by Tim Clayton
Sir Alexander Gordon returned to Quatre Bras a little before nine o’clock with the information that the Prussians were retreating to Wavre. Everybody in Wellington’s entourage assumed that Wavre was a little village just behind Ligny until they spoke to liaison officer Müffling, who exclaimed, ‘My God, that’s a long way!’ Looking at a map, they realised the extent of the Prussian retreat: Wavre was fifteen miles north of Brye.9
This was an emergency. If Blücher had retreated that far, Wellington with something like 45,000 men at Quatre Bras and 20,000 near Nivelles was exposed to attack by Napoleon’s whole army of 100,000. He had to retreat and retreat fast. He gave immediate orders to fall back to Mont Saint-Jean.
In the spring he had selected the best place in which to fight a defensive battle on each of the approach roads to Brussels and had ordered his engineers to make large-scale maps of these ‘positions’. Fortunately, the previous morning, the chief engineer, Colonel Carmichael Smyth, had thought it prudent to send to Brussels for the survey that his department had made of the ridge above Mont Saint-Jean, the battlefield selected in case of an attack from the direction of Charleroi. Wellington’s neat copy not yet being ready, the engineers had dispatched the original plan, in the custody of a lieutenant who arrived with the map tucked into his saddle.
At that very moment, Wellington’s staff was scattered by French chasseurs. In the mêlée the lieutenant was knocked off his horse and ridden over, and when he came to, his horse was nowhere to be seen. He had lost Wellington’s map! After a few minutes of sickening anxiety, however, he found his horse grazing in a garden and retrieved the map, taking it at once to Carmichael Smyth. So, when Wellington called Smyth and asked him for the survey of Mont Saint-Jean, to Smyth’s great satisfaction he was able to hand it straight to him.10
Wellington then retired to the hut with Quartermaster-General Sir William Delancey and they lay down on the ground over the survey to work out how best to place their troops, with the contours, features and buildings on the battlefield in front of them.11 It was a unique advantage to know the battlefield so minutely in advance of the battle, but typical of Wellington’s thorough preparation. He had also had the Staff Corps make surveys of all the routes his troops were likely to use, identifying bottlenecks and potential defensive positions and describing them with maps and profile drawings: the one that Basil Jackson had prepared of the river Dyle and the route from Gembloux to Wavre was being used by the Prussian staff as they made their retreat.12 With the deployment sketched out in advance, Delancey’s staff could guide the troops into approximately the right positions as soon as they arrived.
Marching orders for the infantry were issued as quickly as possible, but an inevitable gloom descended over the army as the rumour spread that they were to retreat because the Prussians had been defeated. Things looked bleak, given that the invincible Napoleon would be snapping at their heels, and the British officers were well aware of the challenge that they faced, since a retreating army was always liable to grow ever more demoralised, and bad troops might disband altogether. ‘He sent the worst troops off first,’ recalled Fitzroy Somerset, these being in his view the two Netherlands divisions. Wellington allowed the troops that were not moving off immediately to cook, Müffling having offered his opinion that in Germany Napoleon had always allowed his troops to cook in the morning if they had bivouacked late, so they would probably not press ahead immediately.
To reduce overcrowding, the Netherlands cavalry were sent via Nivelles, where they ran into the British divisions that were just arriving from Braine-le-Comte. Thomas Jeremiah and the Welch Fuzileers had just overtaken the 52nd, who – having marched thirty miles to Braine-le-Comte the previous day and having been soaked by a thunder shower during the night before marching on at dawn – were serving spirits. The Fuzileers had had no rations since they started marching the previous morning. ‘We marched by them in gloomy silence cursing our Quartermaster for not having provided us with the same dose,’ recalled Jeremiah.
At Nivelles the 51st waited for David Chassé’s infantry and the Netherlands heavy cavalry to march by. For Sergeant Wheeler, the ‘fine looking’ Belgian horsemen yielded an unexpected windfall: ‘One of the pitiful scoundrels in urging his horse through the gate way, by some means upset the horse and in the fall the fellow lost his purse. It was picked up by one of my section. In this section there is a few old campaigners, we had agreed to stick by each other come what would and all plunder was to be equally divided. This was not a bad Godsend to begin with.’13
About 9 a.m. a messenger arrived from Gneisenau’s headquarters to find Müffling sitting on the ground with Wellington; speaking in French, he described the situation of the Prussian army, explaining Gneisenau’s anxiety that the reserve ammunition might have been lost and that consequently only one corps was definitely equipped to fight. Wellington ‘put some questions’ and ‘received sensible and satisfactory replies’, and then told them that ‘he would accept a battle in the position of Mont St. Jean, if the Field-Marshal were inclined to come to his assistance even with one corps only.’ Müffling wrote to Blücher to that effect.14
Staff Corps officers now rode off to Mont Saint-Jean to direct the troops arriving there to their battle stations, but on the way they found Genappe in chaos. As he walked towards Brussels, the wounded rifleman Ned Costello had also found the area behind the battlefield full of confusion and uproar. Soldiers’ wives and other camp followers crowded ‘in great numbers, making inquiries after their husbands, friends, &c, for whom they generally are prepared with liquors and other refreshments … The crowds of carts, horses, &c, which thickly thronged the roadway, were greeted on all sides by anxious faces and earnest inquiries.’ The side of the road near Quatre Bras was littered with ‘overturned ammunition carts, demolished guns or guns jammed into each other; and on the road were ambulances carrying the wounded and an endless wagon train with the camp followers of the Scottish troops’. In the narrow street of Genappe this northward-bound column had collided with artillery wagons and food transports from Brussels that were heading for Quatre Bras.15
Sir William Delancey found Basil Jackson there, trying to direct traffic, and ordered the grenadier company of the 5th German Legion to ‘clear the high road of all carts and carriages as far as Brussels and to suffer nothing but artillery to come up’. Their captain ordered Lieutenant Edmund Wheatley with thirteen grenadiers to clear Genappe, while he went on towards Brussels with the rest. Wheatley, who disliked his captain intensely, anticipated that he would use this excuse to spend the next day in Brussels, which he duly did. He solved his traffic jam by emptying the beef and gin from the commissary carts into the ditch, filling them instead with wounded, and sending them back towards Brussels.16 Meanwhile, the Netherlands infantry marched round the town through the fields, ‘slogging their way through some terrible mud’. At one point some of the soldiers refused to wade through hip-deep water and General Kruse called in a troop of Scots Greys to force them to carry on.17
The two light companies of the 1st Nassau who had earlier been sent on picket duty into the Bois de Bossu were however forgotten and left behind, young Heinrich Gagern among them. When the Brunswick Avant-Garde was ordered to retire, they realised that everybody else appeared to have gone: ‘Things were becoming scary: the French were already in possession of Quatre Bras, and we had to pass by them at a distance of a rifle shot. Fortunately, they appeared to be too busy plundering the place to be paying any attention to what was going on around them.’ The Nassauers hurried off, taking two French stragglers prisoner.18
With the last of the infantry gone from Quatre Bras, the British cavalry was left alone waiting in three lines. It was very sultry. As on the previous day, black clouds were closing in, and distant rolls of thunder could be heard. Then, at about 2 p.m., Light Dragoon William Hay watched as ‘At a great distance in the wood, on each side of those roads, clouds of dust began to spread over the trees. That dust approached thicker and thicker, and
dead silence pervaded our ranks, I thought even the horses were more still than usual, no champing of bits, no clattering of swords. Every eye was directed anxiously to what was passing in the front.’19 It was an ominous indication that something was about to happen.
39
The Road to Mont Saint-Jean
17 June, 2–10 p.m.
Finally, Napoleon had pounced, but it was too late. Wellington’s infantry and artillery were now a minimum of three miles to the north, beyond Genappe, and all that was left facing the French was the cavalry rearguard. Nevertheless, although he had arrived too late to force Wellington to fight at Quatre Bras, Napoleon might still do considerable damage through an energetic pursuit.
Frederick Ponsonby, commander of the 12th Light Dragoons, accompanied cavalry staff and the Duke of Wellington, ‘observing the preparations and movements of the immense mass of troops before us. He was occupied in reading the newspapers, looking through his glass when anything was observed, and then making observations and laughing at the fashionable news from London.’1 When some French howitzers began to lob shells over, ‘The Duke told Lord Uxbridge that it was of no purpose to wait: the sooner he got away the better: that no time was to be lost in getting off.’2 The Duke then trotted off with his staff to Mont Saint-Jean.
The Earl of Uxbridge was reluctant to leave, hoping to get a crack at the French cavalry, and the 9000 British horsemen in three lines behind him were spoiling for a fight. But as more and more of the 10,000 French cavalry that Napoleon had gathered to envelop Wellington’s army emerged from one side of the woods, and 6000 of Ney’s cavalry from the other, even the most daring hussars began to think that a retreat was prudent. Uxbridge gave the word and the British cavalry began to pull out at speed: ‘a few minutes before, our three lines, with sabers [sic] drawn, were watching with breathless interest the approach of the French Cavalry, all, excepting superior officers, having no doubt they were going to be in personal conflict, and now we were retiring literally at a gallop in three separate columns by different roads.’3
To protect troops during an orderly retreat, one line of cavalry would delay the enemy by skirmishing with them until the last moment and then fall back onto another line of cavalry, which took over its duty – and so on. Uxbridge’s withdrawal in three columns went smoothly until, close to the river Dyle, the French closed in on the rearguard of hussars covering Wellington’s eastern column. Sir Hussey Vivian expected John Ormsby Vandeleur’s brigade of light dragoons behind him to wait for his horsemen to pass through their line in the approved manner; Vandeleur was twelve years older than Vivian and thus his senior officer. But Vandeleur was generally regarded as stupid and incompetent in charge of cavalry, and instead his brigade cantered off as Vivian approached. A dragon said that ‘there was not time for the Hussars to pass through our brigade, the enemy were so close upon them, and had we not got off with the least possible delay the Hussars and our brigade would have been in one confused heap.’4
Vandeleur’s premature retreat could have been disastrous for Vivian’s men had not the weather intervened dramatically:
The enemy’s lines began to close with ours, and when within a short distance, as if a sluicegate had been opened, down came such torrents of rain as quite obliterated from our view even our own advance, this continued with such violence in our teeth, that our position seemed untenable; our horses with spurs stuck in their flanks would not keep their heads to the storm.5
In teeming rain Vivian crossed the river a mile east of Genappe, protected against pursuit by some rifle-armed skirmishers of the 10th Hussars who dismounted and took cover on the far bank. One squadron was cut off and had to cross the river lower down, but they almost all escaped, although they then found themselves retreating along ‘a narrow cross-country road, full of holes and of broad, deep ruts full of water from the recent rains. Along this road was most horrid riding, on account of the nature of the soil, which was a stiff slippery clay; consequently, the crowding from the rear pushed many men and their horses into the deep ditches by the road side.’6
Napoleon was extremely unlucky with the weather. The torrential rain and howling gales with which the day ended certainly did him far more harm than it did the allies, who had a good head start before it rained. With all the cavalry Napoleon had gathered, many allied troops might otherwise have been cut off and captured. Indeed, as Assistant Surgeon James of the Life Guards acknowledged, had it rained like this the day before, Wellington’s artillery might never have reached the army: ‘the greater part of the cavalry and artillery were at the distance of nearly 56 miles from the infantry in front and the roads that led to it would have been very difficult if not nearly impassable in some places if the rain which had fallen on the 17th had fallen on the 16th when we were called upon to march.’7
The Emperor was nevertheless hugely disappointed and seemed depressed when he greeted d’Erlon mournfully, ‘We have lost France. Never mind, my dear general, put yourself at the head of that cavalry and press the English rearguard as hard as you can.’ Napoleon accepted that, since he had not believed Ney’s assertion that he faced an army, this latest lost opportunity was largely his own fault. Through a failure of communication and the strained relations between Ney and Napoleon resulting from their misunderstanding the previous afternoon, the opportunity to force Wellington to fight in isolation had been lost.
Bonaparte summoned Jacques Subervie’s two regiments of lancers to follow Wellington’s central column through the town of Genappe. The British army might have been trapped in this difficult bottleneck had the French attacked sooner, or had the torrential rain not made it difficult to outflank the troops behind the town. To cover the lancers Napoleon personally established a twenty-four-gun battery on the river bank and began to pound the British positions behind the village. He had brought a Guard horse artillery battery with his duty squadrons and he shouted to the young officers, with an unmistakable note of hatred, ‘Fire! Fire! They are English!’8
Wellington’s rearguard of infantry, the 95th and the 2nd Light infantry of the Legion, formed square and trudged back through the fields, leaving several lines of cavalry facing the French.9 On the hill to the north of Genappe the 1st Life Guards formed up across the main road, their bedraggled black horses steaming and snorting in the pouring rain. Surgeon James recalled that ‘Captain Kelly, who commanded the rear troop, rode up to ask me if I had any gin in my case. Of this he took a sup and then said: “I should not be surprised if we had a bit of a fight just here. I believe the Duke is surprised that we have not been more pressed by the French before this.”’
Below them, nearer Genappe, Uxbridge commanded two lines consisting of the 23rd Light Dragoons and 7th Hussars. The 7th was Uxbridge’s own regiment and had the honour of bringing up the rear. And here, at Genappe, they and the Life Guards fought what went down in history as a glorious rearguard action, although not everybody had seen it that way. Soon afterwards, Uxbridge felt obliged to suppress ‘reports as false as they were invidious, having been propagated by some enemy of the 7th hussars’. And on 28 June, in case anybody was in any doubt about what had really happened, he wrote to the officers, giving the ‘plain honest truth’ that became history.10 According to Uxbridge the gallant charges of the 7th against serried ranks of lances, though repelled, had prepared the way for a decisive charge by the 1st Life Guards that had broken the French.
James’s friend Captain Kelly described the action to another cavalry officer in rather less glorious terms:
a body of lancers debouched from the town & Lord Uxbridge ordered the 7th H to charge them; it was unsuccessful, the commanding officer & some few others penetrated, were taken & killed, the rest retired in some disorder. The rear of the 1st Life Guards was fronted in support, but on the enemy pursuing, they also went about by order. Lord Uxbridge called out to them ‘would they also dessert [sic] him’. He had previously rallied the 7th, but they would not stand or face the pursuing lancers, when Kelly, who did not bel
ong to the rear squadron of the Life Guards brought them round & charged with half a squadron & fortunately broke, pursued & killed many of them. He retired when he found himself under fire of their supports. They rallied & he again charged them with equal success … from other sources, I believe all this.11
According to Kelly, not only was the leading squadron of hussars routed, but the nearest squadron of Life Guards fled before the French onslaught and the remainder of the 7th also made off, refusing Uxbridge’s order to stand and face the French.
James gave a similar account. He was rejoining his regiment after chatting to a friend in the Horse Guards, when ‘from each side of the houses on the top of the hill, down poured the 7th Hussars and part of the 23rd Light Dragoons followed by the greater part of the French cavalry, all in the utmost confusion. So utterly were they routed that men and horses tumbled into the ditches on either side of the road, such was their hurry. The French pushed them so hotly that some of their dragoons were mixed up with our soldiers, and one of them was killed by my side.’12
At this point Kelly turned a half squadron of Guards around and charged. It was, as James realised, a crucial intervention. ‘Had the Life Guards joined the retreat of the other regiments, it is difficult to say where the thing would have stopped, and this was an event not at all unlikely to happen if young troops unused to action were to see two of the elite British regiments running away at full speed.’ Kelly struck down a colonel and dismounted to cut off his epaulettes as a trophy and capture his fine horse. In so doing he was attacked by several Frenchmen and, as he later admitted to his wife, would have been killed had a corporal not joined him and fought by his side until they had disabled or driven off their enemies.13 It is possible that he fought the great French hero Jean-Baptiste Sourd, colonel of the 2nd Lancers, who fell with six sabre cuts and afterwards had his arm amputated by Larrey.14 Without Kelly’s intervention the British retreat to Mont Saint-Jean might have turned into a glorious rout. Thanks to Kelly, order was restored.