by Tim Clayton
It is notable that in this order the ‘corps’ or ‘body’ of previous messages had become an ‘army’. The determination of the Prussians to resist the attacks on Saint-Amand and Ligny had finally convinced Napoleon that he was now fighting a battle, not an inconsequential skirmish; moreover the stream of approaching troops had persuaded him that he had surprised Blücher’s army on the march. This offered an unexpected opportunity, for with Ney’s help, Napoleon was perfectly placed to trap the Prussians and obtain a crushing victory. By contriving to produce an army Blücher had reacted faster than Napoleon had expected, but his impetuosity provided a golden chance to destroy one of the two enemy forces instantly, in isolation from the other.
Very soon after this order had been written, however, a message arrived from Count Lobau, saying that his aide had just returned from Frasnes and reported that there might be up to 20,000 Anglo-Dutch troops at Quatre Bras.2 This shocking news required another change of plan. If Ney really faced such a large enemy force at Quatre Bras, he might not have already obtained the quick, crushing victory that had been expected in the morning and therefore he might not be in a position to march straight to Brye. However, the Emperor thought, Ney should be able to contain 20,000 Anglo-Dutch troops with Reille’s corps alone, in which case d’Erlon’s corps could be spared for the attack on Brye. At this juncture, Napoleon sent Ney a pencil note containing a direct order to have d’Erlon march with his corps towards Brye and Saint-Amand and attack the Prussian right flank. Since this message did not reach Ney there has been much debate about whether or not it was ever sent.
This is another highly controversial episode in the history of the battle – the problem being that whereas d’Erlon received this order, Ney did not. Every participant subsequently gave a different version of what happened. A duplicate of the message sent to Ney, for a duplicate later reached him, survived in Ney’s archive, whereas the note that d’Erlon claimed to have been shown has not survived; nor, surprisingly, was it entered in Soult’s staff register of orders, although some messages that do survive – such as the earlier one to Ney requiring him to attack with the greatest impetuosity – were omitted from the register. If the message was carried by one of Napoleon’s aides, it is possible that it was merely verbal.3 It has even been suggested that Napoleon did not send a message at all, but that the order sending d’Erlon’s corps to attack the Prussians was issued by one of his general officer aides on his own initiative.4 However, Soult’s message to Ney the following day and his report to War Minister Davout both mention a movement that the Emperor had ordered d’Erlon to make, which proves that it was Napoleon himself who had ordered d’Erlon to Ligny, so this theory can be discounted.5 Possibly one messenger carried both messages, with orders to deliver the second order direct to d’Erlon and then to go on to Ney to give him the first order and explain what had been done.6 At the same time Napoleon ordered Count Lobau to bring his corps to Fleurus, for he now realised that to destroy the Prussians he would need all of his reserves.
Further officers were sent with duplicate orders to make sure that the messages got through. These messages were absolutely crucial, for it was imperative that Ney should appreciate that since the morning the case had altered. Napoleon’s plan had now changed completely. Instead of crushing the opposition to open the road through to Brussels, Ney now merely had to perform a holding role while d’Erlon’s corps surrounded the Prussians and drove the survivors towards Namur. Guillaume de Baudus, an aide to Soult, claimed to have been ordered to carry one such duplicate message to Ney and said that he was instructed by the Emperor:
I have sent count d’Erlon the order to march with his entire corps against the right rear of the Prussian army. You will carry the duplicate order to Ney, which should already have been communicated to him. You will tell him that whatever the situation in which he finds himself, it is absolutely necessary that this order must be executed, that I do not attach great importance to what happens today on his flank; that the business is where I am, and that I want to finish off the Prussian army. As far as he is concerned, if he can do no better, he must aim to contain the English army.7
Napoleon could not be in two places at once and so he was dependent for the execution of this brilliant idea on messages, written and verbal. This was why he gave important messages to intelligent senior aides who were capable of understanding and explaining his intentions. Moreover, while Napoleon could watch the battle at Ligny unfolding before his eyes, he had little idea of what was going on eight miles away at Quatre Bras, so he tried to choose emissaries who were capable of adapting their instructions, on the hoof, to circumstances that had not been anticipated. In this crucial instance, however, something was to go desperately wrong. During his exile Napoleon complained much about Soult, the poor quality of his staff, and the youth and inexperience of his orderly officers. He expressed perplexity about the fate of some messages: ‘It is equally probable that several officers, bearers of dispatches, disappeared.’8 Messengers could be delayed, get lost, make mistakes, be ambushed by the enemy or even go over to the other side.
But as he dispatched his chosen messengers to Ney, Napoleon had no reason to anticipate that they would miscarry, and at that moment he was confident of a resoundingly successful outcome. When Count Gérard had come for final instructions regarding his attack on Ligny, Napoleon told him, ‘In three hours the fate of the war may be decided. If Ney executes his orders properly, not a cannon of the Prussians will escape. They are completely surprised.’9
26
Thin Red Line
Quatre Bras, 3.30 p.m.–5.30 p.m.
At the time that Napoleon sent these orders, Marshal Ney was on the brink of success at Quatre Bras as his troops advanced to envelop the Prince of Orange’s division and block the route through to the Prussians. However, Wellington had just returned to the battlefield and he had fresh British troops at hand to restore stability: Picton’s division was close by, approaching from Genappe, and Wellington’s staff galloped over to meet Picton’s.
Concerned that the French were cutting the road to Ligny, Wellington first sent for Colonel Barnard, whose 95th Rifles led Picton’s column. Fitzroy Somerset instructed the riflemen to thrust east along the cobbled Namur highway and seize the Bois des Censes and the village of Piraumont in order ‘to keep the road open for communication with the Prussians’.1 Having seized the wood to the north of the road, however, they soon recognised that Piraumont was too strongly held for them to retake, so they put two companies into the hamlet of Thyle on the highway north of Piraumont. Barnard’s Scottish adjutant, John Kincaid, recalled that in the burning sun one of his overdressed and overburdened men died of heatstroke as they trotted forward. The two companies at Thyle were quiet until the French brought up artillery and counter-attacked: a pretty Belgian girl was giving a glass of water to Ned Costello when a ball went straight through her house, covering them with dust.2 The riflemen pulled out of the houses before they were surrounded and fell back northward to the wood of Censes, fighting a running battle with French voltigeurs.
Near La Baraque, an alehouse three hundred yards north of the crossroads, Wellington conferred with Picton and his brigadiers. There was no more determined man in a tight spot than Picton, the stocky Welshman who in 1812 had driven through the storming of Ciudad Rodrigo and Badajoz and had taken on the most dangerous role in the victory at Vitoria in 1813, obstinately holding a bridgehead in the face of devastating fire. Picton’s ‘fighting third’ division had become legendary in the Peninsula, although he now commanded different battalions and had first met their senior officers in the park at Brussels the previous evening. But everybody knew Picton by reputation, and the many Peninsular veterans among his men already admired, respected and feared this ‘stern-looking, strong-built man, about the middle height’. In private Picton was livelier than his austere image suggested: an aide who had just joined his staff expecting him to be all cold iron had been surprised at Ostend to hear his boss ‘in
excellent French, get up a flirtation with our very pretty waiting-maid’. The general was wearing civilian dress because his uniform had not yet arrived from Britain: ‘a blue frock-coat, very tightly buttoned up to the throat; a very large black silk neckcloth, showing little or no shirt-collar; dark trousers, boots, and a round hat’.3 His brigadiers, the Scot Sir James Kempt and the Irishman Sir Denis Pack, were both experienced Peninsular veterans.
To the south of the generals, on the highway leading to Charleroi, the Prince of Orange had launched a desperate counter-attack on the French troops holding Gémioncourt, nearly a mile straight up the road. Kempt ordered the next battalion to arrive to support the Prince, but then cancelled the order when he saw the attack was failing. The rest of the 5000 British infantry turned left onto the road to Namur, using the ditches and embankments for cover against French artillery fire. Kempt’s Cameron Highlanders marched furthest east, nearest the skirmishing riflemen, followed by the 32nd Cornish; then came Pack’s division, the Royal Scots, the 44th, the 42nd Black Watch and the Gordons. Behind them, as they marched in, General Charles Best’s brigade of 2500 Hanoverian militia formed a second line and at first the Brunswickers, of whom there were soon about 5000, formed a third.
The 92nd Gordon Highlanders in their dark green and blue kilts hurriedly took up a strong defensive position on the crossroads itself, as Sergeant David Robertson recalled:
The 92d was now brought to the front of the farmhouse, and formed on the road, with our backs to the walls of the building and garden, our right resting upon the crossroads, and our left extending down the front. We were ordered to prime and load, and sit down with our firelocks in our hands, at the same time keeping in line. The ground we occupied rose with a slight elevation, and was directly in front of the road along which the French were advancing.
Shortly after we had formed here, the Duke of Wellington and his staff came and dismounted in rear of the centre of our regiment, and ordered the grenadier company to wheel back on the left, and the light company on the right; so that the walls of the house and garden in our rear, with the eight companies in front, joined in a square, in case that any of the enemy’s cavalry should attack us.4
When threatened by cavalry, infantry would form square, to prevent the speedy horsemen from finding an unguarded flank. A square (usually an oblong with two companies each side and three front and back) was formed four ranks deep; the front two ranks knelt with their muskets braced against the ground, bayonets pointing outwards, and the rear two ranks were ready to fire. When many squares formed simultaneously they tried to take up a chequered formation so as to minimise the risk of hitting each other when firing at passing cavalry.
In this case the Gordons faced three ways instead of four. The substantial farmhouse they had their backs to stood in the north-east quadrant of the crossroads with an enclosed courtyard and a huge brick barn behind it. Diagonally opposite them in the south-west corner of the crossroads was an inn with outbuildings, named (confusingly) Les Trois Bras, and not very far beyond was the edge of the beech wood, the Bois de Bossu, from which the sound of musketry could be heard. To their right, opposite the farm and the inn, were a tollbooth and a barn. In front of them the south-east corner of the crossroads was open but, on the left of the road to Charleroi two hundred and fifty yards ahead, was a small farm called La Bergerie, with a garden across the road, at a point where the highway ran close to the Bossu wood.
Two artillery batteries trundled in, adding ten 9-pounder guns and two heavy howitzers to what was left of the Netherlands artillery. Carl von Rettberg’s lined up to the east of the Gordon Highlanders behind the Namur road, while Major Thomas Rogers’s battery was sent much further to the left, beyond the Cameron Highlanders, opposite some French guns which were behind the Materne lake. As soon as Rogers deployed, the French brought down fire on his guns – he estimated the range at only 5–600 yards – and killed several of his men and horses.5 Indeed, from the start of this battle the allies were made painfully aware of their shortage of artillery and cavalry. The French had at least thirty-four guns – maybe fifty by now – and as allied batteries deployed on the battlefield, so the French destroyed them, one by one.
And as Picton’s men deployed, the Netherlands troops in front of them began to disintegrate. With the Dutch attack on Gémioncourt melting away in the face of strong French fire from the surrounding hedges, Piré’s lancers closed in. Dressed in green with brass helmets and imposing nine-foot spears with red and white pennons, the lancers were a frightening prospect for the young Dutch soldiers. Piré’s men saw the Jägers wavering, charged, and speared and rode them down as they fled; their colonel had his horse shot under him and his head cut open by a sabre.
In an attempt to save the Jägers, Orange ordered the first cavalry to appear, Merlen’s newly arrived 6th Dutch Hussars, to charge before they had even had a chance to form line. Some Jägers who had been captured or were hiding in the corn escaped, but the hussars were soon also in headlong flight, having been counter-charged by French lancers and chasseurs. The victorious French cavalry caught five guns limbered up to support the hussars and overtook them, hacking through leather traces and slashing at gunners.
Waves of French cavalry now swept across the field through the tall crops. The 5th Militia saw them too late and were ridden down and stabbed as they fled. Seeing this, the morale of the 7th Line broke and they ran for the woods, pursued by lancers who skewered everyone they caught up with. The Prince of Orange himself was surrounded by French horsemen and an aide beside him was wounded and captured, before a few hussars cut a way through to the Prince and they all found refuge within a cluster of men of the 7th Line who had stood firm amid the general disintegration.
Somewhat panicked, the Prince ordered his other newly arrived cavalry regiment to charge, and they launched themselves at the French 6th Chasseurs. By coincidence many of the Belgians had previously served with their French opponents and knew them well; by another, unfortunate coincidence they were wearing near-identical uniforms of green with yellow facings.
The French got the better of the encounter. The Belgian colonel received two pistol balls in the arm, a canister ball in the kidneys, was knocked to the ground by a sabre blow and trapped beneath his dead horse. Amazingly, he survived, for during a fierce mêlée some of his men got him away on a fresh horse, before, defeated, the rest of the Belgians turned and galloped off towards Quatre Bras, nearly half a mile back.6
There at the crossroads the Gordon Highlanders fired into the mass of rapidly approaching green-coated cavalry, thinking them to be one hostile body, and brought down horsemen of both sides.7 The Duke of Wellington made the opposite mistake: recognising the fleeing dragoons as Belgian, he failed to see until the last minute the pursuing French chasseurs intermingled with them and had to leap his horse Copenhagen over a ditch and bank to escape into the ranks of the 92nd.8
The arrival of Picton’s division and the Black Brunswickers steadied the line just in time. General Pack led forward the Black Watch and the 44th past La Bergerie to occupy the higher ground north of Gémioncourt, and to their right the Duke of Brunswick’s hussars chased away the French chasseurs while the Brunswickers marched into the area between the Charleroi highway and the wood. The Black Watch, like their colleagues, found the going very difficult through the tall crops. ‘The stalks of rye, like the reeds that grow on the margin of some swamp, opposed our advance,’ recalled a Highlander. ‘The tops were up to our bonnets, and we strode and groped our way through as fast as we could.’ The 44th had their light company in front as skirmishers, ‘but finding that the French had the advantage of seeing us, and picking off many, Colonel Hamerton called them in, and file firing commenced from each company, to clear the rye [as] we advanced’. The kilted and bonneted Black Watch met Foy’s 4th Light Infantry advancing from Gémioncourt, having routed the Dutch Jägers, and succeeded in pushing their skirmish line back in the direction it had come:
By the time we re
ached a 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 paralyze their advance. The singular appearance of our dress, combined no doubt, with our sudden debut, tended to stagger their resolution.9
When the Brunswick 2nd Light battalion arrived, the staff sent them to the left wing to reinforce the British riflemen who were holding the Bois des Censes on the extreme eastern flank. As Adjutant Kincaid recalled, however, the young Brunswickers were raw, trigger-happy and so prone to fire at skirmishing riflemen rather than the French that in the end he was sent to order them not to shoot. Nervous infantry would frequently fire off all their ammunition as quickly as possible and then hurry to the rear, thinking they had done their bit, and Kincaid tried to teach these inexperienced officers and men to reserve their fire for the right target at the right range.10
Just to the west, Picton’s battalions sent their light companies forward to engage Maigrot’s skirmishers, who were holding the line of the stream that ran eastward from Gémioncourt to the northern edge of Thyle and exchanging fire with the riflemen in the wood further east. Picton’s skirmishers, though, were outnumbered and outclassed by the French. An ensign of the Royal Scots reckoned that the lighter weapons the French soldiers used gave them a considerable edge in this kind of fighting: ‘Their fine, long, light firelocks, with a smaller bore, are far more efficient for skirmishing than our abominably clumsy machine. The French soldiers whipping in the cartridge, give the butt of the piece a jerk or two on the ground, which supersedes the use of the ramrod; and thus they fire two for our one.’11 The shorter dragoon musket used by French voltigeurs was lighter still and even better adapted for rapid fire.