Went the Day Well?

by David Crane

  It was not as if Wilkie was alone in his evasions – no one, shilling programme in hand, admiring The Reluctant Departure need give a thought to the misery of the emigrants waiting in Glasgow slums for their passage to Canada that Sunday – and wherever Farington looked he would have found the same discreetly comforting reassurance. Across the south of England this Sunday young mothers and their bastard children were being shunted on from parish to parish, but here was an art in which poverty, inequalities and tragedy – a country workhouse, a drowned fisherman, a punished schoolchild, an evicted tenant – could be safely contained and enjoyed within the humorous or sentimentalising conventions of genre painting.

  Idle Boys … Infant Gleaner … A lady presenting to a cottager an edition of the Sacred Scriptures, given by the Bible Society … The Poor house, Fitzhead, Somersetshire … it says it all that such subjects could hang alongside Miss Geddis’s Children of Quality, or Portraits of the Grandchildren of Sir G. Osborne, Bart, and only reinforce rather than undermine the social order. It is possible that the odd liberal-minded visitor might wonder how many men and women had been hanged so that the Sir John Silvester portrait might also hang, but he might as well have expected to see Géricault’s basket of severed heads or Goya’s horrors of war as anything that intruded a note of ugly reality into the self-confident Britain that in portrait after portrait stared down on him from the Academy’s walls.

  ‘Portraits! Portraits!! Portraits!!!’ protested one critic of the obsession of the age – portraits of wives and children, portraits of grandchildren, portraits of politicians and statesmen, of gentlemen, self-portraits, group portraits, family portraits, domestic, public and royal portraits, portraits of favourite spaniels and broodmares, portraits of hound packs, portraits of ponies, portraits of mules – but he might as well have held his peace. Benjamin Haydon might complain that portraiture was a debasing of the real business of High Art, but the Academy was a market as well as an exhibition, and this is what Britain wanted and was willing to pay for and pay to see: its own image in its day of triumph reflected back at it as if it could go on unchanged for ever.

  And if that triumph now hung in the balance – across the Channel, Sir Thomas Picton, full of robust life in Beechey’s portrait here at the Academy, lay dead with a neat hole from a musket ball through his hat – a visitor to London this Sunday might be forgiven for thinking they were right. In Albemarle Street, in the famous room over John Murray’s bookshop, George Ticknor had spent an agreeable day of literary gossip with ‘Classic Hallam’, Elmsley, Boswell – the son of Johnson’s James Boswell – and the vicious editor of the Quarterly, William Gifford, as if there was nothing in the world to disturb their Tory certainties. The Prince Regent was on his way back from Windsor, where he had gone after morning service at Carlton House. His daughter, Princess Charlotte, whose portrait was also in the exhibition, would have returned from her exercise in the park, unaware that her loved uncle, the Duke of Brunswick, was dead. In her Arlington Street house, the Marchioness of Salisbury was preparing to receive her ‘usual’ 700 ‘distinguished Fashionables’. In Grosvenor Square, Lady Hampden was expecting another large party; in Curzon Street a dowager countess awaited a more select group. Haydon – represented in the exhibition only by his portrait – would be back in front of his Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem fretting over his Centurion. Crabb Robinson would be walking home down the New River after taking tea with the poet Anne Barbauld. Lamb would soon be on his way to Samuel Rogers’s house in Piccadilly. So, too, would Wordsworth and Byron. ‘The seventh day this, the Jubilee of man,’ Byron had written of such a London Sunday, and of all the myriad obscure lives that intersected,

  London! right well thou know’st the day of prayer,

  Then thy spruce citizen, wash’d artisan,

  And smug apprentice gulp their weekly air …

  Some o’er thy Thamis row the ribbon’d fair,

  Others along the safer turnpike fly,

  Some Richmond Hill ascend, some scud to Ware,

  And many to the steep of Highgate hie.

  Here was Farington’s England – the England of the Thames and Greenwich Park, the England that had nothing to do with war, the England of a permanent Sunday afternoon. It was time, though, that he was home. He usually liked to eat at around seven or so, though tonight he was dining alone and could please himself. As he made his way down the staircase and out into the Strand, the doors of the Academy closed on the last Sunday of the exhibition. Within the week only the shilling catalogue would remain to show how Britain saw itself on the day of Waterloo. For the moment, however, as the early evening light came through the skylight in the ceiling of the great room, and the old Lifeguardsman Samuel Strawger had the place to himself, the illusion could hold. And if old Strawger had turned from Lawrence’s portrait of Wellington to his great full length of old Marshal Blücher – ‘Marschall Vorwärts’ – standing square and defiant against the billowing smoke of battle, one hand resting on his sword, the other pointing to his right, then at this very moment he would not have been the only one doing so.

  6 p.m.

  Vorwärts

  On the evening of 18 June 1815, Marshal Gebhard von Blücher, hero of Leipzig and commander of the Prussian forces, was seventy-two years old and very sore. Two days earlier he had been lying half-conscious under his dead horse on the field of Ligny, and only the quick reactions of his aide-de-camp and large applications of alcohol – brandy externally for his battered old body, and a vile brew of garlic, gin and rhubarb for his much-abused innards – had saved the smoked and pickled old war horse for another day.

  If Sergeant Cotton was right that the trumpets would never sound for the dead of Quatre Bras as they should, the dead and wounded of Ligny had fared still worse. In British mythology the defence at Quatre Bras is always the crucial prelude to the ultimate victory of Waterloo, but the Anglo-Dutch action at the crossroads was never more than a sideshow against the left of Bonaparte’s army, while the real battle, a raging inferno that cost the Prussians 30,000 in dead, wounded and deserters, was being fought and lost a few miles to the east at Ligny.

  Two long days after the battle, two days of alternating summer heat and cold and driving rain, the Prussian wounded still lay among the bloated and mutilated corpses of the dead, helpless prey to Belgian peasants who hated them quite as much as they did the French. For the defeated Prussians the obvious line of retreat would have taken them eastwards towards Liège and safety, but when instead they determined to fall back on Wavre to the north – ‘the decisive moment of the century’, Wellington later called it – contact was crucially maintained between the two allied armies and the campaign saved.

  Not everyone in the Prussian army was happy with the decision – Blücher’s able chief of staff, Gneisenau, did not trust Wellington or the British to stand their ground – but whatever his tactical shortcomings there was no stauncher ally than Blücher. He had rejoined his army at Wavre early on the morning of the 17th, and by the end of the day, with the scattered units of his Ligny army once more a fighting force and the fresh troops of General von Bülow’s corps just three miles to the south-east of the town, Blücher was at last in a position to give Wellington the assurance he needed: two corps of Prussian troops, he promised, Bülow’s IVth and Pirch’s IInd – some 60,000 men in all – would be marching at daybreak to his support.

  There were still serious hazards facing the allies – Bonaparte had despatched 30,000 men under Marshal Grouchy in a dilatory pursuit of the Prussians after Ligny – and between Blücher’s widely spread army and Wellington’s position was a difficult march of seventeen miles. The news of Blücher’s intentions had reached Wellington sometime in the early hours of the 18th though, and from the middle of the day, when a messenger had brought him intelligence that von Bülow’s corps were nearing the battlefield, one increasingly anxious eye had been fixed on the woods to the east of Papelotte beyond the far left of the British lines.

  He had n
ot been the only one looking in that direction, either, because on the far side of the valley, at around one o’clock, Bonaparte and his generals had also been peering through their spyglasses, wondering whether the movement they caught in the far distance was Grouchy’s French or the van of a Prussian army. If any of them had thought about it dispassionately they would have known that it could not possibly have been Grouchy, but whether they were Prussians or not they were still three or four hours away from playing any decisive part in the fighting, and a battle that had begun that morning with the odds ninety-to-ten in Bonaparte’s favour he still confidently reckoned to be no worse than sixty-forty.

  The Battle of Waterloo was a close-run thing, Wellington would famously say when it was all safely over, but the truth is that it was always going to be. Wellington had never been a gambler in the same way that Bonaparte was, and yet in choosing to fight his battle where he did he was making the same sort of calculations as his opposite number, reckoning that he could hold his ridge until the Prussians arrived just as Bonaparte thought he could wrap up the British before Blücher’s reinforcements could swing the balance the allies’ way.

  And at just about six o’clock in the evening, as twenty-two-year-old Edmund Wheatley of the King’s German Legion was standing in square on the high ground to the north of La Haye Sainte, no one still could have said which of them was right. For the last seven hours Wheatley had been musing in a vague sort of way over Southey’s anti-war poem ‘The Battle of Blenheim’, but if he was still wondering what he was doing fighting Frenchmen he neither knew nor hated, his powder-blackened mouth and face would suggest that he had overcome his scruples as comfortably as everyone else in the regiment.

  In every respect in fact, save for the Southey, a commission ‘without purchase’ in the King’s German Legion – not a fashionable or lovable formation, particularly their infantry – was exactly where you might expect to find the young man with the staring eyes and stolid features that look out of Edmund Wheatley’s self-portrait. Within the army he would always be on the right side of the social gulf that separated the man from the officer, but in the world beyond it – the world of his beloved Eliza Brookes, the girl he had thought of on her way to church as the battle opened – clearly neither Wheatley’s appearance nor the social status of a man too respectable for the ranks and too poor even for a commission into the ‘Peasants’ made him a particularly eligible prospect.

  ‘Not an individual related to you approves of me,’ he had complained to Eliza, ‘you are forbidden to write to or hear from me’, but whether that was a cause or consequence of his joining the King’s German Legion he had become very good at doing what he did. At the end of his first battle he had retched helplessly at the sight of the butchery, and yet from the very start he seems to have been as immune to personal fear – even the first ‘hissing plaintive whistling’ of musket balls around the ears – as he was to the brutality of army life in a more than usually brutal regiment.

  He never much liked his German fellow officers or the rag-bag mix of nationalities and petty crooks under him, but even that had its compensations. ‘Impelled by curiosity as well as humanity,’ he had written while still an ensign, of a bundle wrapped in a cloak which he had come across among the dead and wounded outside Bayonne, ‘on turning it up I washed away the blood and gore from the features … and discovered the countenance of Lieutenant Kohler of my regiment. My promotion instantly suggested itself and thoughts of my own danger. I walked up to Captain Bacmeister and, bowing, said in the midst of the shot: “Allow me to introduce Lieutenant E. Wheatley to your notice.” And I actually received his congratulations. Can there be any thirst for glory when actions like this take place on the fields of havock? Ambition’s made of sterner stuff. Interest is the impulse in these our modern wars. Paulus Emilius threw his spoils into the public treasury. I throw mine into my private pocket.’

  He might not have had much time for glory – ‘Ten thousand slain you say and more? What did they kill each other for?’ – but for all his philosophising a good fight was another thing. The battalion had only joined Wellington in time to hear the distant cannonades of Quatre Bras, and robbed of his fun there he had had no intention of missing out on the battle he knew was coming. ‘About two o’clock the Grenadier company was ordered to headquarters with orders to clear the road all the way back to Brussels,’ he wrote of 17 June; ‘Captain Notting ordered me to leave him with thirteen men … and join our company at Brussels at night, which I had resolved not to do … as I was confident a grand battle would take place and I had never been absent in the least skirmish since I first campaign’d.’

  Wheatley was there, this Sunday, because, like Gronow, he wanted to be, and the more furious the fighting, the greater ‘the ardor of the fight’ within him. The first man killed near him had been standing just five files away, but by six o’clock ‘when a passe-parole ran down the line not to be disheartened, as the Prussians were coming up to our left’, it was long since anyone had time to count the dead and dying that lay thick either in or around their square.

  For the last two hours they had undergone a ferocious onslaught, as Ney flung wave after wave of cavalry up the slope, turning the whole reverse plateau behind the Ohain road into a desperate checkerboard of red squares and swirling, milling cavalry. ‘About four P.M. the enemy’s artillery in front of us ceased firing all of a sudden and we saw large masses of cavalry advance,’ recalled Gronow; ‘not a man present who survived could have forgotten in after life the awful grandeur of that charge. You discovered at a distance what appeared to be an overwhelming, long moving line, which, ever advancing, glittered like a stormy wave of the sea when it catches the sunlight. On they came until they got near enough, whilst the very earth seemed to vibrate beneath the thundering tramp of the mounted host … In an almost incredible short period they were within twenty yards of us, shouting “Vive l’Empereur!” The word of command, “Prepare to receive cavalry”, had been given, every man in the front ranks knelt, and a wall bristling with steel, held together by steady hands, presented itself to the infuriated Cuirassiers.’

  ‘Nothing could equal the splendour and terror of the scene,’ echoed Wheatley, in square with the King’s German Legion, face unrecognisable, firing shoulder turned to jelly, the field around him thick with heaps of bodies and mutilated struggling animals, as Cuirassiers charged and shied, and cursed and reared, and time and time again broke against the hedges of steel. ‘Charge after charge succeeded in constant succession. The clashing of swords, the clattering of musketry, the hissing of balls, and shouts and clamour … as if Hell and the Devil were in evil contention.’

  In the memories of survivors it was always the French cavalry and above all the Cuirassiers who held visual pride of place – the undulating lines, the gleam of sunlight on steel, the stricken horses, the private jousts, the flashing sabres, the posturing, gesturing and wheeling, the sheer raw immediacy of the fighting – but far more devastating was the artillery fire that punctuated the attacks. The French had failed in coordinating their cavalry and horse artillery to wreak the havoc that they might have done, but as a mesmerised Ensign Leeke watched a ball from the cannon’s mouth tracing its lethal parabola towards his square, he had only time to wonder at the ‘exact rapidity of a cannonball’ and count to two before ‘it struck the front face of the square. It did not strike the four men in the rear of whom I was standing, but the poor fellows on their right. It was fired with some elevation, and struck the front man about the knees, and coming to the ground under the feet of the rear man of the four, whom it severely wounded, it rose and passing within an inch or two of the Colour pole, went over the rear face of the square without doing further injury.’

  ‘About four o’clock I was ordered to the colours,’ recalled Sergeant Lawrence of the 40th, a West Country veteran of Spain and the disastrous River Plate campaign. There had already been fourteen sergeants killed or wounded in charge of the colours, and he had not been there a
quarter of an hour, before a cannon shot had taken off the head of the captain standing next to him, spattering him from head to foot with the poor man’s blood. One of his company who was close by at the time cried out, ‘“Hullo, there goes my best friend,” which caused a lieutenant, who quickly stepped forward to take his place, to say to the man, “Never mind, I will be as good a friend to you as the captain.” The man replied, “I hope not, sir,” the officer having not rightly understood his meaning.’

  Wheatley and his men were right to cheer the news of the Prussians – with the benefit of hindsight, the battle was effectively lost and won when Blücher kept his promise – but within the exhausted British lines it would still precipitate the last major crisis of the battle. The first Prussians had begun to emerge from the cover of Frischermont Wood anything from two to three hours earlier, but with the line of their advance taking them in a south-westerly direction towards the French right and rear rather than in the westerly direction Wellington had bargained on, he was left still with that same gap between Blücher’s men and his badly weakened centre that had been there to exploit all day.

  Wellington had always seen the main French threat in terms of his right wing – both before the battle and deep into the day – and even so late in the action his dispositions dangerously reflected that fear. Behind Hougoumont he had enough reserves to repel a last futile attempt to take the chateau and threaten his flank, but with the impetus of the Prussian advance faltering in the ferocious fighting for Plancenoit two miles to the south, the battle was still there to be gained if the French could break through the badly thinned allied centre.