If Napoleon had won his "Waterloo" ....

[v.Manstein]

ORIGINAL: Joe D.

ORIGINAL: v.Manstein

Grouchy with his 33000 men decided against to march to the sound of the guns raging at Waterloo, so he stuck to his original orders to chase Bluecher who they thought were somewhere else.

If Grouchy "lost" Bluchers' army and was chasing a ghost, he wasn't exactly following his orders.

How could the French cavalry lose contact with an entire army and all its stragglers?

That is what came to mind as well. How could an army of about 40000 soldiers slip away unnoticed??

One of Grouchy's commanders begged him to march to the sound of the guns, though. Wonder what would have happened to the outcome of the battle.
As the victor always names the battles, it could now be even named differently. If Bluecher had his say, he wanted the battle to be named La Belle Alliance, not Waterloo.

[warspite1]

My recollection is that there were two issues here:

1. The Prussians were not defeated and broken after Ligny. They had substantial forces - and some of those were on their way to join Wellington as they had promised.

2. Grouchy was East of the Prussians and tardy in setting out to harrass them the next day. Accordingly Grouchy had little hope of getting between the Prussians and Waterloo.


The battle was set with the remainder of the Prussian forces for Wavre...

[Alchenar]

The Prussians aren't just 'not broken', they're marching to link up with Wellington. Blucher is clearly up for a fight and as we can tell from the Prussian performance at Waterloo, his army was clearly up for a fight.

Maybe best case scenario is Grouchy gets caught up in a running battle with Blucher as he's marching to Waterloo but Blucher knows very well that the critical thing is to link up with Wellington. Maybe a second or even third corps of the Prussian army get caught up in a rearguard action but even the arrival of one corps is going to be enough to force Napoleon to react to it and throw his plan off balance.

And if France wins both battles? The Coalition armies are now on road nets that let them fall back towards Brussels and each other rather than being forced further apart. Absolute worst case scenario they fight another battle there and win.

[Curtis Lemay]

It should be pointed out that the Prussian IV Corps was not at Ligny. It was the first to arrive and did the most damage.