by Tim Clayton
Donald Finlayson, assistant surgeon to the 33rd, had been sent on hospital business to Nivelles, but had returned and was now searching the battlefield for his regiment. When Colonel Cameron was shot a hundred yards away from him, he became acutely aware of the danger he was in. A random shot took away his spur, and then he spotted Lieutenant Arthur Gore, who despite being on the sick list had followed him from Nivelles. Gore was excited to be in a battle and ‘said he “would not have missed this for anything”’.23 Together they turned to the west and found their battalion behind the wood.
Napoleon’s trusted aide Charles de Flahaut, who remained with Ney during the day, was subsequently full of praise for Ney’s great courage and ‘contempt for death’ but critical of his direction of the battle. ‘Our forces were thrown in piece-meal as they arrived upon the scene’ in ‘a series of spasmodic attacks delivered without any semblance of a plan’.24 While this was true, piecemeal reinforcement and improvisation was the nature of the day’s fighting: it could also be said of Wellington that he threw his men in as and when they arrived. Circumstances at Quatre Bras changed so frequently that a consistent plan was difficult and crushing numerical advantage was what was needed for success.
Believing he could produce that crushing superiority, Ney was again poised to deliver the death blow. Although Alten’s reinforcement took Wellington’s theoretical total strength to 28,000 men and 42 guns, facing Ney’s 21,000 and 56 guns, Ney assumed he had d’Erlon’s entire corps waiting in reserve, hidden safely behind the Bois Delhutte, together with most of Kellermann’s cavalry.
But when he summoned d’Erlon to make the big attack that would crush resistance in front of him, his messenger returned with the news that d’Erlon had marched off towards Ligny. The 20,000 men on whom Ney had counted to bring him crushing victory were no longer there. Ney was stunned, and furious. Ordering him to take the captured British staff officer along as proof, he sent Colonel Forbin-Janson to find the Emperor. Forbin-Janson was to tell Napoleon that Ney was fighting Wellington’s entire army, and that without d’Erlon’s men he would be crushed.25
29
Saint-Amand
Saint-Amand, 3.15–5.30 p.m.
On the eastern battlefield, fighting raged at Saint-Amand as well as at Ligny, and in this straggling cluster of hamlets there was more ebb and flow. In the first attack the French had almost broken through, but a counter-attack had driven them from all but the churchyard of Saint-Amand proper.
To reinforce General Lefol, who was holding out in the churchyard, Dominique Vandamme now sent forward the eight battalions of General Berthezène’s fresh division. Two regiments, the 12th and 86th, stormed Saint-Amand, while the 56th opposed the Prussians who were advancing from Saint-Amand-la-Haye. The French regiments drove back the musketeers of the Prussian 12th and 24th Regiments and retook the village. Steinmetz threw in his Westphalian Landwehr, but they fled after losing their leaders. The Prussians regrouped behind the gun line on the slope above the village and Steinmetz launched a second attack, but it got no further than the church. He had already lost some 2300 men in the fighting, more than a quarter of his total strength, and the 24th remained exposed to heavy fire from the French artillery; their commander, Major von Laurens, was blown into the air with his horse by the explosion of a shell and badly bruised.1
French light infantry now pressed forward from Saint-Amand towards the castle at the south of Saint-Amand-la-Haye. They drove back the first line of Prussian defenders and captured their target – a farm with a medieval tower and chapel – but a second line halted them there. Meanwhile, Jean-Baptiste Girard’s division was advancing in a pincer movement from the west with Tiburce Sébastiani’s 11th Light infantry in the lead. They forced the Prussian right wing back as far as the seventeenth-century Château de l’Escaille on the Brye side of La Haye, before a counter-attack drove them back again to the Château de la Haye, and eventually out of the village. Blücher reacted to the setback at Saint-Amand just as Napoleon hoped he would, by sending in fresh troops, ordering Otto von Pirch’s brigade to support General Steinmetz. Not all the troops were fighting, but 13,000 Frenchmen were now tying down 17,000 Prussians.
Blücher still hoped that about this time the Duke of Wellington would march in from the west, but his next move was in accordance with the original Prussian plan to use troops from Georg von Pirch’s II Corps to make a decisive flank attack on the western wing. This would be Blücher’s masterstroke: the idea was that while Otto von Pirch pinned down Girard’s division from the front, the Prussian aristocrat Ernst von Tippelskirch would strike it from the side with 7000 fresh men and destroy it, thus turning the French army’s left flank.
It was Lieutenant Ludwig Nagel’s turn to join the action. Over the previous hour Tippelskirch’s brigade had made a gruelling march, first along the Roman road, then pushing through thick corn, from their position in reserve north of Brye to Wagnelée on the army’s extreme right flank. They were very tired, Nagel’s 25th infantry regiment having marched all day and all night to reach the battlefield. About half their 2400 men came from the well-motivated and experienced Lützow Freikorps of black-garbed volunteers, but the other half were blue-clad conscripts freshly drafted from the Rhineland and barely integrated into the unit, 330 having arrived from Cleves three days ago. Nevertheless, they were excited and enthusiastic: ‘Double time soon became a run,’ recalled Nagel, ‘which at the order of the brigade commander, Major General von Tippelskirchen, grew faster minute by minute.’2
Otto von Pirch advanced on Saint-Amand-la-Haye with his 28th Berg Regiment and Westphalian Landwehr in front and the dependable 6th West Prussians in the second line. Their assault was determined enough but the 28th could not conquer the Château de la Haye and lost their commander. The 6th Regiment stormed in after them but also failed to take the fortified farm. They did hit the enemy commander: General Girard was hit by several shots, one through his lung, while his horse was hit in the head and threw him to the ground. Shortly afterwards his successor was hit in the thigh and had to leave the field. Nevertheless, the French held off the Prussian assault, even if it seemed to occupy all their attention.
Meanwhile, Tippelskirch’s brigade was jogging through and round the village of Wagnelée, part of which was on fire. They occupied the village without firing a shot and pushed ahead towards the higher ground beyond. However, they had become disordered by the broken terrain in the approach to the village, and their inexperienced troops became further confused by the ambitious wheeling manoeuvre required of them in order to pass it. The veteran fusilier battalions of the 25th and the 1st Pomeranians had been ahead as skirmishers and pathfinders but they ended up on the right. They drove away a few French skirmishers and captured Le Hameau, a farm complex west of La Haye, then left their sharpshooters to hold it while they pressed forward. But the fusiliers, who should have led the way, had been overtaken by two disordered battalions of Westphalian Landwehr who had cut the corner and found themselves in the lead, while the musketeer battalions of the 25th followed, all pushing blindly through head-high rye without skirmishers ahead to shield them. They could hear fighting to their left, but they could see practically nothing, although they were under fire from French artillery on distant heights.
In Saint-Amand-la-Haye Prince Blücher personally led Otto von Pirch’s men into another assault, shouting, ‘Children, keep up the struggle! Never let the “Great Nation” lord it over you again! Forward! Forward, in God’s name!’3 Enthused by their commander in chief, the second battalion of the 28th Berg retook the castle farm; their comrades fought fiercely for every house and finally drove Girard’s severely depleted division out of the village.
At this point Tippelskirch’s whole brigade ran into a French trap. Hidden in the tall corn, several French battalions were waiting in ambush with muskets levelled. A battalion of Westphalian conscripts from Paderborn, wheeling to correct their alignment, turned straight into a murderous volley of canister and musketry and carri
ed away the other battalion in their flight. The first the two musketeer battalions of the 25th saw of the French was the flashes when they fired. Shaken Prussians deployed into line, only to find that their columns had been too close and one battalion masked the other. As they attempted to manoeuvre, fleeing Westphalians burst through their ranks and, Ludwig Nagel recalled, ‘at this terrible moment an enemy battalion came from the left at full charge and hurled itself upon us and swept everything before it in the wildest flight.’ They fled towards Wagnelée. ‘Now I no longer wished to live and thought of nothing but death which roared behind us like a storm,’ wrote Nagel in his ‘Tagebuch’ with a passion characteristic of the time. ‘We stabbed and hacked at the fleeing troops. “Blacks form on me! Retrieve our honour or die! Volunteers to us!” That way most officers gathered a little group of men, nearly all Blacks; the Ersatzlings mostly ran for it.’
It was an officer’s duty to attempt to halt the flight of his men and reassemble them as soon as they were out of immediate danger, sometimes seizing a flag as a rallying point. It was a difficult task to turn fleeing men round: the officers were sick at heart at having failed and the same feeling might make the men desperate and violent. Military rules allowed officers to strike at troops who were running away, and Nagel said he did so. The attempt to rally men was a great test not only of an officer’s courage but of the moral authority he had gained during training, so it is hardly surprising that the men Nagel rallied were the volunteers he had campaigned with for years and that the Rhineland ‘Ersatzlings’ who had joined a few days ago fled.4 Nagel and his knots of black-clad volunteers then fought alongside the Pomeranians.
The fusilier battalions were also surprised by the enemy at short range and the three senior officers of the 25th were shot. A lieutenant led a bayonet charge which drove off one French battalion, but others forced the fusiliers to retreat to Le Hameau and then drove them back from there to rally on the Pomeranian reserve.
The outflanking move that Blücher had hoped would bring victory had been crushed ignominiously and he was furious. He summoned 1000 lancers and hussars from the left wing to cover his extreme right flank and to send patrols westwards to look out for troops coming from that direction, possibly still hoping for intervention from Wellington. Around 5.15, what was left of Steinmetz’s brigade pulled out of Saint-Amand, having exhausted their ammunition.5 Blücher threw the remaining battalions of Karl August von Krafft’s brigade – the 26th Regiment and the fusiliers of the Colberg Regiment – into the battle to support Otto von Pirch’s men. The two fusilier battalions stormed into Saint-Amand-la-Haye and moved south down the main street, but they met with fierce French resistance and were eventually forced out. By this stage the artillery barrage had lost much of its intensity, for many batteries were running out of ammunition. Prussian horse batteries that were still mobile retired to the artillery park behind Sombreffe for more, but some batteries on the Prussian side were more or less knocked out.
The day remained oppressively hot, and over the battlefield thunder clouds were gathering. Napoleon had failed to make a crushing breakthrough, but – thanks to the French troops’ training and experience – he was still achieving his objective of sucking in and pinning down superior forces. Around Saint-Amand 27,000 Frenchmen now held 41,000 Prussians, and although the timing of reinforcements may sometimes have altered the balance there were generally about a third more Prussians than Frenchmen in Ligny at any one time. On the French right wing, meanwhile, about 10,000 men opposed about 21,000 Prussians.
At some point during the afternoon, moreover, Blücher learned that Wellington was unlikely to help him; according to Baron Müffling ‘the first intelligence I sent the Prince, after our return from the windmill, could leave no doubt of the Duke’s inability to come to his assistance’.6 Müffling had sent a series of verbal and written messages to Blücher warning that Wellington was unable to lead troops to help them, but that he was successfully containing a French corps so that there should be no threat to Blücher’s right wing.7 Then one of Blücher’s patrols from the 8th Uhlans captured a French staff officer who told them that the 20,000 men of d’Erlon’s French corps were approaching to attack their flank.8 Wellington, it seemed, had failed him totally. Soon after, Jacquinot’s brigade of 1500 French light cavalry appeared to the south of the distant Bois Delhutte, with Prussian cavalry retreating slowly in front of them. Blücher sent his aide-de-camp Count Nostitz to identify the approaching column, worried that Wellington had been defeated.
By Napoleon’s calculations Marshal Ney himself, or a force sent by him, should appear above Brye at about 6 p.m., coming along the chaussée to the north of the Bois Delhutte. Earlier, at about four, he had ordered General Hulot’s division, which had been left to guard the main road, to mount a decoy offensive in a new direction, between Sombreffe and Tongrenelle, to pin down the Prussians on that flank and clear the way for a breakthrough by the Guard near Ligny. Hulot’s light infantry led, with three line regiments following, and Prussian outposts fell back before them until a battalion of the 8th Regiment was fighting to prevent them reaching the churchyard and presbytery of Sombreffe on the chaussée at the southern fringe of the village.
Kurmark Landwehr was defending the main road from Fleurus at the bridge over the river, with a 12-pounder battery on the Fleurus road halfway up the slope to Point du Jour. French skirmishers stormed Tongrenelle, then lost it to a counter-attack. The fighting sucked in yet more Prussian troops from III Corps, including most of the Kurmark Landwehr, who took heavy casualties from the efficient French artillery. The threat to Sombreffe even drew in Prussian reserves from behind Ligny. Steinmetz and Henckel, whose battered battalions had reloaded, rested and reorganised, were summoned to deal with the emergency and had marched over before it was realised that the threat was minor and their help was not needed. Eventually, a counter-attack by two Kurmark fusilier battalions drove the French back over the Ligne in front of Sombreffe. Each side continued to skirmish, the Prussians seeking to hold a line on the Ligne stream but unwilling to advance far into French territory in case they were ambushed. But Hulot had done his job splendidly by drawing reserves northward and away from Ligny.
Napoleon had sent the 3rd and 4th Grenadiers of the Guard with the brigade’s battery of guns forward to replace Hulot as a reserve for Gérard’s corps, and in readiness to spearhead an attack. Now, with half an hour to go to Ney’s expected time of arrival, it was time for the Emperor to commit his reserve. He sent Guillaume Duhesme with the Young Guard division to reinforce the left wing, supported by Claude Michel’s Chasseur division of the Old Guard, Jacques Subervie’s division of light cavalry from the right wing and a Guard light artillery battery. In the centre he formed the rest of the Old Guard in two columns with the 2nd and 1st Grenadiers on the right and the 1st Chasseurs, sappers and seamen on the left, and led them forward in person. Behind them rode the Horse Grenadiers and the Empress’s Dragoons on the right and Jacques Delort’s division of cuirassiers on the left. They marched forward until they were just within range of the Prussian guns, when suddenly the columns halted.9
Just at the very moment Napoleon was going to unleash his Guard, a mass of troops appeared on the horizon to the south of the Bois Delhutte, instilling panic among Vandamme’s weary infantry. When an officer sent to identify them returned with the alarming but totally inaccurate news that the column consisted of enemy troops Vandamme reported to Napoleon that hostile troops had appeared behind their left flank and that he would have to pull back.10 Vandamme should have been warned by the staff to expect French troops to appear on his flank but it seems that the staff had failed to anticipate this issue. Napoleon had been expecting Ney to arrive from a different direction, the other side of the Bois Delhutte, and although this new body might have been the corps that he had demanded, it might also have been a hostile body that had broken through Ney’s position at Frasnes. He may already have known that Ney considered himself outnumbered. Could it be that Ney h
ad been defeated by the English? Could Vandamme be right? The recent capture of the French staff officer by the patrol of the Prussian 8th Uhlans which alerted Blücher to the danger on his flank had probably contributed to French confusion, since the prisoner had presumably been on his way to Napoleon with news of d’Erlon’s impending arrival.
The Emperor needed to find out what was really happening on the left wing. He sent General de la Bédoyère to direct affairs on the spot and help rally Vandamme’s shaken men while another officer rode off to identify the distant force. For the moment the attack by the Old Guard on Ligny was halted and postponed.
30
D’Erlon’s March
Between Frasnes and Brye, 4–9 p.m.
It is arguable that the campaign of 1815 turned on the actions of d’Erlon’s corps on the afternoon of 16 June.