Napoleon wanted to destroy Wellington’s army, and he described his proposed tactics simply enough:
I shall have my artillery fire and my cavalry charge, so as to force the enemy to disclose his positions, and when I am quite certain which positions the English troops have taken up, I shall march straight at them with my Old Guard.
That was disingenuous. What he really planned was to weaken Wellington’s line before he launched massive, hammer-blow attacks that would crash through the Duke’s centre, which meant he was doing exactly what Wellington wanted him to do. The Emperor had declared it would all be over by lunch, but then he had waited to allow the ground to dry, so it would all be over by teatime instead.
So how to weaken the British–Dutch centre? First there were the guns, the great guns that could tear battalions into ragged ruin just as they had shattered the exposed Prussian infantry on the slopes above Ligny. Wellington placed most of his infantry behind the crest, which reduced the effectiveness of the bombardment, but the Emperor also planned a diversionary attack that would be pressed hard enough to persuade Wellington to reinforce the British–Dutch right wing at the expense of his centre. That meant attacking Hougoumont, the complex of buildings on Wellington’s right flank, the fortress which Baron von Müffling feared was inadequately garrisoned. Napoleon reckoned that if he threatened to capture Hougoumont then Wellington would have no choice but to take troops from the ridge top to reinforce the garrison. Once those reinforcements had left the ridge then the real attack, the overwhelming attack, could be launched across the valley to capture Mont St Jean.
So the battle begins at Hougoumont, pitting Lieutenant-Colonel James Macdonell, a Coldstreamer, against His Majesty Jérôme I, by the Grace of God, King of Westphalia, Prince of France, Prince of Montfort, and he would have been none of those things had he not also been Napoleon’s brother. He was the youngest of the family, but like all Napoleon’s siblings he had risen to unimaginable heights thanks to his brother’s patronage. Joseph, the oldest child, became King of Spain, Lucien was Prince of Canino and Musignano, Elisa was Grand Duchess of Tuscany, Louis had been King of Holland, Pauline was the Princess Borghese, Caroline the Queen Consort of Naples, and Jérôme, briefly King of Westphalia, was now a General of Division in his brother’s army. Relations between the two were often fraught, because Jérôme was a spendthrift wastrel. He was thirty-one years old in 1815, but his troubles with his brother began much earlier when, aged nineteen, he had met and married an American, Elizabeth Patterson from Baltimore. The marriage drove Napoleon into a fury. He needed his siblings to marry for dynastic reasons, not for something as trivial as love, and so he forbade Elizabeth to enter France and insisted his brother divorce her. Elizabeth, or Betsy as she was known, retreated to London, where her son, Jérôme Napoleon Bonaparte II, was born in Camberwell. The British, of course, were more than happy to shelter Betsy and use her story to embarrass the Emperor. ‘You have much ambition,’ Napoleon had written to Jérôme in 1809:
some intelligence, a few good qualities, but are spoiled by stupidity, by great presumption, and have no real knowledge. In God’s name keep enough wits about you to write and talk with propriety.
Four years later, after the reverses of the disastrous Russian campaign in which Jérôme had failed miserably, the Emperor let loose a much more damning judgment:
You are hateful to me. Your conduct disgusts me. I know no one so base, so stupid, so cowardly; you are destitute of virtue, talents and resources.
Yet family loyalty overrode such judgments, and Jérôme had been entrusted with the leadership of the largest division of infantry in his brother’s army, the 6th Infantry Division, with nearly 8,000 men, though 1,000 of those had been lost at Quatre-Bras. Now Jérôme had something to prove. He wanted to show his brother that he was not base, cowardly and spoiled by stupidity and, ordered to attack Hougoumont, he was determined to capture it.
Nothing wrong with that, except the capture of Hougoumont was not what Napoleon wanted. He wanted it besieged, and the siege should be fierce enough, and last long enough, to persuade Wellington to reinforce the château’s garrison with troops from the ridge. Only when the siege had achieved that aim of weakening Wellington’s line could it be captured, but Jérôme had other ideas. He would take Hougoumont! Jérôme’s immediate superior was General Reille, an experienced soldier who had risen from the ranks and who, at Waterloo, had responsibility for most of Napoleon’s left wing. It had been Reille who incurred the Emperor’s wrath by offering his opinion that well-posted British infantry were well-nigh impregnable, and now Reille had to attack that infantry, and he began by ordering Jérôme to occupy the valley just south of Hougoumont’s wood and then to push a strong line of skirmishers up into the trees.
The wood was a large stretch of mature trees, mostly oak, that grew to the south of the walled complex of Hougoumont. There were wild raspberries in the sparse undergrowth and forget-me-nots bright along the wood’s edges. The ground rose steeply through the trees, so that any attack would be uphill into the face of the wood’s defenders, 600 skirmishers from Hanover and from the Dutch–German Nassauers. The wood and the steep slope above from where the French began their attacks were also in range of the British–Dutch artillery posted on the high ground above the château.
It was late morning. Napoleon had originally wanted to begin the battle at 9 a.m., but he had waited for the ground to dry so it was after 11 a.m. when Jérôme’s men advanced to capture the wood. General Reille’s orders were specific enough, threaten Hougoumont, but neither Napoleon nor Reille wanted a major brawl that would suck in too many French troops. The main French effort would be against Wellington’s left and centre, not against his right, but Jérôme wanted his victory, and when the first French troops discovered that the German skirmishers were formidable opponents, Jérôme fed in more men. General Foy, who commanded another division under Reille, called the wood a ‘death-trap’. To reach it the French had to cross a stretch of open ground that was under artillery fire, and once in the wood they faced muskets and rifles. The defenders had the advantage of the high ground and had little need to expose themselves except when shooting. The French struggled up the hill to be shot back down again, and soon their wounded were being carried back across the valley. Captain de Vatry, one of Jérôme’s staff officers, heard the men complaining that there were no more ambulances:
This is what happened … most of [the drivers] had never heard gunfire before, they became nervous under the fire of the English batteries, unharnessed the horses or cut the traces and galloped away.
Marshal Ney, who had been given charge of the day’s attacks, sent a staff officer to discover what happened at Hougoumont, and there followed another misunderstanding. The aide was appalled when he discovered French infantry cowering behind trees and begging for help, and so he urged Jérôme to throw in his whole division, over 7,000 men. Jérôme hardly needed the encouragement. He sent in all his troops and then begged Reille for more. The fight for Hougoumont, far from draining Wellington’s army of reserves, was now soaking up inordinate numbers of French infantry. But numbers counted, and as the thousands of blue-coated Frenchmen climbed through the bullet-scarred trees they inevitably pushed the defenders out of the wood. The fight had been going for about an hour and now, sometime after midday, Jérôme’s men faced the real fortress itself, Hougoumont.
The complex of Hougoumont is perhaps best envisaged as three rectangles superimposed on each other. The largest rectangle was an apple orchard protected by a ditch and a hedge. The French, attacking from the south, could gain access to the orchard, but once inside they encountered the second and far more formidable rectangle, the walled formal garden. The garden must once have been the pride of Hougoumont, a lovely space of parterre flower beds cut by walks shaded by hornbeams and cherry trees. More important to Colonel Macdonell was that the formal garden was protected to the west by buildings, and to the south and east by a brick wall that was seven feet h
igh. He constructed platforms behind the wall so that men could shoot over the coping, and the wall itself was loopholed. The third rectangle is the buildings to the west of the garden, and these really were formidable. The buildings were contiguous, so that they presented a solid wall of masonry. To the south, facing the French attack, were a gardener’s house, a storeroom and, between them, a big arched gateway that had been closed and barricaded. The walls of those buildings were again loopholed, as were the buildings that faced west, the chief of which was a great barn. On the opposite side of the rectangle were cowsheds and stables that backed onto the formal garden, while in the centre of the rectangle was the château itself, a substantial and comfortable house with high windows from which men could shoot over the roofs of the other structures. A small chapel stood next to the house. The main farmyard was between the barn and the cowsheds and the main entrance to the whole complex was on the north side of that yard. This is the famous north gate which was to see one of the battle’s most celebrated incidents.
A lane ran alongside the great barn separating the walled buildings from a small kitchen garden that was protected by a hedge and a fence. The whole complex of orchards, gardens, hedges, brick walls and stone buildings was, in the words of Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Woodford, a Coldstreamer, ‘well calculated for defence’:
The dwelling-house in the centre was a strong square building, with small doors and windows. The barns and granaries formed nearly a square, with one door of communication with the small yard to the south; and from that yard was a door into the garden, a double gate into the wood … and another door opening into the lane to the west. There was also another carriage gate at the North West angle of the great yard.
As the French emerged from the oak wood they faced this formidable range of walls and buildings. Immediately to their front they saw the gardener’s house, its windows spitting musket fire, while to its right were 200 metres of the formal garden’s high brick wall. The distance from the wood’s edge to the wall was about 30 yards, and it was in that space that Jérôme’s men died and suffered. One of the first to be killed was General Bauduin, the commanding officer of Jérôme’s 1st Brigade. Many of the German troops who had defended the wood had now joined the garrison inside Hougoumont’s walls, and one of them, Private Johann Leonhard, fought from behind the loopholed garden wall:
We had scarcely taken up position at the loopholes when masses of French came from the wood, all intent on capturing the farm, but they were too late! The shower of balls that we loosed off on the French was so terrible that the grass was soon covered with French corpses. Their retreating and advancing went on!
The Dutch–German troops who had defended the wood needed to retreat into the complex of buildings. As there was no available entrance facing the trees, they ran around the wall, and their understandable haste gave rise to the accusation that they had panicked and run. Several British officers wrote scornfully that the Dutch troops fled, but the evidence indicates that they joined the Guardsmen in the formal garden which was now under siege as the French made desperate efforts to scale the wall. Jérôme’s men charged repeatedly and were repeatedly thrown back by muskets flaring from loopholes or from the upper floors of the buildings. One of the German troops inside the compound described the defenders’ fire as ‘murderous’, and because the range was so short, the musket fire was accurate. Thick powder smoke wreathed the buildings and the upper wood, and the French, desperate to capture this great bastion, sent in yet another brigade of infantry. This was ghastly work. The French had not brought artillery to break down the walls, nor were they supplied with ladders to escalade the defences, yet still they charged. One French infantryman remembered the ‘dead, dying and wounded lying in heaps’. Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Home of the 3rd Guards, the Royal Scots, described the slaughter in front of the wall as ‘immense’, and said that the French wounded, lying in those heaps, repeatedly asked him to ‘order his men to fire upon them and put them out of their misery’. A battery of six British howitzers was also targeting the upper wood, shredding the oak trees with shrapnel and shell fragments that added to the carnage.
Over 9,000 French infantry were now trying to evict James Macdonell’s defenders. Unable to scale the garden wall, the French tried to surround the buildings, sending men to the left and the right. The château was hard-pressed, but reinforcements came from the ridge above. Not from Wellington’s centre, which was Napoleon’s hope, but from the Guards battalions immediately behind the château. Wellington himself despatched some of those reinforcements with the words, ‘There, my lads, in with you and let me see no more of you.’ Two companies of Coldstreamers charged down the hill and, with fixed bayonets, scoured the French away from the eastern flank, then joined the garrison inside the walls. Other companies were sent down later until, according to Lieutenant-Colonel Home, ‘the whole of the 3rd Regiment and eight companies of the Coldstream were employed in or near Hougoumont. The whole force employed there at any one time never exceeded 1,200 men’, and those 1,200 men (to whom we should add the surviving Nassauers) were tying down at least 9,000 Frenchmen.
Private Matthew Clay, the guardsman whose inedible breakfast had been a scorched scrap of pig’s head, was one of the men defending the small hedged kitchen garden that lay across the lane from the great barn. The garden was hardly defensible against the huge number of Frenchmen who now tried to assault Hougoumont, and so the defenders were ordered back behind the walls, but Clay and another guardsman, ‘a very steady and undaunted old soldier’, managed to get separated from their company during this brief retreat. They were forced to stay outside the walls, where they exchanged shots with the enemy skirmishers:
I unwisely ascended the higher part of a sloping ground on which the outside wall of the farm was built. I thought I would be able to single out the enemy’s skirmishers … but I very quickly found that I had become a target for them because my red coat was more distinctly visible … I continued to exchange shots with the enemy across the kitchen garden, but they, having the advantage of the fence as a covering, their shots freely struck the wall in my rear … my musket, now proving defective, was very discouraging but looking on the ground I saw a musket which I immediately took possession of in exchange for my own one. The new musket was warm from recent use and proved an excellent one.
After some minutes Clay noticed that a gate leading into the farm’s yard was open and the two redcoats made a dash for it, reaching safety just after a number of Frenchmen had been killed in the gateway:
the gates were riddled with shot holes … in its entrance lay many dead bodies of the enemy. One which I particularly noticed appeared to be a French officer, but they were scarcely distinguishable, being to all appearance as though they had been very much trodden upon and covered with mud.
That French incursion through the gates was probably the first of two. Most accounts of the battle reckon that only one French assault succeeded in entering the walled compound, but Clay saw two and his account is reinforced by the memoirs of the German defenders. The struggle for Hougoumont is fierce and unrelenting, and it will last most of that long day, but for now we can leave besiegers and besieged because the great guns at the centre of Napoleon’s line have opened fire, heralding the first major attack on Wellington’s ridge. Hougoumont is by no means secure, the French will bring artillery to bear on the walls and there will be a savage crisis during the afternoon, but as the thunderous percussion of Napoleon’s cannon fills the sky Macdonell’s men are holding firm.
While in the centre of the Emperor’s line the great guns are recoiling, spewing thick smoke into the valley and pounding Wellington’s ridge with roundshot and shell. And the Peninsular veterans on that ridge recognized another sound, the pas de charge, the sound of drummers beating out the rhythm of assault, and a sound which announces that one of the greatest infantry attacks of the whole Napoleonic Wars is about to be launched.
* * *
The sound of Napoleon’s
guns pounded the air above the fields of Mont St Jean, and the same noise was rattling windows in Paris. A single cannon was firing from Les Invalides, the military hospital built by Louis XIV which also served as a retirement home for disabled veterans. There was no shot or shell loaded in the cannon; it was firing a salute, smothering the great parade ground with thick powder smoke. ‘The gun at Les Invalides is firing!’ remembered Émile Labretonnière, a student of mathematics. ‘Do you hear it?’ he asked the friend who shared his Paris apartment:
‘It must be a great victory!’ We got up at once and ran off to make enquiries. The gun was celebrating the victory the Emperor had gained over the Prussians at Ligny on June 16th. We went to the Café des Pyrénées to read the bulletin. We were wild with joy! The gun at Les Invalides brought back memories of the triumphs which had stirred our childhood. We were drunk with pride … I remember the enthusiasm with which a student from Grenoble named Rousseau told us that Wellington had been captured and Blücher killed!
Emile had watched the army leave Paris in early June and had been hugely impressed. He described the departing troops as ‘superb’ and he believed they were ‘so full of ardour’ that they had to be invincible. He was elated at the news of Ligny, while the Royalists in Paris were downcast and spreading rumours that tried to undermine the Emperor’s achievement. But that Sunday morning the gun at Les Invalides contradicted the Royalists’ gloom, it told of victory, and Emile, like most Parisians, could not wait to hear of the Emperor’s ultimate triumph. ‘At last,’ he wrote excitedly, ‘the fight was on!’