if we can recreate this landscape and see the level of the slope up which Cavalry and infantry have to run we can see why Wellington chose such a position to defend but to prove his theory Paul must somehow create a view of the landscape as it appeared to Wellington on the day of the battle specialist help is required he calls in surveyors James Kavanagh and Dan using a revolutionary new survey technique the team will create a Terrain accurate 3D computer model of the battlefield the result should be a unique impression of how the Waterloo landscape appeared to Wellington in 1815. okay this gives us a nice Clear View over the battlefield so we'll miss the rain will we have a stain radio contact with this base and then this Little Nail is the reference point for the whole Battlefield survey a geomatic system uses the network of GPS satellites to relay signals between the team's backpacks and this space station James and Dan are then free to roam surveying the land to millimeter accuracy whilst on the move the station started [Music] thank you from the start it's clear the Waterloo terrain is deceptive the area of the battlefield here it's got all these low points so um as you're coming up through this area of the battlefield it would appear that no matter where you were you'd always be in a slight Hollow and then you have such difficulty getting up onto the Ridgeline it's very very difficult to rain it makes me wonder whether Wellington was was a surveyor foreign [Music] to struggle through the mud at Waterloo yeah well we had a sword in the family which is from Waterloo but one of my ancestors names I left my probably great great grandfather who fought on the French side so we must have been here on the big day as it were but he managed to escape [Music] foreign [Music] boggy ground it's really soft unbelievable I don't know how they fought on this it's bad enough making a map with the survey complete All That Remains is for the team to interpret the data and reveal for the first time just how the battlefield of Waterloo really appeared in 1815. trips oh yeah [Music] [Applause] [Music] it's the early hours of the 18th of June 1815. Napoleon is under pressure to attack knowing that every minute he delays brings the Prussian Army closer across the valley the Duke of Wellington positions his Allied Army on the Waterloo Ridge awaiting the inevitable French attack but what was it Wellington had seen in the terrain which made Waterloo such an ideal position for defense Paul Hill is confident that the battlefield survey will provide an answer sir when the results are plotted the first stage is to show the battlefield as it is today including the lion Mound the area where Paul believes the topsoil was removed from then shows up distinctly you can clearly see this circle here is is the mound and you can see quite clearly that's been snipped off there and then pushed up and I think by taking out the mound we can actually get a a flat area where we think most of this Earth has come from but it's not until the Lion Mount is removed and its volume redistributed over the truncated area that Paul gets the evidence he needs the model reveals that the Waterloo Ridge was in fact much steeper before the construction of the lion Mound we can see from the model of this original Ridge along the top it just gives such a commanding view over this entire area doesn't it oh yeah for sure and I mean when we were there do you remember trying to walk up this slope yes and now not only have you got to walk up how it is today but you've got another sort of you know 100 meters of slope to keep going essentially what it's giving you is given you your Battlefield back [Music] still deceptively steep the forward slope would have been an even more difficult obstacle in 1815 whilst the reverse slope would have provided precious concealment and shelter for the Allied troops behind the crest despite the fact that there was a little truncation off the top here we're still looking up what I think is is generally speaking the same aspect that the people had when they were coming up here and it's a classic forward and reverse slope situation because you can't see anybody lined on the ridge up there in fact looking down here even now with the truncation you can just see the top of those Telegraph poles well that's what it must have been like for them it's still a formidable slope and waiting on the other side of course where the British Infantry it's clear that Wellington's position was expertly chosen giving the Allies the terrain advantage but Napoleon still had more troops and greater Firepower as the prussians marched ever closer why did he still not attack you read the accounts of the time you sense a feeling that they wanted to get on with Battle of Finch were very very confident meteorologist Dennis wheeler is fascinated by the impact of weather on major moments in history he's convinced that the weather holds the key to understanding why Napoleon delayed he's determined to do something that has never been done before reconstruct precisely the weather on that day whenever log books contain a rich source of data data not recorded just every every day but sometimes every hour but it's not instrumental data it's the observations made by officers on board deck so you do have a very detailed picture of how the weather each day evolved almost hour by hour it's a bit like looking at a modern day weather forecast but written in 18th and 19th century terms so what we have here is a piece of detective work we've got data from different sources we need to gather it together and once we've got those individual pieces of information together we can plot them on a map and from it we can begin to reconstruct a weather map rather like the sort of weather map would be all too familiar with from the the television forecasts of today Dennis's detective work has established that in the 48 Hours leading up to the battle a low pressure Ridge brought torrential rain to the Waterloo area the night before the Battle of Waterloo the weather could be described as apocalyptic it looks as if it rained consistently through the night and it was still raining at dawn but sometime between eight or nine o'clock the rain ceased the sun came out and the conditions began to become much clearer and certainly a great deal Giant the clearer weather the way seemed open for Napoleon to launch an immediate attack on the Allies spearheaded by his most feared tactic got to his channel the classic Napoleonic Ploy for a battle is always to begin with an artillery bombardment French artillery was very good they were good guns effective guns and there were plenty of them Napoleon's beloved artillery was the most feared in the world and its immense Firepower was more than sufficient to blast Wellington's troops from their positions on the ridge but even though the rain had stopped by morning it had left a big problem for Napoleon [Music] when you're in the uh the hollows around here you've got really sticky claggy mud the problem is you've got a geology around here that's um silty uh loams and they when they get wet they get very wet and very slippery I cannot get my shoe out of the mud and that must seem exactly what it was like but the the mud itself if you look at it carefully it's incredibly fine but when it's wet like this uh these fine particles clogged together and it just becomes like putty had the battle been fought only 30 to 40 miles to the Southwest we'd have had a very different situation nice chalky dance which would have drained very quickly indeed but this is just the wrong area to fight in when it's been raining but why should mud be more of a problem for Napoleon than for Wellington on the morning of the 18th of June 1815 this gun was part of Napoleon's ground battery now this is about as good as it gets this gun was manufactured in 1813 it's a 12 pounder and this should have given artillery General like Napoleon at a sighted Advantage but it's very heavy this is going to take in ideal conditions about eight men to move it that's when the ground is baked hard but on the morning of the 18th of June of course the ground was was like a quagmire Napoleon knew the sudden ground would make it difficult to maneuver his big guns and he was gripped by a terrible dilemma knowing every minute's delay could be potentially disastrous he decided to wait several tense hours for the grand to dry out but with the prussians closing in was this a wise decision what would have happened if Napoleon had pushed on through the mud regardless by water logging and plowing up an area of terrain a team from the Royal artillery simulate conditions on the Waterloo Battlefield they aim to investigate just how difficult it would have been for Napoleon's gun Crews if he'd sent them into action without waiting for the ground to dry out moving the heavy 12 Pounders forward into position would have been just the start for Napoleon's Gunners after every shot the half-ton guns would have had to be run back through the mud the massive recoil having blown them yards back out of position in the opening bombardment at Waterloo the crews would have had to sustain this workload for an hour or more each gun firing more than a hundred rounds the Royal artillery team gets a taste of the fatigue cause by Manning a 12-pounder at Waterloo in a point-to-point relay for just 10 minutes a fraction of the time the French Crews were in action [Music] Steve Myers is a sports physiologist by monitoring the soldiers heart rates and blood lactate levels he's able to measure the level of fatigue they experience that was a very good test and they worked incredibly hard during strenuous exercise lactic acid gradually builds up until muscles tire and seize the lactate levels here are like maximum lactate levels already you get off so you should sort of tests to exhaustion on a treadmill these kind of levels you expect to see the soldiers heart rates too are close to the maximum around 180 beats per minute the heart rates we've got up here interesting what it shows is they're all you know close to maximal heart rates there they're sort of aerobic fat burning type exercise range we saw our well-trained British Gunners doing this and they were really tired at the end of it if you take the French Arts early man firing those guns there's no chance that they wouldn't have been you know they wouldn't have been affected by fatigue they would have been very very tight and they wouldn't have been able to maintain the sort of rates of Fire with dozens of exhausted Crews repeating this process alongside each other the firing of the grand battery would have become sparser and the gun line itself steadily more disorganized it's clear Napoleon made the right decision in delaying his attack if he'd pressed on his prized artillery could have collapsed but he must still have been confident of the overwhelming Firepower of his heavy guns his beautiful daughters masked together in one grand battery ready to smash the Allied line finally around midday the French guns opened fire the great bombardment opens up classic Napoleonic start to a battle um lots of fuss and Feathers lots of noise lots of smoke very little effect [Music] despite its huge Firepower the grand battery was still not as effective as it should have been something else was going wrong with Wellington's troops were sheltered by the reverse slope but as well as solid cannonballs the French were also using explosive shells fired over the Ridge Crest to fall down bursting amongst the Allied soldiers shell fire should have been devastating so why at Waterloo did it have so little impact major Simon West is an expert on the artillery weapons used at Waterloo he's been trying to find out why the French shell fire was so ineffective [Music] to be sure his experiments are accurate Simon has had Hollow iron shells made exactly like those used by the French at Waterloo shells were designed to burst apart sending heavy lethal fragments in all directions in normal conditions this would inflict heavy casualties but at Waterloo the conditions were anything but normal normal on Salisbury Plain he simulates the ground conditions of Waterloo [Music] Simon buries a six-inch shell containing nearly two pounds of gunpowder only feet away from a Target representing a line of Allied soldiers three two one five well this is brilliant because it was buried just below the surface as it might have landed if it was coming at a decent angle and buried a bit the energy of the explosion has been absorbed by the ground and had no effect on the target only a feet away amazingly the target has escaped virtually unscathed although his guns pounded on it's clear the wet Grant severely reduced the effectiveness of Napoleon's Grand battery Wellington's troops had only to sit out the heavy bombardments behind the Sheltering Ridge they knew that eventually the French infantry would be forced to attack across the muddy Valley and up the hill the densely packed French columns would make ideal targets for the Allied cannonballs and shells and the Allies had another weapon one that was not affected by the weather the most feared of all artillery weapons canister foreign Napoleon's artillery has failed thanks to the wet Grand and Wellington's use of the Sheltering Terrain but with the prussians now close by Napoleon dare not delay he launches his heavy infantry attack advancing steadily across the muddy exposed Valley the French soldiers have no cover the easy targets for Wellington's Allied artillery above them on the ridge [Music] the French soldiers struggle into a storm of lethal Close Quarters artillery fire [Applause] using an original Waterloo British cannon that has not been fired in more than a century major Simon West investigates just how effective the Allied cannonballs would have been on Napoleon's densely packed troops he loaded with a six-pound solid iron Round Shot exactly what the Allied Gunners would have used against the ranks of French soldiers represented by the Target a hundred yards away okay right first shot in 150 years standby three two one five [Applause] at over 200 meters per second the Round Shot is devastating the solid iron balls would have plowed through the packed French ranks a single shot killing or wounding as many as 10 or 15 men now seeing the shot fired out of the cannon there you think of that six pound shot having so much energy there's no doubt that if that engaged sort of rows of Cavalry or infantry and column it would reap horrendous havoc but destructive as Round Shot could be when the surviving French infantry closed in to Point Blank Range the Allied Gunners switched to the most feared artillery device of all canister what I'm going to do is make up some canister charge canister was literally musket balls inside a thin walled metal tube Simon wants to find out just why this anti-personnel device was the terror weapon of the Napoleonic Wars the metal tube burst apart as it exited the Cannon's muzzle creating a huge shotgun effect well considering that that Frontage represents probably six men in file not one of them has escaped injury and bearing in mind that each of those balls is traveling at over 100 meters per second even out at this range that's going to represent a fatal injury any french infantryman lucky enough to survive the artillery fire still had to face Allied musketry a British infantry in particular were in hand for their disciplined Clockwork volley fire and at close range their muskets could be just as deadly as canister fire foreign ERS injuries at Waterloo were fatal retired surgeon Mick crumplin is an expert on Napoleonic Battlefield medicine he's looking at the work of those other people on the battlefield the French and Allied doctors how they treated the injured especially the walking wounded could have a significant effect on the outcome of a battle in order to replicate the kind of wounds surgeons would have had to treat Mick commissioned sculptor and a ballistics expert Ivan Williams he's designed an artificial torso to take the place of human flesh and Bone Ivan shoots the Torso using three-quarter inch lead musket balls from an original Waterloo period weapon using original 19th century surgical instruments Mick will then attempt to show how the injuries would have been treated well I think these are just typical of the sort of wounds that would have been inflicted at the Battle of Waterloo and a surgeon would have to deal with of six injuries one would surmise that three were definitely instantly fatal one was presumably fairly soon fatal and two were survivable with good management the chest injuries you can see there are four entry wounds the surgeon would approach these and as with most wounds he would put his finger into the wound to see if the chest cavity was breached and the depth of the wound he could use a silver probe and you can say instantly that these three wounds would be mortal solid missiles or pieces of bone would be relatively easy to extract from a wound as there's something to grip on which is in great contrast to soft things like clothing and bits of belt and so forth using contemporary instruments you can see that this is a relatively easy exercise Battlefield surgery in 1815 was primitive by today's standards but it's always been believed that Napoleon's Army had a big advantage celebrated French experts such as Baron Dominique larae Napoleon's personal surgeon were thought to have developed a much more advanced system of military medicine than any other contemporary Army throughout the Waterloo campaign their groundbreaking treatments were thought to have speeded up the return of badly needed men to the front line contributing much to the soldiers morale thank you this could have given Napoleon The Edge over the Allies so why wasn't this the case Mick crumplin believes that by 1815 the British and Allied surgeons at Waterloo had become just as proficient as the French he studied the extraordinary work of Charles Bell a civilian British Doctor Who carefully recorded the injuries he encountered at Waterloo and the treatments he carried out Charles Bell was an anatomist artist and surgeon from the Middlesex Hospital who traveled out amongst others and he made 47 drawings on Vellum of wounded men the illustration showed Drass countenance shock infection in the men's faces it's an invaluable collection it is really the photography of the Battle of Waterloo [Music] by three o'clock the ground had begun to dry out and the disadvantages the French artillery had suffered in the morning were reduced but just when it seemed the French were about to regain the advantage Napoleon himself caused the Battle to take a fateful turn crucially at some time between two and three o'clock Napoleon left the battlefield exactly why he did this at such a critical stage is still a mystery there is clearly something not right with Napoleon this day he's complaining constantly about the pains in his stomach he's easily exhausted this is a man in in middle age who is beginning to suffer all the ailments of the middle aged and is very conscious of it all the time whatever Napoleon's condition he was absent from the battlefield for nearly two hours returning to his headquarters at Ross on nearly two miles away he left control of the embattled French army in the hands of his second in command Marshall nay lay was a superb soldier at the Tactical level if you wanted a charismatic leader to draw his sword and say to his men follow me for Glory nay was your man but Napoleon could hardly have chosen a worse moment to hand over command at about three o'clock nay looks up there onto the ridge onto the right hand side of the anglo-dutch position and he thinks he sees the Allies retreating no one's absolutely certain what happened that the best historical theory is that Wellington was adjusting some of his potatoes as he did during the course of the battle moving some out of the firing line moving them back to a reverse low position and it seems clear that nay saw this movement taking place and thought right they finally cracked they're beginning to move the exactly as we always thought they were going to and then orders an unsupported cavalry charge nay thought the critical moment had come that the French artillery had finally broken the Allied line whether he was unsighted by Battlefield smoke or by his own sheer impetuosity May seized his chance and acted he turns to the nearest Cavalry Brigade commander and he says take your Brigade capture the plateau the California Brigade Commander says no fair golf or whatever the French equivalent is nay loses his temper very typical of Nay grabs Miho who's the Cavalry core commander and says mijo take your Cavalry capture the plateau go now not only does he commit that Brigade of Cavalry he commits the entire Cavalry Corps So within the space of the next 30 to 40 minutes thousands of French Horsemen are committed to the battle on an area where frankly there is insufficient room for two regiments to charge and suddenly you have eight regiments 12 regiments 16 regiments nay himself passionately takes post ahead of them waves his sword in the air and the whole of the Cavalry moves off down the hill and up towards Wellington's Ridge one of the biggest Cavalry attacks of the Napoleonic Wars five thousand Sabers knee to knee climbing the slope to put the Allies to flight had not broken the waves of French Cavalry cross ER Ridge they found Wellington's infantry in position on the reverse slope formed in impregnable squares the Allied artillery was waiting for them the French Cavalry attacked again and again but it was impossible for them to break through the disciplined squares may had made a catastrophic error of judgment Napoleon comes back from rossom takes a look and says what on Earth are we doing he then starts to organize some artillery and some infiltrator put up in support of the Cavalry but it's too late and the flower of the French Cavalry is blown away hundreds of cavalrymen and horses were killed or wounded and the exhausted survivors played little further part in the battle it was a disaster for Napoleon the Prussian troops now closing in the French were forced to fight on two fronts Napoleon had lost the advantage but the truth is just as he was not the commander he once was his army was not the fighting machine it once had been to find out what had gone wrong with the Grand Army we need to go back further to the years before Waterloo an important clue lies in a dramatic archaeological Discovery in Lithuania just three years earlier in 1812 Napoleon had embarked on the disastrous Russian campaign more than half a million men marched with their Emperor into Russia [Music] it was an army of well-trained professionals the veterans of Napoleon's most famous victories but fewer than one in ten French soldiers returned and in Spring 2002 building workers in the Lithuanian Capital Vilnius found the last resting place of some of them two thousand French soldiers lie buried here in a single pit it's the largest mass grave of Napoleonic soldiers ever found when we escalate such a thing we always have a strange feeling that all these persons died and were just thrown into some kind of mass grave it must have been something like a terror Vision but when they were fresh boxes for the first time archaeologists can discover what kind of men made up Napoleon's Grand Army at the height of its power here you see the remains of uniform and there's green traces are most probably traces of button just this discoloration of Bones these are from artifacts the soldiers had been buried in their uniforms enabling the archaeologists to piece together the clues as to who they were they were able to work out that these women from the prime regiments of the Grand Army including Napoleon's Elite Imperial Guard and their bones revealed something else these soldiers were not diseased they'd been in good General Health when they died also young individual teeth are all healthy seized the third molar just was erupting mainly in their early to mid days these were the prime soldiers of the Grand Army the young men who had carved out an empire for Napoleon it is something like the cream of the French army actually and even these ones who were the strongest and the best soldiers at this period that here during this campaign but the evidence that the cream of Napoleon's Army died in Russia is not all that the skeletons in Vilnius reveal mysteriously few of these young soldiers died of wounds archaeologists were at first baffled as to why they were buried in Vilnius where there is no record of a major battle during the 1812 campaign however research soon showed that a much more poignant fate had befallen them these were the men who had survived the Russian campaign they had escaped to what they thought would be safety and yet what actually awaited them in Vilnius was a terrible death from starvation and hypothermia and the commander who had to Stand By and Watch his men die was Marshall nay could the traumatic experiences that nay suffered here in Vilnius hold the key to what went wrong for Napoleon at Waterloo foreign by 6 30 in the evening the Battle of Waterloo is approaching its final bloody climax as Prussian troops fight their way towards the Allies Napoleon is more and more dependent on his second in command Marshall nay but after the disastrous Cavalry Charges of the afternoon nay is becoming increasingly Reckless Mike Robinson is intrigued by nay's erratic behavior of Waterloo he suspects the legendary martial known as the bravest of the Brave may have played a crucial part in Napoleon's defeat in the battle they always let from the front he was in the thick of it he was in the Smoke he was in the musketry he was a man who's so wholly involved in the battle itself that he lost sight of what was going on around him and his passion was roused to such an extent that he lost his own self-control he made lots of quite serious mistakes of a tactical nature throughout the day a veteran of more than 70 battles nay had always been one of Napoleon's most Dependable Commanders having joined in the ranks as a humble Trooper he was promoted General before he was 30 and made a marshal of France by Napoleon when he was 35. but after the horrors of the Russian campaign of 1812 nay became steadily more unpredictable difficult to tell after this lapse of time just how much that affected his later performance certainly he was prone to make more mistakes both on a strategic and a tactical level he was prone to Greater outbursts of Fury or passion or temper and he was slower to calm down and certainly his performance on the day isn't what you would expect from the man who you want to lead your Army to victory can modern psychology shed light on nay's Behavior to test his theory Mike assembles a panel of leading military psychiatrists experts in identifying symptoms of combat fatigue in modern service personnel the picture that we have of now in the closing stages of the Battle of Waterloo is a man on the lower slopes of the Allied Ridge he's lost his hat he's had five horses shot from underneath him so he's striking the barrel of a cannon with the flat of his saber I can't see that as normal behavior in someone exercising that Rank and those responsibilities the picture you've just described is a man who's just lost to completely who is just lashing out who's out of control which is in stark contrast to what he should be even as a lieutenant or or a colonel you know he's supposed to be in command I think most of all of himself but Courtney's crucial loss of self-control during the battle have been due to a psychological complaint similar to what is now recognized as combat stress not everyone agrees in terms of Latter day thinking from the first war on was Battle shot combat stress shell shock really it's a functional diagnosis in other words can they function he functions but he didn't function as a leader yes he did so in in the sense of overall quality function of the as a leader a very Junior leader but not as a senior leader no he functioned as he'd always functioned um he would always be at the front he was the last man to step out of Russia I I don't think this is behavior that's incongruent with him we have to be careful not to get into a situation where we see the diagnosis as an incapability element that you know that these are people incapable of doing things but what's happening is he's not thinking straight now that's that's okay if you're if you're a private soldier that doesn't particularly matter if you're a general that's a big problem but having discussed the evidence do the group believe that martial nay was psychologically unfit for command I think he was fit I don't think it's a psychiatrist's job to say otherwise he was one of these men that was used the mount for All Seasons the good guys do all the hard work and do burn out and of course Napoleon perhaps we should question whether Napoleon was fit to serve at that time but of course nay if he failed he'd have a great scapegoat my feeling is that during the course of the battle for a brief period he experienced I would use the term combat exhaustion um he developed tunnel vision and he reverted to type as a as a very Junior Soldier rather than functioned as as a leader in that sense he he was suffering a temporary psychological disorder and we were probably Now call battle shock the discussion casts important new light on the part nay would play in the last Act of the battle around 7 30 in the evening Waterloo reaches its final dramatic climax after marching all day to the sound of the guns Prussian troops have now linked up with the allies time is running out for Napoleon and his only chance is to commit the last precious Reserve has left now is the Imperial Guard the guard have never been beaten though the cream of the French army and provided they're properly used they still just might pull Victory from the jaws of defeat absolute crust because if he loses them he loses the Empire and so when the decision is made to commit the guard this is the crucial moment there's no going back from this you've got to win the final moments would reflect the problems Napoleon had faced throughout the whole battle his artillery had failed against Allied troops protected by the reverse slope and soft ground what troops he had left after years of attrition had been wasted in Rush uncoordinated attacks now the Imperial Guard his last Reserve would have to attack over deceptively tough terrain selected by a master of defensive Warfare struggling up the difficult muddy slope they would have faced point-blank artillery fire Round Shot and canister finally command of this critical last attack was handed to a man likely suffering from battleship Marshall name Napoleon could only look on helplessly as nay yelling and screaming led the column into the dense smoke which cloaked the Allied Bridge noise you can't see anything you're trying to pick your way across obstacles force your way through the mud this is a pretty unpleasant movement they have to do but they are the guard and despite the discharge of canister despite the chaos despite the difficulty they keep going [Applause] as the exhausted French Guardsmen reached the crest of the Allied Ridge it seemed for a moment that they had broken through but suddenly the red wall of Wellington's infantry Rose from the reverse slope from less than 30 yards the Allied muskets couldn't miss more than 500 Guardsmen fell to the first volley alone but no soldiers not even the Imperial Guard could withstand such murderous Firepower the first and only time in their history Napoleon's Imperial Guard broke and fled and once the guards start to retreat down the hill the whole French army breaks my whole French army starts to withdraw and that effectively is the end of the Battle of Waterloo [Music] with the end of the Imperial Guard Napoleon's empire passed into Legend and a new Europe was born paid for In The Blood of nearly 50 000 French Allied and Prussian soldiers on the muddy steep slopes of the Waterloo Ridge [Music]

Channel: Our History

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Id: nhLV_5OWnI0

Length: 47min 26sec (2846 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 27 2022