Wellington and Waterloo

by Foster, R E

  Wellington’s chief concern in the small hours of 18 June was what he considered the probability that Napoleon would attempt to turn his right flank. If successful, this would sever his supply line and route to Ostend. Though in his letter to the Duc de Berri he professed to think this unlikely, the same letter admitted the possibility that, ‘It may happen that the enemy will turn us by Hal.’ To minimise that possibility, Wellington made what many have come to see variously as his worst or most inexplicable decision of the campaign: to detach upwards of 18,000 men and 30 cannon under Prince Frederick of the Netherlands to Hal, 9 miles to the west of Mont St Jean. It was, in reality, a case of hoping for the best and planning for the worst. Such a strong force should be sufficient to prevent the success of the flanking manoeuvre he dreaded. But it could also serve a secondary purpose. Had he needed to fall back from Mont St Jean, Wellington might have been able to do so under cover of the forest of Soignes, but there would have been nowhere to mount another stand before Brussels. He would surely have opted to move in a north-westerly direction towards the relative safety of his supply base of Ostend where reinforcements were arriving daily. The force at Hal would help facilitate that movement. This is surely what he meant by his somewhat cryptic reference to Lady Frances Webster about being obliged to uncover Brussels. Ignominious perhaps it may have been, but tactical withdrawal was preferable to annihilation. As he said, the best test of a great general was, ‘To know when to retreat; and to dare to do it.’128

  Retreat, if it came, would be forced by the 71,497 men and 246 cannon opposite him.129 The position of the French front line was marked roughly by the hostelry of La Belle Alliance, near where Napoleon was to establish his second observation post during the battle. To the left or west of it were General Reille’s II Corps. On the other side of the main road to the east Napoleon positioned d’Erlon’s I Corps. In front of them, he stationed his Grand Battery of 84 guns. Behind both d’Erlon and Reille there were cavalry divisions and behind them the reserves, which included Count Lobau’s VI Corps. At the very rear of the position, either side of the farm of Rossomme – site of Napoleon’s initial observation point – the legendary Imperial Guard awaited. Just over a mile south-east of La Belle Alliance, in a dip near the River Lasne, lay the village of Plancenoit.

  Given his concerns as outlined above, Wellington readily admitted with respect to the disposition of his 67,771 men and 156 cannon that, ‘I never took so much trouble about any Battle.’130 Along the ridge, west of the crossroads on his right, he positioned many of his best forces, including the later fabled men of Maitland’s brigade of the Guards Division. The trusted Lord Hill was placed in command of forces still further right, holding Braine l’Alleud, 2 miles distant. To the left, Wellington stationed the three brigades of Picton’s Division with Vivian’s and Vandeleur’s cavalry brigades. Most of Uxbridge’s cavalry, however, including the Household and Union Brigades, were initially massed in the rear centre of his line.

  It was the salient features of the position itself, however, as much as the men holding it, that were destined for imminent immortality. Edward Cotton, participant and later guide, identified various strengths. The forward slope ‘was a fairly steep glacis’ presenting difficulty to attackers, the more so given that it was covered in tall rye and sodden from the previous day’s storm. Wellington’s ridge also afforded its defenders the protection of thick hedges either side of the road. If not exactly the deep ravine later claimed by Victor Hugo, the road was certainly sunken several feet along a substantial length of the 2½ miles that made up the Duke’s main battlefront. Behind the ridge there was also a reverse slope of the sort Wellington’s experience had taught him to utilise so well. Captain Barlow noted that apart from the artillery, whose lack of manoeuvrability meant that it had to be placed on the forward slope from the outset, the army was ‘perfectly concealed from the enemy who could by no means get a sight of its force or disposition’.131 The flanks were also relatively secure. This was especially so to Wellington’s left where trees, streams and the wet ground offered good protection, especially from cavalry. These natural defensive features were enhanced still further by the wooded hamlets of Papelotte, La Haye and Frischermont. On the right flank too, though, Cotton tells us that there were ‘numerous patches of brushwood, trees and ravines […] further protected by hamlets’, principally Braine l’Alleud.132

  What would soon be recognised as the most iconic landmarks of the main battlefield, however, were the farms of Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte. Their importance was later neatly summarised by Wellington when he characterised them as being ‘like two bastions to the ridge between, and made the position a very strong one’. Hougoumont was an outpost on Wellington’s right, almost midway between the rival armies. Sir John Sinclair described it only months after the battle: ‘The buildings consisted of an old tower, and chapel, and a number of offices, partly surrounded by a farm-yard. There was also a garden, inclosed by a high and strong wall, and round the garden, a wood or orchard, and a hedge, by which the wall was concealed.’ The whole was inspected by Wellington early on the eighteenth, who ‘ordered Colonel Cooke to make loop holes in the wall: to throw down part of the garden wall: to raise a temporary rampart within it that the troops might be able to fire over it and to throw an abbatis [felled trees with their branches pointing out as an obstruction], across the Nivelles Road beyond Hougoumont.’133 To hold it, the Duke initially sent four companies from the Guards Division together with some Nassauers, Lüneburgers and Hanoverians.

  La Haye Sainte, by contrast, lay little more than 250 yards in front of the centre of Wellington’s line. As Cotton said, it was ‘far from being so commodious as Hougoumont, but considerably nearer our position, consequently easier of access, although more exposed to the enemy’s attacks and cannonade’. It consisted of:

  a farm-house, and court of offices […] being of a square form, with the house on the side nearest the position; a wall, with a gate and door, contiguous to the high road to Brussels on the left; the side opposite, and facing the enemy’s position, one part of it a wall, and the rest a barn, with a very large gate leading direct into the fields.134

  Defence of the complex was entrusted to a detachment of the King’s German Legion with Major George Baring in command. More or less across the Brussels road from it was a sandpit containing men from the 95th Rifles.

  Dressed in white breeches, blue frock coat and cloak, Wellington was cheered loudly as he rode along his line between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. Having made some late adjustments for the defence of Hougoumont, he rode back towards the elm tree to the immediate south-west of the crossroads on the ridge, which was to serve as his most fixed point that day. All he could do then was wait. As events turned out, waiting was one of the main factors in what followed. Napoleon had planned on starting his attack at 9 a.m. It was nearly three hours later before he did: Lord Hill, who had two timepieces with him, was adamant that his stopwatch showed the first shots to have been fired at 11.50 a.m.135 The delay has usually been attributed to his waiting for the ground to dry out. This is not entirely convincing since the ground remained relatively soft all day. The weather too, remained unsettled: though paintings of Waterloo invariably suggest a dry day, Wellington was not alone in recalling that ‘the day was dark – there was a great deal of rain in the air’.136 There is probably more truth in the suggestion that the belated arrival of the French Army, still not fully deployed at noon, played its part. The Emperor too may well have been suffering from a bout of complacency: over breakfast in the farmhouse of Le Caillou he put his chances of success at 80 per cent and upbraided his marshals who advocated caution by famously rubbishing both Wellington’s reputation (‘Wellington is a bad general’), and that of his men. Certainly he anticipated no intervention from the Prussians.137

  Compared to many engagements in which its two main protagonists had been involved, Waterloo was to prove a very simple battle. Napoleon’s declared intent was to ‘hammer them with my artillery,
charge them with my cavalry to make them show themselves, and, when I am quite sure where the actual English are, I shall go straight at them with my Old Guard’. In agreeing that it was an unsophisticated affair, Wellington preferred a boxing metaphor: ‘Never did I see such a pounding match. Both were what the boxers call gluttons […] Napoleon did not manoeuvre at all.’138 The Duke’s objective was therefore simple enough: to withstand the blows. Modern accounts of Waterloo nevertheless tend to divide the battle into five distinct acts. Such divisions are useful in helping one to make sense of the many confused actions taking place, often overlapping or even simultaneous with each other. But it is equally important to remember that Wellington was afforded no such luxury. For him, it was more a case of being like a circus performer spinning plates than an actor who knew his lines for the clearly-delineated scenes of a scripted drama.

  The first significant action of the battle was memorable because Wellington, like many in his army, could do little other than watch it. Presumably as a diversionary manoeuvre to induce Wellington to reinforce the position, thus weakening his main line, the French attacked Hougoumont. Shortly after midday, men from Jérôme Bonaparte’s 6th Division succeeded in occupying the château’s wood and orchard. But they could not take the château itself. Rather than desist, Jérôme insisted on committing more men to the assault. It is easy to forget, as the focus of Waterloo accounts turn elsewhere, and Hougoumont thus loses centre stage, that this battle-within-a-battle was to continue beyond 8 p.m. At its height, around 2 p.m., some 12,700 French had been drawn into the attack – clearly a disproportionate drain on their manpower given that the number of defenders at that time was only roughly a fifth of that quantity. From Wellington’s point of view, the crisis period came early on, shortly before 1 p.m., when Lieutenant Legros and thirty men managed to force the north gate, only to pay with their lives when Sir James Macdonell and Sergeant Graham managed to force it closed again. In epitomising dogged British resistance against the odds in a fixed and identifiable part of the battlefield, it is easy to see why Hougoumont would figure so prominently in Waterloo mythology.

  It was only at 1 p.m. that Napoleon finally fell on Wellington’s main line. The prelude was half an hour’s bombardment from his Grand Battery. This, because most of Wellington’s men were still on the reverse slopes of Mont St Jean, ‘produced but little effect’.139 Its cessation signalled the advance of General d’Erlon’s corps towards the centre-left of Wellington’s position. They scythed through a Dutch-Belgian brigade and came dangerously close to breaking the Duke’s line. That they did not owed much to the resolve of Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Picton’s 5th Division. Picton, an extrovert and eccentric Welshman – he insisted on appearing at Waterloo in civilian dress – was already well-known to the public from the Peninsular War. Prominent at Quatre Bras, where he had sustained wounds which he concealed, he now consummated his fame by ordering the decisive charge that checked d’Erlon. Moments later, he died instantly from a bullet to the temple. He would be the British Army’s most senior fatality that day.

  Posterity would dwell not only on Picton’s death but the charge by the Household and Union Brigades of cavalry, which transformed the repulse of d’Erlon’s corps into something of a rout. Immortality was assured by their capture of two of the totemic French regimental Eagles. The capture of the Eagle of the 45th by Sergeant Charles Ewart of the Scots Greys was destined to be remembered as one of the most heroic deeds of the battle. Few accounts capture better the duality of heroism and horror that was Waterloo than Ewart’s account of his feat in a letter to his father:

  it was in the first charge I took the eagle from the enemy; he and I had a hard contest for it; he thrust for my groin – I parried it off, and cut him through the head; after which I was attacked by one of their lancers, who threw his lance at me, but missed the mark, by my throwing it off with my sword by my right side; then I cut him from the chin upwards, which went through his teeth; next I was attacked by a foot soldier, who, after firing at me, charged me with his bayonet – but he very soon lost the combat, for I parried it, and cut him down through the head; so that finished the contest for the eagle.140

  Someone else who took part in the charge, and who had received lessons in swordsmanship from Ewart, was 26-year-old Corporal Jack Shaw of the 2nd Life Guards. From Nottinghamshire farming stock, his physique and looks had commended him to the artist Haydon as a model, but he was best known across a broad social spectrum as a pugilist in London. Victories on Hounslow Heath on 8 April had made him Britain’s unofficial boxing champion. Intoxicated on brandy, he was now wounded as a cavalryman, but succeeded in killing as many as nine of the enemy.141

  Ewart’s and Shaw’s exploits notwithstanding, the action as a whole was of mixed military value, for the Union Brigade fatally over-reached itself in the charge. Even as they were swirling around the Grand Battery they were counter-charged by French cavalry. A third of their number became casualties, including their commanding officer, Major-General Sir William Ponsonby, who was killed. Wellington, who saw, but could do nothing to prevent this sequence of events, cannot have been happy: his priority was to conserve his forces in defending his position.

  Shaw would eventually succumb to further wounds he sustained in the next main phase of the battle. Just before 4 p.m., Marshal Ney concluded that Wellington was in the process of ordering the very withdrawal which the Duke had feared might be necessary in his correspondence of the early hours. Though there was certainly discernible movement in his line, Wellington was in fact only bolstering his centre by moving forward three battalions of Brunswickers as those men who had been wounded moved back. Ney, looking up at the ridge and pumped on the adrenalin of battle, thought only of spreading chaos into what he imagined to be an attempted orderly retreat. His response is otherwise inexplicable: to attack, without the support of either artillery or infantry, an unbroken infantry position. The outcome was predictable. As ten regiments of cavalry, including the Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard, moved up the slope east of Hougoumont towards Wellington’s centre-right, the Duke’s infantry battalions formed into squares to receive them. His artillery supported them, the gunners running for relative safety within the squares as the French horsemen approached. Wellington himself, though he denied it, may have sought temporary sanctuary in one. Unable to break the squares, and suffering heavy losses, the cavalry had no option but to fall back. What remains inexplicable, since he now knew that no retreat was under way, is why Ney repeated the manoeuvre several times over the course of nearly two hours. Indeed, like Jérôme at Hougoumont earlier in the day, he substantially increased the numbers attacking, throwing not only Kellerman’s division into the fray but also the Guard’s heavy cavalry under Guyot. Observers on both sides would later describe Ney’s actions diplomatically as ‘premature’. Looking on at the time, a less reticent Marshal Soult declared that Ney ‘is compromising us, as he did at Jena’.142

  But this was Waterloo, not Jena, and Napoleon did nothing to extricate his wayward marshal. In any case, as with the British cavalry charge hours before, this sequence of events was more spectacular than decisive. Wellington’s survival at Waterloo would depend upon his army’s ability to withstand the effects of cumulative attrition. By late afternoon, there were signs that it might not. Specifically, La Haye Sainte, an excellent example of where the ebb and flow of battle makes the detail of events difficult to determine with confidence, was about to buckle in face of sustained French pressure. Men from the French 1st Division had surrounded the strategically important outlier by 2 p.m. at more or less the same time as d’Erlon’s infantry were assaulting the main allied line. They forced the three companies of the 95th Rifles in the sandpit to withdraw and initially defied attempts to reinforce the château. They could not, however, secure the main farm building and some time after 3 p.m. its defenders were reinforced by three companies of the King’s German Legion whilst the Rifles returned to the sandpit. A further 150 men, Nassauers, supplemen
ted the garrison at around 5 p.m. It was not, therefore, men they ran out of but ammunition. Without it, those left had no option but to abandon the farm to the French.143

  It was now 6.30 p.m. and the French determined to exploit their hard-won forward springboard into Wellington’s centre. Artillery was hurried forward to inflict carnage on the Duke’s now-precarious line. Wellington subsequently conceded that the château’s loss had resulted in ‘much of the injury done to the British Army on that day; and at all events their possession of this farm enabled them to make these repeated attacks on the centre of the Allied line’.144 So did sharpshooters: it was from the vantage point of La Haye Sainte at about 7 p.m. that Lord FitzRoy Somerset, Wellington’s military secretary, was hit by the musket ball that necessitated the amputation of his right arm.

  The fall of La Haye Sainte was a major factor in persuading Napoleon that his opponent was on his last legs. To spearhead the delivery of the knockout blow, five battalions of the Middle Guard were assembled with three of the Old Guard in support. The Emperor himself moved forward with them at 7.30 p.m. as far as La Haye Sainte before handing over to Ney to lead the attack on Wellington’s centre-right. Not for the first time that day, they underestimated the resolve of Wellington and his men. Even as the Guard was forming up, the Duke had reorganised and reinforced his centre by moving Netherlanders across from his left together with the light cavalry forces commanded by Sir John Vandeleur and Sir Hussey Vivian. Since he could see that they would bear the brunt of the approaching storm, the Duke also instructed Sir Colin Halkett and Sir Peregrine Maitland to deploy their brigades into lines of four. What followed was remarkably described in a letter written by Captain Digby Mackworth of the 7th Fusiliers, less than four hours later: