Waterloo
Page 41
Most of the British troops remained hidden on the reverse of the ridge, lying down in the mud in line, having piled their arms to try to stop them getting wetter. Behind the infantry, the cavalry were also lying down, holding their horses. They placed lookouts on the top of the ridge to see what was going on, but little could be made out. The weather had closed in again, dull and wet, and smoke lingered over any area where firing took place. Occasionally when the wind freshened people got a view, but most of the time it was murky, so that targets were difficult to make out at any distance.
The art of firing cannonballs was to get them to bounce on a low trajectory, like skimming stones on the sea, for this offered the maximum chance of killing people through their full flight. In this battle the soft ground deadened the impact of gunnery, but the ground was not so soft that cannonballs simply stopped on first impact with a huge squelch. Shots continued to bounce through the mud and most shells still exploded on wet ground, even if they had not already exploded in the air, as they were supposed to; as a result, for both sides artillery remained easily the most efficient and prolific killer.
Fifty-six guns firing at average speed threw 1400 balls and shells an hour at Wellington’s line (and this was a minimum since Napoleon may have deployed more guns). When the gunners increased speed to maximum just before an attack or in order to strike fear into the opposition, they might for a short space of time throw the same number of rounds each minute.10
Because the ridge broadened out where they stood, so they could not hide behind it as effectively as other brigades, Kielmansegge’s Hanoverians and the Nassauers near them were exposed to the direct fire of the Grand Battery. Captain Carl Jacobi of Kielmansegge’s Lüneberg battalion was among those who felt the shock and awe that Napoleon had intended the bombardment to inspire, although it did not make his heart quail:
A marvellous sublime feeling gripped all of us; we had courageously fought many a battle, but never before had we been part of as great a body of troops as this one; never before had we taken part in a battle which was to decide the fate of countries near and far. As the cannonade became ever more violent, as we beheld the enemies attack columns descending into the plain, as the foremost French battalions began to deploy … all the misery of the night and morning were forgotten.
Lieutenant Edmund Wheatley of the 5th German Legion ‘could almost feel the undulation of the air from the multitude of cannon shot. The first man who fell was five files on my left. With the utmost distortion of feature he lay on his side and shrivelling up every muscle of the body he twirled his elbow round and round in acute agony, then dropped lifeless, dying as it’s called a death of glory, heaving his last breath on the field of fame. Dieu m’en garde!’
Although Alten’s men suffered some casualties, most of the shot whistled over their heads and ricocheted into the spaces occupied by reserves, such as the Nassauers who reported some eighty casualties from this phase. Behind them, Major General von Arentsschild’s hussars lost several men and twenty horses, despite shifting position to avoid the line of fire, and the colonel of the 3rd Hussars had one of his legs smashed by a cannonball, dying later in Brussels. The Life Guards, lying down behind the brow of the hill, were surprised that the Cumberland Hussars behind them had not followed their example; instead, their colonel rode forward to Ompteda to ask permission to withdraw to avoid the artillery fire. Many of the wounded, walking northward down the slope, were hit when they had passed the cavalry, because that was where many balls were landing. Private Thomas Hasker of the King’s Dragoon Guards had been a stocking weaver or framework knitter before he joined up, though by his own admission he was ‘a scoundrel from my youth up: and though I tried my hand at many things, I stayed at nothing long’. Nevertheless he had a strong religious streak and reflected, ironically, as ‘the balls came whistling over the hills, occasionally striking one or other of our men or horses’, that this was Sunday morning and at home ‘many thousands of my countrymen are at this moment assembling to worship God!’ As the onslaught continued, Lord Uxbridge rode forward to the brow of the hill so that he could see as much as possible of what was going on.11
At about the time the Grand Battery opened up, the Emperor gave the signal for the first serious assault on Mont Saint-Jean to start. D’Erlon’s 20,000 infantry marched from a position some 3000 paces from the allied ridge. It is usually said that they all picked a way through the French gun line, but this would have involved separating into narrow files to pass the successive waves of vehicles and ammunition tenders, causing the guns to cease fire for a long time as the infantry passed them and inflicting considerable disorder on the infantry. Carl von Rettberg, who commanded the allied artillery battery that was best placed to view the movement, afterwards made a sketch map indicating that most French infantry marched not through the guns, but round their eastern flank, concealed from sight for most of their approach march by the high ground on which the guns stood. The map published in 1815 with An Account of the Battle of Waterloo … by a British Officer on the Staff also showed French infantry moving round rather than over the ridges on which the guns stood. One of the Générals-de-brigade wrote that ‘at midday, Count d’Erlon’s corps, from the extreme right moved against the enemy left, towards La Haye Sainte.’ Likewise, Müffling, the Prussian liaison officer, implied a starting position well to the east: ‘about two o’clock there suddenly appeared four large masses of infantry, which having formed behind the heights of La Belle-Alliance towards Papelotte, advanced upon the position, marching en echellon from the left, its left being directed upon La Haye Sainte.’ An artillery officer on the extreme left of the British line remarked on how the French marched past their flank without paying the slightest attention to the British cavalry in their rear.12 Joachim Quiot, who had lost his arm during Napoleon’s victory at Rivoli in 1797, was a much-decorated soldier with a remarkable fighting record; it is likely that his division marched to the west of the Grand Battery, with one brigade crossing the chaussée to head west of La Haye Sainte and the other turning east into the valley.13
Corporal Louis Canler, of General Charles-François Bourgeois’ brigade, recalled that while they were at the bottom of the valley they were sheltered from the fire of the allied batteries: the shot and shells of both sides whistled over their heads. Having deployed, they stayed in their place for half an hour before advancing.14 There would have been no reason for such a pause had they made a continuous advance through the artillery, but they might have had to wait for the other divisions, which had further to march. The skirmishers of the Cameron light company withdrew from the valley at the sight of an enemy column coming into sight ahead of them and another seen ‘advancing along the valley to our left’.15 To advance to deploy in this way had the advantage that the French guns could continue firing until the infantry left the valley for their final climb up towards the allied guns.
On the right General Durutte had sent a line of skirmishers to mask the farms of Papelotte and La Haye, and for a while French voltigeurs contested possession of Papelotte, but there cannot have been very many of them since a single Nassau company sufficed to drive them back. Durutte detached the small 85th Regiment to guard twelve guns on the left of his division, before halting his other three regiments opposite Papelotte and La Haye, while Marcognet and Donzelot’s divisions turned left to continue their march westward along the valley bottom.16 When they reached their assault positions they deployed.
There is considerable disagreement about the formation adopted by the French infantry. The normal French attack formation was a battalion column on a two-company frontage, a width of about forty-eight men and a depth of nine, with the voltigeur company skirmishing ahead. The battalion would approach the enemy in this compact column, one that was easy to manoeuvre past obstacles, then expand its frontage to form a line three deep, before closing with the enemy. However, the British habit of standing in line two deep, reserving their fire until the French were in the process of deploying, de
livering one devastating volley from close range and then charging, had defeated this formation many times.
Jean-Baptiste Drouet d’Erlon was one of many French generals at Waterloo who had substantial experience of the difficulty of beating British infantry in the Peninsula. He recognised that the wild fervour of his men to get at the enemy was difficult to restrain and the prospect of deploying them at the last moment in an orderly manner was not good. Consequently, it is said, he adopted a crude formation that had been used successfully by the revolutionary armies in the early days of their success in the 1790s. This was a battalion frontage with battalions packed closely one behind the other, instead of 150 paces behind each other. In this formation, the masses would have formed so that each battalion had a front line of about 140 men and a depth of three, meaning that they were already in line. Baron Bourgeois’ brigade, on the left, comprised four battalions, giving it a depth of twelve men with only a few yards separating the battalions. D’Erlon hoped to use the impact and enthusiasm of this mass, invigorated with renewed revolutionary fervour, to punch through the thin British lines.
But there were disadvantages to forming in this way: lines were more easily disordered than columns by rough terrain and there was insufficient space between battalions to change formation or direction with any ease, although a crude square could be improvised easily enough in emergency by turning the platoons at the end of each line to face outwards. The closed column might do this if attacked in the flank by cavalry, but the last thing that d’Erlon had any reason to expect was an attack by British cavalry. In Spain British cavalry had rarely been seen on the battlefield.
The story of this unwieldy formation adopted by complete divisions emerged from Hippolyte de Mauduit’s Bonapartist circle in the 1840s. The official government newspaper, the Moniteur, referred to brigades rather than divisions in its account of d’Erlon’s attack and none of the senior commanders, Napolon included, commented on d’Erlon’s formation in their reports. Lieutenant Martin, in Marcognet’s division, wrote in August 1815 that when the troops formed up in the valley they deployed ‘by brigade en masse’ and ‘in column by battalions and en masse’. Nicolas Schmitz, commanding one of Donzelot’s brigades, wrote in June 1815 that his division formed ‘in columns by battalion in echelon behind the 3rd [Marcognet’s] Division’. These early accounts indicate that a massed formation was adopted, but Martin, like the Moniteur, spoke of brigades rather than whole divisions.17
After d’Erlon’s troops had made their approach march, Jacques Subervie’s eleven squadrons of lancers and chasseurs and the two divisions of infantry commanded by Count Lobau marched to their right into the valley previously occupied by d’Erlon’s men, in preparation to come to their support or to exploit their success, while the Guard moved forward from Rossomme to fill the space on the left of the main road that Lobau had vacated. As they marched forward in closed columns of divisions, a cantinière who had followed her lover from Elba was walking behind him at the rear of the column when she was hit by a cannonball, her blood splashing all over his pack and bearskin. They buried her by the side of the road, marked her grave with a cross made from two branches cut from a hedge, and pinned an epitaph to it: ‘Here lies Maria, cantinière to the 1st Regiment of foot grenadiers of the Old Imperial Guard, killed on the field of honour, 18 June 1815, at two o’clock.’18 She was their first casualty of the battle.
50
D’Erlon’s Assault
Wellington’s left wing, 18 June, 1.30–2 p.m.
After the skirmishing, the diversionary attacks and the bombardment, the real assault was about to be launched. To experienced men on Wellington’s side of the valley this may have been obvious from the way that the French gunners accelerated their rate of fire to two or three rounds a minute, the whirring balls and explosions no longer occasional but constant. But, even so, it was difficult to know where the main attack would come. The wall of smoke rising from the French Grand Battery to the left of the position of Wellington’s staff on the ridge near the Guards was matched by smoke from an almost equally large number of French guns to their right.
Before d’Erlon made his attack, Marshal Ney ordered a second diversionary assault on Hougoumont to distract attention. Jérôme’s elite line regiments from Reille’s II Corps, still about 3000 strong after hard fighting at Quatre Bras, attacked the buildings, garden and orchard, where Major Jean-Louis Baux led two charges by the 1st Line. After a fierce fight in which many officers were picked off by the accurate fire of the German riflemen – to whom he later paid tribute in his report – they were repelled, and so, sending the remnant of the first two battalions round the flanks, he led in the third battalion. This time he himself was hit, his arm broken by a ball.1
From the upper floor of the château Captain Büsgen of the Nassauers saw the French coming on in a great rush. They tried to climb the garden walls and they set fire to the haystack and strawstack in the kitchen garden, hoping it would spread to the buildings. One French battalion commander later wrote that as he understood his orders, there was no need to attack the château, but the men kept hurling themselves at the walls and then running away, and he had to keep bringing them back into the wood, knowing that it was essential for him to hold the wood because it was the point on which the army would pivot. Once, he was leaning against a bank at the edge of the wood when he heard something moving behind him, and turned to see a shell rolling down the slope to his right. He threw himself to the ground and it exploded without hurting him.2
The French 2nd Line launched its own attack on the orchard, within which Lord Saltoun’s Guards, Nassauers and Hanoverians were also coming under fire from light troops in the wood and large numbers of tirailleurs lying down in the high corn in the field to their left. French assault columns drove Saltoun’s men back through the fruit trees, but they rallied on two companies of Germans in the sunken lane to the north. Reinforced by Scots Guards, the Germans counter-attacked and the battle in the orchard swayed to and fro several times. To meet the next French attack, the remaining companies of the Scots Guards marched down into the orchard. The Coldstreams defended the enormous walled garden, reinforcing the Nassauers at the loopholes in the southern wall but also manning the eastern wall facing the orchard. Apart from the two companies guarding the Coldstreams’ colours, Byng’s whole brigade was now in Hougoumont, taking the garrison within the enclosure, including casualties, to about 3000.3
Guards light infantryman Matthew Clay had been ‘posted in an upper room of the chateau’ overlooking all the other buildings and from his window he was well placed to ‘annoy’ the enemy skirmishers.4 Meanwhile Jérôme’s men renewed their attack to the west of the farm, advancing in a strong skirmish line through the tall crops against the Brunswick and Yorkshire light infantry lining the avenue and the sunken lane to Braine l’Alleud. With Piré’s French lancers threatening to turn the flank of these light infantry, Lord Uxbridge had ordered General Grant’s cavalry to the extreme right to oppose them; Dörnberg’s horsemen rode west to replace Grant’s as support to the Guards, thus weakening the centre.
Opposite them, Baron Gilbert Bachelu’s division advanced to hold a line just south of Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte in order to support the assault on the farm by Joachim Quiot’s men. From his hillock near Rossomme Napoleon looked on: ‘When thoughtful,’ recalled his coachman, ‘he also took an immense quantity of snuff; the remains of which he shook from his fingers with great impetuosity, upon any sudden impulse. During the battle of Waterloo, at each movement of the army he evinced this habit in so remarkable a manner as to attract attention.’5
Although it had barely been prepared for defence, the whitewashed brick farmyard of La Haye Sainte was naturally strong; it was situated two hundred yards below the junction of the cobbled road to Brussels with the lane to Ohain, both of which at this point were in deep cuttings. A farmhouse, white with grey tiles, and an adjacent L-shaped stable with copious provision for pigeons, enclosed the northern and
western sides of the cobbled farmyard. On the south side was a large barn and a high wall which also shut off the eastern side of the farmyard, linking the house to the barn, although the only platform for shooting over it was a lean-to shed that they called ‘the piggery’. The buildings occupied a site about sixty yards square with a pond in the south-eastern corner. To the south of the farmyard an orchard, eighty yards wide and two hundred long, enclosed by a hedge, bordered the road, and to the north was a very muddy kitchen garden, seventy yards wide and forty long, walled to the road and hedged elsewhere.
The buildings lacked outward-facing windows from which to fire, but five doors led into the farmyard in addition to the large principal gate from the road into the yard, and the gate into the west side of the barn. Since the barn doors had been used for firewood the previous evening, this unfortunately was now a gaping hole. Major Bäring posted three of his six companies in the orchard, two in the buildings and one in the garden; Bäring himself rode to the orchard. In addition, 170 riflemen from the 1st German light battalion were sent forward to skirmish near the garden; with 140 British riflemen in the quarry only fifty yards north of the farm, the initial total of defenders in and close to La Haye Sainte was about 700 green-coated riflemen.
In the orchard, the men lay on the wet grass behind the hedge in the hollow where the farm stood, until suddenly French skirmishers appeared over the rise ahead of them and crouched in the corn. The riflemen had orders to hold their fire until the main column was close, but the French voltigeurs began their work of picking off the officers. Bäring reckoned the very first French shot broke his horse’s bridle, for as a mounted officer he was conspicuous, and the next shot killed the horse ridden by his second-in-command, Major Böseweil. After the skirmishers came formed infantry, moving very fast, their drummers beating the pas de charge. Only now did the riflemen fire; their first volley killed a number of the closely packed French, who nevertheless came on. Rifleman Lindau’s friend was shot dead lying next to him and Lindau’s brother carried their dying captain to the farm as the French stormed towards the hedge, while a second French battalion column headed past the orchard for the buildings, threatening to cut off the 200 riflemen among the fruit trees. They ran back to the wide open barn and as they ran Major Bösewiel was hit; he stood up but then fell dead on his face in the mud. Bäring’s horse collapsed with a broken leg. The riflemen pushed past the French at the barn entrance in a fierce scuffle and then made a stand at the far end there; thanks to men in the yard passing forward loaded Baker rifles to those in the barn, they were able to produce such unbroken fire that the French didn’t dare to come in.6