Etienne Maurice Gerard

Etienne Maurice Gerard told Grouchy to march to the sound of the guns at Waterloo and was overruled, which is the single most argued-over conversation in Napoleonic history. He was a volunteer of 1791 who rose through the revolutionary and imperial armies - Austerlitz, Jena, Wagram, the Russian campaign, Leipzig - and was made a count and a general of division. On 18 June 1815 he was commanding a corps under Grouchy, pursuing the Prussians after Ligny, when the cannon of Waterloo became audible from Walhain. Gerard urged Grouchy to abandon the pursuit and march towards the firing; Grouchy, holding written orders to follow the Prussians, refused, and thirty thousand French troops spent the afternoon fighting a rearguard at Wavre while Blucher's main body arrived on Napoleon's flank. The two men disputed the exchange bitterly in print for the rest of their lives. Gerard was wounded that day, went into exile in Brussels afterwards, returned under an amnesty, and had a long second career: deputy, commander of the army that took Antwerp for the new Belgian state in 1832, Marshal of France, briefly prime minister in 1834, and grand chancellor of the Legion of Honour. He is one of the names on the Arc de Triomphe. He had made his name at Austerlitz carrying dispatches under fire and was given a battlefield promotion for it. The phrase march to the sound of the guns is attached to him in French military teaching to this day, usually without the detail that the man he said it to refused. His account of Waterloo was published in 1829 and Grouchy answered it in print the following year. He served three regimes and was decorated by all of them. He died in Paris in 1852 and is buried at Pere Lachaise.

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