But first they must cross the Lasne. Prussian light cavalry were the first to cross, and they skirmished with French hussars in the Bois de Paris, the Paris Wood, which lay on the defile’s western side. Colonel Marcellin de Marbot commanded the French horsemen:
I threw the hussars and lancers that led [the Prussian column] back twice. I tried to win time by holding the enemy at bay as long as I could. He could only come from the steep muddy tracks with great difficulty.
The French lost an opportunity. General Lobau had over 6,000 infantry just to the west of the wood, and if those men had been posted on the lip of the Lasne’s valley they could have held the Prussians back for hours, but Napoleon had given Lobau specific instructions that he was not to attack the Prussians until he heard Grouchy’s guns assailing them from the rear, and so Lobau stayed where he was, listening for a sound that did not arrive, and, unit by unit, the Prussians managed to cross the river. They gathered in the Bois de Paris, cavalry ahead, infantry behind, and artillery on the road. It took time – there was just one narrow bridge across the Lasne – but by mid-afternoon the Prussians were over the river in force. Grouchy, who was supposed to be attacking them, was still advancing on Wavre, where his scouts had discovered the Prussian rearguard left to defend that town. Napoleon might pray for Grouchy’s arrival at Waterloo, but the Marshal was about to start a separate battle 12 miles away.
General Baron von Müffling was the Prussian liaison officer with Wellington and he now had messengers going backwards and forwards between himself and Blücher. The allies were in touch, though it would still be some time before the Prussians could engage the enemy in sufficient strength to make a difference. Yet von Müffling was in no doubt that his countrymen’s assistance was needed urgently. ‘After 3 o’clock,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘the Duke’s situation became critical, unless the succour of the Prussian army arrived soon.’
Because it was after three o’clock that the French hurled their most desperate attacks on Wellington’s line.
* * *
Hougoumont was on fire. French howitzers were lobbing shells over the high walls. If they could not drive the garrison out, then perhaps they could burn them out. The fire prompted one of Wellington’s most famous orders. He kept a supply of ass’s skin slips (ass’s skin was smooth enough to be wiped clean and re-used) on which he wrote his orders, using the pommel of his saddle as a desk. He had ridden along the crest and stared down at Hougoumont and now wrote to Macdonell, and the order is worth quoting in full, remembering that it was written under fire in a place assailed by noise. The clarity is extraordinary:
I see that the fire has communicated itself from the haystack to the roof of the Château. You must however still keep your men in the parts to which the fire does not reach. Take care that no Men are lost by the falling in of the Roof or floors. After they will have fallen in, occupy the Ruined Walls inside of the Garden, particularly if it should be possible for the Enemy to pass through the Embers to the Inside of the House.
It might be said that Macdonell hardly needed the order, he would have done precisely as Wellington wished without the careful instructions, but Wellington rarely left anything to chance. Matthew Clay, after his adventure outside the château walls, was now shooting from one of the main house’s upper windows which, he noted, were higher than the other buildings and their fire ‘annoyed the enemy skirmishers’:
The enemy noticed this and threw their shells amongst us and set the building we were defending on fire. Our officer placed himself at the entrance of the room and would not allow anyone to leave his post until our positions became hopeless and too perilous to remain. We fully expected the floor to sink with us every moment and in our escape several of us were more or less injured.
Flames destroyed the main house, which was never rebuilt. The fire reached the chapel, where many of the injured were lying, but the flames died just as they reached and scorched the crucifix suspended over the small altar. Some took that as a miracle. Other wounded men were in the barn, which was also on fire, but not all the injured could be rescued and their screams could be heard as they burned to death. Some horses were also burned to death there, their suffering adding to the day’s cacophony. Yet the garrison still held. Some time in the afternoon a brave driver of the Royal Wagon Train whipped his horses down the lane. Captain Horace Seymour, an aide to Lord Uxbridge, had asked the man to take his wagonload of ammunition to the defenders:
I merely pointed out to him where he was wanted, when he gallantly started his horses, and drove straight down the hill to the Farm, to the gate of which I saw him arrive. He must have lost his horses, as there was a severe fire kept on him. I feel convinced that to that man’s service the Guard owe their ammunition.
That is a reminder of all the heroes at Waterloo. Sous-Lieutenant Legros and his men, Sergeant James Graham, Charles Ewart; so many on both sides. Yet there was also cowardice. Some men offered to help wounded to the rear and never returned. It even happened among the elite units. General Sir Andrew Barnard commanded a brigade of the Light Division that included a battalion of his own 95th Rifles. He wrote after the battle:
I regret to say that a great number of our men went to the rear without cause after the appearance of the Cuirassiers, there was no less than 100 absentees after the fight and this vexes me very much as it is the first time such a thing has ever happened in the regiment. Kincaid says very few if any quitted the corps after the charge of the cavalry. Many of those that went to the rear were men that I little expected to have heard of in that situation.
Edward Costello, one of Barnard’s riflemen, had been wounded at Quatre-Bras. He retreated with the rest of his unit, but on the day of the battle he was ordered to Brussels to have his wound dressed. He walked north through the woods and saw ‘droves’ of men in the trees:
Belgians, and English also, with fires lighted, busily cooking, having left their comrades in contest with the enemy. There appeared to be nothing the matter with them.
It is worth remembering that far more stayed than went. Some wounded men were ordered to the rear and doubtless they felt relief at the order, but many refused to leave, preferring to stay with their comrades. Others had legitimate reasons to leave the battlefield. Three troops, which was half the survivors, from the Inniskilling Dragoons were given the task of escorting a mass of French prisoners to Brussels. Those prisoners were fortunate because they lived. Wilhelm Schutte was a surgeon with the Brunswick troops. ‘Our men’, he wrote to his parents, ‘were full of a hellish anger,’ then provided an example:
At four o’clock in the afternoon some 100 French prisoners were brought in; one of them escaped at a favourable chance. A hussar chased him and shot him through the head with his pistol, others ran towards him and stabbed at him and even wounded men took pieces of wood or whatever else they could find and clubbed him until no single piece of him hung together.
By mid-afternoon there is a constant stream of men retreating northwards from the battlefield. Most had legitimate reasons for going, they were either wounded or helping the wounded reach the surgeons, though not everyone who looked after the injured were doctors. Elizabeth Gale was a five-year-old, the daughter of a rifleman in the 95th, and she and her mother had accompanied the battalion to Mont St Jean. Years later Elizabeth recalled how she helped tear up lint to make bandages for the wounded and even assisted her mother in dressing some wounds. Elizabeth was to live to be 95 years old and to be the last living survivor of the battle, dying in 1904. A journalist interviewed her shortly before she died:
She has a vivid recollection of several men dying in the camp and was much frightened when her mother lifted a cloth which covered one of them and she saw the dead man’s open eyes apparently staring vacuously towards the battlefield.
So Marshal Ney, watching from the southern ridge, saw crowds of men making their way north towards Brussels. Most were wounded, some were deserters, many were wagoneers going to fetch ammunition, and thousands wer
e prisoners under escort, and it was that flood of men, horses and wagons that was the direct cause of the next great drama of Waterloo.
‘Wellington’s Orders, Battle of Waterloo, 1815’: ‘I see that the fire has communicated itself from the haystack to the roof of the Château. You must however still keep your men in the parts to which the fire does not reach. Take care that no Men are lost by the falling in of the roof or floors.’
‘Sir James Macdonell’, by William Salter. Macdonell’s task that Sunday was to defend Hougoumont with 1,500 guardsmen and 600 Dutch–German allies, against some 9,000 French infantry who eventually massed to evict the defenders.
‘Defence of the Chateau de Hougoumont by the Coldstream Guards’, by Denis Dighton. Thousands were to die in and around Hougoumont, and we must forgive the survivors if their accounts are not always coherent.
‘Closing the Gates at Hougoumont’, by Robert Gibb.
CHAPTER TEN
The most beautiful troops in the world
THE REVEREND WILLIAM LEEKE, a graduate of Cambridge, was the Perpetual Curate in the parish of Holbrook in Derbyshire and the author of several earnest works which strove to improve the Anglican Church. Yet before he studied theology and before he became a priest, he had been a soldier, and in 1815 he was a seventeen-year-old Ensign in the 52nd Foot. ‘The standing to be cannonaded,’ he wrote in the memoirs of his military service:
and having nothing else to do, is about the most unpleasant thing that can happen to soldiers in an engagement. I frequently tried to follow, with my eye, the course of the balls from our own guns, which were firing over us. It is much more easy to see a round-shot passing away from you over your head, than to catch sight of one coming through the air towards you, though this occurs occasionally. I speak of shot fired from six, eight, nine or twelve pounder guns.
Leeke was holding one of the regiment’s colours, though the two flags, having been carried through the battles of Vimeiro, Corunna, Bussaco, Fuentes d’Onoro, Ciudad Rodrigo, Badajoz, Salamanca, Vitoria, Nivelle, Orthez and Toulouse, were now little more than tattered rags on bare poles. The 52nd was the largest infantry battalion at Waterloo, with over a thousand men in its ranks, about half of them Peninsular veterans. It would soon have a chance of glory, but for now it must endure the ‘most unpleasant thing that can happen to soldiers’. The Reverend Leeke continues his tale:
After we had been stationed for more than an hour so far down in front of the British position, a gleam of sunshine, falling on them, particularly attracted my attention to some brass guns in our front which appeared to be placed lower down the French slope, and nearer to us, than the others. I distinctly saw the French artillerymen go through the whole motion of sponging out one of the guns and reloading it … and when it was discharged I caught sight of the ball, which appeared to be in a direct line for me. I thought, Shall I move? No! I gathered myself up, and stood firm, with the colour in my right hand. I do not exactly know the rapidity with which cannon-balls fly, but I think that two seconds elapsed from the time I saw this shot leave the gun until it struck the front face of the square. It did not strike the four men in rear of whom I was standing, but the four fellows on their right. It was fired at some elevation, and struck the front man about the knees, and coming to the ground under the feet of the rear man of the four, whom it most severely wounded, it rose and, passing within an inch or two of the colour pole, went over the rear face of the square without doing further injury. The two men in the first and second rank fell outward, I fear they did not survive long; the two others fell within the square. The rear man made a considerable outcry on being wounded, but on one of the officers saying kindly to him, ‘O man, don’t make a noise,’ he instantly recollected himself, and was quiet.
Leeke’s battalion was in square. They had been in reserve, but Wellington had brought them forward to the right of his line which, so far, had not been attacked. Some men reported that the battle went ‘quiet’ after the repulse of d’Erlon’s Corps and after the waste of the British cavalry that followed d’Erlon’s defeat, but ‘quiet’ was relative. The noise still hammered the eardrums, Hougoumont was ablaze and under siege, but for a while the French made no attempt to cross the valley. The survivors of d’Erlon’s Corps were being re-formed on the right of Napoleon’s line, making ready to fight again, but Marshal Ney, who had operational command of the French forces, was now on the French left opposite the 52nd. He was on horseback, which gave him added height, and he was also on a rise of ground on the French ridge which let him stare through his telescope at the smoke-wreathed British line.
And what he saw elated him. He saw the salvation of France. He saw victory.
What he really saw was a scattering of British–Dutch guns along the crest with some infantry just beyond. He would have seen the smoke of the exploding French howitzer shells that were being dropped on that infantry, but what caught his attention was what happened beyond that slaughter and, because he was just high enough to see the ground behind Wellington’s line, he saw hundreds, maybe thousands, of retreating men. He saw wagons going north, he saw wounded men being carried by comrades, he saw prisoners being escorted, and he jumped to the conclusion that Wellington was disengaging his army and attempting to retreat. In short, he saw the British running away. He also knew that the last thing a good soldier did was allow an enemy to withdraw unmolested. He had made that mistake himself just two days before when he had allowed Wellington to slip away from Quatre-Bras unmolested. Napoleon had savaged Ney for that mistake, and Ney was not going to risk another reprimand. He could see Wellington’s men strung along the road as they hurried north towards Brussels, which meant that the troops left behind on the ridge must be few and becoming fewer every minute, so this was the moment to redeem himself and to give France victory!
He ordered the cavalry to charge.
Initially he wanted one brigade of cuirassiers to make the attack, and so he gave the order for almost 900 heavy horsemen with their distinctive breastplates to charge the British ridge between Hougoumont and La Haie Sainte, but the brigade commander, Lieutenant-General Delort, stopped the advance. Delort protested to a fellow general:
that I only received orders from the general who commanded the corps to which my division belonged. During this dispute, which stopped the movement of the brigade, Marshal Ney himself arrived, seething with impatience. Not only did he insist on his first order being obeyed, but, in the name of the Emperor, he demanded two other divisions as well! I still hesitated, pointing out that heavy cavalry should not attack infantry that was well posted on high ground, that had not been weakened and was well positioned to defend itself. The Marshal yelled, ‘Forwards! The salvation of France is at stake!’ I obeyed reluctantly.
General Edouard Milhaud was the Corps commander who should have given orders to Delort, but Milhaud was himself now caught up in the excitement of the moment. He told Delort to charge, then shook hands with the commander of the Imperial Guard Light Cavalry and urged him, ‘We’re going to charge! Join us!’, which he did and so still more horsemen joined the assault. Colonel Michel Ordener commanded the 1st Cuirassiers and wondered whether military history contained ‘other examples of such a mass of horsemen charging simultaneously’. In fact the famous French charge through the snows of Eylau in 1807 was almost twice as large, but Ordener (who had been present at Eylau, but could probably see little through the blinding snowstorm) nevertheless reckoned he had never seen such a mass of cavalry. The 900 had grown to almost 5,000.
Marshal Ney placed himself at our head, it was 4.00 pm. At first our impact was irresistible. In spite of a hail of iron which beat on our helmets and breastplates, in spite of a sunken lane above which were sited the English batteries, we reached the crest of the heights and went like lightning through the guns.
The key words there are ‘at first’. Because what was beginning was perhaps the most extraordinary passage of fighting on that extraordinary day. At first Ordener probably thought Ney was doin
g the right thing because, as his horse breasted the British–Dutch ridge, he saw ‘the enemy baggage and massed fugitives hurrying along the road to Brussels’, and he saw abandoned artillery through which the horsemen had passed ‘like lightning’, but then he saw something else.
British squares. The British were not running away. Wellington was not disengaging and trying to withdraw his forces. Yes, there were men and wagons on the road, but most of the British–Dutch army was still on the ridge and they were ready to fight. The allied guns were indeed abandoned, but that was temporary because the gunners had taken refuge inside the squares. Those guns had already taken a toll of the horsemen, sending roundshot through their ranks to leave crippled and dying horses in the valley, then they had fired canister at deadly short range before the gunners ran to the shelter of the nearest infantry square.
So now it was horsemen against infantry, and every cavalryman must have known what Captain Duthilt had written, that ‘it is difficult, if not impossible, for the best cavalry to break infantry who are formed in squares’, so while at first the cavalrymen seemed to have pierced the British–Dutch line, instead they were faced with the worst obstacle a horseman could encounter. The wide plateau of the ridge top was packed with squares, at least twenty of them, in a rough chequer pattern so that if a horseman rode safely past one square he was immediately faced with another, and then encountered more beyond. And each square bristled with bayonets and spat musket fire. At that moment the sensible thing for Marshal Ney to have done was to recognize his mistake and withdraw the cavalry from danger, but Michel Ney was rarely sensible in battle. He believed courage and passion could drive men through any hardship, and so it might, but it would not drive horses onto the face of a square.