by Tim Clayton
The Household Brigade walked forward with the 2nd Life Guards to the east nearest the main road to Charleroi, the King’s Dragoon Guards in the centre and the 1st Life Guards on the right. The Horse Guards were to remain behind as a reserve, which they did: if they charged at all, they did not advance far and Sir Robert Hill kept his men in hand.
A cavalry charge normally gathered pace from walk, to trot, to canter but in this case a number of obstacles impeded progress. The right wing met the enemy first, encountering the cuirassiers who had unsuccessfully charged the squares of the Hanoverian brigade ‘on the ridge of the hill’, thus on the allied side of the lane to Ohain, which at this point presented no serious obstacle.3 According to Captain Edward Kelly the two opposing lines accelerated into something resembling a charge, and the French yielded when they met, but Kelly had a gift for exaggeration and it is fairly likely that the French were already retreating. The Life Guards pursued them to the west of the orchard of La Haye Sainte and any fighting took place where the chaussée ran through cuttings as it climbed towards La Belle Alliance, causing difficulties for the horses and bottlenecks on the road south of the farm. Kelly himself had his leg broken by a musket shot and had to leave the field.
Of the King’s Dragoon Guards in the centre of the British line, the right-hand squadron led by their major and Colonel Fuller met little opposition at first and cantered away towards the French lines. The left-hand squadron had much more difficulty crossing the lane to Ohain, which itself entered an increasingly deep cutting as it approached the chaussée. Near it they met cuirassiers and trapped some in the corner of a field. Lord Uxbridge was fighting there, while Lord Edward Somerset leaped over the bank of the road and charged on, followed by those whose horses could cope with the slippery conditions.4
Here the French were definitely already pulling out. They had achieved their objective by silencing the allied guns, and had waited on the plateau for support, but they knew that they could not hold their ground against fresh cavalry. Some trotted eastward down the Ohain lane and were pursued by British dragoons onto the chaussée; some were said to have plunged to their death over the precipice of at least twenty feet above this main cobbled road.5 The two bodies then raced southward for the cuttings through which the road ran above La Haye Sainte and below La Belle Alliance. There the retreating French collided with their own reinforcements, and in this bottleneck the pursuing British dragoons caught up with the trapped Frenchmen. The British slaughtered as many helpless cuirassiers as they could in a fierce, crowded mêlée, until General Colbert led the reinforcements’ rear squadrons round the defile to charge the British pursuers in flank and rear. The tables were now turned; the British found themselves surrounded and outnumbered.6
When fighting cuirassiers, the British found it difficult to get close enough to use their curved sabres, being kept at a distance by the long, straight swords used by the French, but their own horses were bigger and better than the French ones, often giving them an advantage in height.7 The British and French heavy cavalry adopted two different styles of horsemanship: the French adhered to the old style of ‘manèged’ training in slow-moving discipline, manoeuvre and obedience, whereas British horses were bred for the hunting field and the racecourse and valued for speed and endurance. The British advantage derived from the erosion of French breeding stock by the demands of war and the relative abundance of good, big, strong horses in Britain. Most foreigners were envious of the fine steeds that the British could still lay their hands on.
Dragoon Thomas Hasker came over the ridge to see cuirassiers cutting down infantry. As the Dragoon Guards charged, however, the cuirassiers turned and made off; the dragoons pursued, hacking at those they caught up with. A sergeant major reckoned that ‘we lost but few men by their swords; it was the grapeshot and the musketry that cut us down before we got amongst them. We had to charge to meet them so far over heavy ground that many of our horses were stuck in deep mud. The men were obliged to jump off, leave them and seek their safety away from the cannon fire.’
In Hasker’s recollection, ‘many of them on our right flank got behind us, and thus we were at once pursuing and pursued’, and while this may refer to the bottleneck on the cobbled road there were probably many knots of dragoons who were counter-attacked by French reserves. Hasker swung left of La Haye Sainte and found himself duelling with a cuirassier; they made ‘several ineffectual passes at each other’ before the Frenchman brandished his sword and muttered something Hasker didn’t understand. ‘I – thinking I must say something in reply – muttered in my turn, “The sword of the Lord and Gideon!”’ At this the Frenchman ‘very wisely turned his horse’s head on one side, and rode off; and I as wisely turned my horse’s head on the other side and rode off’.8
On the left the 2nd Life Guards had been delayed by fleeing troops, as Playford described: ‘Presently we met a number of English foot soldiers running for their lives: they passed between our horses, or through squadron intervals, formed behind us and followed us. They were succeeded by a confused mixture of artillery and rifle men, hastening to get out of our way and form behind us.’ The German Legionaries, dressed in British uniforms, looked English to Playford, while the fugitive Lünebergers and the 1st and 2nd Light looked like riflemen. One private trooper afterwards told his wife that ‘the English infantry was broke and squandered, canon shot, grape and canister shot was flying like hail, our infantry making the best of their way to the rear and falling every moment from enemy fire, through all this & even over our own straggling infantry we were obliged to charge.’ Charge is something of a misnomer, for having walked through the fugitives the 2nd had to find a way across the lane to Ohain on the ridge, which for four hundred yards was steeply banked as it descended to meet the Brussels chaussée.9 For the first hundred it was ten to fifteen feet deep and the single path into the hollow from the field behind La Haye Sainte was wide enough for only two horses, very slippery and at an angle of around forty-five degrees, with a similar opening up into the field on the north side of the road.10 Most of the squadron probably crowded into the cutting through which the chaussée from Brussels to Charleroi ran where it crossed the ridge north of La Haye Sainte
South of the crossroads where the chaussée met the Ohain lane the charge sounded, and ‘at that moment a line of French horsemen in bright armour appeared in front of us; they were shouting, waving their swords, and sabring the English infantry and artillerymen who had not got out of our way. Our shouts had arrested their attention, and looking up they saw fearful ranks of red horsemen galloping forward, shouting and brandishing their swords.’ What followed was a blur as the Life Guards spurred their horses into a hail of shot. Playford recalled seeing Corporal Shaw hit and then seeing his riderless horse. John Shaw had joined the Guards with his Nottinghamshire village friend Richard Waplington and the two were known as the ‘Cossal giants’. When Shaw didn’t return from the charge, legends grew overnight about how many cuirassiers he had dispatched before they got him and how Waplington had last been seen holding a French eagle. Playford allowed that Shaw might have survived the wound and the fall that he witnessed and might have found another horse, but he suspected that the truth about Shaw’s death was more prosaic than the legends.11
Life Guards recalled passing through a line of cuirassiers, crossing the road and then running into a disorderly mob of French infantry who threw themselves to the ground, getting up and firing at them after they passed. A mass of Life Guards and Dragoon Guards wheeled to the east of La Haye Sainte, drove back any cuirassiers, and then cut and hacked at the infantry in their path. Skirmishers from the battalions attacking the farm were swept away in the general rout. By then squadrons were intermingled and, either side of the farm, were suffering from the fire of disciplined infantry in steady squares.12
Uxbridge sounded the rally in an attempt to stop his men from pursuing, ‘but neither trumpet nor voice prevailed’. The British cavalry were enjoying the thrill of the chase. Nobody hea
rd him, nobody stopped; so he went back ‘to seek the support of the 2nd line, which unhappily had not followed the movements of the heavy cavalry’. He was already regretting the self-indulgence of leading the charge, conscious that he should really have been organising a reserve, for the light cavalry in the area had never received any clear orders to support the heavy cavalry; he had merely told their commanders to use their initiative.
By then, however, the effect of the charge of Uxbridge’s other heavy brigade had become visible, and French infantry were streaming down the hill towards their own lines in utter rout. As Uxbridge later wrote, on his way back he met Wellington with his staff and diplomatic entourage, and ‘never saw so joyous a group as was this troupe dorée. They thought the battle was over.’13
53
The Charge of the Union Brigade
The left centre of Wellington’s line, 18 June, 2.15 p.m.
Wellington and his staff meanwhile had been watching the ridge to the east of the cobbled road. Here, the French sharpshooters, pushing ahead, had reached the crest of the position, driving before them the skirmishing riflemen and the broken Netherlanders. And as the French marksmen reached the hedge a new gallery of British officers became targets. The hero of Quatre Bras, the redoubtable Sir Thomas Picton, was shouting to Horace Seymour, one of Uxbridge’s aides, to rally the men who were fleeing, when he was shot in the temple and fell from his horse. A second later Seymour’s horse was shot and he too tumbled to the ground; as he scrambled back up to his feet he saw a grenadier looting Picton’s spectacles and purse from his trousers. He ran over to the general and chased away the grenadier just as one of Picton’s aides arrived, but Picton – ‘a person in whom the troops had the greatest confidence, and of such experience and knowledge in his profession as to be of the greatest loss to the army’ – was dead.1
Sir James Kempt, the senior brigadier, immediately took over, leading the three battalions of his brigade against the massed Frenchmen. They formed line and charged, checking the attack of Bourgeois’ brigade. A French officer seized a colour belonging to the 32nd Cornwall, but he was instantly run through the body by the colour sergeant’s pike and the ensign’s sword. When the ensign fell wounded, a lieutenant took the flag and defended it stoutly.2 British infantry witnesses claimed that they routed the French, although others stated that the British began to give ground.3
Soon after Canler’s 28th at the head of Bourgeois’ column reached the Ohain lane, the second assault column made their attack, having almost caught up when Bourgeois’ men had to manoeuvre round the quarry. Lieutenant Jacques Martin was at the front with his 45th Line: ‘A sunken lane with hedges both sides was the only thing separating us from them now,’ he wrote to his mother in Geneva soon afterwards. ‘Our soldiers didn’t wait for the order to cross it. They threw themselves at it, jumping over the hedges and leaving their ranks disordered in their eagerness to run at their enemies.’ Denis Pack’s Highland Brigade, still in columns as Bijlandt’s Netherlanders streamed through the gaps between the battalions, gave ground, shaken by the rout of the Dutch and the confident onset of the French, who were reforming on the crest of the ridge.4
Behind the two British brigades, however, about 900 heavy dragoons of the Union Brigade were walking up the slope.5 Sir William Ponsonby, their commander, had ridden forward to the ridge with his aide, having told his senior colonel that if he wanted the brigade to charge he would wave his hat as a signal. At the crucial moment Ponsonby’s hat blew out of his hand and while he dismounted to recover it, his aide waved his, whereupon a bugler signalled the cavalry to mount and advance. The contours hid them from the French infantry until they were at most ninety yards away, at which point the dragoons spurred their horses on. On the right of their line were the English Royal Dragoons, who rode through the units of Kempt’s brigade that were opposing Bourgeois’ column. The French front ranks fired and brought down about twenty men, before two squadrons of Royal Dragoons hit them, and at almost the same moment the rear of Bourgeois’ column disintegrated as Life Guards swept by and into it, pursuing cuirassiers and hacking at the nearest French foot soldiers.
The Royals continued to press the French down the hill. As they did so, Captain Alexander Clark, commanding the centre squadron, according to his own account, spotted an eagle and ordered his men to ‘attack the colour’. Just as British colours were sought after by the French, for the British army to seize an eagle was the greatest honour an individual or a regiment could aspire to – especially since, as the British were quick to point out, whereas each of their battalions carried two flags, there was only one eagle for the three or four battalions in a French regiment. Clark explained how he overtook the porte-aigle and ran his sword into his right side, but the eagle fell just out of Clark’s reach onto the neck of the horse behind, to be caught by Corporal Francis Styles who was guarding Clark’s back. Clark yelled, ‘Secure the colour, secure the colour, it belongs to me,’ so Styles gave it to him. Clark was trying to break the golden eagle off the top of the pole when Styles complained, ‘Pray, sir, do not break it’; Clark ordered, ‘Very well, carry it to the rear as fast as you can, it belongs to me,’ and Styles with a few companions rode off with it. In his own account, Styles himself seized the eagle on the order of a junior lieutenant; this version, though less colourful, is probably more truthful.6
The Royals rode far enough forward to suffer from the fire of Donzelot’s men who, following up as the reserve division, had by then formed a vast rectangle to defend themselves against the cavalry; some dragoons now turned back, Clark included, and began to herd as many French prisoners as they could back up the slope.
From Corporal Canler’s point of view the French infantry had hardly got onto the plateau before they were assailed by dragoons shouting savagely. There was no time to form a square: the dragoons penetrated their ranks and from then on it was carnage, each man for himself, sabres and bayonets slicing and stabbing flesh, pressed against each other, with no space to get a shot off. To General Dessales, watching with Marshal Ney from the centre of the French artillery, it looked as if Bourgeois’ brigade was charged in the rear by Life Guards coming from the west and that it disintegrated from the back. In fact it may well have been hit more or less simultaneously from both sides. Suddenly, Ney shouted to Dessales, ‘You are being charged!’ Life Guards and Dragoon Guards were spreading out in all directions from La Haye Sainte. Some were assailing squares of French infantry in the valley, others heading for the guns which were being towed forward from the Belle Alliance ridge to their new advanced position above La Haye Sainte. Some guns had reached the forward position and were unlimbering, but most were not firing for fear of mowing down the fleeing French troops running towards them.7
Further east, Lieutenant Martin was trying to stop his men pursuing the retreating allied infantry and get them back in formation:
I had just succeeded in pushing one back into his place in the line when I saw him tumble to the ground at my feet from a sabre blow; I turned round sharply. There were English cavalry charging into our formation from all directions and cutting us to pieces. I just had time to throw myself into the crowd to avoid the same fate. The noise, the smoke, the confusion, inevitable at such times, had stopped us noticing that on our right several squadrons of English dragoons had come out of a sort of hollow, formed up in our rear and charged us in the back.
The 45th was hit in front by Irish Inniskilling dragoons; those that Martin said charged their right flank and rear were probably Scots Greys. Cavalry could slaughter disordered infantry with impunity, however brave the infantry. Soldiers would stretch to try to bayonet the horsemen towering above them, but they nearly always failed and any shots fired in the confused crowd were just as likely to wound one’s own men as they were the enemy. Martin now found himself caught up and swept away in the current of a confused and turbulent mob. The French artillery fired into the mêlée, while the British, in an orgy of bloodlust,
sabred everyone
pitilessly right down to the children who served us as fifers and drummer boys in the regiment and who begged for mercy, but in vain. It was there that I saw death from closest to: my best friends were falling at my side, and there was no avoiding the logic that the same fate lay in store for me; but I no longer had clear thoughts; I just fought mechanically as if waiting for the fatal blow.8
Some of the Royal Dragoons and Inniskillings had nothing before them and charged on down the hill until they reached the valley, where Donzelot’s division had been advancing in reserve. Donzelot’s men had time to improvise one huge rectangle by folding back each battalion’s wing platoons in order to fill the narrow gap between battalions – a dense formation filled with men, but one that sufficed for the present emergency. The dragoons failed to break in, suffering some casualties from musketry before careering on towards the French guns, some of which they caught limbered up and moving. Though the British horsemen were unable to spike the guns or to drag them away, they killed horses, cut traces and drove away riders so that the guns were immobilised. It is not clear just how much damage was done, but the French certainly lost the use of some guns for a considerable time, perhaps permanently. Sir William Ponsonby was in this central area and he with his staff tried desperately to halt the charge, ‘but the helplessness of the enemy offered too great a temptation to the dragoons’.9
The Scots Greys had no business charging, for their orders were to support the other two regiments, but their colonel had no intention of missing out on this glorious party. So he charged in support, close behind and to the left. The Greys passed through the 92nd, ‘who appeared to be giving way’ or were ‘retiring somewhat confusedly’.10 The Gordons extended beyond the line of Martin’s 45th Regiment and greeted their compatriots who were riding distinctive grey horses and wearing bearskins with shouts of ‘Scotland for ever!’ Some of the Greys hit the leading French brigade in the flank. Sergeant Charles Ewart, aged forty-six but a towering giant of six foot four in a bedraggled bearskin, cut his way to the eagle of the 45th and seized it, parrying a thrust at his groin from the porte-aigle, then slicing through his skull. He was set upon by several Frenchmen, but cut them down with the help of rough-rider James Armour, a relative of the poet Robbie Burns’s wife, Jean. Ewart was ordered to leave the field and ride with the eagle to Brussels to ensure for the sake of regimental honour that the invaluable trophy remained captured.11