‘Good God, Alexander, I pray not. Can you imagine another day like yesterday? No, his invincible Imperial Guard proved anything but, and their reputation, and his, have been destroyed. Surely the French will not rise for him again.’
‘I recall hearing similar words when he escaped from Elba, General,’ said Macdonell quietly.
‘It will not be Elba this time, James, if the Duke has his way, which, of course, he will. Somewhere very much more distant and inhospitable will be found for him. If the royalists do not get their hands on him first, that is. Looking at what lies before us, I for one rather hope that they do.’ For some minutes they sat in silence. ‘Gentlemen, the Duke sent his preliminary despatch to London last night. He intends to send another, more complete, within a day or two and has asked me for my report. To write it, I shall need yours.’
‘You shall have mine this evening, General,’ replied Macdonell, dreading the prospect of having to sit down and write it.
‘And mine, General,’ added Saltoun.
Byng nodded. ‘It was a terrible day. I thank God it is over.’ He turned his horse and trotted back up the road to the village. Macdonell and Saltoun did not move. For all its horror, the battlefield had a mesmerising effect. They sat and stared at it.
A carriage rattled down the road towards them. The driver reined in his huge black carthorse and came to a halt at the crossroads. He wore the grey trousers of the Royal Waggon Train. The door of the carriage opened and a crimson-jacketed surgeon with a large bag of instruments stepped out, followed by three women in floral dresses and pink bonnets. Each of them carried a basket of bandages. All four were so bloodstained and filthy that their own mothers might not have recognised them. They took no notice of the two mounted men under the elm tree but walked a little way along the ridge and looked down into the valley.
A single rider had followed the carriage. ‘Good morning, gentlemen,’ he said as he approached. He looked down on the battlefield. ‘Well, perhaps not good, but for us at least better than it might have been.’
‘Good morning, Francis,’ replied James. ‘Have you ever set eyes on a more desolate sight? I certainly have not. Did you find a billet for the night?’
‘No. I slept in a haystack in the village. A trifle prickly but not too bad. The surgeons and their assistants were at work all night. I came down with Daisy. She’s exhausted.’
‘Is that Daisy with the surgeon?’ asked James. ‘I did not recognise her.’
‘It is.’
‘There were two women with us at Hougoumont, wives of privates helping with the wounded. One was wounded, a shot to the breast.’
‘I am sorry for it. Now I shall attend the ladies. Daisy has taken to calling me general, the impertinent child, although I have told her not to.’
‘General?’
‘When General Cooke was wounded, General Byng took his place and I in turn took General Byng’s place. A temporary state of affairs only but it amuses Daisy to think otherwise.’
‘Yet you remained in the orchard.’
‘I did.’ He grinned. ‘From there I could stand in for the general whilst keeping an eye on you. My new role made no difference. The orchard had to be defended.’
‘Yet you might have told me,’ replied Macdonell. ‘I should have been happy for you.’
‘Tush, James, you were much too busy.’
‘There,’ said the surgeon loudly, ‘the battlefield. It is as we were warned, is it not? Let us waste no time. Miss Brown, Miss Westfield, kindly make your way down the slope to the left. Take great care where you step. Call out if you find a man living. Miss Box, if you would, accompany me. We will do what we can for them.’
Francis dismounted and led his horse along the path to where the little party stood. He called out. Daisy turned. Tears ran down her unwashed cheeks but her eyes were blank. Francis put his arms around her shoulders and embraced her. It was no time for convention.
‘Time I went to work,’ said James quietly. With a flick of the reins he set off down the path towards Hougoumont, leaving Saltoun on the ridge.
He passed groups of haggard soldiers, sitting, squatting and lying around their fires or in roughly constructed bivouacs. The men glanced up but looked quickly away again when they realised he was not an officer in their battalion and was not there to give them orders. Soldiers need orders and they had none. Until orders came they would have to stay where they were and fend for themselves.
Behind the rows of bivouacs, Gunners sat propped against the wheels and carriages of their artillery pieces, smoking their pipes and sipping from their canteens. Their carriage horses, hobbled together, searched in vain for tufts of grass in the narrow strip of mud between the guns and the wood.
At the top of the ridge the path was still stony and hard. Lower down, the earth had been churned to mud and they had to go slowly. Twice Macdonell’s mount slipped and he only just avoided a fall. The ground was littered with discarded packs, shakos and blankets. The dead had been cleared to one side to await burial or burning. The looters would find them soon.
In the field outside the orchard that Saltoun and Hepburn had defended all day, half a dozen soldiers were going from body to body. At first Macdonell thought they were checking for signs of life but soon realised that they too were looting. He spurred his horse and cantered towards them. When they saw him, they ran off towards the woods. None of them wore jackets. It was hard to be sure but he thought three were British and three French.
Smoke was still rising from the ruins of the chateau and the farm. He entered through the north gates, battered but intact and standing open. Bodies filled the yard, many, to his fury, already stripped naked. The looters had been at their foul work during the night. What had been the barn was a smouldering heap of debris. Fragments of bone and skull lay flensed and charred in the ashes. The cowshed and the farmer’s house were gone, the draw well was a hellish tangle of bricks and bodies, the garden wall was barely standing.
The walls of the chateau and the tower – what remained of them – were pitted with bullet holes and still warm to the touch. The chapel door had gone – burnt to cinders – but the chapel itself still stood. Macdonell bowed his head and went in. The walls and floor were scorched black. He turned to look at the place above the door where the carving of Christ on the cross had hung on the wall. It was still there. The flames that had destroyed the chateau, and the farm which had brought death to so many, had reached Christ’s feet but no higher. Macdonell crossed himself. The Grahams had been right. God had watched over them.
In the south yard, where the worst of the fighting had been raging no more than twelve hours earlier, a party of men under James Hervey had begun the task of collecting the dead and carrying them outside. Hervey, too, was blank-eyed and exhausted. ‘I thought before the looters find them, Colonel …’ he began.
‘Quite so, Mister Hervey,’ replied Macdonell. ‘The scavengers must have been here all night. Let us bury them as quickly as we can. Where are you digging?’
‘Near the woods, Colonel.’
‘Good. Use every man you can find and do not forget the wretched souls in the barn.’
The gardener’s house, where the gardener and his daughter had hidden in the cellar for the whole day, was still standing. The south gate under it had been destroyed by the French light guns, as had much of the south wall. James left the yard through the arch of the gate.
The wood was no longer a wood. Such trees as were still standing had not a leaf upon them. Every trunk was black and every branch broken. He walked around the garden wall. Unlike the woods and the farm it had stood up to the assault remarkably well. The loopholes were there of course, in places there were gaping holes and barely a brick was unmarked by bullet or shot, yet it stood. Outside the wall the dead were being cleared and taken to what would be their grave near the wood. A large figure was pushing a handcart on which three bodies had been loaded.
‘Corporal Graham,’ called out Macdonell. ‘How is your
brother?’
Graham put down the cart. ‘He lives, Colonel, but his leg has gone. The surgeon took it last night.’
‘Were you with him?’
‘I was, sir. He is in the farm at Mont St Jean. Many of the wounded are there. A young lady named Daisy held his hand while the surgeon worked. She helped him bear it. Joseph says he will live.’
‘Then I am sure he will.’
In the garden, piles of bodies had been heaped against the south wall. In the middle of what had been a parterre a fire had been lit. Five men sat around it, using upturned French cuirasses as seats and another as a cooking pot. One of them was Harry Wyndham.
‘Breakfast, Harry?’ asked James. Whatever was in the cuirass flooded his mouth with saliva.
The men jumped up. ‘Pigeon,’ replied Harry. ‘They obligingly arrived this morning from the wood. Nests blown to bits, I daresay. Would you care for a mouthful? I am sure we would not mind.’ The soldiers shook their heads.
‘Thank you, Harry, I would. And you have found new uses for French armour.’
Harry skewered a piece of pigeon on a bayonet and passed it to James. James took a bite and raised his eyebrows in surprise. It was good.
‘I found an unwanted bottle of claret. Just the thing for pigeon stew,’ said Harry. ‘We’ve grim work before us and we need a good breakfast.’ The four privates grunted their agreement. ‘It was hard fighting, James. The roll was difficult last night. It was dark and I may have missed some, but we lost at least five hundred. More in the orchard.’
‘Have you stood on the ridge?’
‘Not yet.’
‘There might be fifty times that and as many French.’
‘Good God. So many?’
‘I fear so.’
For some moments, Harry was lost in thought. Abruptly, he stood up. ‘But we held Hougoumont.’
Macdonell too rose. ‘Seeing it now in ruins, it is hard to believe, but we did.’
AFTERWORD
James Macdonell
There are various spellings of ‘Macdonell’. Wellington, bizarrely, refers to him on at least one occasion, as ‘Macdonald’. I have used the spelling Macdonell himself used when signing the regimental order book on the morning of 16 October.
He was awarded, among other honours, a knighthood and the Order of the Bath for his gallant service at Waterloo and, not surprisingly, went on to a distinguished career in the army, becoming commander of the Brigade of Guards in Canada and being appointed a general in 1854. He died in 1857, aged 76.
‘The Bravest Man at Waterloo’
There is more than one version of the story but the likeliest seems to be this. In August 1815, the rector of Framlingham, in Suffolk, one John Norcross, late of Pembroke College, Cambridge, offered an annuity of £10 to the man nominated by the Duke of Wellington as the most deserving of it for his gallantry at Waterloo. Wellington demurred and suggested that the choice should be made by Major General Sir John Byng. Perhaps advised by James Macdonell, Byng jointly nominated James Graham, who had been promoted to sergeant and had already been awarded a special gallantry medal and Joseph Lester, his boxing opponent. (Sergeant Ralph Fraser, the man who pulled the French colonel off his horse and rode it triumphantly through the north gates, was another to receive the medal. The unlucky colonel was named Cubières.) They received the annuity for two years but when the rector was declared bankrupt, it ceased.
The rector’s fortunes must have recovered because when he died twenty-two years later, his estate was sufficient for him to leave £500 (about £23,000 in today’s money) to the man nominated by Wellington as ‘the bravest man in England’. This time, Wellington agreed and nominated James Macdonell. More than once, Wellington, who was not given to extending praise, expressed the view that the outcome of Waterloo turned on the successful defence of Hougoumont and, in particular, on ‘the closing of the gates’. He was referring to the heroic closing of the north gates when the attackers might easily have overrun the enclosure and opened the south gates, allowing their waiting comrades to pour in. He wrote, ‘The success of the Battle of Waterloo turned on the closing of the gates at Hougoumont. The gates were closed in the most courageous manner at the very nick of time by the efforts of Sir J. Macdonell. I cannot help thinking Sir James is the man to whom you should give £500.’ Macdonell accepted the award only on condition that it be shared with James Graham. Every British soldier who fought at Waterloo was awarded The Waterloo Medal.
Not only was Macdonell a man of great personal courage, renowned for always being in the thickest of the fighting, he was also an exceptional leader of men. In scorching heat, his light companies marched twenty-seven miles from Enghien to Quatre Bras, were thrown straight into the battle there, spent a wet, miserable night in the open, conducted a fighting retreat for the twelve miles back to Mont St Jean, were sent down to Hougoumont without food or water, spent another wet night there, and, finally, fought for over eight hours in its successful defence. James Macdonell led them through all of this.
Casualties
Estimates naturally vary but the consensus seems to be that at Quatre Bras the Allies lost nearly 5,000 killed and injured and the French about 1,000 less.
At Waterloo, on a single day, some 15,000 Allied, 7,000 Prussian and 25,000 French troops died or were injured. It took weeks to bury and burn the dead.
Hougoumont
In the story James Macdonell wonders whether Wellington really expects the Guards to hold Hougoumont or whether they are merely intended to draw French troops away from Napoleon’s centre. General Müffling certainly did not think Hougoumont could be held and said so. Wellington took pleasure, after the battle, in pointing out his mistake.
It seems likely that Wellington hoped the Guards would hold the chateau and farm all day but, if not, that they would do so for long enough to be a serious thorn in Napoleon’s side. Napoleon, on the other hand, hoped that Wellington would have to reinforce the Hougoumont garrison, thereby weakening his own centre. In fact, the relatively few reinforcements Wellington sent came from his right wing and did not weaken his centre.
The French may have committed as many as 14,000 men at different times to the attacks on Hougoumont, the Allies perhaps 3,500 (including Hanoverians, Brunswickers and Nassauers) to repulsing them, so Napoleon’s plan did not work. French casualties in and around Hougoumont of 5,000 were more than three times those of the Allies.
Hougoumont is often described as ‘a battle within a battle’. In some ways, it was. Macdonell and his Guards could not have known much of the progress of the battle raging in the valley and on the ridge beyond the orchard other than what little could be seen from the tower before it was destroyed. The whole battlefield would have been shrouded in smoke, information coming down the hollow lane would have been sketchy and unreliable and it would not have been easy to distinguish between the report of an Allied cannon and a French one. Fighting in a vacuum cannot have made the Guards’ task any easier.
The chateau and farm were situated about equidistant from Wellington’s right wing and Napoleon’s left. If Hougoumont had fallen, the French would have been able to use it as a springboard from which to attack the Anglo-Dutch forces on the slope behind it, which would have forced Wellington to reinforce his right wing, thereby weakening his centre.
That is why Wellington reckoned that Hougoumont held the key to the battle and why he chose James Macdonell to command the garrison there.
Fact and Fiction
On 17th August 1815, Wellington wrote, ‘It is impossible to say when each occurrence took place, nor in what order.’
Hougoumont was attacked at least five times during the day, and the orchard more often. Within the framework of the battle, I have simply tried to give the reader an idea of what it must have been like for both attackers and defenders – unceasing, terrifying hell – rather than try to recreate the exact sequence of events.
The incident of Lord Saltoun leaving the orchard and meeting Wellington on the w
ay up to the ridge is well recorded, but odd. The explanation I have suggested is my own invention, but seems to me to be plausible. In the notorious ‘fog of war’, such things can happen.
The name of the giant, axe-wielding French sous-lieutenant was, appropriately, Le Gros. He was known to his comrades as L’Enfonceur – ‘The Smasher’. The drummer boy’s name is not known, or even whether he survived. I have chosen to believe that he did, and that he managed to run back to the French lines at the time of the general retreat.
Stories of the gardener, Monsieur van Cutsem, and his daughter vary. At least one contemporary account denies their existence altogether. Some histories suggest that van Cutsem took an active part in the battle, others that his presence came as a shock to all when the fighting was at last over. I have chosen the latter. The brave Mrs Osborne, happily, survived.
The gallant button salesman who carried a vital message down from Wellington to General Kempt disappeared after the battle. It was only some years later that, by chance, Wellington learnt of his whereabouts and was able to reward him for his service.
There is a painting by W. Wollen, entitled by the artist – I respectfully suggest, mistakenly – The First Shot at the Battle of Waterloo. It looks to me much more like the French cavalry officer at Quatre Bras who was so furious at his horse being shot from under him that he brandished his sabre at the Guards in the wood who had done such an unchivalrous thing. The officer did not survive. I mention this as an example of how stories of Waterloo so easily changed with the telling and became confused. There are many other such examples.
Wellington’s remark, ‘Ah, but you do not know Macdonell’, is well documented but did not, as I have suggested, take place at the house in Waterloo. It was more probably said to General Müffling when they rode down on the morning of the battle to inspect Hougoumont.
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