by Tim Clayton
Then the Young Guard arrived, their drummers beating the pas de charge and their band, like that of Lefol’s 28th Regiment, playing the Chant du Départ, the song from 1794 that had become Napoleon’s anthem in this new war to save the Revolution: ‘Tremble enemies of France, Kings drunk with blood and arrogance, the sovereign people advance!’ Their appearance breathed new life into the exhausted and demoralised troops on the left wing. Their commander Guillaume Duhesme, the forty-nine-year-old author of the French light infantry manual Essai historique de l’infanterie légère, had a reputation for ruthlessness and daring. Highly intelligent and a brilliant leader, Duhesme’s outspoken republicanism had impeded his career in the past, but now he was the ideal man to inspire the troops; Napoleon thought afterwards that he should have given Duhesme a corps.3 Girard’s men joined the voltigeurs, pushed back Tippelskirch and recaptured Le Hameau, while the tirailleurs finally seized the high ground over Saint-Amand. The Pomeranians and Freikorps held out at Wagnelée and the last reserve brigade advanced to steady the situation at La Haye. Frantic Prussian cavalry charges sought to stop the French.
At Ligny, the fighting was still raging. The Prussian commander was now Georg von Pirch, acting chief of II Corps since the sacking of its general over the Saxon mutiny. Georg, the elder brother of Otto, was a weak personality whose inexperience at this level made him reliant on subordinates, of whom the dominant personality was Colonel Heinrich von Zastrow, commander of the 9th Colberg Regiment. ‘Zastrow’s outstanding personal bravery had earned the respect of the entire army, but he assessed the probability of success according to the yardstick of his own courage; unfortunately, others were not always quite as brave, and to adopt his recommendations without close scrutiny could lead to mistakes.’4 Zastrow held the northern and western part of the village, the French held the area round the church and the south-east.
For half an hour the French had brought down a murderous artillery bombardment on western Ligny. The silver-embroidered blue and yellow colour of the 7th second battalion was shot through and its staff smashed by three cannonballs.5 Then General Gérard led in his last reserves and again drove the Prussians back. He got two guns into the churchyard and with their help was finally able to capture the Ferme d’en Bas on the far bank. An attempt to recapture it by the Prussian 7th Regiment failed, while Westphalian sharpshooters, trying to reach the churchyard, were picked off on the narrow footbridge, or shot, clubbed or bayoneted at the wall. The Prussians fell back through a labyrinth of hedges on the north side of the village. Some Frenchmen had isolated the second battalion’s tattered, broken colour and were wrestling with its bearer, Ensign Schulze, when two musketeers came to his rescue and killed his assailants, recapturing the flag. The Prussians were still holding out in the medieval castle, though the French bombardment was smashing the stonework and the troops there were isolated. An assault on the village by two battalions of the Prussian 23rd Regiment from their corps reserve failed to make any headway, but a second attack by the remaining battalion supported by Elbe Landwehr fared better and the Prussians recovered the western sector.
The French responded by firing incendiary shells at the western half of Ligny, from which they could not shift the obstinate defenders. At 6.30 the barn of the castle went up in flames, creating a blaze so hot that the Prussians were forced to evacuate the medieval stronghold. Much of Ligny was soon alight: the thatched roofs caught fire easily and burned fiercely hot. Prussians crawled out of cellars and leaped from attics, dragging with them what wounded they could. Smoke from the fire combined in the sky with an ever more intense blackness – the super-vivid purple grey of summer thundercloud. The stifling heat would soon explode in an electric storm.
Around the same time Napoleon finally learned that the mysterious force on the horizon was, in fact, d’Erlon’s corps, but that it was obeying orders to return to Quatre Bras. Why his staff failed to communicate with General Durutte is not clear – Durutte’s own staff had deserted in the morning – but 4000 infantry continued to stand idly by in full view, no more than a mile from the Prussian-held village of Wagnelée.
Napoleon decided to relaunch the attack of the Guard on Ligny in an attempt to isolate the Prussian right wing. The crack regiments of the Old Guard, the 1st Chasseurs and Grenadiers, were to attack to the north-east of the village with the support of Claude-Etienne Guyot’s horse grenadiers and dragoons. François Roguet’s grenadier division – the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Grenadiers – was to seize Ligny, and Jacques Delort’s division of cuirassiers was to attack between Ligny and Saint-Amand. The head of Lobau’s column was just emerging from Fleurus to form a fresh reserve. On the ridge between Saint-Amand and Ligny the Prussian 12-pounders traversed to point at the Guard and the ridge disappeared in billowing smoke, but they were firing slowly now and there were fewer guns. When the smoke cleared, Napoleon could see that the space behind the guns was relatively empty. ‘They are lost: they have no reserve remaining!’ he remarked to Gérard.6 The Guard advanced in solemn silence, drums still, waiting for the signal to charge. ‘Tell the Grenadiers that the first man to bring me a prisoner will be shot,’ yelled General Roguet.
The Old Guard was legendary, and it was well known that it advanced into combat only in order to win battles by striking the decisive blow. Its very appearance, therefore, struck fear into the heart of the troops opposing it. Hippolyte de Mauduit painted a portrait of the 1st Grenadiers, of which he was a sergeant: their average height was five foot ten inches and their age thirty-five; many sergeants and corporals in fact were over forty and had seen fifteen years of campaigning. A fifth of the privates had been NCOs in the line. They were lean and sinewy, physically very fit, tanned and in many cases showing grey in their hair. Obesity was unknown in the Guard. Almost universally, they wore moustaches and gold earrings and they were heavily tattooed. The British painter Benjamin Robert Haydon said that ‘they had the look of thoroughbred, veteran, disciplined banditti.’ The veterans wore their normal combat dress: blue overcoats and wide trousers, white crossbelts and black bearskins and gaiters, although the newly raised regiments did not even have the proper kit and wore shakos instead of bearskins.7
Napoleon himself rode at the head of the pride of his army as far as the Tombe de Ligny, the ancient burial mound, from which he watched his men jog towards the smouldering ruins. Around the village the remnants of twenty-one Prussian battalions were still slugging it out with what was left of Gérard’s corps.
Forty-eight fresh 12-pounders of the Guard artillery commenced a bombardment of the Prussian reserves around the Bussy windmill. The British liaison officer, Henry Hardinge, was hit in the hand and forced to leave the field. And as the heavy guns spoke, the storm finally broke. Rumbling, crashing thunder complemented the roar of artillery and warm rain fell in bucketloads. The guns stopped and through the sudden downpour rushed François Roguet’s division of grenadiers, entering the smoking and steaming village in small sections.8
The Prussians pulled out, leaving their skirmishers and riflemen with orders to hold on for as long as they possibly could to give the main bodies time to reorganise a defence further back. Lieber’s officer, Carl von Bagensky, was shot as they retreated, but his men returned for him, carrying him away to safety. Karl August von Krafft organised the tired Prussian survivors into squares behind the village, but they fell back before the Grenadiers of the Guard and their expert artillery. Westphalian Landwehr cavalry bought time for the retreat by charging the French infantry, taking the grenadiers by surprise. They completed their squares but could not get into the chequer formation, so the cavalry rode through the gaps between squares unscathed.9
Napoleon’s personal bodyguard and the dragoons, horse grenadiers and gendarmerie d’élite had followed the grenadiers round Ligny. Now they chased off the Prussian cavalry and broke one of their infantry squares.10 To avoid being trapped and captured, the Prussian front-line units at Wagnelée and La Haye had to retreat towards Brye and Les Trois Burettes. In yet one
more battle Napoleon’s Imperial Guard had made the decisive breakthrough for a glorious victory.
As the villages fell into French hands, Colonel Forbin-Janson of the staff found the Emperor and told him that Ney believed he was facing the whole of Wellington’s army. Napoleon said this was nonsense: Ney was merely fighting a British vanguard. Giving Forbin-Janson, who was feeling faint with heatstroke and hunger, one of his own Arab horses, the Emperor told him to ride back and tell Ney that he must take Quatre Bras.11
32
Kellermann’s Charge
Quatre Bras, 6.30–7.30 p.m.
Seven miles away, Ney was seething with frustrated rage, more determined than ever to win his own battle. It is difficult to know what was going through his head. If he had received and understood Napoleon’s 3.15 order, and especially if he had listened to the explanations of the Emperor’s envoys, he might have grasped what was in Napoleon’s mind: that Ney could now fight on the defensive while detaching troops to the right. But he seems to have been consumed by fury at being robbed of his own victory, blind to the possibility that the Emperor might have a better opportunity to exploit than he had. ‘The Emperor is in his chair. He can’t see what’s happening here. The English are in front of me and I am going to beat them,’ he shouted at one of Napoleon’s aides.1 Behaving like a suicidal hero of Sturm und Drang, he threw himself into the thick of the conflict, inspiring his warriors, courting death, but never pausing for cool calculation. To judge from contemporary writing this frenzied style of conduct and expression was fashionable among officers of the period, especially on the continent. Finding himself without infantry reserves and with only one division of the heavy cavalry corps that were supposed to be supporting him, he raged, ‘Oh how I wish these English cannonballs would all bury themselves in my chest!’
Since Napoleon’s orders allowed him to use the cuirassiers if the Emperor hadn’t taken them himself, Ney must at some point have ordered Kellermann forward, although only his first brigade was at the front, the second being some distance to the rear in reserve. Ney still hoped to win the battle through a sudden aggressive stroke: when Kellermann objected that a single brigade could make little impact on 25,000 infantry, Ney insisted that he should charge, saying that he would support him with all the remaining cavalry. ‘General, the salvation of France is at stake. A supreme effort is required. Take your cavalry, throw yourself into the middle of the English. Crush them! Trample them underfoot!’
The 8th and 11th cuirassiers formed south of Gémioncourt and Kellermann led them in a charge along the main road.2 Dressed in blue, with shining steel breastplates – it was rumoured that these were bulletproof – and helmets, long swords and trailing black horsehair plumes, the cuirassiers were the pride of the French cavalry. Although they did not belong to the Guard they were nevertheless regarded as elite, big men on big horses, battle-winning shock troops. The British had never faced cuirassiers in Spain, but their reputation had gone before them and they were a fearsome unknown quantity.
Towards 6 p.m. Colin Halkett’s British brigade was another to find itself pushing through rye ‘of an extraordinary height, some of it measuring seven feet’. Thomas Morris of the 73rd recalled that it ‘prevented us from seeing much of the enemy; but, though we could not see them, they were observing us’, for the French had a better view from the high ground near Frasnes and the rooftops of Gémioncourt. Morris remembered a Gordon Highlander whose arm had been shot off at the shoulder by a cannonball staggering by: ‘On passing us, he exclaimed, “Go on, 73rd give them pepper! I’ve got my Chelsea commission!” Poor fellow! I should think from the nature of his wound, he would bleed to death in half an hour.’3 They advanced in ‘open column of companies’, one company behind another, each in line, a formation from which it was easy to form square.
It happened that the grenadier company of the 33rd, reaching high ground, saw cuirassiers and shouted a warning in time for their battalion to adopt their defensive formation. The cuirassiers saw this in turn and changed their aim towards the 69th South Lincolnshire, who were in a dip and did not see the cavalry coming until they were fifty yards away. The 69th were raw troops, a few from the Lincolnshire area but over a third Irish, and one of the least experienced British units with an average age of twenty-one, a quarter of them being fifteen to nineteen. They broke and ran. Within a month officers were claiming that the Prince of Orange had ordered them from square to line, but one of their captains attributed the disaster to an order from Captain Lindsay to the grenadiers to halt and fire, rather than form square.4 The 8th cuirassiers rode down the fleeing boys, of whom few were killed but very many were injured by cuts and stabs to their heads, shoulders, backs and arms, and after a fierce fight, two cuirassiers of the 8th captured the battalion’s king’s colour, their Union Jack. Captain George Barlow had heard that the best thing in these circumstances was to dive for the ground and play dead, and that was what he did – it really was what the manual recommended. After being ridden over, he made his way to the square of the 42nd Regiment, where he complained that what he had been told about horses avoiding prone bodies was simply not true.5 By then the battalion was dispersed beyond recall.6
It seems that the 73rd were not charged, but some of them nevertheless ran for the trees. Their colonel afterwards insisted that they never retreated into the wood, but one lieutenant admitted that being in line, ‘the 73rd to give effective fire threw back its left a little, not however in perfect order, for there was not time … Some of the men might have unavoidably entered the wood.’ Sergeant Morris was perhaps with that left wing, for he recalled, ‘We continuing to advance, the glittering of the tops of our bayonets, guided towards us a large body of the enemy’s cuirassiers, who, coming so unexpectedly upon us, threw us in the utmost confusion. Having no time to form a square, we were compelled to retire, or rather to run, to the wood through which we had advanced.’7 If they did run, they soon recovered, because they and the 30th afterwards continued to advance towards Gémioncourt.
The 30th Cambridgeshire were Peninsular veterans, the only battle-hardened battalion in Halkett’s brigade, and they also saw the cuirassiers early enough to form square and drive off their adversaries. Sir Thomas Picton rode over to congratulate them.8 The cuirassiers swept on, charging the Black Watch, who this time formed square successfully. The 33rd meanwhile had escaped the first wave of cuirassiers but its troubles were not over, for a second French regiment was poised behind the first. The French action was a fine example of how to combine artillery and cavalry. The cavalry obliged the enemy to form square, which made it an ideal target for artillery. If the square wavered at the casualties from the artillery, the cavalry finished it off. A private described their baptism of fire as they were targeted by the French 12-pounders:
Before we had been in the field half an hour we got it pretty hot. The officer of my company, I believe, was the first that was killed in the company. The enemy got a fair view of our regiment at that time, and they sent cannon shot as thick as hail stones. Immediately we got up on our ground and seen a large column of the French cavalry, named the French cuirassiers, advancing close upon us, we immediately tried to form square to receive the cavalry, but all in vain, the cannon shot from the enemy broke down our square faster than we could form it; killed nine and ten men every shot; the balls falling down amongst us just at the present and shells bursting in a hundred pieces. We could not be accountable for the number of men that we lost there; and had it not been for a wood on our right, about 300 yards, we should have every every [sic] man been cut in pieces with the cavalry, and trampled upon by their horses.
The 33rd were still on ‘rising ground’ where they were all too conspicuous, and the face of the square nearest the cannon began to crumple despite the sergeants using crossed halberds to push the rear men forward. Captain John Haigh stepped from his own company to the danger point, sword raised, shouting encouragement, but a cannonball hit him in the abdomen and almost cut him in half. His eyes s
trained and bulged, his lip quivered and his body convulsed as he fell on his back. His brother, standing nearby, burst into tears. Surgeon Finlayson wrote soon after that ‘Captain Haigh was killed with a cannonball, as he was most coolly & gallantly encouraging his men & directing them how to act. His brother, Lieutenant Haigh was close by & saw him fall & his bowels all gush out. He exclaimed, “Oh kill me with him!” I endeavoured to console him and said it might soon be our own fate.’ Immediately afterwards another ball cleanly removed the top of Arthur Gore’s skull and, recalled his lieutenant, ‘poor Arthur Gore’s brains were scattered upon my shako and face.’ Finlayson saw Gore, the man who had followed him from Nivelles, ‘laying on his back with the upper part of his head shot away. The rest of his countenance was most pleasant, I never saw it more so, he seemed asleep.’9
As they hurriedly retreated from the exposed position a rumour spread that cavalry was behind their flank, and they panicked and ran. Some of those at the back were cut down and captured, and a cuirassier seized the battalion’s colour and rode off with it. A corporal and a lieutenant were hiding in the rye when the corporal saw the horseman with the colour riding straight at him. He shot the Frenchman, tore the flag from the staff and gave it to the lieutenant, who ran for the wood. The corporal was quickly surrounded and taken prisoner.10