by Tim Clayton
It was perfectly permissible to leave the ranks with a wound and seek help behind the lines, although to leave with a very minor injury was likely to invite contempt from colleagues. Captain Edward Kelly of the Life Guards, the hero of Genappe the previous day, left the field with a broken leg, and subsequently wrote to his wife in confidence, ‘There are some officers, who were absent from some idle excuse or other, who are envious of my praises. One you mentioned in your last letter might have been in the Field on Sunday but he reported himself wounded from a scratch and when he heard Ferrior was killed, he posted off to take command of the Regt. immediately. This to yourself.’4
It was also generally permissible to help a wounded man from the field. Bandsmen and other supernumeraries were supposed to help the wounded, but there were only a few bandsmen so they were quickly expended. Ney allowed two men to help a comrade with a fracture and one to assist a man with any other wound, while Napoleon sought to reduce the consequent wastage of manpower by providing ambulances to fetch the wounded from the front line. But the ambulance service at Waterloo was inadequate. An aide to Prince Jérôme wrote that soldiers returned from taking wounded men back complaining that the ambulance drivers had fled, abandoning the vehicles; this was hardly surprising, he continued, since the ambulances were being driven by postillions from the civilian post coach service who had been forced into the army and had never before been under fire.5
Having helped their wounded colleagues to the nearest advanced dressing station, soldiers were supposed to return, but many got lost or took the opportunity to linger out of harm’s way. An experienced captain of the British light dragoons was proud that at the end of the battle his troop had ‘less than one man away assisting each wounded’: even so, this nearly doubled his effective casualties. This practice had serious implications for battlefield attrition, and explains how, in many cases, so few men remained with the colours after several hours of fighting. Captain Mercer of the horse artillery claimed with typical post-war British disdain for their Belgian allies that he saw Belgian wounded with ‘six, eight, ten and even more attendants’, but it wasn’t only Belgian officers who required such care. A Scots Grey recalled early in the battle watching a wounded Highland officer being carried down the hill ‘in a blanket by five or six of his regiment, when a shell came and fell near them and destroyed nearly the whole’. Where five or six men left a battalion each time an officer was wounded its strength was quickly eroded.6
Once rallied and reorganised, the infantry of d’Erlon’s corps formed squares in the valley, and companies took turns to go forward to duel with the reduced forces of the British 5th Division in what became a prolonged skirmishing match. Lieutenant Martin’s foot had been stood on by a horse and he had a slight bayonet wound above his knee, but he continued to lead a remnant of the 45th.
Although the failure of d’Erlon’s attack had been a serious setback, the assault had resulted in a net gain in territory. When the gun line of the Grand Battery was rebuilt it was situated on the forward position, 250 yards from La Haye Sainte and 600 yards from the crest of the ridge, with the French squares on the slope beneath it and their skirmish line sometimes lining the hedge of the Ohain road.7 The charge of the British heavy cavalry had caused Napoleon to mount his horse and gallop forward over the battlefield, surrounded by his staff. To repair the Grand Battery he called up Guard artillery, including 12-pounders, to replace what had been damaged or abandoned, and their rapid deployment and accurate fire put a stop to further allied cavalry attacks. Napoleon was discussing the situation with General Jean-Jacques Desvaux, commander of the Guard Artillery, when Desvaux was killed by a cannonball; this caused Napoleon to split the Imperial staff into less conspicuous groups.8
Meanwhile, Wellington’s aides called forward reinforcements from the allied reserves. A brigade of German Legionaries and two battalions of Hanoverian Landwehr formed square and advanced to make a second line in the area behind Hougoumont. Two more Landwehr battalions marched off to the right to support the squares of Mitchell’s brigade against Piré’s light cavalry between Hougoumont and Braine l’Alleud.9 Further west, Vinke’s brigade of Hanoverian Landwehr took an hour to disentangle their battalions from Best’s before marching to a position in central reserve close to the Charleroi road. Here they were replacing the Nassauers, who advanced into the front line to occupy the space left empty by the destruction of two German battalions. With these very inexperienced troops plugging gaps it was invaluable to have Sir John Lambert’s fresh brigade of veteran British infantry marching in to replace Kempt’s battalions in the front line east of the Charleroi road.
Their ordeal began during their march forward to Mont Saint-Jean, for this coincided with a renewed intensification of fire from the Grand Battery. The French cannonade became violent in the extreme, ‘probably as much so as has been witnessed in any open field of battle’. Carl von Alten said that even the oldest soldiers (and he was one of them) had never seen anything like it.10 Sergeant William Lawrence recalled:
a shell from the enemy cut our deputy-sergeant-major in two, and having passed on to take the head off one of my company of grenadiers named William Hooper, exploded in the rear not more than one yard from me, hurling me at least two yards into the air, but fortunately doing me little injury beyond the shaking and carrying a small piece of skin off the side of my face.
The shell burned off the tail of his red sergeant’s sash and blackened the handle of his sword.
A young lad named Bartram, who had never before been in action, came to Lawrence and told him he had to fall out of line because he had been taken ill. Despite encouraging words, ‘Bartram fell down and wouldn’t move another inch.’ Lawrence felt he should have been shot for cowardice, but left him lying there.11
No soldier from the ranks of the British army had been tried or shot for such an offence during the whole of the Peninsular War: a good few were shot for desertion, but none for cowardice in the face of the enemy. The only punishment for cowardice in someone who was not an officer was personal shame and the contempt, silent or otherwise, of comrades, which could, as a Highlander of the Black Watch implied, make his future army life fairly unpleasant: ‘a man may drop behind in the field but this is a dreadful risk to his reputation … woe to the man that does it, whether through fatigue, sudden sickness or fear.’ Tom Morris later prevented one of his men from receiving a Waterloo medal because during the conflict, ‘he ran away to Brussels, and placing his arm in a sling, reported himself wounded.’12
Officers, however, faced dismissal, though the honour of the regiment tended to ensure this was kept private; if all the evidence survives, only two British officers faced a court martial for cowardice on 18 June, and that was because of the enmity of their ambitious and not very popular accuser. A more common penalty was to be forced out by one’s colleagues. The Earl of Portarlington, commander of the 23rd Light Dragoons, was an example: accused by Uxbridge of refusing to charge at Genappe, he was ‘taken dangerously ill with spasms and a violent bowel attack’ and carried to Brussels that evening ‘in a dangerous state’. He was forced to retire from the regiment in September 1815 and, despite the efforts of his friend the Prince Regent to uphold his honour – and despite, too, a story that he fought at Waterloo with another regiment – he ‘took to dissipation, lost a large fortune, and died at a humble lodging in an obscure London slum’. A number of Hanoverian officers went sick between 16 and 18 June; the weather and the unusual exertion demanded of men on those days could genuinely have caused some to fall ill, but colleagues were inclined to be suspicious.13
British records tend not to document such things and they only emerge from private letters. Lieutenant John Gordon of the 18th Hussars was thought to have been killed at Waterloo but returned to the unit, his horse having been shot before he rode another to Brussels. Before his departure, ‘Major Grant had found him so anxious during the business that he had relieved him of the command of his half squadron and put MacDuffy in
his place.’ Gordon left the army in 1816.14
Of the two officers who were court-martialled, the thorough investigation, which took place soon after the battle, revealed, better than any other evidence we have, how little people under oath remembered of just what had happened at any given moment on the day of Waterloo. Both officers were accused of sheltering behind a bank after their men had gone forward, but witnesses gave conflicting versions of when and where. The court’s judgment reflected the existing reputation of the officers as much as what anybody could recall. Both were acquitted, although only one, Henry Ross-Lewin, was completely exonerated.15
Such detailed investigations as those trials often throw up enlightening details about battlefield behaviour. For instance, from the evidence given to the court it emerged that when that regiment – the 32nd – was ordered to lie down it was usual for the officers to lie down with the men. Whenever the artillery fire intensified and there was no threat from enemy cavalry the British troops lay down. The re-establishment of the French Grand Battery was one such moment and the British infantry in front lay down. The Prince of Orange, Charles Alten and their staff watched anxiously for developments from a commanding position on the ridge midway between the two main roads (today occupied by the Lion Mound, a monument built by the Belgians in order to commemorate the battle on the spot where the Prince had stood).
As the French barrage increased in intensity their own artillery suffered serious damage and ‘several powder wagons blew up in front of, and close to, the brigade.’16 Major Lloyd, who had earlier appealed to Mercer for help, had his leg shot off – a wound that also proved fatal. Captain Friedrich Weiz of the 1st Nassau Regiment vividly remembered the moment when ‘three guns of a recently arrived battery were smashed before having fired a single shot’ and one of the battery’s caissons blew up just as it was passing in front of Weiz’s own battalion. Then ‘with the caisson all ablaze, its horses panicked and drove it straight towards the large artillery park, from where they had come. A major disaster was averted when some dragoons rode up in a hurry and, while racing along, stabbed and brought down the horses.’17 Cleeves’s battery, immediately in front of the Nassauers, was reduced to two guns without horses, although the crews of these guns remained with them, firing until the last second when threatened, and then taking shelter in the ranks of the Nassau battalion. The rest of the battery had gone. The French guns fired canister at the skirmishers out in front: the three senior officers with Edward Macready all fell within two minutes before he retreated with a surviving third of the men.
Experienced troops were constantly changing formation according to the threat, line for artillery, square for cavalry: Edmund Wheatley recalled that ‘In order to destroy our squares, the enemy filled the air with shells, howitzers and bombs, so that every five or six minutes, the whole Battalion lay on its face then sprang up again when [the danger] was over. The Prince of Orange gallop’d by, screaming out like a new born infant, “Form into line! Form into line!”’
Lying down offered further opportunities for the risk averse. One of Lieutenant Wheatley’s duties as he prowled the square of the 5th German Line was ‘inspecting the fallen to detect deception or subterfuge’, in order to determine whether his men were really dead or wounded or just pretending to be. Sticking a sword point in them usually worked.18 Wheatley tried to walk about and appear calm, ‘chatting and joking with the young officers who had not then smelt powder’, but even he had really seen nothing like the carnage around him:
An ammunition cart blew up near us, smashing men and horses. I took a calm survey of the field around and felt shocked at the sight of broken armour, lifeless bodies, murdered horses, shattered wheels, caps, helmets, swords, muskets, pistols, still and silent. Here and there a frightened horse would rush across the plain trampling on the dying and the dead. Three or four poor wounded animals standing on three legs, the other dangling before. We killed several of these unfortunate beasts and it would have been an equal Charity to have perform’d the same operation on the wriggling, feverish, mortally lacerated soldiers as they rolled on the ground.19
Wheatley was finding the renewed bombardment very difficult to endure: ‘We still stood in line. The carnage was frightful. The balls which missed us mowed down the Dutch behind us, and swept away many of the closely embattled Cavalry behind them. I saw a cannon ball take away a Colonel of the Nassau Regiment so cleanly that the horse never moved from under him.’ And it was altogether too much for the Duke of Cumberland’s Hussars, who ‘at first fell into some agitated movements and then took off in the wildest of flights’. Though pursued by Uxbridge’s burly aide Horace Seymour, they refused to return to the battlefield and continued on to Brussels and beyond.20
At about this time and in this area Quartermaster-General Sir William Delancey was on the ridge talking to Wellington when a ricocheting cannonball, or possibly just its wind, hit him and, ‘striking him on his back, sent him many yards over the head of his horse. He fell on his face and bounded upwards and fell again.’ The staff ran to Delancey, who told Wellington to let him die in peace. But his cousin, one of his assistants, had him carried to the rear and eventually to Waterloo, where he was placed in a bed in a cottage.21
Casualties were mounting and the cumulative stress imposed on the troops in its path by the French Grand Battery was beginning to have an effect on their morale. How long could the French keep up the pressure and how long could the troops in Wellington’s line take the punishment that the French artillery was handing out?
58
Sauve Qui Peut!
Waterloo to Brussels, 4–6 p.m.
Behind the allied lines at Waterloo, many of the villagers had gone outside or upstairs to watch the battle. ‘We could see the flashes of the guns and heard quite distinctly the sound of firing, but smoke prevented us from making out the actual fighting. Mama was very frightened,’ recalled the sixteen-year-old son of the schoolmaster. At about three o’clock wounded men began to trudge up the path from Mont Saint-Jean, the cobbled part of the road being choked with wagons full of ammunition and ambulance wagons and ration carts. The wounded came to the boy’s house asking for water and his father stationed him outside with a barrel of watered beer. After a while they heard shouts of ‘Sauve qui peut!’
Tupper Carey, the twenty-two-year-old who was responsible for supplies for the British 2nd Division, had stayed with his headquarters until his general, Sir Harry Clinton, told him to go to the rear and ‘to endeavour to find them out when the action was over and if possible bring up supplies’. He lingered until the troops were ordered forward from Merbe Braine, and then rode back half a mile and joined some fellow commissaries who were watching the battle.
Very soon, ‘the whole position became enveloped in a dense smoke, and nothing could be perceived’. Carey took two of his officers to Waterloo to look for provisions, but they had only just reached the village ‘when another panic, worse than the last, seized the followers of the army and renewed the scenes of the previous evening, which put an end to any transaction of business’. Belgian troops, he said, were ‘deserting their standards, spreading reports as they came along that the enemy was at their heels’. Carey was swept away with the crowd but after a while he decided to go back and looped round Waterloo to see what was really going on.
The road was thronged with Belgian fugitives in whole companies, both horse and foot, intermingled with numerous wounded officers and soldiers giving sad and desponding accounts of the progress of the action, together with numerous prisoners of all ranks and sorts, forming a melancholy exhibition of the usual occurrences in the rear of a general action.
However, these first gloomy impressions were dispelled when
Shouts were heard at a distance, and immediately after a group was seen approaching and producing a singular and exulting contrast to the scene around us. It consisted of a detachment of Scots Greys and Inniskilling Dragoons bringing in two eagles just captured from the enemy. Every man was woun
ded or disabled. One eagle was still on the pole of the standard, and was held up high in the air; the other had been broken off the pole in the scuffle, and was in the possession of two other men, who equally did their utmost to show their trophies to the best advantage. The appearance of the men was not less striking. Some had lost their helmets in the fray, and had handkerchiefs bound round the heads, from which the blood was still trickling; others had their arms in slings, while others had their clothes tattered, as if they had been in personal conflict hand to hand, and been dragged in the mire. The horses appeared to have equally suffered by sabre cuts and other wounds in various parts of the body. In particular, I perceived one as it passed me had had a large portion of flesh torn off his rump by the splinter of a shell.1
These wounded but exultant men mingled with lost, confused and sometimes despondent troops of all nationalities. Men from badly damaged units like Carl Jacobi’s Lüneberg battalion and the brigades of heavy cavalry were heading for Brussels along with members of units with less excuse, like the Duke of Cumberland’s Hussars. In addition, some of those who accompanied the wounded had decided to leave the battlefield; others, such as Tom Morris’s rear-rank man or Lieutenant Gordon of the 18th Hussars, simply ran away.
The surgeons of the Hanoverian militia divisions had set up their hospital in some buildings near the windmill at Mont Saint-Jean, but having seen nothing like this devastation before, the junior surgeons and musicians deserted their posts and joined the rout. Only Best’s senior surgeon and one junior remained to tend to the wounded, while all of Best’s quartermasters and many NCOs and privates retreated with the baggage to Brussels and even Antwerp. The same was doubtless true of other divisions. Later in the afternoon the British evacuated the advanced dressing station that had been established in Mont Saint-Jean farm when it came under heavy fire and its capture by the French seemed imminent, and the walking wounded set off for Brussels.2