seemed to have been changed into an ocean of fire, all of the farm buildings were aflame. The soil underneath my feet began to shake and tremble, and large fissures opened before my very eyes.
That, perhaps, is as good a description as any of the sensations of that awful fight. Thousands were to die in and around Hougoumont, and we must forgive the survivors if their accounts are not always coherent.
The struggle for Hougoumont continues. Wellington once remarked that closing the gates was the decisive act of the battle and later, when an eccentric clergyman wanted to arrange an annuity for ‘the bravest man at Waterloo’ and requested the Duke to make that difficult judgment, Wellington chose Macdonell. Macdonell, in turn, insisted on sharing the money with Sergeant James Graham, an Irishman who had been at his side in those desperate moments. The pair did receive the annuity for two years before the generous clergyman lost his money, but it is significant that Wellington, forced to make a choice, nominated Macdonell and, by association, Graham. Just after Graham helped close the gates he saved the life of a 25-year-old Captain, Henry Wyndham. A Frenchman clambered onto the high wall beside the gate and aimed his musket at Wyndham, but Graham shot first. Wyndham lived till 1860, and the women of his family always complained that his house was excessively cold and draughty because, they claimed, ever since he had helped shut the gates at Hougoumont he had never closed a door again.
The gates at Hougoumont were indeed closed, but the siege was far from over, and the French now start shelling the farm, while off to the west, beyond the main road that bisects the battlefield, the British cavalry are running wild.
* * *
The Duke of Wellington never had much confidence in British cavalry. ‘I considered our cavalry’, he wrote after the wars:
so inferior to the French from want of order, that although one squadron was a match for two French, I did not like to see four British opposed to four French. As numbers increase, order becomes more necessary. Our men could gallop, but could not preserve their order.
The Duke prized order above every other military virtue. Order made troops steady under fire, it allowed them to remain firm under horrific artillery bombardment, it sustained men in the close exchange of volley fire. The Duke’s infamous remark about his army being ‘the scum of the earth’ was made when order collapsed. That was after his great victory at Vitoria, when the British troops captured the enemy’s baggage train which contained all the French plunder from their occupation of Spain, and discipline went to the wind in an orgy of looting, theft and murder. Order made everything else possible, and the British cavalry famously lacked order. In the Peninsula Wellington trusted the King’s German Legion cavalry, but was always wary of his own. It was true that the heavy cavalry had made a battle-winning charge at Salamanca in 1812, but then they had been under the command of Major-General John Le Marchant, probably the best British cavalry leader of the Napoleonic period, who had been killed in that fight.
The Household Brigade, the Inniskillings, the Royal Dragoons and the Royal Scots Greys had done magnificent work in shattering d’Erlon’s attack. The French columns, broken into panicked pieces, were retreating fast, leaving behind 3,000 prisoners and about as many others wounded or dead. Cavalrymen were scattered across the long slope, bloodied swords in hand, and the trumpeters were sounding the recall, but almost all the horsemen ignored the summons. ‘Our men were out of hand,’ a staff officer admitted. Across the valley they could see Napoleon’s Grand Battery, the great line of guns which had hammered the British ridge. Those guns were still silent for fear of hitting the survivors of d’Erlon’s Corps who were still on the British side of the valley. The Grand Battery was not on the crest of the French ridge, but well forward of it, and the British cavalrymen could not resist. They turned their horses and charged the guns. Corporal Dickson saw Sergeant Ewart carry the Eagle away to the rear and afterwards, he said, ‘we spurred on in search of like success’. He and his companions saw another column, almost certainly General Durutte’s men on the extreme right of the French attack:
Trumpeter Reeves … who rode by my side sounded a ‘rally’, and our men came swarming up from all sides, some Enniskillens and Royals being among them. We at once began a furious onslaught … the [French] battalions seemed to open out for us to pass through, and so it happened that in five minutes we had cut our way through as many thousands of Frenchmen. We had now reached the bottom of the slope. There the ground was slippery with deep mud. Urging each other on we dashed towards the batteries on the ridge above which had worked such havoc in our ranks. The ground was very difficult, and especially where we crossed the edge of a ploughed field, so that our horses sank to their knees as we struggled on. My brave Rattler was becoming quite exhausted, but we dashed ever onwards. At this moment Colonel Hamilton rode up to us crying, ‘Charge! Charge the guns!’ and went off up the hill like the wind towards the terrible battery that had made such deadly work among the Highlanders … Then we got among the guns and we had our revenge. Such slaughtering! We sabred the gunners, lamed the horses, and cut their traces and harness. I can hear the Frenchmen yet crying ‘Diable!’ when I struck at them, and the long-drawn hiss through their teeth as my sword went home … The artillery drivers sat on their horses weeping aloud as we went among them; they were mere boys, we thought. Rattler lost her temper and bit and tore at everything that came in her way … The French infantry were rushing past us in disorder on their way to the rear.
Dickson reckoned that fifteen guns were put out of commission, other cavalrymen suggested the number was higher, but as no one dismounted to use a spike on the vent-holes it is likely that every gun was eventually used again. General Durutte, who had seen his column broken, watched the British cavalry charge on across the valley and decided they ‘were either drunk or did not know how to curb their horses’.
Hundreds of British cavalry on blown horses were now on the French side of the battlefield. The French saw their chance and launched lancers and chasseurs against them. The French cavalry came from the east and struck the British hard. ‘On no occasion,’ General Durutte said, ‘did I appreciate as well as in this clash the superiority of the lance over the sabre.’ The British tried to regain their own side of the valley, but the French were on fresh horses and cut them down. Colonel Bro de Comères was the commanding officer of the 4th Lancers:
I took the head of the squadrons and shouted ‘En avant, children! We must destroy this rabble!’ The soldiers answered, ‘En avant! Vive l’Empereur!’ Two minutes later the crash happened. Three enemy ranks were thrown over and we struck into the others terribly! The mêlée became dreadful. Our horses trampled on corpses and screams sounded from the wounded.
Colonel de Comères was unlucky to be wounded in the arm, but most of the ill luck was with the British who struggled through the deep mud to escape the lighter French horsemen. Sir William Ponsonby was the brigade commander of the Royals, Scots Greys and Inniskillings, and he had charged with the rest. Now, his tired horse mired in the mud, he gave his aide-de-camp some keepsakes and valuables to hand on to his family, then waited for the inevitable. His body was discovered with seven lance wounds. Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Frederick Ponsonby, second cousin to the doomed Sir William, was wounded in both arms, then knocked senseless from his horse by a sabre cut. He recovered consciousness to see a lancer looming over him. ‘Tu n’est pas mort, coquin!’ the lancer said, addressing Ponsonby as though he were a child, ‘You’re not dead, you rascal!’ Then the lancer thrust down with his nine-foot lance to pierce Ponsonby’s lung. Ponsonby lay there, bleeding. Retreating infantrymen looted him, and later he was used as a musket rest by a French skirmisher before being ridden over by Prussian cavalry, yet somehow he survived. He died, aged fifty-four, in 1837.
The British did not use the lance, but their experience at Waterloo persuaded them to adopt the weapon. John Dickson, on his mare Rattler, made it back safely, but hundreds did not, even though British light cavalry rode to cover the p
anicky retreat. For a while the valley east of the main road was chaos and Louis Canler was still far down the British slope, having surrendered and been plundered of his knapsack and belongings.
Suddenly I heard the order, ‘At the trot!’ French lancers and cuirassiers had arrived to help us. The English dragoons had to abandon us to repulse this charge and I took advantage of the sudden freedom to hide in a nearby wheatfield. The French cavalry attacked the English dragoons furiously, sabering and lancing them so savagely that the English retreated and left a good number of their men on the battlefield. This permitted me to cross the field and rejoin my unit [and] … I found myself close to an English dragoon officer who had been killed in the mêlée. A sabre had split open his head, bursting the brain from his skull. Hanging from his fob was a superb golden chain and in spite of my haste I paused a moment to plunder this chain and a beautiful golden watch.
Canler rejoins the remnants of his battalion, richer than when he left them, and slowly the chaos cleared. The surviving British horsemen go back to their ridge, and by about three o’clock in the afternoon the valley is empty again, except for the dead, the dying and the suffering. The gunners of both armies return to their cannon and start firing. The great attack by d’Erlon’s Corps came so close to success, but was shattered by volley fire, by the bayonet and by the British heavy cavalry who, having destroyed the vast columns, destroyed themselves so foolishly. Roughly half the men who charged were lost, either killed, wounded or captured; now the rest gathered again behind the ridgeline. For a short while there was little activity in the valley, but the respite would not last long. The Emperor was running short of time.
* * *
‘Great battles are won by artillery,’ Napoleon once said, though he said so many things that it is difficult to know when he was being serious. He liked making flat, declaratory statements that contained a grain of truth, presumably to provoke an argument that he could win, but he did love his artillery, and now the big guns are firing all along the line, bombarding the whole British ridge with roundshot and shell. More guns are shelling Hougoumont, though that battle is out of Napoleon’s sight.
Napoleon never went to the left wing of his army to see what happened at Hougoumont, though he must have received reports of the frustrations his men were suffering, because it was the Emperor who ordered howitzers to be used against the fortress. For almost all of the battle Napoleon stayed close to the main high road, either at the Rossomme farm which lies well south of La Belle Alliance, or else close to La Belle Alliance itself. He was wearing a grey greatcoat and many men watched him walking up and down on the patch of high ground from where he could see the smoke-shrouded battlefield. A rush-bottomed chair and a small table had been fetched from the inn and he sat for long periods – some men said he slumped – and gazed at the map spread on the table. He picked his teeth with scraps of straw, or stared through the smoke with his telescope. His brother Jérôme later claimed that Napoleon left the battlefield briefly to have leeches applied to his piles, and it is certain that the Emperor had faith in that remedy, but far from certain that he used it on that fateful day.
In the years after Waterloo the battlefield became a popular tourist spot, and one of the many guides was a man called Decoster, who claimed to have been taken captive on the morning of the battle and forced to be Napoleon’s informant on the countryside. It makes sense that a local man would be asked what lay beyond the ridge, and where the lanes went, but Decoster’s stories seem to contain a deal of fantasy. The Emperor watched the battle as best he could through the smoke, but he did not mount his horse and visit the various units that were fighting for him. Aides did that on his behalf, their horses dashing across the ridge with news and messages. There was an observation tower on the French ridge, a tall and rickety structure of timber scaffolding which was probably built by surveyors shortly before the battle to help make a map. Undoubtedly some French officers watched from the tower’s top, but there is no mention of Napoleon climbing the ladders.
The Duke of Wellington, meanwhile, was never off his horse, Copenhagen. For much of the battle he stayed beside the elm tree at the crossroads, but at moments of great danger he was always with the threatened troops. He had visited Picton shortly before d’Erlon’s columns reached the crest, but as the day went on he was more and more out on his right wing. He later claimed that the ‘finger of providence’ protected him because, though many of his companions were killed or wounded at his side, neither he nor Copenhagen were touched. He was always a ‘hands-on’ general, giving orders to battalions himself, while Napoleon was content to let Ney run the fight for him. One of the claims made for the Emperor was that he had a sixth sense for the moment when the crisis of a battle had arisen and he would then launch his master-stroke that would cripple the enemy, but if that was true then the sixth sense had abandoned him on 18 June 1815. There were to be many crises, but none elicited the unexpected attack to take advantage of British–Dutch weakness. Wellington reckoned Napoleon’s presence on a battlefield to be worth 40,000 men to the French, and undoubtedly the French soldiers worshipped the Emperor, loved him even, and fought for him with a desperate courage, yet Wellington’s presence was also worth men. He was neither worshipped nor loved, but he was respected. When he rode along the line, sergeants could be heard ordering their men to ‘Look to your front! Silence in the ranks! Here comes Nosey!’ They knew he valued order above all else. He also valued his men, and they knew that too, and many accounts pay tribute to the Duke’s presence. When the battle was at its fiercest, when canister and roundshot and musket balls were shredding British–Dutch ranks, then Wellington was frequently just paces away. A British officer noticed him in the afternoon, accompanied by a single aide, ‘all the rest of the staff being killed or wounded’, and Wellington, the officer recorded, ‘appeared perfectly composed, but looking very thoughtful and pale’. He looked imperturbable, not because he was, but because he had to look that way. A soldier loading and firing his musket, his face flecked with powder burns, his ears assailed by noise, his view of the battle reduced to a few smoke-shrouded yards, and with his comrades dying or killed, would take a glance at the Duke. If Nosey looked worried then it was time to panic, but if the Duke appeared calm and confident then things were probably all right.
He was neither calm nor confident. He was heard to murmur once ‘Let the Prussians come or nightfall!’ and he was seen to look at his watch frequently. Later he would often say what a near-run thing that battle was. ‘I was never so near being beat.’ And all the time he was glancing eastwards. So was Napoleon. They were watching the far hills, watching for troops. The Duke knew the Prussians were coming, he would never have offered battle otherwise, but as his army is worn down, as the fighting goes on, he knows he needs the Prussians desperately. And Napoleon knows he has one chance left now, and that chance is to break Wellington before the Prussians arrive. It is a race now. Except that for Blücher and his Prussian troops it has become an obstacle race.
* * *
The Prussians paused on the eastern side of the Lasne valley. Blücher was in a hurry, but had no choice but to wait as his straggling column caught up with the vanguard. He chivvied them. ‘Forwards!’ he was quoted as saying. ‘I hear you say it’s impossible, but it has to be done! I have given my promise to Wellington and you surely don’t want me to break it? Push yourselves, my children, and we’ll have victory!’
It is impossible not to like Blücher. He was seventy-four years old, still in pain and discomfort from his adventures at Ligny, still stinking of schnapps and of rhubarb liniment, yet he is all enthusiasm and energy. If Napoleon’s demeanour that day was one of sullen disdain for an enemy he underestimated, and Wellington’s a cold, calculating calmness that hid concern, then Blücher is all passion. He can hear the battle which is being fought just three or four miles to the west, and he knows his troops will make the difference, but for all his impetuosity he also knows he must approach the fight with a certain ca
ution.
There are French troops on the far side of the Lasne defile. They are light cavalry, so they are unlikely to start a troop-killing firefight, but if Blücher throws a few troops over, or sends units piecemeal as they arrive, he is likely to tempt French infantry into the thick woods beyond the Lasne and so suffer his men to be destroyed unit by unit. He has to collect enough troops to cross the small river in force so that they can defend themselves while the rest of his army arrives. So he waits.
The Lasne defile does not appear a major obstacle today, but on 18 June the small river had been swollen by the torrential rains of the previous day and the sides of the valley, steep enough already, were treacherous with mud. There were log steps laid into the tracks to allow carters’ horses a chance to rest, and now they served to help the Prussian artillery make the precarious passage, but the guns, far heavier than most carts, needed huge teams of men to control their clumsy weight on the steep, slippery slopes. The cavalry had to lead their horses across, the infantry slid and clambered, but slowly the forces crossed an obstacle that was psychological as well as real. Once across the river’s valley Blücher would have small chance of retreating. If his forces were overwhelmed by the French then they would be trapped against the valley and, in all likelihood, annihilated. Yet it is doubtful that Blücher worried about that prospect. He only wanted to get over the river, through the trees, and so burst onto Napoleon’s right flank. One proposal was simply to join Wellington’s forces, adding the Prussian regiments to the British–Dutch line, but Gneisenau argues for an approach further south, one that will slice behind Napoleon’s army and so offer a chance of an encirclement that would inevitably lead to the utter destruction of the French army. Blücher agrees, and so the first target of the Prussians will be the village of Plancenoit.
Waterloo: The True Story of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles Page 20