Waterloo
Page 51
I ran by Colonel Ompteda who cried out, ‘That’s right, Wheatley!’ I found myself in contact with a French officer but ere we could decide, he fell by an unknown hand. I then ran at a drummer, but he leaped over a ditch through a hedge in which he stuck fast. I heard a cry of, ‘The Cavalry! The Cavalry!’ But so eager was I that I did not mind it at the moment, and when on the eve of dragging the Frenchman back (his iron-bound hat having saved him from a cut) I recollect no more.
The cuirassiers hit the right flank and rear of Ompteda’s battalion. They were ridden down and the cuirassiers captured both of the battalion’s colours. Linsingen’s horse was shot and when he had extricated himself from under it he saw his battalion was annihilated, but the 120 remaining horsemen of Arentsschildt’s 3rd Hussars had charged the left flank of the cuirassiers to help the survivors escape. Linsingen spotted Ompteda’s nephews, Christian and Louis, grabbed them, and hauled them back into the hollow way. Just a handful of men joined them there; most had been cut down or captured.
Looking to break through the line, the cuirassiers now took sharp fire from the riflemen near the crossroads. The hussars and cuirassiers fought a short but bloody mêlée 200 paces from Bäring, who watched a duel between a corporal of the hussars and a cuirassier, each of whom was trying to rejoin his comrades after riding through the other line. ‘I feared for the hussar as I saw him bleeding; however, all his training showed above the strength of his opponent, and managed to get on his left side, gave a mighty blow to his face which laid him on the ground and he then rode calmly back to his side while his comrades were cheering and congratulating him.’8
Wheatley remained below in the ditch enclosing the kitchen garden of La Haye Sainte: ‘On recovering my senses, I look’d up and found myself, bareheaded, in a clay ditch with a violent head-ache. Close by me lay Colonel Ompteda on his back, his head stretched back with his mouth open, and a hole in his throat. A Frenchman’s arm lay across my leg.’ Wheatley was utterly dazed. ‘So confused was I that I did not remember I was on the field of Battle at the moment.’ But when he peered over the edge of the ditch and saw the backs of a French battalion, it all came flooding back. He heard a voice say, ‘En voici! En voici!’, and lay back pretending to be dead, holding his breath. ‘Voici un autre bougre!’ A hand tugged at his epaulette. Realising the Frenchman would turn him to rifle his pockets, Wheatley jumped up, but his head swam and he hit the mud before the Frenchman grabbed him, growling ‘Où vas tu, chien?’ and dragged him into the farmhouse.
La Haye Sainte was badly damaged and burned. ‘The floor, covered with mortar bricks and straw, was strewed with bodies of the German infantry and French tirailleurs. A Major in green lay by the door. The carnage had been very great in this place.’
After questioning, Wheatley was led back along the main road, but the British artillery fire down it was so intense that his guard took shelter in the ditch. From there, Wheatley surveyed the British lines, where little red squares held out proudly. But the area where his own battalion had been standing was now alarmingly bare.
64
Guns and Horses
The centre, 5.45–6.45 p.m.
Exactly when La Haye Sainte fell is difficult to pinpoint. The times given by witnesses ranged from 2 p.m. to 6.30 p.m., but a time around 5.30 is most likely. In trying to save the farm, Ompteda’s brigade had effectively ceased to exist, while the centre of Wellington’s army was becoming very weak. Meanwhile, French witnesses emphasised the difficulty of the conquest and the number of attempts they made, but there was still time left in the day for them to exert great pressure on the allied line after its fall.1
Napoleon now ordered the two batteries belonging to the Guard light cavalry to go forward as far as they could and open fire. Once over the crest of the hill the French unlimbered two of their twelve 6-pounders opposite each allied square, and began hitting them with murderous case shot from close enough to hear the allied officers giving frantic orders to close up their ranks.2 Practically all of the Allied artillery in this area had gone by now, and a strong French infantry battalion was advancing against the Bremen and Verden square, while the Nassauers were being menaced by cuirassiers.
The French gunners soon found their aim, and the third volley of canister hit the first Nassau battalion. Major von Weyhers had formed it in a column with a frontage of two companies, nine ranks deep, which made it exceptionally vulnerable to artillery. The Hanoverian and British battalions either side had constantly changed formation from line (under artillery fire) to square (when threatened by cavalry), which kept the men busy and minimised casualties, but Weyhers made no attempt to follow their example. He ordered Friedrich Weiz to take command of the first company, which stood in the front rank along with the grenadier company; its three officers had all just been wounded and its sergeant was dead. The cuirassiers had edged closer and were now barely a hundred yards away on their right flank. Each time the gunners got ready ‘the circular movement of the portfires to the fireholes could clearly be seen, even at a distance, and each time that this occurred, a certain uneasiness or painful sensation could be noticed in our soldiers’ eyes.’ At every shot groups of men were cut down and it was ever harder to get the ranks cleared and closed up.3
Two or three hundred yards to the right, Sergeant Tom Morris surveyed the guns opposite their square apprehensively. His 73rd Regiment had been combined with the 30th Cambridgeshires, and they had spent the afternoon deploying into line to minimise casualties, then forming square to defy two charges from French cuirassiers. Now the guns were up with the horsemen. Ensign Edward Macready of the 30th recognised the gunners as Guard artillery, and ‘had scarcely mentioned this to a brother officer, when two guns unlimbering at a cruelly short distance, down went the portfires and slap came the grape into the square’. The first shots hit true on the Cambridgeshires’ side of the square and the cuirassiers rode for the gaps the guns had torn, but the Cambridgeshires closed them and the horsemen turned aside. It had begun to drizzle again. Through the smoke Morris could just make out the light that the French gunner applied to the touch-hole, and this time the balls hit his side ‘thick as hail’. Morris turned and ‘saw my left hand man falling backwards, the blood gushing from his left eye’. His comrade to his right was screaming: a ball had gone through his right thigh and Morris dragged him inside the square where all their wounded lay groaning. The other was dead: they threw him out for cover, an addition to the barrier of bodies against the French horsemen.4
A howitzer shell came plummeting out of the sky and stuck in the mud a few feet in front. ‘While the fuse was burning out, we were wondering how many of us it would destroy.’ Seventeen of them were killed or wounded, Morris with ‘a piece of rough cast-iron, about the size of a horse-bean, which took up its lodging in my left cheek; the blood ran copiously down inside my clothes, and made me feel rather uncomfortable.’ The company captain was sixty, and before Quatre Bras had been in the army for thirty years without seeing a fight. He was ‘horribly frightened’ and kept going to Morris for ‘a drop of something to keep his spirits up’. The battalion sergeant-major, on the other hand, had fought his way from Portugal to France in the famous Light Brigade, but even he was appalled by this carnage. His face grew deadly pale and he turned to Colonel Harris saying, ‘We had nothing like this in Spain, Sir.’
The cuirassiers advanced again. It was hardly a charge: they trotted slowly through the deep mud and over piles of bodies into the faltering fire of the haggard huddle that was all that remained of Colin Halkett’s brigade. They walked their horses right up to the bayonets, and one of them leaned over his horse and made a thrust at Morris. Since Morris was wedged in and couldn’t avoid the sword he instinctively closed his eyes, but when he opened them again the Frenchman was lying in front of him, sword arm outstretched. A man standing behind Morris had shot him in the groin. His face twisted in agony, the cuirassier tried to raise himself to fall on his sword but it was too long. He couldn’t lift himself high
enough. Reaching out he grabbed a bayonet, wedged its end in the mud, inserted the point under his breastplate and killed himself.5
With his Nassauers on the point of disintegration, Major von Weyhers decided to rush the guns. They had advanced forty paces before the next volley of case shot hit and Weyhers went down severely wounded, along with many others. The charge faltered and then stopped as they tried to fill the gaps. One of Wellington’s aides rode up to order them to move back and an experienced Nassau staff officer took command to direct the retreat, but the leading companies, firing at the approaching cavalry, never heard the order.
In no time the two companies – 140 men at most, led by Weiz and the veteran grenadier officers – were surrounded by cuirassiers. Their line disintegrated immediately. Some ran until they were sabred by pursuers, slashing down on their shoulders from above. Little knots of older grenadiers fought like tigers, ‘hiving’ back to back. A sergeant bayoneted two cuirassiers from their horses though his right eye was stabbed from its socket and hung down over his face, his head lacerated by sabre cuts. In the end the horses trampled and pushed their way among them. Weiz was trapped between two horses and forced to surrender. Passed to the care of a trooper as the French pulled back, he saw his chance to make a run for it and reached the nearest English square, rolling underneath the bayonets that bristled from it.
Colonel Michel Ordener of the 1st Cuirassiers had suggested he might have to kill every single allied infantryman to capture the plateau. Major Georg Bäring of the Legion, now alone somewhere near Mont Saint-Jean farm, was reaching the same conclusion; he remarked that ‘nothing seemed likely to terminate the slaughter but the entire destruction of one army or the other’. His third horse, formerly the property of an English dragoon, had been shot in the head and had fallen dead, trapping Bäring’s right leg beneath it. His men, sheltering with others from the 1st battalion between the banks of the Ohain lane behind him, had thought him dead, and he lay there for some time before one of them crawled up to pull him free. Bäring’s leg was not broken but he couldn’t move it. Nobody would find him a horse, so he limped and crawled to a cottage called La Valette in the direction of Mont Saint-Jean, where an Englishman finally helped him onto a stray mount. In the meantime, the 1st battalion’s adjutant recalled, ‘the attacks of the enemy cavalry and infantry became so severe and followed each other so very quickly that our losses were very large and the battalion melted away.’ Some had occupied La Valette, some fell back to the houses of Mont Saint-Jean, some fled.6
The French cavalry attacks still could not break the allied infantry. Groups of horsemen trotted from square to square testing their resilience and the infantry brought down a man or two. But despite their obstinate resistance to the cavalry, the squares were gradually being destroyed by artillery fire and the sniping of tirailleurs:
On one or two points, squares became, at times, exposed to the fire of musketry; and the 27th regiment was almost entirely destroyed in such a situation, the soldiers in the most dauntless manner stepping into the place where a comrade had stood the instant that he fell. Fortunately, however, the enemy did not possess the skill of combining cavalry and infantry attacks or it is impossible to say how destructive the result might have proved.
Standing in square somewhere in front of Mont Saint-Jean farm, the 27th Inniskilling Fusiliers took terrible casualties: of its 750 men, 478 were killed or wounded. In the centre of their square the pregnant Elizabeth McMullen tended the wounded until she herself was hit in the leg. Her husband Peter lost both arms, but the two of them survived and ‘Frederica McMullen of Waterloo’ was born later in the year in Chelsea.7
The veteran rifleman John Kincaid had fallen back with what was left of his men to the cottage of La Valette north of the Ohain lane:
I felt weary and worn out, less from fatigue than anxiety. Our division, which had stood upwards of five thousand men at the commencement of the battle, had gradually dwindled down into a solitary line of skirmishers. The twenty-seventh regiment were lying literally dead, in square, a few yards behind us … The smoke still hung so thick about us that we could see nothing. I walked a little way to each flank, to endeavour to get a glimpse of what was going on; but nothing met my eye except the mangled remains of men and horses, and I was obliged to return to my post as wise as I went.
I had never yet heard of a battle in which every body was killed; but this seemed likely to be an exception, as all were going by turns.8
On the allied right, things were going much better. This, though, was hardly apparent to the participants; a sergeant of the 1st Guards wrote that ‘the fight, at one time, was so desperate with our battalion, that files upon files were carried out to the rear from the carnage, and the line was held up by the sergeants’ pikes placed against the rear – not for want of courage on the men’s parts (for they were desperate), only for the moment our loss so unsteadied the line.’9 The seven-foot pikes carried by sergeants in the British army were often wielded horizontally to push men back into an even line, but here they were preventing the line from disintegrating under fire.
Wellington now tried to clear the plateau of French cavalry and tirailleurs by ordering three battalions of Brunswickers, the 2nd and 3rd Light and the 3rd Line, to cross the ridge onto the forward slope to the right of Maitland’s Guards, where Byng’s brigade had stood. But they suffered severely from artillery fire and fell back over the ridge, where they formed square against cavalry supported by horse artillery. Trying to advance over the ridge again, they were again forced back.
Wellington tried again, finally bringing forward the best of his reserves. The four small, veteran battalions of the 1st Brigade of the German Legion were lined up on the reverse side of the slope, and Wellington ordered the crack light infantry battalions of Frederick Adam’s British brigade to join them to their left. Adam’s men had spent the first three hours of the battle lying down in front of Merbe Braine; then, during the cavalry charges, they had advanced and formed square behind the junction of the track to Merbe Braine with the Nivelles chaussée, remaining there under artillery fire for another two hours. Now, at last, they were ordered forward.
Passing between the squares of the Brunswickers, they came over the brow of the hill above Hougoumont and into a hail of lead. The Highland Light Infantry could see little but smoke as they approached the brow ‘but all around the wounded and slain lay very thick. We then moved on in column for a considerable way and formed line, gave three cheers, fired a few volleys, charged the enemy and drove them back.’10
The battalions of the Legion approached Hougoumont with their riflemen skirmishing ahead. They attacked a strong line of tirailleurs and drove it into the Hougoumont orchard, but forming square to defend themselves against cuirassiers, found themselves under heavy fire from the boundary hedge and ditch and from artillery to their left. Brigadier Carl du Plat was mortally wounded as his squares advanced. The third battalion of the 95th Rifles shifted from square to skirmish formation and took the tirailleurs on, while to their right the combined German rifle companies stormed the Hougoumont hedges. They were reinforced in the orchard by the second battalion of the German Legion, temporarily driving the French out.11
Just to the east, the second battalion of the 95th Rifles advanced well beyond the Hougoumont boundary. Private John Lewis was to describe this advance to his family in Axminster on 8 July:
My front rank man was wounded by a part of a shell through the foot & he dropt as we was advancing. I covered the next man I saw and had not walked twenty steps before a musket shot came sideways and took his nose clean off, & then I covered another man which was the third; just after that the man that stood next to me on my left hand had his left arm shot off by a nine pound shot just above his elbow & he turned round and caught hold of me with his right hand & the blood ran all over my trousers, we was advancing so he dropt directly.12
During the advance the battalion’s five most senior officers were wounded by snipers or artillery,
and it was a junior captain who ordered them into extended order as skirmishers at the very front, with the artillery of both sides firing over their heads. The main lines were only 450 yards apart – much closer than infantry usually fought – and Lewis was 150 yards in front of the British front line, between 250 and sometimes only 100 yards from the French. Then they were charged by cavalry and succeeded in ‘hiving’ only just in time to present a porcupine of bayonets to their opponents. The French rode up and fired at them with their carbines. At that moment, Lewis wrote, ‘the man on my right hand was shot through the body & the blood run out of his belly & back like a pig stuck in the throat, he drop on his side, I spoke to him, he just said “Lewis I am done” & died directly.’ As Lewis was loading his rifle, a ball hit it just above his hand and bent it. When, as they redeployed into skirmish order, their sergeant was cut in two by a cannonball nearby Lewis went and grabbed his rifle.
The Highland Light Infantry were also charged by French cavalry and hardly had time to form up ready to receive them: ‘The square was only complete in front when they were upon the points of our bayonets. Many of our men were out of place. There was a good deal of jostling, for a minute or two, and a good deal of laughing. Our quartermaster lost his bonnet in riding into the square; got it up, put it on, back foremost, and wore it thus all day.’ Jack Barnett reckoned that the 71st gave a good account of themselves even so, for ‘our men never fired a single shot, till they were nearly touching our bayonets, front rank kneeling, they then gave a volley you heard a scream, & saw them fall like leaves, horses with legs shot off limping about, the few who were not killed, faced about, & our dragoons who were in rear of us, past by us, & cut them down in all directions.’