The Waterloo Kriegsspiel: Turn Two (16th of June)

This is post four in a series of seven; the others are:

Starting in the East, dawn saw the Prussians take a gamble and move Pirch's II Corps, along with 2. Brigade of I Corps along the Nivelles road to attack Vandamme's III Corps - five of the eight divisions that they had assembled at Fleurus - leaving them quite outnumbered around Fleurus itself.

The French were aware of this, but mindful of the fact that his orders were merely to hold the Prussians on this flank, Grouchy declined to attack, instead ordering an artillery bombardment of the Prussian positions in Fleurus.

With hindsight, this was the first serious mistake the French made, albeit an understandable one. With the superiority they enjoyed, they could have easily forced the small army at Fleurus back and then fallen upon II Corps from two directions at once. 

As it was, the artillery bombardment went on for much of the day, but Prussians had plenty of guns to oppose the French, and the net result was a tactical stalemate, while further Prussian divisions arrived throughout the course of the day.

Moving NE then, we come to the battle between Vandamme and Pirch's detached Corps.

This was a substantial engagement: roughly 40,000 Prussians attacking 17,000 French.

As bold as the decision to send Thielmann's Corps to attack Quatre Bras had been, Thielmann himself was even bolder, sending virtually all of his cavalry (some 4,000 sabres) around the French right flank to cause trouble.

This they did with relish; Vandamme's Corps cavalry was only one fourth the size of the Prussian cavalry force, so proved unable to halt the flood. Unknown to Thielmann, Napoleon was also present, and narrowly escaped capture himself.

Despite their superiority though, the Prussian cavalry couldn't do much about the French infantry once formed into square, and began to take severe casualties themselves.

Meanwhile, just to their east, the Prussian infantry smashed through the horribly outnumbered men of Habert's division, denied reinforcement by the antics of the Prussian cavalry.

With one division mangled and the other two not deployed into a useful formation for fighting infantry, Vandamme exploited the eventual pulling back of the Prussian infantry to retreat west towards Nivelles; Thielmann being content to seize the crossroads as ordered.

I think here the French blundered by deploying a French corps that simply wasn't up to the job of taking on a Prussian one. Had Vandamme been reinforced with some more infantry, and crucially one of the reserve cavalry corps sitting around near Charleroi, he could quite possibly have beaten the relatively inexperienced Prussians.

Now reinforced with the bulk of the troops who had reached Le Reulx,  Orange advanced South to try and defeat Ney, who marched North to meet him.

This was (to begin with) a fairly evenly matched battle; Orange with around 28,000 men facing Ney with 33,000. Ney's aggressive advance brought the two sides to blows quickly right along the line, and the fighting seesawed back and forth for the next couple of hours. 

At one point Ney managed to see off the British cavalry on his left flank, and charged into the British lines, breaking one brigade of Chasse's division. It was here that Orange, attempting to keep the other units from breaking, rolled a '12': possibly the single consequential die roll of the campaign. 

Had Orange not kept his men together, there was a very real chance that Orange's force would have been shattered and driven back North, leaving Wellington very exposed and with a large inferiority in force: an opportunity for Ney to defeat both armies in detail.

With his cavalry blown, Ney retreated back on the village of Binche, and was unpleasantly surprised to find British reinforcements arriving from the West: Wellington, with a further 12,000 men.

About this time Napoleon also arrived from the East. Finding the village under attack by superior numbers, he personally lead a counterattack to drive them out... and was hit in the head by a stray bullet and knocked out (a '3' that could have been a '2' and an outright death). 

When Napoleon comes to shortly later, he sees that his chance here is gone and orders a retreat East on Charleroi. The British, who have marched far and fought hard, elect not to pursue and remain encamped at Binche, where they now sit astride the primary line of communication between the main French army and d'Erlon's far flung Corps.

The 'battle', if you can call it that, of Lens was something of a fumbling mess. Both sides spent all day staggering about like drunks in an unlit house, groping for far-flung friendly divisions, enemy forces in various quantities and cavalry of unknown origin and allegiance.

Chronologically, we should start with the latter.

Very little happened in the area until General Uxbridge arrived from the East: behind French lines. As he had neglected to inform General Hill of his impending arrival, and elected to bring with him a brigade each of Dutch and KGL cavalry (all neatly attired in blue uniforms), the first thing both Hill and d'Erlon were aware of was the sudden presence of 2,000 blue uniformed cavalrymen who nobody could identify.

Uxbridge solved this particular dilemma by charging headlong at the cavalry guarding the French right flank, breaking through and setting off for the - understandably alarmed - British lines, with French cavalry in hot pursuit. Eventually though, they give up and Uxbridge & Co make it to Hill's position largely unscathed.

This was one of the stranger episodes of the fog of war messing things up - it's certainly hard to see it happening on the tabletop - and I think makes episodes like Ney's nightmare of order and counter order which kept him from both Quatre Bras and Ligny.

After that, both sides settled in to watch the other. I later found out that, as with Fleurus, both players were under the impression that their job was to hold the enemy here while the decisive engagement was elsewhere. 

The stalemate lasted till mid afternoon, when General Hill's reinforcements arrived. The men of Lieutenant-General Stedman's 1st Netherlands Division, accompanied by the Dutch Indies Brigade (some 9,000 men in all) had marched hard from Oudenarde the day before, and instead of having them reinforce his position from the North via Ath, had sent them on a circuitous flank march nearly as far south as Mons before arriving SW of the French position.

For the rest of the day, d'Erlon bounced back and forth between the two British forces like a counterpuncher jabbing to keep an opponent at bay. Hill struggled to coordinate his forces, but managed just about well enough to keep d'Erlon from defeating each in detail, and when darkness fell both sides were still just about capable of further action.

At the end of the day, the French attack has bogged down. Fleurus and Lens were missed opportunities; Quatre Bras and Binche more serious reverses. Despite this, the balance of power has not yet tipped decisively in favour of the Allies, and we enter the third day of the campaign with everything still to play for.