by Tim Clayton
Wellington’s prayer was answered almost instantly. Suddenly, he heard the sound of fresh artillery on his left wing as, towards 7 p.m. General Ziethen’s vanguard under Karl von Steinmetz – around 5000 infantry, 2500 cavalry and two batteries of guns – threw themselves eagerly into the attack. The skirmishers and fusiliers of the 12th and 24th Regiments led, their guns thundering in support. Unfortunately, it was Wellington’s left wing that they attacked: for the second time that day, Prussians had taken the men of the Orange-Nassau Regiment for Frenchmen.
Prince Bernhard rode over to remonstrate with Ziethen, who told the junior officer somewhat brusquely that he couldn’t help it if Bernhard’s men looked exactly like Frenchmen. The misunderstanding was resolved only after Ziethen’s chief of staff Ludwig von Reiche explained diplomatically to him that the colonel he was talking to was a prince, and Ziethen adapted his tone more appropriately to Bernhard’s social status.
Sergeant Johann Döring of the 1st Orange-Nassau recalled fighting the Prussians until ‘some Prussian officers waved at us with white cloths’, after which the fellow Germans advanced together into what for Döring was, though exhilarating, the hottest fighting of the day. He recalled a Prussian Landwehr NCO running by, shouting ‘We will yet make them smoke some Prussian tobacco!’ before he fell wounded.1
The united forces quickly took the château of Fichermont and the hamlet of Smohain as the French pulled back, the Prussians turning Fichermont into their field hospital. Meanwhile Reiche established his two batteries on a height behind Smohain which commanded most of the battlefield. The artillerymen were reluctant to fire in case they hit their own side; Ziethen insisted that the noise that announced their presence was important – they must fire, whatever they hit.2
There was more confusion. Nassauers defending Papelotte, puzzled by the sudden, inexplicable disappearance of French skirmishers, advanced to La Haye, but found upon being driven back to the road between it and Papelotte that there were skirmishers behind them, and in repelling these realised that they were Prussians. Only after an officer scampered across in the cover of a sunken lane to tell the Prussians they were on the same side did the Nassauers join the Prussian skirmishers. Together they advanced towards La Belle Alliance.3
Ziethen’s appearance at last released Sir Hussey Vivian’s hussar brigade, ordered to remain on the wing until the Prussians arrived to relieve him, to take part in the battle. He and his men had been itching to get involved. Vivian’s men were among the few Britons who were aware that the Prussians had already been engaged with the French for some hours further south, as one of them reported:
We could … perceive that the right of the French was engaged in, and opposed by, a heavy cannonade on their right rear, which could only be another body of Prussians, although from the distance, and dusk, which at this time was commencing, we could discern nothing with the eye but the flashes and smoke of their cannon, and the sound even extended beyond where we could see, and it was evident that the French were engaged in rear of the heights on which they showed their front to us.4
Napoleon too was straining his ears to work out what was happening out of sight. As Wellington’s troops fell back, he and his staff had moved forward more than half a mile to La Belle Alliance. He knew all too well about the fire from Bülow’s artillery that Vivian’s men could hear but not see against Plancenoit behind his eastern flank, where the Prussian assault on the village was under way, but the new gunnery opening up to the north-east was a mystery. Being an optimist by instinct, he hoped it was Marshal Grouchy arriving behind the Prussians, for it appeared that the buildings around Smohain were being shelled and attacked from the rear.
General Drouot, who was by Napoleon’s side, reported in Paris soon afterwards that ‘towards seven o’clock we perceived in the distance towards our right, a fire of artillery and musketry. It was not doubted but that Marshal Grouchy had followed the movement of the Prussians, and was come to take part in the victory. Cries of joy were heard along our whole line.’5 While Napoleon’s retelling of a battle was notoriously untrustworthy, Drouot was regarded as a model of probity, so there is every reason to suppose that when the French staff saw the fire of Ziethen’s column, which was initially directed against the Nassauers on the allied flank, they genuinely entertained hopes that this was Grouchy attacking the Prussians in the rear.
It was this belief that decided Napoleon around seven o’clock to launch the remaining battalions of the Guard in a final attack to break through Wellington’s line. Drouot reported that the Emperor saw this as the decisive moment: to shore up the morale of the exhausted French troops that he required to make a final attack, moreover, he ordered his aides to spread the word that Grouchy had arrived and the battle was won. Lieutenant Martin of the 45th, whose depleted regiment had been skirmishing with men from Picton’s division, reported that the news of Grouchy’s arrival reinvigorated everybody and their enthusiasm burned anew with the certainty of imminent victory.
In doing this Napoleon has often been accused of callous hypocrisy, but he was not lying – he hoped and wanted to believe that Grouchy had come. The French were very close to breaking through above La Haye Sainte and that part of the line would collapse once the British realised they had French troops behind their flank. What was needed now was a last crushing effort in the area where Bachelu and Foy had been repelled.
With this in mind, Napoleon initiated the last part of his plan: the attack of the Guard. Unfortunately after Prussian intervention he barely had half of them left. He led forward the ten remaining battalions straight at Wellington’s own position.6 The breakthrough had to be achieved quickly, for the news from the right was not good. Several aides rode in saying that the Prussians were ‘penetrating the right wing of the French army’. Napoleon dismissed them with much ill-humour: ‘“Be off,” said he to one of them, “you are frightened!”’7 D’Erlon’s battered corps advanced again and shouts of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ rang out from the right where he was, to the left at Hougoumont, while in the centre the Guard marched forward to attack.
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Plancenoit
The southern sector of the eastern flank, 6.30–8 p.m.
Friedrich von Bülow had deployed forty-eight guns in front of his 16th Brigade to bombard Plancenoit before making an assault on the village, where five battalions from Lobau’s corps had made their stand. Launched from the east, the attack was led by Johann von Hiller, who formed six battalions into three assault columns. On the right were the musketeers of the 15th Regiment; in the centre those of the 1st Silesian Landwehr; and on the left the two fusilier battalions led by Major von Keller, which made an outflanking march to the south through the woods on the far side of the flooded Lasne stream. Hiller’s cavalry was stationed behind the village with orders to turn back any troops who were absconding.
Preceded by skirmishers, the Prussian columns attacked at assault pace into a hail of canister and musketry. The 15th pushed along a hollow lane leading to the church and Hiller captured the churchyard as well as a howitzer, two cannon, ammunition wagons and several hundred men. Further south, the Silesians reached the western fringe of the village but there met reinforcements from the Young Guard, sent in by General Drouot.
The fighting around the church was intense, for the French were dug in behind hedges and walls and packed into the houses and farms on the far side of the open space where the church and its walled graveyard stood. As Hiller tried to fortify the churchyard, using pews from the church as firing platforms, shots were exchanged at a range of fifteen to thirty paces, a range at which even muskets were deadly accurate. A bullet drilled through one lieutenant’s head in the instant he looked over the tall churchyard wall. Men were using ramrods as weapons and trying to pull the muskets out of the hands of those who poked them over the wall. One of the French regiments engaged in the defence was the 5th Line, including the battalion that had refused to shoot Napoleon and had instead joined him when sent to intercept him in the Alps in March. During
their defence of Plancenoit, twenty-two of their officers were killed or wounded, including the colonel and one battalion commander. Of the two battalion commanders of the 15th Regiment, one was shot dead and the other severely wounded by shrapnel.
Despite such losses, General Guillaume Duhesme’s crack light infantry succeeded in forcing back the Silesians, who sent Hiller a message saying that their men couldn’t hold on in the western side of the village. Hiller held the churchyard long enough to allow them to fall back, but when a Young Guard assault column reached the open space around the churchyard, Hiller himself pulled out. The Prussians were pursued out of the village and General Domon’s chasseurs threatened to surround them and cut them off, but Prussian artillery drove off the French cavalry and a squadron of Silesian Hussars chased the pursuing French infantry back to the houses. The Prussian fusiliers had succeeded in turning the village, but fell back when the main body retreated.1
The Prussian infantry rallied and the 15th, reinforced by four battalions from the 11th Silesians and the 1st Pomeranian Landwehr, launched a second attack, the fusiliers again infiltrating the wooded Lasne valley to get round the French southern flank. The Prussians stormed in, splitting up among the houses, and Lieutenant von Schätzel led Wilhelm von Rahden’s company up a side alley to the far side of the village. Stopping at the last cottages, they found themselves in sight of the Charleroi chaussée and cheered wildly, for they could see the road packed with French fugitives running from the fight with the English. Behind them the fighting continued fiercely, but after a long struggle, the Prussians took the whole of Plancenoit except the churchyard and a few houses round it and forced the Young Guard to retreat.
General Pelet of the Old Guard chasseurs could see Young Guard fugitives emerging from the village and sent a small detachment to rally them. When Drouot ordered him to retake Plancenoit and hold the place at all costs, he sent one company forward to make an initial attack, and followed with the remaining 450 men of the first battalion of the 2nd Chasseurs of the Old Guard. Seeing these men in bearskins coming down from their hill, Schätzel decided to pull back and he and Rahden took their men back to the centre of the village. Units were all mixed up there, Silesians like them with yellow collars, West Prussians with red, Pomeranians with white.
As the chasseurs entered the village Pelet met General Duhesme, who was being carried away on his horse, shot in the head. His tirailleurs and voltigeurs had scattered in small groups and most were falling back. Pelet promised to stop the enemy, while the Young Guard officers promised in turn to rally their men behind him and support his attack.
As he approached the centre of Plancenoit, however, Pelet found his vanguard retreating towards him, pursued by Silesians storming up a street. The Silesians, Rahden among them, charged on confidently, but Pelet had a trick up his sleeve. Suddenly, to Rahden’s astonishment, anguished cries of ‘Fall back!’ came from behind his leading group. Pelet had sent his 3rd Company to charge the Silesian column in the flank with their bayonets, and this incursion threatened to cut the Silesians off. Their commander was shot dead and a dozen French grenadiers went for the standard, but its bearer, Sergeant Schmidt, who had saved Rahden’s life the year before, drove them off and pursued them down the lane. The rest of the Silesians scattered, desperate to save themselves. There was no way of rallying them within the village and the choice for Rahden and Schätzel lay between capture and running for it. They ran, Schätzel a few paces ahead, yelling ‘Quick! Quick, dear Rahden!’ As they passed the church Rahden was shot in the hip, his boot filled with blood and he felt himself swaying. The enemy seemed to be everywhere, cutting off every route. Rahden threw himself into a house where he found men from his battalion with a wounded captain. They all left together and within five minutes they were out in the fields.
Once in the open, Rahden passed a lieutenant he knew with his arm in a sling, at the head of twenty of his tirailleurs, rallying men round him. Rahden was limping across a meadow when he suddenly sank up to his knees in boggy mud. He couldn’t push himself out and nobody heard his shouts. Three or four voltigeurs spotted him, taking pot shots at him as they closed in. Bullets whizzed by before he saw a Prussian officer with some men and shouted. The very last of them paused, turned and ran over. He shot the nearest voltigeur, reloaded, and fired after the others, who were now running off. Hauling Rahden out of the mire, he hoisted him onto his back, carried him a hundred paces to the nearest bush and laid him down behind it. Then he got a bandage out of his knapsack and bound Rahden’s wounds, before helping him to the casualty station where a sergeant was looking after the wounded. Rahden was carried to the field hospital that the Prussians had established in the château at Fichermont; there he found an old friend whose left foot had been smashed by grapeshot.2
General Pelet found that each company that he sent into the attack split up and started to skirmish, and following every charge his men dispersed in pursuit of the enemy. He ordered a captain to guard the church but he led his men too far forward, to the very edge of the village, opposite a wood where the Prussians were, and the Young Guard voltigeurs who followed went charging off into the fields. Pelet set up a base in the churchyard, but found himself pinned down there under effective fire from Prussian snipers still concealed in the surrounding houses no more than thirty yards away. Meanwhile the Prussian artillery laid down a barrage of shellfire which set some of these houses and barns alight.
As at Ligny, the fighting within the village was bloody and merciless, animated by mutual hatred. Having found, it was rumoured, some Frenchmen who had been hanged by Prussians, the French were cutting the throats of any Prussians that they caught alive. Pelet tried to stop the murder but saw one Prussian dispatched as he approached. An officer pleaded for his life, speaking of his French friends. Pelet took him into his personal protection, along with a few others, keeping them behind his mare, Isabelle, and then handing them over to his sappers, who were to answer for them to him.
At first General von Bülow believed that he had been attacked by the whole of the Old Guard, but it did not take him long to form a more correct estimate of the enemy’s numerical weakness. Moreover, he himself had further reinforcements on the way. Towards 7.30 p.m. the head of Pirch’s II Corps marched onto the battlefield, cavalry in the lead, followed by Tippelskirch’s 5th Brigade which was ordered to march to Plancenoit, easily identified in the dusk by the smoke and flames rising from it. To Ludwig Nagel’s disappointment, the musketeer battalions of Lützow’s Freikorps were told to stay at Saint-Lambert as a rearguard; this ‘vexed us bitterly, for we were burning to fight; but many regiments met the same fate.’ Franz Lieber’s brigade followed Tippelskirch’s but the Colberg Regiment did not get into the fight either, merely gaining a distant view of the battle. Excluding Ziethen’s troops, Blücher now had some 44,000 men and 104 guns deployed against Napoleon’s right wing.
Pelet meanwhile was taking off his greatcoat in order to display himself as a general officer, riding Isabelle here and there, trying to bluff that his strength was greater than it was. Then, at the moment when he felt most pressed, a company of Baron Golzio’s battalion of the 2nd Grenadiers appeared from nowhere. Golzio with his 545 veteran grenadiers had been sent to support Pelet with orders from the Emperor himself, who had ridden into their square and instructed Golzio not to fire a shot but to go straight in with the bayonet. Having driven a Prussian battalion from the gardens around the village, Golzio had then sent one company to help Pelet, keeping the other three companies in reserve. Since the grenadiers were able to maintain better discipline than the chasseurs, Pelet now used them wherever a bayonet charge was needed. For the moment, he had Plancenoit under control: he was being bombarded with explosives, there were fires burning all around and he was surrounded by snipers, ‘but it made no difference. I held on like a demon. I couldn’t bring my men together but they were all under cover. They brought down murderous fire which kept the Prussians pinned down. They would have silenced the sharps
hooters completely had there not been so very many of them.’3
Meanwhile Keller’s battalions of Prussian fusiliers had manoeuvred round the village through the woods that bordered the Lasne and were ready to break out towards the main road. Napoleon ordered the 1st Grenadiers of the Old Guard under General Petit to form square, the first battalion near Rossomme, the second half a mile south on high ground dominating the lane from Plancenoit to the hamlet of Maison du Roi. Initially Petit’s grenadiers had had a quiet time, waiting in reserve; then, after the attack on Plancenoit began, he sent a hundred grenadiers under the adjutant in skirmish order to contain the Prussian skirmishers lapping round the village. But there turned out to be far more Prussians than he had imagined: they ambushed the adjutant, shot his horse and peppered him with musket balls. Only one of these hit, but he was so badly wounded by it that the Prussians left him for dead in a ditch. He lay there for six days before somebody found him.
A few hundred yards further south, the farm of Le Caillou, where Napoleon had established his palace, was defended by 653 veterans of the first battalion of the 1st Chasseurs under a Dutchman, Johan Coenraad Duuring from Rotterdam, charged with guarding the Emperor’s possessions. For most of the afternoon they had sat around idly, although between two and three o’clock Duuring was alerted to the existence of French fugitives and mounted up with the Gendarmerie d’Elite to stop them, round them up and return them to the battlefield. After an hour the stream of fugitives had dried up and everything became very quiet: a number of British cavalry officers were brought in as prisoners, and then French artillery ammunition wagons and even some guns came past, claiming they had run out of ammunition. Some ammunition wagons were empty, some were not and Duuring parked them either side of the road.
Napoleon’s valet Louis Marchand was waiting at Le Caillou anxiously. When he left the front line, all had been looking good, but recently Mameluk Ali had ridden in to fetch something for the Emperor and had told him hastily, ‘It’s going badly. We’ve just seen masses of troops in the distance. At first we thought it was Marshal Grouchy and there were shouts of joy, but it is Blücher’s corps, and we have no news of Grouchy.’ Duuring advised the Grand Equerry, Albert Fouler, to get the treasure loaded, harnessed up and ready to move. Marchand packed up Napoleon’s bed and locked up the portable treasury which contained 100,000 francs in gold and 300,000 in banknotes.4