Waterloo

by Tim Clayton

  Around Alten’s battalions the plateau broadened out, so that they were not able so easily to hide behind the crest; nor, unless they advanced close to La Haye Sainte, did they have the same height advantage over any assailants that the Guards enjoyed. Anticipating trouble from cavalry, Shaw instructed them to form oblongs with a frontage of four companies front and back and just one at each side, this being quicker to evolve than a square.8 In front of them were Andreas Cleeves’s and Major William Lloyd’s batteries of guns, Lloyd’s being hidden in rye over head-high.9 On his early morning inspection Sir Augustus Frazer, commander of the horse artillery, found that the Prince of Orange had moved Lloyd’s battery away to the crossroads. He had it restored to its original position and deployed Sir Hew Ross’s battery of 9-pounders from the artillery reserve where the Prince wanted guns, with two on the chaussée and four in front of the sunken lane on the ridge above.

  Behind these troops was the Household Brigade of heavy cavalry, theoretically 1226 sabres, although their officers reckoned subsequently that there were far fewer of them in the field; to their right were the excellent 3rd German Hussars, 622 strong on paper. The latter were commanded by fifty-nine-year-old Frederick von Arentsschildt, ‘the Duke of Wellington’s favourite old hussar’, who had taken part in all the Duke’s principal victories and was the author of the manual on light cavalry outpost duty.10 Further back were the three brigades of Netherlands cavalry, a total of 3500 horsemen; to their east, across the chaussée, was Mont Saint-Jean farm, about five hundred yards north of the crossroads of the Charleroi chaussée with the Ohain lane.

  About two hundred yards south of this crossroads was a second outpost at the farm of La Haye Sainte, occupied by the 2nd Light infantry of the King’s German Legion. They had camped there the previous evening, but their commander Georg Bäring had been ordered to send his pioneer detachment to fortify Hougoumont and naturally assumed that he was not supposed to defend the farm they marched away from. Every battalion stationed nearby raided La Haye Sainte for straw, firewood and food and the big, west-facing barn door on the south side of the farm was broken up and burned, leaving a huge gap. Assistant Quartermaster James Shaw complained that ‘nothing whatever was done during the night towards its defence; in place of which, the works of scaffolding, loopholing, building up gates and doors, partial unroofing, throwing out the hay and securing a supply of ammunition, should have been in progress all the night’, but in the morning his proposals for strengthening the farm and placing a British battalion there were turned down by headquarters staff.11

  In fact, the German battalion stationed there was one of the best in the army, but unfortunately there were fewer than 400 men in it, whereas Shaw argued that the garrison should have been 1000 strong. Partners in crime of the 95th Rifles, Bäring’s green-coated riflemen had undertaken the majority of the least appealing tasks doled out during the Peninsular campaign and, as aide to Alten, their commander had been with them from the start. When a job cropped up from which the chances of survival were virtually nil, it was usually assigned to the light infantry of the Legion, so to be told to defend La Haye Sainte to the last man came as no surprise. ‘As the day broke on 18 June, we sought out every possible means of putting the place in a state of defence, but the burned gate of the barn presented the greatest difficulty. Unfortunately, the mule that carried the entrenching tools had been lost during the day.’ Friedrich Lindau helped build a barricade across the road at the top of the orchard out of carts and farm implements. With great difficulty they knocked three gaping holes that passed for loopholes out of the wall so that they could fire onto the road, but no reserve supply of rifle ammunition was placed in the building.

  Whose fault was the poor state of defence of La Haye Sainte? James Shaw, who might have been to blame, was vociferous in his attack on Wellington’s staff, and it does seem to have been the case that they were myopically concerned with Hougoumont to the exclusion of other priorities. Shaw absolved his friend Bäring, but it should have been apparent to Bäring long before the battle started that he had insufficient ammunition, and it ought to have been possible to find supplies from somewhere, even though there were acute logistical problems on the morning of the battle and there are signs that the Hanoverian reserve ammunition, like that of the Netherlanders, had disappeared.

  If La Haye Sainte itself was inadequately prepared and garrisoned, it was very well supported from behind. Both the rifle-armed first battalion of the 95th, the best skirmishers in the British army, and the excellent riflemen of the 1st German light, were positioned close behind the farm to pick off assailants. Hew Ross’s battery was also one of the best in the army, though its position on and next to the cobbled road was too conspicuous.

  To the east of the Charleroi road, Wellington and Delancey placed the troops that had suffered most at Quatre Bras. Picton’s 5th Division had been the best infantry in Wellington’s army but it was reduced to half strength. Lining the hedge behind the sunken road to Ohain were two companies of the 95th Rifles, with three companies stationed 120 yards further forward in good cover behind a small knoll and in the sand quarry situated beneath it.12 To the east of the 95th were Major Thomas Rogers’s battery and Adriaan Bijleveld’s six-gun horse artillery battery. Beyond them were the battalions of Bijlandt’s Netherlands brigade who had also suffered heavy losses at Quatre Bras, with their voltigeurs and tirailleurs out ahead skirmishing. Bijlandt’s strength was probably about 2400 men.

  Behind the guns and the Belgians, in a full second line, were the veteran British battalions of Sir James Kempt’s brigade (reduced to fewer than 2000). The 32nd Cornish were nearest the road, with the 79th Camerons to their left and the 28th Gloucesters to the left of the Camerons. An officer estimated that the 32nd only had about three hundred men in the field, and if this was so it reinforces the suggestion that the paper strengths of many battalions were much higher than numbers on the ground, a point on which officers present are unanimous.13 The Union Brigade of heavy cavalry, which had never yet fought a battle, stood behind Kempt’s men. Its commander Sir William Ponsonby, whose late father had kept ‘the best hunting establishment in Ireland’, was the nephew of the leader of the Whig opposition in Parliament, a man who greatly admired Napoleon. Sir William had more experience of fighting than his men and with his cousin Frederick had distinguished himself in a Peninsular cavalry action at Llerena in 1812.

  At this point the Brussels road was cut deep into the hillside, so that the right flank of the 32nd was secured by a steep embankment. Sir Denis Pack’s severely depleted brigade was to their left and even weaker, with only about 1700 survivors of Quatre Bras. The Royal Scots, the 42nd Black Watch, the 44th Essex and the 92nd Gordon Highlanders had only twelve officers to command about 330 men. Not only was Picton, the division’s redoubtable commander, still concealing his musket wound, but three out of four of Pack’s regiments were commanded by majors, two colonels having been killed.

  Although the field in front of the hedge lined by Bijlandt’s brigade was fallow, that on which this division stood had been recently ploughed, as had one to the west of La Haye Sainte, below the German infantry. After the troops had marched across it, the ploughed land took on ‘the consistency of mortar’ as Sergeant Robertson of the Gordons put it. Many of the men had slept submerged in mud, and now they stood in mud up to their knees.

  Major Carl von Rettberg’s battery stood just east of Bijlandt’s men in an excellent position above the sunken lane to Ohain, protected by a high bank and partly concealed by a hedge, in which they cut gaps. From this point Rettberg could send enfilading fire across the slope below the British line to the west. However, he had used more than half his ammunition at Quatre Bras and had been unable to get more. Behind his guns and stretching east were Charles Best’s Hanoverian Landwehr, who had emerged with credit from Quatre Bras, and Ernst von Vinke’s 2366 untried Hanoverian militiamen, with Prince Bernhard’s brigade largely in front of them. The 2nd Orange-Nassau battalion still ha
d precious little ammunition for their French muskets and remained in reserve. Bernhard’s light troops were disposed to skirmish from the farms of Papelotte and La Haye, in a marshy valley nearly a mile east of La Haye Sainte, and from the village of Smohain and the château of Fichermont further east on the south side of the stream. With them was a half-battery of three guns. Sir John Ormsby Vandeleur’s brigade, with 1012 sabres, provided support.

  Five troops of horse artillery were attached to the cavalry under Uxbridge’s command, in central reserve, and there was a reserve of artillery, consisting of three batteries.

  As far as possible, the British infantry was on the reverse slope of the ridge out of sight of the enemy and, once firing started, lying down. Few of them were exposed to view. Only the front-line artillery was clearly visible on the front face of the ridge and even then, some guns were partly concealed and protected by the banks of the Ohain lane or hidden in rye. The skirmishers were also exposed, and visible if they had not been able to conceal themselves in the tall crops, but in extended order they were not worth a cannonball.

  Sir Hussey Vivian’s brigade of 1240 hussars, still accompanied by Gardiner’s 6-pounder battery, covered the left flank. The ground to the east of the position was open and without natural protection, but Wellington assumed his eastern flank would be covered by the Prussians and that they would soon join him and greatly reinforce the weaker eastern part of his line. An artillery officer with Gardiner’s troop watched Vivian being given his orders:

  Sir William de Lancey pointed to a direction to our left by which the Prussians would come, and, that Sir Hussey Vivian was on no account to move his Brigade from the position assigned to it until he had put himself in communication with the Prussians, and they, the Prussians, had joined or reached his left. Sir William de Lancey showed a dark spot on a hill by a plantation, and said if they were troops, it was certainly a Prussian picquet. I made the remark that they certainly were troops.14

  Edmund Wheatley, whose watch was evidently slow, recalled: ‘A Ball whizzed in the air. Up we started simultaneously. I looked at my watch. It was just eleven o’clock, Sunday (Eliza just in Church at Wallingford or at Abingdon) morning. In five minutes a stunning noise took place and a shocking havock commenced.’15 They were the first moments of action. The battle of Waterloo had begun.

  PART III

  The Battle of Waterloo

  46

  The French Plan

  Rossomme, 18 June, 11 a.m.

  ‘A battle is a dramatic action that has its commencement, its middle and its end. The order of battle taken by the two armies, and the first movements to come to action, constitute the prelude. The contre movements of the attacked army forms the plot. This causes new dispositions, brings on the crisis, from whence springs the result.’ So begins Napoleon’s description of the battle of Waterloo.

  For a battle that has been discussed so thoroughly, a remarkable amount remains unknown or contentious about how this dramatic action unfolded. The first uncertainty concerns the French plan, of which two sources, both claiming to derive from statements by Napoleon, gave two very different versions.

  According to Napoleon’s chief orderly officer Gaspard Gourgaud, writing on his return from Saint Helena in 1817, the deployment of the French army indicated that Napoleon’s plan was to break straight through the allied centre, driving it back along the chaussée to the forest and cutting off the retreat of the left and right wings. On the other hand, the memoir ‘dictated’ to Napoleon’s other companions on Saint Helena stated that Napoleon’s intention was to break through on his right, while refusing his left. Two of d’Erlon’s divisions, supported by two of Lobau’s, were to attack La Haye Sainte; two more of d’Erlon’s divisions, supported by the cavalry of both corps, were to attack further east and break through the line there so that ‘the whole left of the enemy would be turned’. Meanwhile Wellington’s strong right wing, pinned down by Reille, would be cut off from Brussels. Napoleon chose to turn the left in order to separate Wellington from the Prussians at Wavre, because Wellington’s left wing appeared to be much weaker, and because if Grouchy appeared, it would be on the eastern flank and the Emperor did not want to be cut off from him.1

  Napoleon’s accounts of his own actions are notoriously unreliable: the question of whether what he gave posterity was what he did or what he ought to have done has to be taken into account. But on this occasion there is no particular reason to disbelieve his account and credit Gourgaud’s. As Gourgaud argued, the deployment betrayed the intention, but it was not the stacking up of reserves along the chaussée that reveals Napoleon’s thought but rather the placing of all the reserve artillery from the three front-line corps in a line that had its left resting on the cobbled road beyond La Belle Alliance, thus supporting Napoleon’s right wing more than his centre. The deployment of the Grand Battery above and to the east of La Haye Sainte against Colonel Ompteda’s brigade and Sir Thomas Picton’s division proves that it was Napoleon’s design to exert maximum force against that part of Wellington’s line, since powerful artillery support was the keynote of the attack. Napoleon instructed General Dessales, who commanded d’Erlon’s artillery, to construct a gun line from the twenty-four 12-pounders of the combined corps reserves and all thirty-two guns belonging to the four divisions of I Corps’ infantry, and not to open fire until all could do so simultaneously in order to shock and intimidate the enemy.2 Napoleon later claimed that this battery consisted of eighty guns and, although Dessales pointed out that he commanded only fifty-four, it is possible that Napoleon had deployed additional Guard artillery under separate command from the outset as some authorities have argued.3

  It was a time-consuming business dragging the heavy guns through the thick mud and into position, and lining up behind them the ammunition caissons and supply wagons, so the attack had to wait until the artillery was in place; in the meantime the Guard and other troops were still marching up from the rear.

  Execution of the attack was delegated to Marshal Ney, who now had more staff. Pierre Heymès had been joined on the evening of 16 June by a second aide and on 17 June at Quatre Bras by a third, Octave Levavasseur, who brought with him the marshal’s own horses and military equipment. Soult then gave Ney at least one officer from his own staff: Colonel Jean-Louis Crabbé, an experienced Belgian cavalryman, who had been Ney’s aide in the early years of the Grande Armée. Thus, by the morning of Waterloo Ney had a small but experienced team to help him direct his troops.4 However, Napoleon retained a huge reserve under his own control in order to exploit the opportunities revealed by Wellington’s reaction.

  As a formality, at eleven o’clock Napoleon gave Ney a written order, stating simply that the objective of his first attack was the village of Mont Saint-Jean where the cobbled roads met and that the attack was to be supported by the massed heavy artillery of the three corps, firing over the ridge at the troops hidden from view on the far side:

  Once the army is deployed for battle, at about 1 o’clock, at the moment when the Emperor gives the order to Marshal Ney, the attack will commence with the objective of seizing Mont Saint Jean, where the roads meet. To this effect, the 12-pounder batteries of II Corps and VI Corps will be joined to that of I Corps. These 24 guns will fire on the troops at Mont Saint Jean, and Count d’Erlon will begin the attack by leading forward his left division and supporting it, as circumstances dictate, with the divisions of I Corps.

  II Corps will advance sufficiently to maintain alignment with Count d’Erlon. The sappers attached to I Corps will be ready to barricade themselves within Mont Saint Jean instantly.

  To the copy of this order that he wrote for d’Erlon, Ney added a cryptic note: ‘Count d’Erlon will understand that it is from the left that the attack will begin, rather than the right. Communicate this new arrangement to Lieutenant General Reille.’5

  It might be thought that study of such orders would permit us better to understand Napoleon’s intentions for the course of the battle. Howe
ver, the order itself is extremely vague, while from Ney’s postscript it is clear that Napoleon had already explained his intentions in detail to Ney, d’Erlon and Reille, presumably by word of mouth. In one respect the plan had changed, but just how it had changed is unclear: ‘it is from the left that the attack will begin’ has little meaning unless you already know what aspect of ‘the attack’ it refers to. It might mean that a diversionary attack on the far right had been abandoned in favour of one on Hougoumont on the left. Or it might mean that d’Erlon’s left-hand division was to attack first rather than his right-hand division. Reille would need to know this so that his right-hand division was ready to advance sooner than originally expected in order to support it. Both of these changes would have the potential effect of sucking enemy reserves westward, in preparation for the delivery of a decisive blow from Napoleon’s right.

  Understanding of the order is further complicated by the consideration that d’Erlon’s ‘left’ division might mean not geographical left, but his junior division, the fourth: that is, Durutte’s. The French, like the British, often marched ‘left in front’ with the junior element leading the way. Given all these conflicting possibilities, it is pointless to use Ney’s order and its postscript to speculate about the detail of the attack, because without knowledge of the verbal instructions that had been delivered previously the order is ambiguous.