Waterloo: The True Story of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles

by Bernard Cornwell

  So Ligny was a victory for Napoleon, but it had not achieved his first objective, which was to destroy one of the allied armies. It remained to be seen whether he had achieved his second objective, which was to drive the Prussians away from their British–Dutch allies. If that happened, if Blücher led his army eastwards towards Prussia, then Ligny would be a stunning victory.

  But though the Prussian army had been defeated, it was still capable of fighting, as was its commander, Blücher. In the morning after the battle he sent for Colonel Hardinge, the British liaison officer who had lost his left hand in the battle, and called him lieber Freund, dear friend, and Hardinge remembered how the old Marshal stank of schnapps and rhubarb, the first a medicine taken internally, the second a liniment on his bruises. And Marshal Forwards was still belligerent. He had been defeated, not beaten. ‘We lost the day,’ Blücher remarked, ‘but not our honour,’ and he would live up to his nickname and fight again.

  His army had survived because d’Erlon’s Corps had failed to arrive.

  But the British had also failed to arrive. That is another ‘if’ of history, what might have happened if Wellington had brought troops to Blücher’s aid. He had promised to do so, ‘provided I am not attacked myself’, but while Blücher was engaged in his desperate struggle at Ligny another battle was being fought just five miles away.

  The battle of Quatre-Bras.

  Marshal Michel Ney, c. 1804 (French school). ‘Bravest of the brave’, mercurial and fearsome, Ney, was fiery, red-haired and passionate – renowned for his extraordinary courage and inspiring leadership, no one would ever call Ney cool-headed.

  ‘Battle of Ligny – Marshal Blücher stunned by the violent fall lay entangled under his horse’. Marshal Blücher, despite his age, tried to restore the position by attacking with his own cavalry. He was unhorsed and ridden over by French heavy cavalry, but Blücher’s aide-de-camp, with great presence of mind, draped a cloak over the Marshal’s medals and braid, so obscuring his eminent status, and in the failing light the French cavalry did not recognize him, so that at last he could be rescued by his own men.

  ‘Battle of Ligny, 16 June 1815’. The battle was a desperate struggle, reduced to hand-to-hand fighting in the villages. A French officer said the dead in the main street ‘were piled two or three deep. The blood flowed from them in streams … the mud was formed from crushed bones and flesh.’ The sky thickened with great gouts of powder smoke belched by massive cannon that fill the air with man-made thunder.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Avancez, mes enfants, courage, encore une fois, Français!

  BERNHARD OF SAXE-WEIMAR’S 4,000 troops at Quatre-Bras were reinforced early on that Friday morning with another 4,000 men from the Dutch army, but luckily for them Marshal Ney hesitated. He feared the landscape, thinking it might conceal Wellington’s whole army, while in truth that army was still desperately trying to reach the crossroads.

  The battle that was to develop at Quatre-Bras was a scrambling affair and one that stands out from all Wellington’s others. He is usually depicted, somewhat disparagingly, as a great defensive general. He was indeed a great defensive general, choosing the ground on which he would fight and using that ground to his men’s advantage as he had at Busaco, but to dismiss him as merely a defensive fighter is to wilfully ignore some of his greatest victories. When he was asked, much later in life, of what he was most proud he replied in one word, ‘Assaye’. Assaye was a battle fought in India, against a much larger army, and he turned the enemy’s flank, attacked and crushed them. Then there was Salamanca, in Spain, sometimes termed his masterpiece, where 40,000 Frenchmen were destroyed in 40 minutes. Salamanca was a brilliant offensive battle that took the French by surprise and routed them. Or Vitoria, the battle that cleared the French from Spain, another offensive masterpiece that left the enemy in ruins. He was, in truth, a great attacking general, but attacks are, broadly speaking, more expensive in men than defensive tactics, and Britain’s army was small and there were never enough replacements for battle casualties, and so the Duke preferred defensive battles where he could use the terrain to shelter his men from enemy artillery.

  Quatre-Bras was, essentially, a defensive battle, but one fought on terrain that Wellington had not chosen. He had no time to prepare and little time to react to the enemy’s assaults, and for almost all of the day he was outnumbered. The story of Quatre-Bras is essentially that of allied troops arriving in the nick of time to stave off another crisis, yet it all began quietly enough. Wellington reached the crossroads at about ten in the morning and, finding that the French were still hesitating, he rode east to meet Blücher. That was the conference at the Brye windmill where Wellington promised to send troops to help the Prussians ‘provided I am not attacked myself’.

  Yet by mid-afternoon he was being attacked and there would be small chance of sending any troops to assist the Prussians. Wellington needed every man who arrived. He had to defend the crossroads because that was his link to the allies, and the French had at last made up their minds to capture the vital junction. They were advancing in force and most of Wellington’s men were still marching in the sweltering heat to reach Quatre-Bras.

  Most of the British troops arrived from Brussels, a march of 22 miles. Once at Quatre-Bras they faced a tight battlefield. In front of them was a stretch of gently rolling countryside in which sturdy stone-built farmsteads stood like small forts. Not that any man could see much. The landscape was obscured by thick stands of trees and by the fields of high, obstinate rye which grew between the pastureland. It was also hidden by gun smoke which gradually thickened.

  The fighting was to take place south of the Nivelles road, the highway which led east to the Prussians. The western side of the battlefield was defined by a thick, almost impenetrable wood, the Bossu Wood, where Saxe-Weimar’s tired troops had taken refuge. A small stream rose inside the wood and trickled across the Brussels highway, though it was no obstacle to cavalry, infantry or guns. Where the highway met the stream, in the very centre of the battlefield, was a big stone-built farm called Gemioncourt. It would have helped Wellington enormously to hold that farm, but the French had driven out the Dutch defenders and had now garrisoned its thick walls. Once past the farm the streamlet trickled on to feed an artificial lake, the Materne Lake, beyond which was a hamlet called Piraumont which, to Wellington’s consternation, was also held by French infantry. Those enemy infantrymen were perilously close to the Nivelles road and, being to the east of the battlefield, threatened to cut the vital link between Wellington and Blücher.

  The Frenchmen in Piraumont never did cut the road because Wellington contained them with the first reinforcements to arrive, the 95th Rifles, who were helped by a battalion of Brunswick infantry. That meant his left flank was safe for the moment, while his right was protected by the thick undergrowth of the Bossu Wood. The major fighting would take place in the mile-wide stretch of undulating country between the lake and the wood, and when he returned from his meeting with Blücher, around 3 p.m., that stretch of farmland was swarming with Frenchmen.

  Rebecque, the clever Dutchman, had managed to assemble 8,000 troops at Quatre-Bras, but the newcomers had retreated in panic from the French while Saxe-Weimar’s men, still short of ammunition, had taken cover in the Bossu Wood. It must have seemed that there was nothing to stop the French advance, but fortuitously Sir Thomas Picton’s fine division was just arriving from Brussels. The 95th led them and they were sent left to stop the French breaching the road to Ligny, while the rest were deployed to face the attack coming straight up the Brussels highway. Some newly arrived British artillery unlimbered south of the crossroads, but almost immediately came under fire from French skirmishers concealed in the tall fields of rye. There were still some Dutch skirmishers in the rye, but they were being pressed relentlessly back and the French could spare men to fire at the British gunners and at the newly arrived infantry. Lieutenant Edward Stephens of the 32nd, a Cornish regiment, described the fire of the Fr
ench skirmishers as ‘very galling … our men were falling in every direction’.

  Skirmishers play a large part in the story of Waterloo. Essentially they are specialist infantrymen who fight neither in line nor in column (though they could and often did do both), but fought ahead of a line or column. They formed a skirmish line, a scatter of troops spread wide, whose job was to snipe at the enemy’s formation. Every battalion possessed a Light Company, and some whole battalions were light troops like the battalions of the 95th Rifles. The French had expanded the numbers of their skirmishers because, like the artillery, they were useful for weakening an enemy line before the column attacked. The best defence against skirmishers was other skirmishers, so in battle both sides had their light troops in extended order way ahead of their formations. Their scattered formation made them difficult targets for inaccurate muskets and not worth the price of a cannonball, though they were vulnerable to canister, an artillery round which turned the cannon into a giant shotgun. They fought in pairs, one man firing while his companion loaded. In an ideal world the French skirmishers, who were called voltigeurs or tirailleurs, would go ahead until they were in musket range of the enemy line and then they would open fire, hoping to bring down officers. Tirailleur, the official name, simply means a shooter, from the verb tirer, to shoot, while a voltigeur is a vaulter, or gymnast, because the ideal skirmisher was an agile, quick-moving man. They knelt or lay down to fire, making themselves small targets, and enough skirmishers could seriously hurt a line of troops, but only if they could get close. French skirmishers usually outnumbered the British, though the British had the advantage that many of their skirmishers were armed with rifles, a weapon that Napoleon refused to employ. The rifle’s drawback was that it was slow to load because the bullet, usually wrapped in a leather patch, had to be forced down the rifled barrel, and that took far longer than ramming a musket ball down a smoothbore barrel, but the advantage of the rifle was its accuracy. The British used the Baker rifle, a superb and dependable weapon, that was accurate far beyond the range of any musket.

  Skirmishers dared not get too far ahead of their parent battalions because, in the deadly game of scissors, stone and paper which characterizes artillery, infantry and cavalry in the Napoleonic era, they were totally vulnerable to horsemen. Their scattered formation meant they could not form square or offer volley fire, so a few cavalrymen could decimate a skirmish line in a matter of seconds. But when Picton’s Division arrives at Quatre-Bras there is no cavalry to scour the French skirmishers away. The Black Legion of Brunswick reached the battlefield at the same time as Picton’s men, but the rest of the Duke’s cavalry regiments are still hurrying to reach the battlefield and so Wellington decides to attack the French skirmishers with his line of infantry. There were columns of French infantry beyond the enemy skirmishers, but British lines had never had trouble defeating French columns, and so the six battalions were ordered forward.

  They were severely outnumbered. The French were coming in three columns. The largest with over 8,000 men was attacking northwards close to the Bossu Wood, the central column, advancing along the highway, had 5,400 men, while to their right were another 4,200 infantry, all of them supported by over fifty cannon and by troops of cavalry. The six battalions of British infantry had around 3,500 men between them who had to face at least 17,000 infantry, as well as the artillery and cavalry, but these battalions were among the best and most experienced in Wellington’s army.

  What followed was typical of the day’s confused fighting. One of those battalions was the kilted Highlanders, just over 500 men of the 42nd, the Black Watch. James Anton was a Sergeant in the battalion that first had to advance through the field of rye where the Dutch skirmishers were being overwhelmed by the heavy French attack:

  The stalks of the rye, like some reeds that grow on the margins of some swamp, opposed our advance; the tops were up to our bonnets, and we strode and groped our way through as fast as we could. By the time we reached the field of clover on the other side we were very much straggled; however, we united in line as fast as time and our speedy advance would permit. The Belgic skirmishers retired through our ranks, and in an instant we were on their victorious pursuers. Our sudden appearance seemed to paralyse their advance. The singular appearance of our dress, combined no doubt with our sudden début, tended to stagger their resolution: we were on them, our pieces were loaded, and our bayonets glittered, eager to drink their blood. Those who had so proudly driven the Belgians before them turned now to fly … we drove on so fast that we almost appeared like a mob [and] Marshal Ney, who commanded the enemy, observed our wild unguarded zeal and ordered a regiment of lancers to bear down upon us … [We] took them for Brunswickers.

  The Black Watch was now in an open field and still in line. There was cavalry on their flank, but they assumed they were the Brunswick horsemen who had arrived at Quatre-Bras about the same time as the 42nd. Brunswick was a German state which had fallen to the French, and in revenge the Duke of Brunswick had raised a regiment which had joined Wellington in Spain. They wore black uniforms and were known as the Black Legion, and were led at Quatre-Bras by their young Duke, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Brunswickers, though they had been allies of the British in Spain, were not popular, mainly because of their taste for dog meat. The Irish Rifleman, Private Edward Costello of the green-jacketed 95th Rifles, remembered a dog called Rifle who had accompanied his battalion in Spain:

  A dog which had attached itself to our regiment and which could never be induced to leave us. We lost him on one or two occasions, but he always managed to rejoin us. We used to joke among ourselves at Rifle’s antipathy to a red coat, for he had a decided preference for green. The poor fellow survived many of our skirmishes, in which he used to run about barking and expressing his delight as much as a dog could.

  Then one day Rifle vanished altogether, and it was discovered that he had been eaten by the Black Legion. Legend insists that the Rifles got their revenge by slicing the buttocks from some dead Frenchmen, smoking them and then selling them as hams to the Brunswickers.

  Sergeant James Anton and the 42nd Highlanders were still advancing in line across the open field of clover, ignorant that the cavalry to their right were not dog-eating Germans, but Frenchmen. Then a German staff officer galloped past the battalion shouting that the approaching cavalry were ‘Franchee! Franchee!’ The horsemen were lancers.

  We instantly formed a rallying square; no time for particularity; every man’s piece was loaded, and our enemies approached at full charge; the feet of their horses seemed to tear up the ground.

  This was desperate work. A battalion in line was fearfully vulnerable to a cavalry charge, but an infantry square could defeat almost any attack by horsemen. Yet it took time to make a square and the Highlanders had no time and so the order was shouted to rally. This was almost a panic. Instead of the careful ordering of the companies into a rectangle bristling with bayonets, the 42nd simply ran towards the colours and formed a huddle with the men facing outwards. Some lancers were even trapped inside the hastily forming rally-square and were dragged from their horses and killed. The skirmishers, who were deployed ahead of the battalion, stood no chance and were ridden down by the lancers, as was the battalion commander, Sir Robert Macara. Sir Robert’s death was witnessed by the 42nd and it enraged them. He had been wounded earlier and, just before the lancers appeared, was being stretchered to the rear in search of a surgeon. The stretcher was either two jackets with their sleeves threaded over a pair of muskets or, more likely, a blanket held by the four men carrying him. The French saw the wounded man’s medals and braid and, presumably in search of plunder, callously slaughtered all five men. That was murder, not warfare, and it enraged the Scots. They drove off the lancers with musketry, but later in the day the officers of the 42nd had to restrain their men who were slaughtering surrendering Frenchmen with shouts of ‘Where’s Macara?’

  Captain Archibald Menzies, who commanded the Grenadier Company of the 42nd, was also
trapped outside the rally-square. He was a man of legendary strength who, preferring to fight on foot, had handed off his horse to a drummer boy. Menzies (pronounced Mingis) was wounded and fell next to Private Donald Mackintosh. The drummer boy abandoned the horse and ran to help, upon which a lancer tried to seize the valuable animal. Mackintosh, with his last effort, managed to shoot the lancer. ‘You mauna tak that beast,’ he is reported to have said, ‘it belongs to our captain here!’ A French officer, seeing Menzies trying to stand, attacked with his sabre:

  As he stooped from his saddle [Menzies] seized his leg, and managed to pull him off his horse upon him. Another lancer, observing this struggle, galloped up and tried to spear [Menzies, who], by a sudden jerk and desperate exertion, placed the French officer uppermost, who received the mortal thrust below his cuirass and continued lying on Menzies’s body for near ten minutes, sword in hand. A pause in the battle permitted some men of the 42nd to carry their officer into the square of the 92nd, where he was found to have received sixteen wounds.

  Menzies survived and lived until 1854. While he was tended in the 92nd’s square his own battalion tried to form line again, this time to oppose an approaching column of French infantry, but almost immediately they were threatened by still more cavalry, this time cuirassiers. Cuirassiers were France’s heavy cavalry and the riders wore metal breastplates. The 42nd formed square just in time to receive the charge. ‘The Cuirassiers’, Anton remembered, ‘dashed full on two of [the square’s] faces; their heavy horses and steel armour seemed sufficient to bury us under them,’ but the horses sheered away from the Scottish bayonets:

  A most destructive fire was opened; riders cased in heavy armour fell tumbling from their horses; the horses reared, plunged, and fell on the dismounted riders; steel helmets and cuirasses rang against unsheathed sabres as they fell to the ground.