by Tim Clayton
It is apparent however that the role of Reille’s corps was to be defensive: his officers understood that they were to seize and hold Hougoumont wood and to prevent any allied breakthrough on the French left. Their task was to contain Wellington’s strong right wing, maintaining their position at all costs, while the rest of the French army pivoted on them to deliver a right hook.6 They were only to advance as far as would allow them to support d’Erlon’s attack on La Haye Sainte and, in the event that d’Erlon was successful in seizing Mont Saint-Jean, to form a diagonal line of echelons linking his left to the wood.
To divert enemy attention while the Grand Battery moved into position on the heights opposite the British right and d’Erlon prepared his attack, the French began to launch probing attacks to assess the strength of the enemy response in various parts of the battlefield. Although it did not take much scouting to discover that the bulk of Wellington’s troops were on his right, most of his troops were out of sight.
The very first action of the day came with a demonstration by French cavalry and infantry skirmishers on the eastern flank. Major Taylor’s lookouts fired off their carbines to issue the alarm and Taylor saw that three squadrons of French cavalry were approaching. His own squadron of hussars mounted and deployed to the west of Ohain; from here they could see French tirailleurs skirmishing with Nassauers from the cover of the hedges and ditches of the valley around the scattered farmsteads, before French horse artillery opened up, killing with one of their first, lucky shots the commander of the 3rd Nassau battalion. The other nine squadrons of Vivian’s hussar brigade rode forward from their bivouac to support Taylor and formed a line on the higher ground above the hamlet of Smohain, after which the skirmish in front of them gradually petered out. Meanwhile, though, they began from their position to hear, further right, the noise of a much more formidable attack.
47
The First Assault on Hougoumont
Hougoumont, 11.30 a.m.–1 p.m.
One of the weaknesses of the new-fangled topographical map was that where several features coincided there was liable to be a confusion of symbols. Hence, Hougoumont was marked on Napoleon’s map with the symbols for a chapel, a farm and a château, all of which were in fact combined in one complex of imposing buildings, hidden from French view by the tall trees of its park. The surveyors even got its name wrong: the sixteenth-century building was correctly the Château du Goumont.1 The country seat of the eighty-six-year-old Chevalier de Louville, the grand house had seen better days; the geometric bosquet to the right of the elm wood had been cut down and reduced to a field of grass, for the chevalier had rented his estate to a farmer, although he still employed a gardener to maintain his cherished topiary parterres. The wood to the west of the former bosquet remained ornamental and, with little undergrowth, was easily crossed. Two carriage drives approached from the south and south-east, converging at the corner of the projecting garden wall; here the visitor might enter through the south gate, or continue round the corner of the farm to the west of the stables, to a junction with a sunken lane running along the north side of the farm and an avenue of poplars linking the house to the Nivelles highway and a lane to Braine l’Alleud.
The southern entrance to the château, set into an imposing gatehouse where the gardener lived, was flanked by the garden wall. The windows above it had been bricked up but loopholes provided opportunities for defenders to shoot down on attackers. In the morning the gardener and his five-year-old daughter were still in their house, where the troops fed the little girl with biscuits, but after the fighting began a sergeant led her off the battlefield. The south gate led into a courtyard at the end of which stood the château itself, a tall brick building with a projecting chapel and a tower at the right, mounted by a spiral staircase. On the west side a narrow door in a short stretch of wall led across the carriage drive to the kitchen garden occupied by Matthew Clay’s light company of the 3rd Guards. This was enclosed by a hedge beyond which were fields of tall crops. Also on the west side of the southern courtyard was a store shed, while the east side was bounded by a tall wall with a gate into the formal garden.
The farmhouse was a small building attached to the east side of the château; in the yard a disused central well was capped by a dovecote. On the west side was the great barn and a smaller shed, and to the east was a long, L-shaped stable. A north gate gave onto the junction of the formal avenue leading towards Braine l’Alleud with the sunken lane that ran along the northern boundary of the orchard, and beyond this path the rising ground was covered with trees. To the east of the buildings was the owner’s pride and joy, an enormous garden of formal vegetable planting and topiary parterres which stretched for two hundred yards. ‘A berceau or covered walk ran round it, shaded with creeping plants, amongst which honey suckles and jessamines were intermingled, en treillage.’2 The garden was walled on the south and east and to the north it was separated from a narrow orchard by a hedge. Beyond the garden to the east a large orchard stretched for a further two hundred yards, bordered to the south by the thick hedge.
The target for the French was the wood to the south of the château. Their orders merely required them to take and hold that. French infantry columns began to march over undulating ground towards Hougoumont with skirmishers covering their front while, from the ridge to the north, allied batteries opened fire on them. At this late stage, Lord Uxbridge handed control of the horse artillery to Sir Augustus Frazer, who immediately sent for Robert Bull’s battery of heavy howitzers from the artillery reserve. For ten minutes two allied batteries fired without reply; the 9-pounder guns were an unpleasant novelty, being more powerful than the 6-pounders previously standard to British artillery, and the very first shot wounded three light infantrymen.3 Soon they were showering the French columns with shrapnel.
The attack on Hougoumont was led by Napoleon’s brother, Prince Jérôme, with the help of the experienced General Armand Guilleminot, while the first assault on the wood was made by voltigeurs from the 1st Light Regiment in Pierre Bauduin’s brigade. After ‘a heavy cannonade with shell and case shot’, Bauduin’s light infantry swarmed into the elms to the south of the buildings and garden while the French artillery switched its aim onto the British guns on the ridge above.4 Among the trees 600 or so French voltigeurs duelled with nearly as many Germans – 130 of Alten’s Jägers, crack-shot foresters armed with rifles, and 200 Hanoverian riflemen, supported by a company of Nassau voltigeurs. For some time the Germans contested the wood with success against the elite French troops: a rifleman shot dead General Bauduin, leaving Colonel Cubières of the 1st Light to command the brigade.
To the west of the château French troops also advanced. Some of Count Piré’s lancers rode westward along a sunken lane towards Braine l’Alleud, creeping round the British right flank, while a half battery of their artillery found a good position to fire north-east up the Nivelles road. Skilfully enfilading the British artillery above Hougoumont, they disrupted the gunners while covering French skirmishers who were moving stealthily through the crops to the west of the wood south of Hougoumont.
On this side of the château’s park, two of the Guards’ specialist light companies were defending the outer hedge of the kitchen garden, and their commander, James Macdonell, had just caught Matthew Clay and his comrades wandering about picking cherries. ‘You scoundrels,’ he roared, ‘if I survive this day I will punish you all!’5 Soon, however, Clay and his mates had more pressing anxieties as French skirmishers advancing through the neighbouring cornfield began to shoot at them, completely hidden by the crops. Kneeling behind the hedge, Clay felt his pack and heels occasionally hit by spent crossfire from the wood. Eventually, pressure from the more numerous French skirmishers became too great and the Guards made a dash for the sunken lane to the north of the farm.
To help relieve the pressure on them General Hill sent the three light companies of Mitchell’s battalions forward through tall corn against the French skirmishers. Coming upon the French sudde
nly in undulating ground and catching them by surprise, they fired, cheered, charged and pursued the tirailleurs southward past Hougoumont, while Macdonell’s light troops made a counter-attack, chasing their opponents beyond the southern end of the vegetable patch, where Clay took cover behind a circular haystack. To drive back the allied skirmishers French lancers moved in and the light troops were ordered to make a rapid retreat to avoid capture. They were protected by British hussars, while Hill sent four more companies of the 51st, including Sergeant Wheeler’s, to help extricate them.6 Artillery peppering them with canister, they took shelter in the sunken lane linking Braine l’Alleud with Hougoumont.
Behind the French skirmish line Amadée-Louis Cubières led forward more powerful columns of elite French light troops. The colonel was the illegitimate son of the Marquis Louis-Philippe de Cubières, author of the Histoire des coquillages de mer. As an infant he had played Cupid at a party given by his parents for Marie Antoinette at the Hermitage at Versailles, and at the age of six he had been imprisoned when the people stormed the palace. He was brought up by the state as an enfant de liberté. Joining the army as a private in 1803, he had fought in all the Grande Armée’s great battles, winning the cross of the Légion d’honneur at Eylau in 1807, a bloody battle in the snow where he was bayoneted in the stomach. In 1813, the year he married the novelist Aglaé Buffaut, he was promoted to colonel, and in April 1815, he alone among Napoleon’s colonels had the nerve to vote against the Emperor’s new constitution because although it was more liberal, most republicans did not think it liberal enough.
As Cubières rode forward, his head was bandaged from sabre cuts received at Quatre Bras and his arm was in a sling because he had already been shot in the shoulder. He led his columns round the wood to the west, outflanking the Germans who were fighting among the tress and threatening to cut off their retreat. This finally unnerved the Hanoverian riflemen who made a sharp exit after a tough firefight lasting an hour, during which the French voltigeurs had been reinforced by more and more companies from the 1st Light. The riflemen sped northward past the buildings, some to the west into the kitchen garden and some through the gate into the orchard, where they were covered by the Nassau company at the hedge.
The French pursuit was brought to an abrupt halt by fierce fire from unseen assailants: the smoke was so thick that some said they mistook the red brick garden wall for a line of red-coated British infantry.7 The ordinary French soldiers had not known that there were buildings hidden by the trees, but Captain Büsgen’s Nassau grenadiers were shooting from the south gatehouse, two more companies of Nassauers were at the loopholes in the garden wall and one was lining the hedge of the orchard, where Matthew Clay and his company had earlier made holes to fire through.8 Many of the 800 Nassauers were, like their leader, veterans of five years in the French army in Spain and Büsgen himself had been wounded in victories over the Spanish at Medellin and Ocaña. Being light troops, they were better trained for the task of defending buildings than the British Guards on the ridge behind them.
Private Johann Peter Leonhard, at a loophole in the garden wall, whooped with delight at the way the shower of lead toppled startled Frenchmen; those opposite him made a swift retreat. Further east, though, the defensive line failed: under pressure from larger numbers of pursuers, Leonhard’s comrades abandoned the orchard hedge and fled back across the orchard.
Up above, from his station in front of the Guards on the ridge, Wellington watched their flight with disgust. ‘Do you see those fellows run?’ he remarked to the foreign attachés close to him. ‘Well, it is with these that I must win the battle.’9 Robert Bull’s howitzer battery and a Netherlands horse battery arrived at the British front line above the château at this moment, taking the gun line there to twenty-six pieces. Frazer placed Bull’s howitzers to command Hougoumont wood, assuring Wellington that he had perfect confidence in their accuracy, before explaining carefully to the bearded Bull and his officers that part of the park below them was held by the enemy and part by the allies. Frazer then rode further right and placed a horse battery so as to be able to fire down the Nivelles chaussée towards Piré’s artillery, before summoning Norman Ramsay and Cavalié Mercer’s troops to cover the right of Mitchell’s brigade, where Piré’s lancers threatened an outflanking movement.10 Napoleon had thus succeeded in drawing five reserve batteries – thirty-two guns – to the Hougoumont area to meet his diversionary attack. This was going just as he had hoped.
Napoleon had ordered General Kellermann’s horse artillery to reinforce Reille’s, so that the French had forty-two guns firing on the British troops behind the ridge above Hougoumont. Here seventeen-year-old Ensign Thomas Wedgwood of the 3rd Guards, grandson of the potter and cousin of Charles Darwin, was fretting about whether or not he would prove to be brave. At Quatre Bras he had been ‘rather nervous at first’, but on that occasion his battalion had remained in reserve. Now, as he lowered his expensive uniform into five inches of wet mud, he felt better prepared, trusting that God would spare him. Nevertheless, the experience was trying. He hadn’t eaten for two days, his boots were stuck to his swollen feet and later on he found that his face had contracted on one side so that his mouth went left when he smiled and he could no longer shut one eye without the other; having no mirror, he hadn’t yet noticed this partial paralysis brought on by exposure. Like many others, he was finding waiting while under fire particularly stressful: ‘The most disagreeable part was when we were on the top of our position, lying down doing nothing, with the shells and shot coming over like hailstones, and every now and then seeing 1 or 2 men killed.’11 Only two officers were hit, however, and he was not one of them.
Further back and to the west a lively debate was taking place among the 14th Buckinghamshire Regiment, nicknamed ‘the Bucks’ at home but known to Flanders veterans as ‘the peasants’. Here Mrs Ross, the Quartermaster’s wife, was refusing to leave the field. Unlike most of the ‘peasants’, who had until recently been rustic militia, she was an old hand on a battlefield and had been wounded at Buenos Aires when her husband had been a sergeant with the 95th Rifles. Now she was insisting that
‘accidents might arise … that would render her services useful.’ At last it was suggested to her that what was right and proper in a sergeant’s wife, was not so becoming in an officer’s lady. Upon this hint she withdrew and passed the rest of the Sunday in a neighbouring church, not in the aisle in attendance upon divine service, but in the belfry, where she enjoyed a better view of the battle than could have been obtained by the commander of either army.12
A few hundred yards away another seventeen-year-old ‘felt a very curious sensation before I went into the heat of the battle and all I could do would not hinder me from bobbing though the balls flew 100 yards over my head but that was only for a little while as I soon got accustomed to them,’ as he wrote to his father two days later. ‘Bobbing’ was ducking down as cannonballs passed; strictly banned for those who had to set an example, it was instinctive when ricocheting, moaning cannonballs produced the optical illusion that they were heading straight for your face.13
Below these battalions, at Hougoumont, fierce fighting continued. In the hollow way (or sunken lane) north of the orchard, the Hanoverians and Nassauers fleeing to the east of the walled garden rallied on Lord Saltoun’s light companies of the 1st Guards, who had been ordered down the slope as reinforcements. Their combined forces drove the French pursuers out of the orchard and into the wood, until French reinforcements made another attack, forcing Saltoun’s light troops to fall back from tree to tree through the orchard to the sunken lane. The French dragged a howitzer up to the hedge, but four more companies of Coldstream Guards arrived to reinforce Saltoun and together they all again drove the French back to the southern hedge, where Saltoun tried but failed to capture the French gun.
While the fighting in the orchard to the east of the château and its garden see-sawed, to the west Colonel Cubières drove back the light companies of Mitchell’s
brigade who had been defending the 200 yards of the Hougoumont avenue and the sunken track leading westward to Braine l’Alleud. Wheeler and the Yorkshire light infantry fell back to their start line, while Macdonell’s Guardsmen fled into the farmyard through the north door. Hidden behind his haystack and concentrating on the enemy, Clay did not see them go and he and a comrade were left behind, cut off outside. He thought he might get a better sight of the French from the bank close to the farm wall, but discovered first that this had merely made him more conspicuous and second that firing in the damp did not always work. On average a gun misfired one time in nine, but in wet weather this rose to one in five or six, and damp powder was not the only problem; Clay knew that ‘from the effects of the wet, the springs of the locks became wood bound and would not act correctly, and when in action the clumsy flints became useless.’ It was at this moment, with French bullets rattling against the wall behind him, that Clay’s musket failed him; fortunately, he knew too that ‘The quickest way of amending these failures which were very disheartening was to make an exchange from those that were lying about amongst the slain.’ He made a dash southwards to a clover stack and found a better musket, still warm from use, lying on the ground.14
Three hundred yards north-west, French marksmen crept close enough to pick off the gunners of the British battery shooting down the Nivelles road and force it to retire.15 Wellington responded by ordering the Brunswick battalions and a brigade of Hanoverians to advance to the high ground over the Nivelles highway, sending Brunswick light troops further forward to reinforce Mitchell’s skirmishers.