Waterloo

by Tim Clayton

  The defenders had fought hard and the Young Guard was almost wiped out in the defence of Plancenoit. Having started the day with 3800 men, a week after the battle it was able to muster only 598: doubtless many had deserted, but casualties at Plancenoit were high.

  The 1st Regiment of Grenadiers, together with the seamen and sappers, retired some distance in squares, covered by their tirailleurs. As they passed Le Caillou they were joined by the remnant of Pelet’s troops from Plancenoit. They came under fire from a battery and from Major von Keller’s Prussian fusiliers around the building, but once past this threat they were not closely pursued.

  A part of the French army got away in good order, but by gambling everything in search of a victory the bulk of the army had been engulfed in catastrophe. The damage was greatest among Napoleon’s artillery, much of which was lost on the battlefield. At this stage, few could assess the extent of the victory; the allies merely knew that they had won. After such a long and anxious struggle they celebrated accordingly, warmly congratulating each other, whatever they might have said soon afterwards when rivalry set in and embittered them.

  As the Foot Guards and Adam’s brigade marched past La Belle Alliance, the band of a regiment of Prussian cavalry played ‘God Save the King’.12 Wellington rode on with Felton Hervey and a small knot of other unwounded staff, including Basil Jackson, as far as Maison du Roi, the village at the southern end of which the farm of Le Caillou, Napoleon’s burning headquarters, was situated, and then turned back. As they rode north, said Jackson, ‘a group of horsemen were seen crossing the fields to our right; on seeing them the Duke left the road to meet them. They proved to be Marshal Blücher and his suite.’ Wellington and Blücher shook hands and embraced, and Blücher said ‘Mein lieber Kamerad! Quelle affaire!’13 They rode back together to La Belle Alliance, where Prussian cavalry greeted them with a fanfare of trumpets. Wellington handed over responsibility for the pursuit to Blücher and the two heroes parted, Wellington for Waterloo and Blücher to follow his pursuing cavalry along the road to Genappe.

  ‘Darkness shrouded the spectacle of the dead and dying near La Haye Sainte,’ continued Jackson, ‘but the frequent snorting of our horses as they trod between them showed that the ground, so fiercely contested during the day, was very thickly strewed with bodies of the brave.’14

  72

  The Pursuit

  Charleroi road, 9 p.m.–morning

  There had already been sufficient casualties from ‘friendly fire’ for it to appear preferable for just one army to undertake the pursuit of the French. Blücher was eager: many of his men had been marching for hours – even days – with no chance to kill Frenchmen. They were better motivated than the remains of the battle-weary, if euphoric, allied cavalry, so after discussing the issue with Blücher, Wellington told his cavalry to stop and make camp. They pursued no further than the level of Plancenoit.

  It had already become too dark to be sure who was friend and who was foe. Sir Hussey Vivian was at the head of the 1st Hussars of the German Legion when they almost fought the 11th Light Dragoons; they were in the process of charging each other when they recognised each other’s cheers as being performed in British army style. By then Vivian’s brigade had improved its bank balance by capturing nearly 200 horses.1 Prussian cavalry scoured the country close to the road to Charleroi, sabreing and spearing those they caught up with, and many wounded men were killed in this way. Their object was to spread fear and harry the French retreat to prevent any rally.

  The fusiliers of the Prussian 2nd Regiment meanwhile stormed Le Caillou and set it on fire, and if Larrey and other survivors can be believed, they and their cavalry did their best to massacre the surgeons in the hospital. And in the Bois de Chantelet below Le Caillou, General Gneisenau found Major von Keller with his fusiliers. Keller said that his men were still ready for anything, so Gneisenau led them along the chaussée after the retreating French with a drummer beating incessantly and horns blowing. At the very head of the column was a lieutenant of the 15th Regiment, with a hornist, two sergeants and twenty fusiliers; two hundred yards behind marched a vanguard of two or three hundred men and behind them came Gneisenau leading the main body.

  The 1st Grenadiers of the Imperial Guard were well ahead of the Prussian fusiliers. Once they had passed Le Caillou they were not closely pursued, and so they formed column and marched to Genappe. Ney rode with them, along with a small remnant of the light cavalry of the Guard, including generals Lefèbvre-Desnouëttes and Lallemand, while General Guyot had retreated in good order with several hundred of his Horse Grenadiers and the Empress’s Dragoons, together with both of his batteries of guns.

  At Genappe, however, they found the way forward blocked. Panic had seized the artillery train and they had cut the traces and abandoned their guns, leaving them piled at the edge of the village and by the side of the road. There was utter chaos at this bottleneck: the wounded were crushed under the wheels of vehicles and people fought each other to force a way along the narrow road, blocked by abandoned vehicles, that wound towards the little stone bridge over the Dyle. There was no need for men on foot or horseback to cross here – the Dyle, swollen as it was, was still little more than a stream, and sensible people bypassed the town and crossed it elsewhere – but rumours of pursuit produced panic. More determined soldiers, perhaps inspired by some of the Old Guard generals, had barricaded the road and determined to defend the place. They held the barricades until they heard the loud music heralding Gneisenau’s approach, when in the ensuing confusion they fled with the rest.2

  When Pelet’s men were fired on from a barricade at the edge of the village, the grenadiers left the chaussée and marched across the fields towards Charleroi. Guyot decided that he could take his guns no further and abandoned them, judging it impossible to carry them round the village. During the night, as they tried to make their way by narrow lanes, even the grenadiers broke up into groups of a hundred or so.

  Most French troops had passed Genappe by this stage. Corporal Louis Canler had marched through with wagon loads of wounded from the hospital at Le Caillou, which had been evacuated before the Prussians burned it. Canler walked across the fields to Charleroi. Lieutenant Jacques Martin had limped round the town, helped and guided by a Belgian sergeant from his battalion who took him to the bridge at Ways la Hutte and then on to Quatre Bras; there, he believed, he glimpsed the Emperor warming himself by a campfire in the woods.

  Stumbling along at the head of the retreating French column were British prisoners. Friedrich Lindau and the others who had been captured at La Haye Sainte were marched along the chaussée for three hours and then pushed into a dark barn. When Frenchmen burst in to rob them, Lindau escaped in the confusion. He came across a well and begged water from a French Guardsman, who turned out to be German and pointed him towards the Prussians. Lindau and a comrade overpowered and killed a lone Frenchman, then hid in a chicken shed and in the morning found their way to a patrol of Prussian lancers who took them to Genappe; from there they eventually found Major Bäring.

  Edmund Wheatley had been captured too and was marched through Genappe with French wounded. The sights he saw left him with a lasting revulsion for war and ideas of honour:

  Against the wall of a Garden I saw a foot soldier sitting with his head back and both his eyeballs hanging on his cheeks, a ball having entered the side of his head and passed out at the other. Nothing could equal the horror of his situation. His mouth was open, stiff and clotted, clear blood oozed out of his ears and the purulent matter from his empty sockets emitted a pale stream from the vital heat opposed to the evening cold.

  After being briefly shut up with some wounded British Life Guards, he was marched on. The road became choked and the sense of disorder increased. Between Genappe and Quatre Bras he was robbed of his boots and epaulette and forced to walk barefoot on the road; at Quatre Bras, they walked over the naked corpses still lying on the field. Wheatley ‘felt a temporary relief to my feet in treading on throug
h soft jellied lumps of inanimate flesh. The French assured me they were all Prussians.’ His only drink had been brandy and he felt feverish. Having marched all night he reached Charleroi at dawn:

  Here at the entrance, my two guards lay on the heaped up ruins of a delapidated [sic] house and fell asleep exhausted, while I sat shrivelled up with cold and misery, my feet black with dirt and bruises, viewing the passing troops, pale with fatigue and exertion, entering the town.

  A Grenadier of the Imperial Guard sat himself by me, struck with my unhappy appearance, and, asking me if I spoke French, pulled out a small memorandum book which he told me he took from an Hanoverian Officer whom he had killed and asked me its contents; but I found only the names of his Company. He then took out the pencil and begged of me to write some recommendation of him that it might be of use if ever he fell into our hands so, taking the pencil, I scrawled the following words: ‘I Edmund Wheatley, Lieutenant in the German Legion, write this on a bundle of bricks, June 19th 1815 at the entrance of Charleroi in the middle of the retreating French Army. Cold, wounded, barefooted, bareheaded, like a dog in a fair, every one buffets me ad libitum. If the bearer, named Riviere, is in your power, prove to him how differently an Englishman can treat a poor unhappy victim of human instability. Signed, E Wheatley.3

  Several days later Wheatley rejoined the army.

  Back at Genappe, Napoleon’s coachman Jean Hornn had found the road barricaded. He had tried to drive round the village but soon became stuck. Minutes afterwards Prussian lancers and fusiliers arrived. They bayoneted the postillion and lead horses, and Major von Keller himself cut down Hornn. Hornn was unarmed and thought they would take him prisoner, but instead ‘they drove their lances into his back, shot him in the legs, and in the right arm; cut off two of his fingers, and having inflicted ten wounds upon him, he fell senseless and was left for dead.’4

  Gneisenau’s vanguard stormed the barricade at the edge of the town and the rest of their battalion followed. They captured some two thousand Frenchmen there, including many wounded, and eighty guns. Keller believed that Napoleon had escaped from his carriage just as he captured it, but in reality Bonaparte had not been in the carriage – he had ridden away across country; according to Flahaut, he was very tired and would have fallen from the saddle had Flahaut not been by his side.

  The Emperor stopped at Quatre Bras, where four or five thousand naked corpses glowed palely in the moonlight. He had been hoping to find Girard’s division, to whom Soult had earlier sent an order, but they were not there. They paused around a campfire in the woods and Soult wrote to Grouchy, who was still trying to break through the Prussian lines at Wavre, telling him of the defeat and ordering him to cross the lower Sambre; it took the officer Soult sent nine hours to find the marshal. With Gneisenau still pressing, they pushed on through Gosselies.5 Johan Duuring with the 1st Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard took a route away from the chaussée in the direction which he thought the Emperor had taken. He got lost, but was led in the direction of Fleurus, reaching it at dawn.6

  General Gneisenau halted his men beyond the bridge at Genappe and together they sang Luther’s German Te Deum, ‘Herr Gott dich loben wir!’ When Gneisenau asked them to go on, the men answered with joyous cries of ‘Vorwärts! Vorwärts!’ At a point just beyond Quatre Bras the Prussians caught up with the headquarters baggage train, whose seven carriages, led by those of Napoleon’s valet Louis Marchand and cabinet secretary Pierre Fleury de Chaboulon, had been held up by an abandoned howitzer and a queue of wagons near Frasnes. Prussian cavalry fell on the rear of the column, sabreing the drivers and ransacking the coaches. Marchand stuffed 300,000 francs in notes into the front of his uniform and abandoned the rest. He, Fleury de Chaboulon and Maret, duc de Bassano escaped ‘by a miracle’, running for it on foot. They were terrified, since ‘the Prussians, in determined pursuit of us, treated the miserable creatures that they caught with unparalleled barbarity.’7

  The pursuit ended at the alehouse called L’Empereur south of Frasnes, where Gneisenau spent the night, giving Napoleon’s treasure to the men with him.8 The booty in banknotes, gold, silver and diamonds was huge. Fusiliers stuffed their knapsacks and pockets with riches: an NCO of the 2nd Regiment made 1000 Reichsthalers from selling booty and another found 500 gold Napoleons.9 At first the soldiers only went for the gold, rejecting the silver and assuming the diamonds were glass: initially, in the Prussian camp five diamonds were trading for a gold coin. One fusilier discovered a gold box full of jewels and wanted to throw them away but an experienced sergeant recognised that they were the real thing and bartered for them, making the biggest fortune of the night.

  Other Prussian units had followed Gneisenau. Hans von Ziethen led his cavalry as far as Maison du Roi, then let Röder take them on and set up camp.10 Blücher rode on as far as Genappe before stopping for the night at the Roi d’Espagne. There he found the mortally wounded General Guillaume Duhesme, who had been captured on the road, and had his own surgeon do all he could for the wounded Frenchman. The comte de Lobau, who had also been wounded and captured, visited Duhesme before he died at the inn the following night. He was buried at Ways church.11

  In the Roi d’Espagne, Blücher wrote to his wife: ‘Together with my friend Wellington, I have brought Napoleon’s dance to an end. His army is completely routed and the entirety of his artillery, caissons, baggage and equipage is in my hands. I have just been brought the insignia of all the different decorations he had won, found in a box in his carriage.’12 Here, where the staff had witnessed so much of the drama of the four-day campaign, it seemed a fitting place to note its conclusion.

  73

  Victory! Victory!

  By 2 a.m. the Prince of Orange at Brussels had recovered sufficiently from his wound to write a triumphant letter to his mother and father: ‘Victory! Victory! My very dear parents, we have had a magnificent affair against Napoleon today. It was my corps which principally gave battle and to which we owe the victory, but the affair was entirely decided by the attack which the Prussians made on the enemy’s right. I am wounded by a ball in the left shoulder, but only slightly.’1 It was a vainglorious letter, but the claim that his corps had borne the brunt of the battle was not without substance.

  Wellington returned, exhausted, to his inn at Waterloo towards midnight. Dismounting from Copenhagen, he spotted his cook James Thornton in the shadowy entrance passage and said, ‘Is that you? Get dinner.’ Early that morning Thornton had been ordered to prepare a supper and had bought food from the market at Brussels; he had then packed it in baskets with wine, sent it to Waterloo and followed with Wellington’s butler. While the battle raged, Thornton had cooked.

  They dined upstairs because Wellington’s aide Alexander Gordon was ‘lying with his leg cut off in the dining room’. The table was laid for the entire staff with guests, but their numbers were very much thinned by casualties. The Spanish representative, Alava, said that each time the door opened the Duke looked up enquiringly.2

  At about half past three Delancey’s deputy quartermaster-general called, asking for movement orders for the troops. The war had not suddenly ended with this battle and daily military routine continued. Dr Hume woke Wellington, naked but still covered in grime, to tell him that Gordon had just died, before giving a resumé of other casualties. Wellington wept and said, ‘Well, thank God, I don’t know what it is like to lose a battle; but certainly nothing can be more painful than to gain one with the loss of so many of one’s friends.’ He told Fitzroy Somerset, ‘I have never fought such a battle, and I trust I never shall fight such another.’3 He was right: Waterloo was to prove his biggest, toughest and last fight.

  The Duke wrote again to Lady Frances Webster to tell her that she was perfectly safe because he had won a great victory; just about all his staff had been wounded but the finger of Providence had preserved him. And he began, very tired, and knowing little of what had happened out of his own sight, to write a dispatch to the government. At dawn he took it to Brussel
s to finish and gave the honour of carrying it to London to Major Harry Percy.4

  The first man in London to discover the outcome of the battle of Waterloo was Nathan Rothschild, the banker who had supplied the Duke with twenty-five million francs to pay for the campaign. But he didn’t hear the news from Harry Percy. Rothschild’s own agents had moved faster than Wellington’s envoy. Rothschild had already sold on the stock exchange, apparently on the news of the retreat following Quatre Bras. The likelihood that his pessimism was well-informed caused others to follow his example, but then, when the price had fallen sufficiently low, he bought, making up to £7000.

  Percy disembarked at Broadstairs on 21 June and took an express coach for the metropolis. Rumbling into town with an eagle sticking out of each window, he found nobody at the offices in Horse Guards Parade, but was directed to Grosvenor Square where Earl Bathurst, the war minister, was dining. From there, he, Bathurst and the Prime Minister, the Earl of Liverpool, went to the merchant Edmund Böhm’s house in St James’s Square where the Prince Regent was attending a ball. Percy laid his eagles at the Prince’s feet, and the Prince promoted him to lieutenant-colonel, bursting into tears at his account of the casualties.

  ‘After two Days Impatience for Accounts from Abroad, last Night Major Percy arriv’d from Ld. Wellington with an Account of a glorious but terrible & bloody Victory gain’d on Sunday June 18th,’ wrote the well-connected Lady Lucas. ‘My Servants heard it from Ld. Bathurst’s Servants in the Morning.’5 At ten o’clock on 22 June guns boomed out in Green Park and from the Tower to announce the victory. Wellington’s dispatch was published in a London Gazette Extraordinary and in the newspapers the following day. It was a rushed piece of work, followed by corrections, and the press published every other shred of information they could lay their hands on.