by Alan Schom
To take advantage of his immediate superiority, Bonaparte had to act promptly and destroy Wellington’s force before Blücher could arrive. But the mud just got deeper and mobility slower.
As a gray dawn broke on June 18, 1815, the deployment of the two enemy forces could at last be seen, at least in part. General Chassé’s Third Belgian-Dutch Division was anchoring Wellington’s extreme right flank around the village of Braine l’Alleud, joined by Clinton’s division behind the Braine l’Alleud Road, along with Cooke’s and finally Alten’s division, extending to the junction with the Brussels Road. Wellington’s own reserve corps there held the center of the Anglo-Allied front, continuing up the Ohain Road, straddling the Brussels-Charleroi Road intersection, opposite La Haie Sainte Farm. Picton’s division continued up the Ohain Road as far as Papelotte and La Haie (not to be confused with La Haie Sainte), and where Saxe-Weimar secured the left flank, supported to the rear by Uxbridge’s cavalry. The men were literally packed one against another.
Napoleon deployed his men more than seventeen hundred yards to the south, before the Belle Alliance Inn, in roughly a parallel line, his left flank anchored at the Mont Saint-Jean-Nivelles Road, extending eastward across the Brussels Road, and anchoring on the extreme right opposite the hamlet of La Haie. Beginning at the extreme left, Napoleon placed Piré’s cavalry and Reille’s corps, the cavalry of Kellermann and Guyot behind. Right, or east of the Brussels Road, the first French line was held by d’Erlon’s I Corps, with Jacquinot’s cavalry on the extreme right flank, supported to the rear by Milhaud and Lefebvre-Desnouettes. Napoleon placed his principal battery of eighty-four guns to the right of the Belle Alliance Inn. Given the deep mud, it was difficult to transport them far from any road. Lobau’s VI Corps and the Imperial Guard formed the main reserves.
Bonaparte’s plan could not have been simpler: to batter his way through Wellington’s central position along the Brussels Road, while attempting to turn his extreme flanks, then drive to Mont Saint-Jean Farm and cut off the Brussels Road and the entire right flank of the English army. If Blücher somehow managed to attack, d’Erlon was assigned to halt him, supported by the Imperial Guard and “a detachment of troops from Marshal Grouchy.”[792]
Because of the heavy rain throughout the night, and the inevitable mist and soggy ground, instead of launching a dawn attack, Bonaparte was still taking breakfast at the Caillou farmhouse with his senior commanders and brother Jérôme. But the main reason for this extraordinary delay was the enormous difficulty of moving up men, artillery, and supply wagons through the wheatfields and cornfields that soon became vast quagmires of heavy mud. Thus the original attack, postponed to eleven o’clock, was delayed again until one o’clock on the afternoon of June 18.
Jérôme Bonaparte, as a divisional commander in Reille’s corps, was to begin a diversionary attack at 11:50 A.M. from the extreme French left flank against the large walled Château de Goumont, or Hougoumont Farm, as it was locally known, in order to draw as much of Wellington’s attention and firepower as possible to that sector, while Napoleon prepared for his big central drive. The farm itself was already controlled by Wellington’s Nassauers, Hanoverians, and British troops dug in behind the walls.
After 11:50 the firing became general along the line. Time and again Jérôme threw all four brigades against Hougoumont, only to be repulsed every time. Clearly needing more men, Jérôme “sequestered” half of Foy’s division, over the latter’s outraged protests. But the British in turn were reinforced by the Coldstream Guards and the Scots Guards, for Wellington was determined not to have that flank turned. Nevertheless it was surprising that Napoleon did not interfere, permitting this useless slaughter of troops as Reille and Jérôme attacked first with troops rather than bombarding Hougoumont Farm with howitzers and cannon. But Bonaparte’s whole attitude today was very different from the past. He merely observed from a distance with his telescope, far from the actual fighting.
Just before one o’clock, while Jérôme was continuing his attack and Napoleon was preparing to order his superbattery of eighty-four guns before La Belle Alliance to open fire, an unknown column was spotted some eight miles distant in the direction of Wavre. Were they French or Prussian? Napoleon suspended operations until the approaching army could be identified. Half an hour later Colonel Marbot rode up in a spray of mud to give Napoleon the bad news: It was General Bülow von Dennewitz’s IV corps, no doubt ahead of the rest of Blücher’s army.
Before the main attack even began, a greatly outnumbered Napoleon had the choice of continuing with a swift full-scale attack or withdrawing to the south. “Even now we have a sixty percent chance of winning,” he optimistically summed up, and then remembering Grouchy’s still unanswered letter of the night before, he hurriedly dictated instructions ordering him “not to lose a moment in closing in in this direction to join us in crushing Bulow, whom you will certainly take by complete surprise.” Incorrectly estimating that a fast courier could reach Grouchy, near Walhain, within an hour, he was determined to launch his attack and hold on until that marshal arrived. In fact, however, the messenger took the long route and didn’t deliver the instructions for four hours. “A more careful man would have broken off the engagement and retreated,” Colonel Clausewitz concluded. But of course Bonaparte had rarely been careful in his life.
Reassessing the situation, Napoleon ordered Comte Lobau’s Reserve Corps of 20,330 men and thirty-two guns to cross the Brussels Road to secure d’Erlon’s rear and right flank by forming a perpendicular line across the fields extending from Frichermont almost to Aywiers, where it appeared that the first Prussian units would debouch from the forest in their attempt to envelop Napoleon.
With these orders issued at 1:30, Bonaparte finally unleashed a ferocious artillery barrage from Belle Alliance, the powerful 12-pounders landing well within English lines though not doing as much harm as Napoleon had predicted. Many of the Allied troops were concealed over the lip of the hill, denying the gunners a precise target, and many of the cannonballs just sank in the deep mud instead of ricocheting and plowing through British troops.
At two o’clock d’Erlon launched three of his divisions in the direction of La Haie Sainte Farm, but instead of deploying in smaller units by battalion, two of the divisions proceeded in two massive columns two hundred men abreast — a superb target for the British, who simply mowed them down. It was a slaughter. They “appeared to wave like high-standing corn blown by sudden gusts of wind...their caps and muskets flying in the air,” one eyewitness described the advance.[793] Although they did rout a Dutch-Belgian brigade under van Bijlandt, and destroyed one of Ompteda’s battalions, the rest of the Allied line held, as Wellington in the heart of the heaviest fighting popped around giving instructions and encouragement.
Unfortunately d’Erlon’s divisions had chosen to attack part of Wellington’s finest troops, commanded by General Picton. Although seriously wounded back at Quatre-Bras, Picton courageously led his men against d’Erlon, repelling them from Ohain Road and Papelotte Farm, though being killed himself as he did so. These English, even Anglophobe Fleury de Chaboulon admitted, were “recklessly bold in withstanding the charges of our infantry and cavalry with such great firmness.” For Bonaparte, who had never personally come up against Wellington before, it proved a disagreeable surprise, the resistance stunning. The British were at their most heroic; not only was Picton killed now, but thirteen of his fifteen brigade and regimental commanders were either killed or wounded by nightfall. Still they did not give way, as Uxbridge’s cavalry charged forward sweeping the French back, though paying a high price in 40 percent overall casualties, including Uxbridge and seven of his nine commanding officers. By three o’clock Wellington was still holding his line, if barely, and this was just the first serious French attack.
With the exception of Reille’s II Corps, still attempting to take Hougoumont Farm, there was a lull across the rest of the muddy fields of corn and grain as both sides licked their wounds; Kempt
replacing Picton, while Prince Bernhard von Saxe-Weimar’s Second Nassau Brigade reoccupied the hamlet of Papelotte.[794]
If Napoleon was to win, it had to be very quickly now, but time was not on his side. He now received another message from Grouchy, sent from Walhain at 11:30 A.M., announcing that he was still intent on marching toward Wavre, some nine miles away, though he could hear the big guns round Mont Saint-Jean even from that distance and despite the vociferous protests of both Generals Gérard and Vandamme. Meanwhile the Prussians had set out from Wavre for Mont Saint-Jean. It was a sad comedy of errors and betrayal.
At 3:30 Napoleon pressed Marshal Ney to try to take the stoutly walled and enclosed farm of La Haie Sainte, just below the important crossroads of the Brussels Road and the Wavre-Braine l’Alleud Road. Ney personally led a cavalry attack against the farm, while overhead Napoleon’s “belles filles,” as he called his 12-pounders, belched forth death, announcing a second French attack. But Ney was repulsed by the King’s German Legion, holding La Haie Sainte Farm.
The hot-headed, or desperate, Ney now took actions leading to a whole chain of disastrous consequences for the French. Mistaking a long stream of wounded men and vehicles behind the British line for a major retreat, Ney ordered the crack IV Cavalry Corps to make an extraordinarily bold if uncoordinated charge, some five thousand men plowing right up the slope of the Allies’ central position on the west side of the Brussels Road, at the very point where Napoleon was still concentrating his principal artillery barrage. An incredulous Bonaparte stopped the barrage just in time. Somehow slipping and sliding up the muddy slopes, Ney found himself before tightly packed squares of bright red uniforms. “Prepare to receive cavalry!” the British commander shouted above the din of screaming cavalrymen and pounding horses, as thousands of Brown Bess muskets and Baker rifles, along with double-shotted British artillery tore through Ney’s brave but badly led men. Still the British fired, reloaded, and fired again and again, the muzzles of some of the guns “bent down by the excess heat [and] many touch-holes melted away.” Watching through his telescope, Napoleon was beside himself about this “fatal charge” and Ney’s blockheadedness. “Never did cavalry behave so nobly or was received by infantry so firmly,” Colonel Frazer attested. “What indescribable confusion,” another officer more accurately put it.
The horses of the first rank of cuirassiers, in spite of all the efforts of their riders came to a standstill, shaking and covered with foam, at about twenty yards’ distance from our squares. Unable to renew the charge, but unwilling to retreat, they brandished their swords with loud cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ and allowed themselves to be mowed down by the hundreds rather than yield.
The British too paid a high price. In one regimental square “it was impossible to move a yard without treading on a wounded comrade, or upon the bodies of the dead.” After one final lethal volley, assisted by more doubleshot, even a confused Ney had to recognize the failure of his charge, falling back down “the corpse-strewn acres,” urged on by Uxbridge’s cavalry.
Ney, by now no longer knowing what he was doing, regrouped some of the survivors at the bottom of the slope, and despite their exhausted, blown, and frequently wounded mounts launched another attack up the crest, this time at a walk through the thick mud, however further slowed by the hundreds of dead and dying men and horses. Once again the British squares, “suffocated by the smoke and smell of burnt cartridges,” poured out more death. Ney again turned back, only to rush over to a furious Napoleon and ask for reinforcements to try again. “Where the devil do you expect me to find them!” the emperor snapped at this man who seemed bent on committing suicide.
Sensing just how critical their position was, by five o’clock Gen. F. E. Kellermann and his III Cavalry Corps of 3,858 men, along with Guyot’s 2,068 cuirassiers, joined Ney as Napoleon looked on in hopeless silence through his telescope. It was insane. Some 9,000 French cavalry under Ney’s lead were emerging from between Hougoumont and La Haie Sainte, galloping pell-mell along a five-hundred-yard-wide front straight at the British. The whole appeared “one moving mass,” recalled Captain Siborne, “and as it approached the Anglo-Allied position, undulating with the conformation of the ground, it resembled a sea in agitation...Like waves following in quick succession...and the devoted [British] squares seemed lost in the tumultuous onset.” “Never, no never did the French strike their adversaries with such murderous force,” Fleury de Chaboulon exclaimed from the French lines. “Hard pounding this,” a more phlegmatic Wellington admitted. “Let us see who will pound the longest.” And the redoubtable British squares repulsed this “tempestuous and hazardous” attack with thousands of musket balls and the defending British cavalry. “Thundering murderous work,” one soldier called it.
Re-forming yet again, the stunned French cavalry somehow forced themselves up that same slope against the bloodied British squares, Generals Friand and Michel falling mortally wounded, and Ney himself, though miraculously untouched, having his fourth and last horse shot from beneath him, hurling him headfirst into the mud. After six o’clock and “the most horrible carnage I have ever witnessed,” as Ney himself later described it, he found his way back to the French lines on foot, not a single French officer or trooper willing to offer him a place behind his saddle. Ney had foolishly advanced without even ordering Reille’s and d’Erlon’s infantry to follow, nor did he have adequate artillery. It was perhaps one of the most incompetent moves of any French marshal in history. Not even the Imperial Guard could stand up against the British infantry, Wellington had once boasted, and he had now proved it.
Napoleon, still isolated, continued to watch in dull amazement. Everything that could possibly go wrong had gone wrong, from the very beginning. Ney had lost the battle on the fifteenth and sixteenth, when he had disobeyed orders to advance. Soult was an incompetent, even mischievous, chief of staff. As for Grouchy, one could not find the words with which to describe the cowardly commander of the phantom right wing.
It simply could not end this way, and Napoleon ordered another attack against La Haie Sainte Farm, Ney finally succeeding in seizing it, now that the cut-off German legion was out of ammunition. Coming to life again, Napoleon quickly ordered his artillery to concentrate fire on Wellington’s already badly battered center, annihilating brigades of both Ompteda’s and Kielmansegge’s forces, in the process killing Ompteda himself. Wellington’s original core of 28,000 men, now reduced to just a few thousand and greatly shaken, was barely holding on.
When Ney now pleaded again for reserves from the Imperial Guard, Napoleon refused outright, though they were probably in a position to drive through the British center at last. The news had just reached GHQ that the Young Guard, badly mauled, had withdrawn from nearby Plancenoit. Napoleon had only fourteen battalions in reserve and would not risk his fate by giving one more to Ney.
Nor had the Prussians been inactive this June 18. Blücher had finally joined Bülow’s corps at Chapelle-St.-Lambert at one o’clock, bringing with him two more corps, leaving only Thielmann’s much reduced corps to cope with the likes of Grouchy. Blücher was still not very steady on his legs after the severe ordeal he had been through at Ligny, and he reacted slowly to the fast-moving events before him at Mont St.-Jean. It was not until 4:00 P.M. that Bülow’s first few brigades began debouching from near the Bois de Paris, between Frichermont and Aywiers.[795] On came Bülow toward Plancenoit, just two miles away, scattering General Domon’s Third Cavalry Division by five o’clock as he advanced, and although Lobau’s 7,000 men tried to stop Bülow’s 31,000 troops, it was quite in vain. At 6:00 P.M. they abandoned Plancenoit, from which a road linked directly with the Brussels Road behind the Belle Alliance and Napoleon’s own position. GHQ was now exposed.
Having to seek shelter from Bülow’s bombardment, a desperate Napoleon, literally fighting for his life, called up some 4,000 Young Guards, along with twenty-four pieces of field artillery, briefly retaking Plancenoit before falling back, while Durutte attacked P
apelotte, just before the French line. Bülow hurled fresh forces against the Guard, killing their commander and recapturing Plancenoit. Once again that Prussian corps commander was in a position to cut off Napoleon’s retreat. Reacting to this new check, Napoleon deployed eleven of his reserve Guard battalions in squares along the Charleroi-Bruxelles Road, between La Belle Alliance south to Rossommee Farm. Still not giving up, he ordered another attack on Plancenoit with two battalions of the Old Guard’s chasseurs, actually retaking Plancenoit by seven o’clock as news arrived of the French recapture of Papelotte and La Haie by Durutte’s redoutable Fourth Infantry Division.
At about the same time, Jérôme Bonaparte was still vainly laying siege to Hougoumont, as he had been doing without success since before noon, the sun finally breaking through for the first time all day. Napoleon’s situation, despite the temporary successes, was by now hopeless, as thousands of fresh Prussian troops supported the exhausted Anglo-Dutch army. If he withdrew now he could perhaps regroup around Philippeville in order to defend the northern French frontier from invasion, and unless Grouchy appeared (and predictably he did not), that was about the only option. It really was the end, but instead of retreating, Napoleon decided on another attack against Wellington’s center before La Haie Sainte, for as he had often put it, “by its very nature the outcome of a battle is never predictable.” Given the increasing military revolts throughout France, he could not return to Paris defeated and hope to retain his throne or perhaps even his head.
As the ever loyal Fleury put it, “the brave presence of the Guard and a dramatic talk by Napoleon now inflamed the troops again.” Colonel Clausewitz, observing the entire tragic fiasco, saw things differently. “Never had Bonaparte committed a greater error. There has always been an immense difference between leading an invincible army in an orderly withdrawal from a battlefield in the face of an overwhelmingly superior force, and returning like a veritable fugitive, guilty of having lost and abandoned an entire army.” Unlike his position after having abandoned his army in Egypt, however, here there would be no second chance.