by Tim Clayton
Lieutenant George Graeme’s section fired from behind the barricade on the road until the French got close, when they ran into the farm and climbed on top of the ‘piggery’ to shoot down at the French on the road. Higher up the chaussée the riflemen in the sand quarry were ideally placed to snipe at the French officers attacking the farm entrance and kitchen garden.
Meanwhile, just to the east, half an hour after Baron Bourgeois’ brigade reached its starting position near the Brussels road, Ney gave the order to attack. Three brigade columns, each of about 2000 men, were directed against Sir Thomas Picton’s command; they were led by Bourgeois, Noguès and Grenier, with the two stronger brigades of Donzelot’s division following in reserve. They moved in echelon, leading from the left, so that the 28th Regiment led the attack. To Corporal Canler their experienced adjutant-majeur, organising their tightly packed battalion columns, looked pale and preoccupied: the 28th had fought the British from Talavera in 1809 to Vitoria in 1813 and Captain Hubeau knew what to expect from British soldiers defending a ridge.
When the columns were formed the comte d’Erlon addressed them, telling them that this was the day when they must conquer or die. The signal to advance was greeted with deafening shouts of ‘Vive l’empereur!’ The drums beat the pas de charge and the unwieldy columns began the ascent towards the riflemen and the twelve cannon. The allied guns turned their fire onto the columns as soon as they became visible. ‘Whole ranks disappeared thanks to canister,’ wrote Jacques Martin, ‘but nothing could stop our march. It continued with the same order, the same precision.’ Once more, the officers were picked off by riflemen: ‘We had hardly gone a hundred paces before the commander of our second battalion M. Marans was mortally wounded,’ remembered Canler.
The captain of my company, M. d’Uzer, was hit by two balls; Adjutant Hubeau and the porte-drapeau Gosse were killed. And in the middle of all that, the calm, serious voices of our officers saw to the execution of just one command, ‘Close up the ranks!’ At the second discharge of the English battery, the grenadier drummer Lecointre had his arm taken off by a shell shard, but this brave man continued to march in front, beating the charge with his left hand until he fainted from loss of blood.
The third discharge shattered the front line, and the terrible shout of ‘Serrez les rangs!’ rang out again, but instead of filling them with horror their losses only hardened the men’s will to win and avenge their brothers in arms.
One grizzled veteran who was an aide to Bourgeois reckoned the enthusiasm of the men was dangerous; they were tiring themselves by trying to move too fast through the cloying mud, so thick and heavy that it was ripping off their shoes, and as they came under fire there was disorder in the ranks. Some distance behind, at the front of Marcognet’s column, Lieutenant Jacques Martin reckoned that the distance they had to cover would normally only have taken five or six minutes, but the soft wet clay soil and the tall rye through which they were marching slowed their progress so much that the enemy artillery had all the time it needed to complete its work of destruction.7
Fortunately for the French, however, they faced little of that artillery. Most of Wellington’s guns were now deployed around Hougoumont, and to stop this massive assault there was only Thomas Rogers’s and Adriaan Bijleveld’s twelve guns in front and Rettberg’s six to the flank. In the front line with the artillery were about 250 riflemen and the 2400 or so survivors of Quatre Bras in Bijlandt’s brigade; behind them were the survivors of Picton’s British division, about 3000 strong.
Both Rogers and Bijleveld had taken a battering at Quatre Bras, and they were soon taking another: Rogers used no shells at Waterloo, so his howitzer, which had fired during the retreat the previous day, was presumably destroyed early on, and his guns fired only 259 rounds during the whole day. Rettberg was particularly well placed to deliver enfilading fire against the French and had been doing so through much of their advance and deployment as well as during the attack. Unfortunately, he had used up a lot of ammunition on 16 June and had been unable to find more. He had practically no ammunition left after d’Erlon’s attack, so the 477 rounds – 80 per gun – that his battery expended at Waterloo must nearly all have been fired during this first assault.8
‘We were going to win the prize for our bravery,’ wrote Martin: ‘already the English were beginning to slip away; already their guns were retiring at a gallop.’ As the French approached close, Bijleveld limbered up his 6-pounders and pulled out, determined to lose no more cannon. The senior captain of the Dutch 7th Militia was impressed with the way the French came on through the hail of fire: ‘Their countenance was perfect,’ he wrote to his sister in July. ‘None of these masses disintegrated. Soon they were seen crossing the ground at attack pace, and the height where our brigade was deployed was in the first line. It was impossible for us to withstand this first shock. We received the order to fall back behind the British troops which were in the second line. By this time we had received heavy casualties.’ General Perponcher had already lost two horses and his chief of staff had been wounded before his men fell back. Some of them rallied behind the British second line.9
French tirailleurs approached the sandpit, dropped to their knees in the rye and duelled with the riflemen, while the main column marched on, drums beating, still shouting. They had to manoeuvre to their right to avoid the quarry, causing delay and disorder, which meant that the brigade to their right almost caught them up. Meanwhile, battalions were moving past La Haye Sainte, outflanking the riflemen in the quarry on the other side. When the French threatened to cut them off, the riflemen legged it, seeking the protection of their support companies in the sunken lane to Ohain, and some rifle officers had to disengage swiftly from duels with their French counterparts. Kincaid rode his horse through the hedge and, finding the supports also beginning to fall back, rallied the men into a new line some yards behind it.
After what seemed an age, Canler reached the lane and climbed the high bank on the far side, from behind which the enemy guns had been firing. Scrambling through the hedge, he found that the guns that could be moved had gone, and watched as the British sergeant commanding a gun immobilised with a damaged carriage, drove a metal spike into the touch hole in order to prevent it being used by the French.10
While scrambling up the muddy bank, Canler had slipped on the wet clay; the strap on his gaiter broke and his heel came out of his shoe. As he bent down to put the shoe back on, something knocked his shako back: a ball had turned the number 28 on his plaque into a 0 and had shaved his head on its way through. He had had a lucky escape.
51
Crabbé’s Charge
The centre, 18 June, 1.50 p.m.
It was evident to the Prince of Orange and his advisers in the centre of the allied position that a serious French assault was aimed at their area, and that it was essential above all to hold La Haye Sainte. To reinforce the farm against the masses of tirailleurs assaulting it, General von Alten therefore ordered forward the green-coated Lüneberg light battalion with the remainder of the 1st Light. The French fell back and the Hanoverians were able to recapture the orchard to the south of the farm. Some of Bäring’s riflemen now sallied out from the yard and together they spread out in a strong skirmish line to oppose the French tirailleurs. Captain Jacobi’s company took post in the orchard, defending the hedge.
Major Bäring was in the orchard with them when an officer rode over to tell him that the French had surrounded the kitchen garden behind them, and his men couldn’t hold it. Bäring told him to abandon the garden and get the men into the farm. Just as Bäring realised that the French had outflanked him to the east, a French column charged forward again in front. Jacobi’s men fled from the orchard, but even as they ran, they heard shouts of ‘Cuirassiers! Cuirassiers!’ Bäring tried to call his men around him to fall back to the farm but they were mixed up with the Lünebergers:
The number of the battalion which had come to our assistance, exceeded, by many degrees, that of my men, and as,
at the same time, the enemy’s infantry gained the garden – the skirmishers having been driven out by a column attack – the former, seeing the cuirassiers in the open field, imagined that their only chance of safety lay in gaining the main position of the army. My voice, unknown to them, and also not sufficiently penetrating, was, notwithstanding all my exertions, unequal to halt and collect my men together; already overtaken by the cavalry, we fell in with the enemy’s infantry, who had surrounded the garden, and to whose fire the men were exposed in retiring to the main position. In this effort a part succeeded.1
The cuirassiers are said to have belonged to a special, improvised unit that Ney had created by asking his colonels to give him a squadron each. If this was true, it was a sizeable and balanced force of cavalry. From it, Ney sent out some squadrons of cuirassiers to cover his infantry attack and gave command of them to his old aide Jean-Louis de Crabbé, the Belgian veteran who had been returned to him by the headquarters staff in view of his need for help. As one colonel recalled, their objective was the twenty-four allied British guns above La Haye Sainte.2
Some of Crabbé’s cuirassiers charged through the Lüneburgers, who could put up no resistance in their extended skirmish order, and light infantry scattered for their lives in all directions. Their colonel was wounded, their major was captured and one of their colours was taken.3 Such were the casualties of the battalion in killed, wounded, prisoners and fugitives that it virtually ceased to exist and as a unit took no further part in the battle, although those who escaped sought shelter between the hedges and banks of the sunken lane or within the squares on the slope. Carl Jacobi made it back to a square, behind which he found his wounded colonel without a horse. ‘Nobody among us knew how he had escaped the horses’ hooves or the horsemen’s swords,’ Jacobi wrote. ‘There were moments when the senses of hearing and sight had in fact shut down.’ Someone lent him a mount to get the colonel to Brussels, and Jacobi with most of the other survivors followed him there.4
Colonel Michel Ordener claimed that it was his squadron that dispersed the skirmishers, before riding on against the gunners and finally taking on a square of infantry; at this point Ordener’s horse was killed and he was hit in the neck. He may have led the force that mounted the ridge and charged Kielmansegge’s Hanoverian brigade. Crucially, however, the two Hanoverian squares held, forming up in time and holding their fire until the French were forty paces away. The Germans captured a staff officer and a colonel whose horses had been killed, while the cuirassiers veered away to reform near the abandoned allied guns.5
Further east the cuirassiers found another promising target, for Christian von Ompteda had been ordered to send the 8th Line of the Legion to oppose French infantry that was advancing north from the kitchen garden of La Haye Sainte. Ompteda’s division, though numerically weak, comprised four very good, experienced units and Ompteda was one of the Legion’s outstanding officers, highly respected for personal bravery as well as good sense. Edmund Wheatley, who was not slow to criticise his officers, had the highest regard for him, first won during an afternoon spent sitting watching fighting in Spain with Ompteda and his nephews, Christian and Louis. The pair, now aged seventeen and fifteen, were with him again today.
The 8th Line charged the French battalion and had seen it turn around, when they were surprised and overwhelmed by cuirassiers who charged their own right flank and cut them to pieces. The ensign carrying their king’s colour fell to the ground with three sabre wounds; a sergeant picked up the standard but a cuirassier hacked off his hand, seized the flag and rode off with it. Their commander was mortally wounded and the legionaries fled for the crest, where their major rallied the remnant into a small square.6
Ompteda’s fifth battalion had advanced to support the 8th. Though seasoned troops, they had never faced cuirassiers in Spain and were naturally apprehensive of Napoleon’s armoured elite. Lieutenant Wheatley now watched ‘a black consolidated body’ approaching with flashes of sunlight on steel breastplates, accompanied by the thunder of hoof beats that announced the famous heavy cavalry. He and his men formed square just in time:
shouts of ‘Stand firm!’ ‘Stand fast!’ were heard from the little squares around and very quickly these gigantic fellows were upon us. No words can convey the sensation we felt on seeing these heavy-armed bodies advancing at full gallop against us, flourishing their sabres in the air, striking their armour with the handles, the sun, gleaming on the steel. The long horse hair, dishevelled by the wind, bore an appearance confounding the senses to an astonishing disorder.
But the 5th stood firm and the armoured horsemen whirled past them.7
Just in front of the sunken Ohain lane stood four 9-pounders of Sir Hew Ross’s battery, with two more on the chaussée below. They got off a round of case shot, forcing the cuirassiers charging them to swerve off the road, and the gunners tried to limber up, ‘but before we could move one yard the French was all round us’.8 The cuirassiers cut up men and stabbed horses as they fled, slashing at the leather traces. From the other side of the cutting through which the highway ran, Adjutant Kincaid looked down to his right and realised with horror that the field that side was full of cuirassiers; further back, the irruption of French cavalry onto the plateau had caused all of the British infantry in the second and third lines to form square.9
The artillerymen of Cleeves’s battery saw French cavalry sweeping over the field behind their left flank and pulled out. One of Cleeves’s drivers brought up his limber in time to pull his gun down the hill to a new position right in front of the 1st Nassauers. The commander of the howitzer on the far right of the battery was concentrating on a target and didn’t see the cavalry coming at all. His driver rode up with the limber, shouting to the officer that the enemy had reached the left of the battery. ‘Because of the soft muddy ground, the gun could not be limbered up quickly enough; several gunners sprang on to the limbers with the rammer and hurried to the square.’ The officer ‘fired off the loaded round and then threw himself under the gun’. After the French cavalry retreated, the driver brought back his limber and they took this howitzer to join the other gun in front of the Nassau square.10
Seeing cavalry and infantry triumphing, the commander of the 12-pounders on the left of the French Grand Battery ordered his guns to limber up and advance to the forward position that General Dessales, the commander of I Corps’ artillery, had previously selected. Dessales watched them with anxiety, for he had not intended to advance so soon, but soon saw them reach the new position, unlimber and open fire.11 Encouraged, he ordered his own batteries to follow them. The French attack had started well.
52
The Charge of the Household Brigade
The centre, 18 June, 2.10 p.m.
What General Dessales could not see was that hidden from him beyond the plateau on which Carl von Alten’s division stood in squares, and onto which Colonel Crabbé’s cuirassiers had surged, the British Household Brigade of around a thousand heavy dragoons was waiting. Lying or standing by their large horses – those of the Life Guards and Horse Guards being uniformly black – they were impatient for action, watching their officers for a sign that their moment might have come. As Yorkshireman Thomas Playford recalled:
After a time I saw the Earl of Uxbridge, who had been in front watching the progress of events, gallop towards us, when a slight murmur of gladness passed along the ranks. The word ‘Mount’ was given, and the trumpet sounded ‘Draw Swords’: and the command followed ‘Form line on the leading squadron of the 2nd Life Guards’. This done the word ‘Advance’ was given, and the trumpet sounded ‘Walk’. But we saw no enemy; yet there was a strange medley of shouts, musket shots, and the roar of cannon, beyond the rising ground in front of us.
The cavalry received its instructions via coded trumpet calls; now they waited for the call to accelerate from walk to trot. Playford recalled that the huge, blond hero of his regiment, John Shaw, who was said to have defeated the boxing heavyweight and former slave, Tom Molyne
ux, in a prize fight, rode three files to his left. These heavy cavalry were big men on big horses, taught to ride and fight in two lines in close order, like the French cuirassiers themselves.1
Lord Uxbridge was one of many senior officers who had been drawn to the right, like moths to a flame, to see whether the cavalry were deployed properly to defend the priority stronghold of Hougoumont. As he returned eastward from the right wing, he suddenly realised the seriousness of the deteriorating situation around La Haye Sainte. He galloped to Lord Edward Somerset, commander of the Household Brigade, and ordered him to form line, then joined Sir William Ponsonby who was watching the developing attack from the high ground further east, instructing him to wheel his Union Brigade into line when the Household Brigade did. Finally he returned to the 2nd Life Guards in order to lead them forward in person.2