Waterloo

by Tim Clayton

  Riding on through the wood they emerged in sight of Fichermont, a château and hamlet which was Wellington’s easternmost infantry outpost. They could see French patrols, but their own approach appeared to have gone totally undetected by the enemy.11 The French, it seemed, had no idea that their right flank might soon be in danger from a Prussian attack.

  43

  Finding Breakfast

  Mont Saint-Jean, 18 June, 4–10 a.m.

  ‘The first hours of this 18th of June were bleak and cold, with a damp, chilly wind,’ wrote Surgeon James; the ‘change from intense heat to great cold’ concerned the medic, especially as the 1st Life Guards had ‘neither food to eat nor spirits to drink’. The rain had stopped before dawn, but everything in their bivouac under the trees at the edge of the forest was soaking wet, ‘everyone was covered with mud, and it was with the greatest difficulty that the men managed to get fires lit, some breakfast cooked, and their arms cleaned and their ammunition dried.’1

  Staff officer George Scovell, ordered to clear the road near the village of Waterloo of abandoned wagons, found General Lambert’s newly arrived infantry division there, hoping to cook breakfast before marching to the battlefield. He made a bargain with the officers that they could use the wagons as firewood if they would guarantee to clear the road; this they did, though it took several hours. Meanwhile Lambert sent his veteran brigade major, rifleman Harry Smith, to find Wellington and get orders. When Smith located the general at the château-ferme of Hougoumont, Wellington told him to draw up the new brigade at the junction of the Nivelles and Brussels roads and then reconnoitre the quickest route to join General Best’s Hanoverian brigade, also part of General Lambert’s command, which was situated to the east of Picton’s division. Wellington was glad of the opportunity this gave him to strengthen his weak left wing.2

  In the fields behind the village of Mont Saint-Jean the 15th Hussars were preparing for action. ‘This we did in darkness, wet, and discomfort,’ recalled their surgeon, ‘but a night spent in pouring rain, sitting up to the hips in muddy water, with bits of straw hanging about him, does make a man feel and look queer on first rising. Indeed, it was almost ludicrous to observe the various countenances of us officers, as, smoking cigars and occasionally shivering, we stood round a watch fire giving out more smoke than heat.’ They waited for orders, impatient to move, ‘for both horses and men were shaking with cold’. Told to form up on the higher ground above Hougoumont, a mile south-west, they went to its farmyard to look for forage for their horses and, after a long dispute with the sentries of the Guards who had orders to refuse all admittance, they succeeded in extracting some corn and drinking water.

  Guards light infantryman Matthew Clay had reached the hill above Hougoumont the previous afternoon and made a ‘Portuguese tent’ out of two blankets and five muskets against the rain. He had no opportunity to take advantage of it, however: during the artillery duel when Bonaparte feigned an attack in the late evening, his company had been called to arms and in the course of their advance he had fallen, after which he spent the night soaked through on sentry duty in a ditch on the French side of the château’s orchard. Nor was there any respite: in the morning Clay’s company fetched fuel to light fires and straw to sit on from a barn in Hougoumont, and shared some bread and a piece of a slaughtered pig. Clay changed his underclothes, putting on homemade linen he had taken from the pack of a dead German at Quatre Bras, and then started cutting away inconvenient branches and making holes to shoot through the orchard hedge. After much effort preparing the orchard for defence, they were promptly marched off through the topiary garden and the southern courtyard of the château to the kitchen garden that bordered the buildings to the west.

  Others had endured the conditions in equal discomfort, but managed to find some consolation. Young Jack Barnett ‘never woke till the Assembly blew, & woke with my side in a puddle of water’. His Highland light infantry were also in the open fields near Merbe Braine, the hamlet three-quarters of a mile behind Hougoumont. ‘I got up with my teeth chattering, but I begged a smoke from a man in my compy. out of an old dirty pipe, who had a little tobacco, this warmed me, & made me once more fit for a march.’ General Hill took a few of them to escort him while he made a reconnaissance. The French were only half a mile away, with d’Erlon’s corps camped all over the high ground just across a narrow valley. Those who remained behind were given half an allowance of gin, which, one wrote, ‘was the most welcome thing I ever received’.3 A rifle officer from the same brigade had been out skirmishing in the evening, and then spent the night on outpost duty, unable to evacuate casualties:

  Our wounded were in a desperate situation, and those who were not wounded were like so many half drowned and half starved rats. At about seven o’clock however to our great satisfaction the skirmishers were called in, and as a reward for our nocturnal labours, we had leave from General Adam who commanded our (Light) Brigade to plunder three farm houses which were near us! The idea of a fire was a most consoling one! Chairs, tables, sofas, cradles, churns, barrels, and all manner of combustibles were soon cracking in the flames, our fellows then proceeded to the slaughter of all the living stock the yard contained, and in less than an hour we had as delicious a breakfast of beef, pork, veal, duck, chicken, potatoes and other delicacies as I ever made an attack upon.4

  This licensed plundering seems to have been general near Merbe Braine. Thomas Jeremiah and a friend set out through the drizzle, armed with cudgels and haversacks, to find food. Just beneath the Welch Fuzileers’ camp they saw ‘a pig and calf closely pursued by 4 or 5 German soldiers, some with knives and others with their bayonets’, and would have demanded a share had they not feared the Brunswickers would kill them. At Merbe Braine they scuffled with more Brunswickers to get some flour and took a large milk pan from a farmhouse. Sergeant William Wheeler wrote home:

  The morning of the 18th. June broke upon us and found us drenched with rain, benumbed and shaking with the cold. We stood to our arms and moved to a fresh spot to get out of the mud. You often blamed me for smoking when I was at home last year but I must tell you if I had not had a good stock of tobacco this night I must have given up the Ghost. Near the place we moved to were some houses, these we soon gutted and what by the help of doors, windows, shutters and furniture, we soon made some good fires.5

  Two miles away from Merbe Braine, on the extreme eastern flank of Wellington’s army, the Orange-Nassau Regiment had their sleep interrupted by an outbreak of shooting, and with it the rumour that ‘the French had managed to break through at our right wing and were upon us in full force.’ The rumour soon proved unfounded but, wrote Sergeant Johann Döring, a tanner from Herborn, south of Dillenburg in Hesse, ‘only someone who has been through all this, on a pitch dark night with constant rain and even a thunderstorm, can have an idea of what that did to our spirits.’ His friend, Sergeant Achenbach, a veteran of the Spanish campaigns and a huge man, found that he had burrowed so deep in the mud that he couldn’t get up, and ‘broke out into a series of the most violent curses’. Later they went raiding for food:

  the farms, mills, etc. located between the lines were plundered, both by our troops and the French, for cattle, pigs, geese, ducks, chicken, potatoes and other edibles. Some of the buildings were burned down. To lose no time, all of this, half boiled or half grilled, was devoured with the greatest haste and appetite; no wonder after several days of fasting … During all this plundering, our soldiers and the enemy’s were the best of friends, and nobody gave a thought to the prospect that in a few hours they would meet in a fight for life and death.6

  A mile to the west, Sergeant Robertson of the Gordon Highlanders was roused at daylight and ordered to stand to arms: ‘I never felt colder in my life; every one of us was shaking like an aspen leaf. An allowance of gin was then served out to each of us, which had the effect of infusing warmth into our almost inanimate frames, as before we got it, we seemed as if under a fit of ague.’ Another half-mile west, on the othe
r side of La Haye Sainte, Carl Jacobi woke up to find that he was lying in a pool of water, puddles having spread over any slight depression. The grey figures around the smoking fires ‘looked like monuments made of rock, numbly staring down, unreceptive to the outside world … no cheerful word was heard from the merriest among the men’. In the dull light they stirred. ‘They rose one by one from their wet bedding’, unrefreshed, with ‘tired, pale faces and the sound of stifled groans’.7

  After standing guard until six, Robertson’s Highlanders were ‘ordered to clean ourselves, dry our muskets, try to get forward, and commence cooking’.8 Some of those who had been wounded at Quatre Bras but had refused to leave the ranks were now persuaded to go to Brussels, and most of the fit officers took the opportunity to scribble on a scrap of paper a last will and testament, or a last letter home, and hand it to one of those who was walking to safety. ‘Kempt’s and Pack’s brigades had got such a mauling on the 16th, that they thought it as well to have all straight. The wounded officers shook hands and departed for Brussels.’9 At one point they were joined by the Duke of Richmond and his son William Pitt-Lennox, who had broken his arm in a horse race. Richmond cheered the officers – since his wife was a Gordon, the Highlanders were a favourite regiment – by telling them the news he had learned from Wellington: the Prussians were on their way.10

  A few rays of fitful sunshine broke through as the wind began to blow away the rainclouds. At dawn Major-General Count Kielmansegge, commanding the Hanoverians half a mile to the Highlanders’ right, had sent Captain Carl Jacobi’s brother to find the ship’s biscuit in the baggage wagons, but he had found the Brussels highway completely blocked by abandoned vehicles and had returned empty-handed. Despairing of breakfast, the officers had begun to supervise the removal of wet cartridges from the men’s muskets when, miraculously, the battalion’s sutler drove up with a wagon full of foodstuffs. This enterprising Jew had stayed with them since 1813 and the officers flocked to him; having gasped at the prices he was charging, they then bought everything he had, suffering some pangs of remorse as there was insufficient food to give any to their men. With the sun now shining more strongly on and off, Jacobi found a patch of dry ground and went to sleep again.11

  Close by, Tom Morris sat with his friend Sergeant Burton, sharing the unwanted gin rations of those of their men who had been killed in the previous evening’s cannonade. Burton told Morris to save some for after the battle and Morris replied that he thought ‘very few of us would live to see the close of that day: when he said, “Tom, I’ll tell you what it is: there is no shot made yet for either you or me.”’12

  The Netherlands chief of staff Jean-Victor Constant and the Prince of Orange, mounted on his horse Waxy, were visiting General Bijlandt’s brigade, which at that time was in front of the Highlanders on the southern slope of the ridge to the east of the Brussels highway. To their right was a sand quarry above the farm of La Haye Sainte. Bijlandt’s battalions were short of ammunition, having used most of what they carried with them at Quatre Bras, and nobody could locate the artillery park with the reserve ammunition. While Constant sent thirty cavalry to clear the road and try to find some ammunition wagons, the Prince of Orange promised the men food and water, and he contrived to find some, remaining with them for breakfast. ‘He sat on the same ground as us to eat, he was hungry just as us,’ recalled a star-struck militiaman.13

  Staff officers began to scurry about on horseback, ensuring troops were in the right position. The old Peninsular veterans meanwhile found innumerable little jobs to fill the time, learned over years, in order to maximise their comfort during the fighting and their chances of survival; above Bijlandt’s Netherlanders, a Scottish ensign reported what he saw looking northward from the ridge at the bulk of the allied army:

  A moving mass of human beings – soldiers cleaning their arms and examining the locks, multitudes carrying wood, water and straw from the village and farm of Mont St Jean; others making large fires to dry their clothes, or roasting little pieces of meat upon the end of a stick or ramrod, thrust upon the embers. A few bundles of straw had been procured, upon which our officers were seated. Though nearly ankle-deep in the mud, they were generally gay, and apparently thinking of everything but the approaching combat …14

  Looking forward, south, from the ridge, the Scottish ensign then observed the allied cavalry vedettes on watch for enemy activity, far away in front, prancing about. ‘Presently we could see, by the trampling of their horses, that they had become uneasy; one, then another, fired his carbine, retreated, loaded, advanced, and fired again.’ The allied lookouts disappeared from view and then he saw enemy skirmishers in extended order, advancing and firing and, finally, enemy columns.15

  About six hundred yards away to the west, Lieutenant Edmund Wheatley was also looking forward from where Alten’s division of the King’s German Legion stood above La Haye Sainte. Detached the previous day to clear the road at Genappe, he had slept in the Forest of Soignes but, determined not to miss the battle, had rejoined his battalion with his thirteen grenadiers. Like many others, he was fascinated by the spectacle of the approaching enemy army:

  on the opposite heights we could perceive large dark moving masses of something impossible to distinguish individually. Where the edge of the ground bound the horizon, shoals of these gloomy bodies glided down, disjointing then contracting, like fields of animated clods sweeping over the plains, like melted lava from a Volcano, boding ruin and destruction to whatever dared impede its course. It had a fairy look and border’d on the supernatural in appearance. While gazing with all my utmost stretch of vision on the scene, little Gerson [the surgeon] struck me on the shoulder saying, ‘That’s a battle, my boy! That’s something like a preparation! You’d better have stopped with Notting [the captain of his grenadiers] at Brussels. I must be off to the Hospital and I hope to see you there.’

  They shook hands and Assistant Surgeon Gerson left for the field hospital which was being established at Mont Saint-Jean. Wheatley, disconcerted by his friend’s black humour,

  walked up and down for some time and felt very uneasy that I had left no letter of remembrance behind me.

  I fancied the occupation of all at home. It was about six o’clock. Just then (a cloudy drizzly morning) my brother, I thought, was unconcernedly packing up orders or reading calmly some new publication. I concluded you, my Dearest Eliza, you, whom I always regretted, I was certain was asleep innocent and placid. The pillow that supported you was unconscious of its lovely burthen.16

  Wheatley had seen hard fighting in the Pyrenees and France, but unlike the surgeon he had never been involved in a really big pitched battle and their conversation had suddenly brought home to him the strong possibility that he might never see home or his beloved Eliza again.

  44

  Tyrans, Tremblez!

  Napoleon’s line, 18 June, 4–10 a.m.

  The previous evening Napoleon had ordered his men to march forward at first light to attack as early as possible. Now, as he learned how scattered his army was, how many were out marauding, and how the minor roads were unusable with mud, reluctantly he postponed his assault. He ordered his generals, however, to make sure that their troops prepared their arms and cooked and then marched to the positions that he had designated in last night’s order, so as to be absolutely ready to fight at nine o’clock.1

  He rested in bed, then got up, shaved, and cut his nails, while thinking about the battle to come and looking frequently out of the window at the weather. Having dressed, he dictated to General Gourgaud, pacing up and down and still concentrating on the weather outside: as the drizzle stopped and the wind got up, his excitement grew.2

  The Emperor was desperately anxious to start the battle, but even his more relaxed timetable was proving difficult to meet. Reille’s men, starting from around Genappe, stood to arms at first light and marched off at five, but were then ordered to stop to cook and prepare their weapons. As a result of this halt they were not to reach the Em
peror’s headquarters at Le Caillou until about nine in the morning, by which time Napoleon – having been told by Reille of his delay and by Drouot that it was taking an age to get the Guard together – had postponed the attack again.

  Moreover, Drouot gave his opinion that it would be some hours before the ground was dry enough for the artillery to manoeuvre. Alongside Napoleon, he was the army’s leading artillery expert and Napoleon respected his judgement. Because their number and quality was the greatest asset of the French army, the performance of the cannon was crucial. And although the French artillery had always been better than that of other nations, in this campaign their numerical strength in guns was more marked than usual.

  D’Erlon’s corps meanwhile had time to kill: they dried, oiled and prepared their weapons and then cooked. Corporal Canler’s company made a stew of the sheep acquired the previous evening with some of the flour he had found near Frasnes, but their cook, lacking salt, added saltpetre instead, which turned out to ruin the flavour. Lieutenant Martin’s men cooked the veal they had obtained the day before, drinking a lot of eau de vie while waiting for orders.3

  The Emperor ate his breakfast with his brother Jérôme, General Reille, Grand Maréchal Bertrand, Major-Général Soult, his principal secretary Hugues-Bernard Maret, duc de Bassano, the trusty General Drouot and Marshal Ney. Ney urged an early attack in order to prevent Wellington from escaping, but Napoleon objected that Wellington now had no choice but to fight. Jérôme warned his brother about the conversation with the waiter at the Roi d’Espagne, and the British expectation of Prussian intervention. The Emperor replied that after the sort of defeat the Prussians had suffered and with a substantial body of troops in pursuit, Blücher could not possibly link up with Wellington within two days.4