Waterloo

by Tim Clayton

  On 23 June the town was illuminated in celebration, with ordinary people putting lights in their windows and others showing off. As the Morning Post reported, ‘The town was last evening in a blaze. The crowds of people at the west end were greater, if possible, than on the first night of lighting up in honour of the Victory of Vitoria.’ All along its façade, the Admiralty acclaimed with large capitals picked out in lights ‘Unconquered Wellington’. The name ‘Wellington’ was displayed at Carlton House, the Earl of Liverpool’s home, the Treasury, the Bank of England and the Horse Guards, while the Horse Guards, Earl Bathurst and the House of Commons correctly added ‘Blucher’. The Ordnance Office was decorated with cannon, and private houses, clubs, theatres and significant shops were also lit up. The prize for originality went to the printseller Rudolph Ackermann, who displayed ‘A most humorous Transparency, about fifteen feet long’, surmounted by a circle of gas lights. In it ‘Bonaparte flying frightened, and pursued by Wellington, is running direct into the arms of Blucher, who is preparing to meet him with an engine of destruction (an English blunderbuss) …’6

  The human cost of the battle was soon known to have been high: ‘this Victory has been purchas’d with a terrible Loss of brave Officers, & many who survive are desperately wounded,’ wrote Lady Lucas on 22 June. The newspapers printed long lists of casualties but they were known to be incomplete. The painter John Constable had two cousins in the battle, and he and his family were desperately anxious about their fate:

  We are full of anxiety about our relations who were in the late dreadfull battle – we can get no account of them whatsoever – beside what are made publick they have a list of 800, killed & wounded, at the War Office which they will not publish. My poor Aunt at Chelsea is almost shaken to peices, with anxiety, but she hopes for the best.

  It turned out that the cousin closer to Constable, who used to advise him on fashion, was dead, killed instantly by a cannonball during a charge. The son of the aunt in Chelsea came through unharmed.

  ‘The late dreadfull battle’ was all the name the conflict had. General Gneisenau put in the first bid to name it in his official report; acclaiming the success of determined cooperation between two allies in which Wellington had held the French and Blücher had moved heaven and earth to come to his support, he explained how finally, by chance, Blücher and Wellington had met at the inn named La Belle Alliance, where they greeted each other as victors. ‘In commemoration of the alliance which exists today between the English and Pussian nations, of the meeting of the two armies and of their confidence in each other, the Field Marshal has asked that the Battle should be known as la Belle Alliance.’7

  The editor of the Morning Post had had the same happy thought, possibly independently, writing on 24 June that ‘the splendid victory of the 18th appears to have been achieved at a place called La Belle Alliance – a happy omen of the success by which the Alliance against rebellion, perjury and perfidy will be crowned. The affair may therefore be correctly called the Battle of La Belle Alliance.’8 He tried again on 27 June, asserting prematurely that Wellington and Blücher had agreed to ‘call this famous battle by so auspicious a title, “the battle of La Belle Alliance”’.

  By then it was clear that the French in their newspapers had already named it the battle of Mont Saint-Jean. And it soon became equally clear that as a name for what the papers still referred to as ‘the tremendous battle’, Londoners preferred the more easily anglicised ‘Waterloo’. On 23 June in the Lords Earl Bathurst referred to the enemy attacking Wellington at Waterloo and that day Lady Lucas noted, ‘Nothing almost can be talk’d of but this Battle (I believe it will be call’d the Battle of Waterloo) which is one of the most glorious, but also one of the most bloody in our Times’.9 Without naming the battle, Wellington’s dispatch had been dated from Waterloo and referred to the British line being formed in a position in front of Waterloo. Other letters were sent from ‘Waterloo’, chiefly because there happened to be a post office there.

  Despite its editor’s efforts, in the Morning Post of 27 June there was a notice headed ‘Battle of Waterloo’, inviting merchants and bankers to attend a meeting to ‘consider the propriety of a public subscription for the relief of the sufferers in the late glorious battles’. A poem, ‘Wellington’s words after the Glorious Victory of Waterloo’, was printed on the same page. It seems that the setting aside of Gneisenau’s noble proposal was attributable chiefly to the adoption by the British public of the most obvious, if least accurate, name on offer.

  74

  Butcher’s Bill

  Most of those left in Brussels stayed up long into the night to find out what had really happened in the end. The Whig politician Thomas Creevey learned of the victory at 4 a.m. from his Belgian friend, into whose house the badly wounded General von Alten had been carried. After a few hours’ rest he was eager for further information and at eleven on a hot summer morning Creevey walked to the Duke’s house; seeing Wellington on the balcony, he was invited to come up. ‘It has been a damned serious business,’ said the Duke. ‘Blücher and I have lost 30,000 men. It has been a damned nice thing – the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.’1

  Later that day Wellington wrote to his brother William:

  It was the most desperate business I was ever in. I never took so much trouble about any Battle, & never was so near being beat.

  Our loss is immense particularly in that best of all instruments British infantry. I never saw the Infantry behave so well.

  The Anglo-German infantry in the centre were heartbroken that so many old comrades, veterans of scrape after scrape in Spain, had not made it to the end of the war. What was left of Alten’s division camped on their positions in the front line, but Major Georg Bäring could round up only 42 of his 400 men:

  Whoever I asked after, the answer was ‘Killed’, or ‘Wounded!’ I freely confess that tears came involuntarily into my eyes at this sad intelligence, and the many bitter feelings that seized upon me. I was awakened from these gloomy thoughts by my friend Major Shaw, Assistant Quartermaster General to our division. I felt myself exhausted to the greatest degree, and my leg was very painful. I lay down to sleep, with my friend, upon some straw which the men had collected together for us: on waking we found ourselves between a dead man and a dead horse!2

  In the morning Shaw and Bäring buried Colonel von Ompteda, one of the bravest and longest-serving opponents of Napoleon, along with many other old friends and comrades.

  For the surgeons, the work went on long after the battle ended. Most of them, like John James of the Life Guards, ‘being fully engaged with my colleagues in a house at the rear with the wounded, of which there were many’, had not seen much of the battle after the beginning:

  Our work behind the lines was grim in the extreme, and continued far into the night. It was all too horrible to commit to paper, but this I will say, that the silent heroism of the greater part of the sufferers was a thing I shall not forget. When one considers the hasty surgery performed on such an occasion, the awful sights the men are witness to, knowing that their turn on that blood-soaked operating table is next, seeing the agony of an amputation, however swiftly performed, and the longer torture of a probing, then one realizes fully of what our soldiers are made. Most of the wounded were sent back to hospitals in Brussels in carts or any sort of transport that could be found. One’s mind shrinks at imagining the sufferings they must have endured on that long, jolting ride, or that weary tramp, and then only to face in so many cases the pain and disgust of a spreading gangrene.3

  From an average battle British surgeons expected 10 per cent casualties: at Waterloo, casualty rates were around three times as high. Figures are muddled – confused by multiple nationalities and several days of fighting – but the best available figures suggest that at Waterloo alone Wellington’s army lost 3500 dead, 3300 missing and 10,200 wounded. About half of the missing subsequently proved to be dead and between one and two thousand of the wounded soon died. A return
of 13 April 1816 stated that of 7687 British and King’s German Legion wounded from all three days of fighting, 856 had died, 854 remained in hospital, 236 had survived amputation, 5068 had rejoined their units, 506 had been discharged and 167 transferred to garrison duties. The total dead was one and a half times the number originally reported.4

  Where the Prussians were heavily engaged, casualty rates were if anything higher. They lost 1200 dead, 1400 missing and 4400 wounded at Waterloo, as well as another 2500 in the fierce fighting at Wavre.

  French losses are impossible to calculate. About 30,000 mustered at Laon, when reviewed by Marshal Soult on 23 June, leaving 40,000-plus unaccounted for, but many of these had deserted. The French press estimated losses at Waterloo at 24–26,000, including 6–7000 prisoners, and these figures are not impossibly low although there may really have been more killed and wounded.5 According to a recent analysis of records of officers killed, the French lost 207 dead and disappeared against the Allies’ 279, which might reasonably suggest that casualties were actually lower in the French army than in the Allied armies.6 It is usually argued that French casualties must have been higher since they spent the day attacking; in most battles the attacking army suffered higher casualties and in the fierce Prussian assaults on Plancenoit they seem to have lost considerably more men than the French. But attacks on Wellington’s line were sporadic and against the cavalry the British infantry usually held its fire. Between attacks there were artillery bombardments and prolonged exchanges of fire between skirmishers, and given the substantial numerical superiority of the French artillery and skirmishers, it is possible that Wellington’s army might have suffered more casualties.

  Two hundred thousand men had fought over an area barely two and a half miles square. That night there might have been as many as 40,000 dead and seriously wounded bodies lying on the battlefield. There cannot have been fewer than 20,000, together with the best part of 10,000 dead and dying horses. Most were concentrated where the fighting had been heaviest, or where the artillery had mown them down, and in some places the dead lay in piles. The positions of allied squares remained marked by lines of red-coated bodies, and not far away lay heaps of horses and French cavalrymen. Behind La Haye Sainte could be seen areas where concentrations of cuirassiers and Life Guards had been cut down. Scavengers closed in on the dead and the living, taking first their valuables and then their clothes, to reduce them to the naked state of the corpses littering the ground, or washed by the heavy rain into the ditches at Quatre Bras.

  The skies had cleared at sunset to produce a cold night of eerie moonlight, raucous with shrieks, shouts and groans. A sergeant of the Scots Greys wrote to his wife, ‘believe me dear Mary, the cries of those poor creatures to God Almighty to take them out of this world frightened the horses.’ Most front-line soldiers, like Tom Morris, were however spared this horror through deafness: ‘the cries and shrieks of the poor creatures would have been dreadful in the night, if we could have heard them; but the continued discharges of the artillery, during the battle, had so affected the drums of the ears, that we could scarcely hear anything for two or three days afterwards, but the roaring of cannon.’7

  On the French gun line, it was time for the French tirailleur who had sought cover behind the wounded Colonel Frederick Ponsonby to take his leave. ‘Towards the evening the fire became much sharper, he told me our troops were moving on to attack and with his last shot he said: Adieu mon ami nous allons nous retirer.’ Soon afterwards a squadron of Prussian cavalry rode over Ponsonby, inflicting several bruises: ‘in general horses will avoid treading upon men’, the cavalryman pointed out, ‘but the field was so covered, that they had no spare space for their feet.’ It grew dark, and Ponsonby now knew they had won the battle. Earlier, he had assumed that he would soon die, but now it seemed easier to breathe and he began to hope for a rescue. He was plundered by Prussians, but then, terribly thirsty, a condition exacerbated by loss of blood, persuaded a British soldier to stay with him.

  In the morning the soldier found a dragoon from Ponsonby’s brigade and the two of them tried to hoist Ponsonby onto a horse; failing in this, the dragoon rode to fetch help. They took Ponsonby to the inn at Waterloo where Dr Hume dressed his wounds and, after a week in the village, he was taken to Brussels.8 His sister, Lady Caroline Lamb, came to look after him and his mother, Lady Bessborough, also travelled to Brussels from Italy to be by his side.

  Thomas Hasker of the King’s Dragoon Guards had fallen near La Haye Sainte. He was quickly plundered by French soldiers of his valuables, trousers and boots, and as night fell a dragoon regiment rode over him. Then he saw fires and tried to stand, but fell again:

  The dead and dying lay thick about me. Hearing two men talking very near, I called to them as well as I could to come and help me. They said they could not for a while. Soon after this two foreigners passed by, to whom I made signs; they came, and raising me up between them, took me to one of the fires, and brought me a surgeon; they afterwards wrapped a cloak about me, and left me there for the night. The next day I was kindly treated by some English soldiers, come to reinforce the army, and was laid, with many more, on some straw near the road side. The following morning several of my comrades were dead, and I prevailed on some one to take the trousers off one of these, which I managed to put on. There was much crying out for water, and some was brought. I requested to be allowed to taste, but finding there was blood in it, I could not drink. In the course of the day I saw two or three wagons standing, and the wounded men getting upon them, I made an effort, and succeeded in mounting one of these, and we rode on towards Brussels. The stench from the bodies of men and horses was horrible. We stopped more than once, when some that had died from the shaking of the wagon were pulled off, and others who had travelled as far as they could on foot were taken up.

  It was common for the British troops to blame the looting and stripping on their Belgian colleagues, who in the words of a fellow King’s Dragoon Guard, ‘were without exception the greatest set of cowards and rascals in the world’. In reality, the practice of instant plundering of the dead was widespread, and another officer noted that next day French watches were five francs apiece and horses also changed hands cheaply. One light dragoon admitted that the moment their pursuit ceased he and some comrades went looting corpses in the moonlight:

  It is one of the worst results of a life of violence that it renders such as follow it selfish and mercenary: at least, it would be ridiculous to conceal that when the bloody work of the day is over, the survivor’s first wish is to secure, in the shape of plunder, some recompense for the risks which he has run and the exertions he has made. Neither does it enter into the mind of the plunderer to consider whether it is the dead body of a friend or of a foe from which he is seeking his booty.

  Indeed, having searched a number of haversacks without worthwhile reward, the dragoon suggested riding off to find the body of a British officer who had been shot dead near some dunghills and whose gold watch and seals he had glimpsed in the twilight. He did locate the corpse but was disappointed to find that it had already been stripped naked. Having passed a pen containing animals, they were looting a farm where the dragoon had found some china and glass and was eating a ham, ‘when a General Officer rode into the farm-yard, and instantly there was a cry from all quarters of “escape as you best can.”’ They fled just before the provost and his guards turned up and rode back to camp, where they told their comrades about the animals they had seen and ‘party after party sallied out’ until they had mutton for all.9

  Anything the front-line troops overlooked was taken by a second army of camp followers or a third of local scavengers – the latter perhaps seizing some recompense for what had earlier been taken from them. It was common to strip bodies of everything but their shirts. With such a high proportion of dead and wounded in this state or even naked by morning, when parties of Dragoon Guards went to identify their dead and search for their wounded they were hard to recognise:

 
; Our officers were only known by the name on the shirts; I daresay many died of cold in the night. Our brigade was so totally cut up that a party could not be mustered that night to go over the ground and consequently the wounded men and officers were left to shift for themselves. Such a scene of misery was never seen before; the action took place about eighteen miles from Brussels, and the road was strewed with dead men the whole way, who had been trying to crawl to the town from the field and had died on the road, some through cold, other through hunger and thirst. For the space of six miles (beginning from the field of battle and going over the road that the French had retreated) the way was literally so strewed with bodies of horses and men that no carriage or horse could pass unless they went considerably to the right or left.10

  Crawling to the road was a risky business since several witnesses noticed both corpses and wounded men by the roadside who had been driven over by vehicles.11

  Sergeant David Robertson of the Gordon Highlanders was another to be confronted by the ghastly aftermath of the battle. Walking out at first light, he was shocked to see ‘the number of the dead was far greater than I had ever seen on any former battlefield. The bodies were not scattered over the ground, but were lying in heaps – men and horses mixed promiscuously together.’ He ‘turned away with disgust from this heart-melting spectacle, and had scarcely arrived at my quarters when every person that could be spared was sent out to carry the wounded to the road side, or any other convenient place where the waggons could be brought to convey them to hospital.’