The Age of Elegance

by Arthur Bryant

  On the night of Thursday, June 15 th, there had been a ball in the

  1 D'Arblay, III, 353. See idem, 3S4-6o, 368. See Near Observer, 16-19; Costello, 195-6; Creevey Papers, I, 232-5; Life and Times, 78-80, 87-9; Jackson, 38-9, 81-3; Smith, I, 281-3; "Picton, 104.

  city. It had been given by an English milord of fabulous wealth, the Duke of Richmond, and the principal officers of the British and Allied army had attended it, including the Duke of Wellington and the leader of the Netherlands forces, the Prince of Orange, heir to the throne of the new kingdom. But during its course, and even before it had begun, it had become known that something was amiss. Several times Wellington had been interrupted by messages and was seen to write orders, and at an early hour many of his officers took their leave. During the small hours of the 16th the squares and streets of Brussels had filled with troops as trumpets sounded and drums beat to arms. Presently the troops—green-jacketed Riflemen, scarlet-clad infantry of the line and Highlanders, blue-coated Belgians and Brunswickers in black—had moved off, laughing and joking in the early morning sunshine, and asking one another what all the fuss was about. The stolid Flemish country folk, rolling into the city in their carts, had watched them with curious eyes as they marched out down the Charleroi road. Everyone in command had seemed very composed and quiet; old Sir Thomas Picton, commander of the British 5 th Division, with top hat and reconnoitring glass slung over his shoulder, cheerfully accosted his friends as he rode through the streets.

  Elsewhere—at Enghien, Ath, Grammont, Nivelles, Oudenarde and even as far away as Ghent—other troops, British, German and Netherlandish, roused from their cantonments, had assembled to the sound of trumpets and bugles, and, marching off along the hot, dusty highroads southwards and eastwards, had begun to converge on the assembly point. It had been a day of intense heat. As they emerged from the beech forests on to the great corn plain that fringed the Sambre to the north, the tramping infantrymen and jingling cavalry and gunners heard a dull, sullen sound like distant thunder and saw on the horizon columns of smoke arising.1

  For on June 15 th, after one of his incredibly swift and secret concentrations, Napoleon had sprung like a tiger across the Sambre and driven in the outposts of Blücher's army at the point where its right touched the left of Wellington's equally scattered force. When the first news of the crossing had reached the Prussian and British

  1 "There they go, shaking their blankets again," said the old soldiers. Leake, I, 11; Near Observer, 2-4; Becke, 49-5; Bessborough, 240-1; Costello, 190; Creevey Papers, 1,223,226-7,229-230, 232; Lynedoch, 756; D'Arblay, III, 341-2. 347-8; Frazer, 520-4, 529-30, 536 544. 572; Jackson, 6,14-18; Kincaid, 153-6; Mercer, I, 47. 53-5,103-4, l5 5-7,198-202,217-19,230-9,242-243, 284; Siborne, 3, 23; Simpson, 16-17; Smith, I, 226.

  commanders, they had suspected it to be a feint. The hours Napoleon had thereby gained had given him the chance to drive a wedge between them. With 124,000 men he had placed himself between Blücher's 113,000 Prussians and Wellington's miscellaneous 83,000. His object had been to defeat one or the other before they had time to concentrate and then, forcing both back on their divergent communications, to enter Brussels as a conqueror. Thereafter, he had believed, the Belgian common people would rise against the Dutch, the war-weary French take heart and unite behind him, the Tory Government in London fall, and his Austrian father-in-law, deprived of British subsidies, sue for peace.

  All afternoon on the 16th the people of Brussels had heard, through the hot, airless haze, the sound of cannonading from Quatre-Bras, where twenty miles to the south Marshal Ney was trying to brush aside a weak Netherlands force from the crossroads which preserved front-line communication between the Prussian and Anglo-Dutch armies. By some miracle of tough, confused fighting, in which Picton's Highlanders had covered themselves with glory and the Duke of Brunswick had fallen, Wellington, reinforced by successive contingents, had held the crossroads and by nightfall assembled 30,000 troops in Ney's path. But owing to the delay in ordering his concentration—the result of faulty staff work—he had failed to join Blücher in battle that day against Napoleon. By nightfall, six miles away at Ligny, 63,000 Frenchmen under the great Emperor had beaten the 80,000 Prussians concentrated against them and inflicted 15,000 casualties. The seventy-two-year-old Field Marshal had only narrowly escaped capture after being trampled on by French cavalry.

  Yet Napoleon's victory had not been as complete as he had thought. Owing to the failure of one of his corps which, through contradictory orders, had marched and countermarched all day between the two battlefields without taking part in either, the Prussians had escaped annihilation and were able to withdraw in tolerable order into the night. Next morning, when the Emperor, detaching 33>ooo troops under Marshal Grouchy to pursue the Prussians, had thrown the rest of his army against Wellington, the latter had withdrawn in good time up the Charleroi-Brussels highway. And though Napoleon had supposed that he had driven the Prussians back eastwards towards their communications, Blucher had in fact withdrawn northwards towards Wavre on a road parallel to the British only a dozen miles to the east. Unknown to Napoleon, the Allied armies had thus remained in touch and, though the Emperor had reduced their numerical superiority and shaken their morale, he had not, as he supposed, divided them. Nor, though the people of Brussels had expected all day to see the victorious French emerge from the Forest of Soignes, had the British withdrawal towards Brussels been on the whole precipitate. It had been brilliantly covered by Lord Uxbridge's cavalry and horse artillery, and by nightfall Wellington had concentrated his army on the ridge of Mont St. Jean twelve miles south of the city. During the afternoon Napoleon's retreat had been increasingly delayed by torrential thunderstorms which had converted the Charleroi chaussee and the fields on either side into quagmires. It had seemed, recalled one

  officer, as if the water was being tumbled out of heaven in tubs.1

  The two armies had spent an uncomfortable night. The rain fell almost continually, with flashes of lightning and violent gusts of wind. The ground on which the men lay, drenched to the skin and shaking with cold, was sodden with wet crops. A few old campaigners made themselves tolerably comfortable by smearing their blankets with clay and making pillows of straw. Few of the newcomers to war, who in the Allied army outnumbered the old hands, got any sleep at all.

  Dawn on the 18th was cold and cheerless. Everyone was covered in mud from head to foot. Presently the clouds began to lift, and the men managed to get their camp-fires lit and to cook breakfast. Afterwards, on the officers' orders, they dried their ammunition and cleaned their arms. Later, as the sun came out, Wellington rode round the lines, accompanied by his staff. They looked as gay and unconcerned as if they were riding to a meet in England.2

  The ridge or rather rolling plateau on which the British army had halted was one which the Duke had long marked as a favourable position for the defence of the Belgian capital. It crossed the highroad from Brussels to Charleroi a mile and a half south of the village of

  1 Hamilton of Dalzell, MS., 46-8, 77. See also Simmons, 364; Stanhope, 244; Tomkinson, 286-8.

  2 Gronow, I, 186-7; Smith, I, 270.

  Waterloo and the forest of Soignes. It was named after the little village of Mont St. Jean which nestled by the roadside in one of its northern folds. In the course of riding and hunting expeditions Wellington had carefully studied its gentle undulations and contours.1 It was here that twenty-one years before, when he was a young lieutenant-colonel marching from Ostend to join a hard-pressed and almost identically circumstanced army, his chief, the Duke of York, had urged the Austrian generalissimo, Coburg, to give battle to Jour dan's levies after Fleurus. But Coburg had chosen to fall back eastward on his communications, leaving Brussels to its fate and the British to shift for themselves. It was because, after a generation of disaster and servitude, a Prussian Field Marshal had learnt the necessity of unselfish co-operation between allies, that Wellington was able to take his stand here. For though his only reliable troops were out
numbered by two to one and though the French had nearly double his weight of artillery, he knew that he had only to hold his ground with one wing of an international army until the other under Blücher could reach the battlefield. Then, on the morrow, the whole mighty force could take the offensive and sweep Napoleon back to France.

  Unlike Blucher at Ligny, who, in the normal Continental manner, had drawn up his army in view of Napoleon, Wellington—the greatest master of defensive tactics in Europe—had chosen a position where his infantry could inflict the utmost damage on the attackers while suffering the least themselves. Its reverse or northern slope, in whose undulations he concealed his forces, gave him precisely the cover and field of fire needed for an active defence. Behind it lay the forest which, stretching for miles on either side of the Brussels highway, constituted, with its close-growing beeches and freedom from undergrowth, an excellent temporary refuge into which to withdraw inexperienced troops if they proved unable to withstand Napoleon's attack. Once inside it, he remarked, he would have defied the Devil himself to drive him out.2 But as, like his ally, he was thinking in ultimate terms, not of defence but of offensive

  1 "If the Prussians are beat, which I think is very probable," he told the Duke of Richmond on the night of the famous ball, "that is the spot"—pointing at Waterloo on the map—"where we must lick those fellows." Lady Shelley, 1,171. For a first-hand confirmation of this story, see Granville, II, 538. See also Mercer, I, 194.

  2 "It is not true that I could not have retreated. I could have got into the wood and I would have defied the Devil to drive me out." Mrs. Arbuthnot, Journal, 16th May, 1823. See also Cotton, 303.

  action, he gave battle on the open plain where the full strength of the Prussian and British armies could later be brought to bear on Napoleon.

  Until then, however, Wellington knew that his role must be strictly defensive. At least half the foreign troops under his command could not be trusted to manoeuvre. Kincaid drew the picture of a detachment of them at Quatre-Bras, behaving for all the world like Mathews', the comedian's, ludicrous sketch of the American Militia; whenever, after a careful explanation of their role, they were given the word to march, they had started blazing away at the British skirmishers ahead—"we were at last," Kincaid wrote, "obliged to be satisfied with whatever advantages their appearance would give, as even that was of some consequence where troops were so scarce." Later in the day, he admitted, when they got used to the sensation of being fired at, they behaved quite well. Many, however, having fought for Napoleon when Belgium, Holland and Western Germany formed part of his empire, had little stomach for fighting against him. Many more were boys and raw landwehr, though, in the case of the Brunswickers, with good officers and N.C.O.s. Few were adequately equipped or trained.1 Of the 42,000 foreign troops in Wellington's army only the 5500 men of the veteran King's German Legion—an integral part of the British army—could be described as first-line troops.

  Wellington was, therefore, forced to do as he had done in early Peninsular days; to stiffen his foreign formations with redcoats. In the teeth of opposition, particularly from the King of the Netherlands, he had tried to make his force as international in organisation as possible; to this end he habitually wore the national cockades of all the Allies in his hat and forbade the playing of "Rule Britannia" at regimental concerts. As at Talavera, the most immobile troops of all he stationed among buildings and behind walls. Fortunately one of the features of his position was the presence of villages and farms on either flank of his two-and-a-half-mile front—Smohain, Papelotte, La Haye and Frischermont to the east, and Merbe Braine and Braine l'Alleud to the west. In these he placed some rather uncertain Nassauers—who, however, defended them bravely—Chasse's Belgian division and the youthful Brunswickers who had suffered so severely

  1 Lynedoch, 764; Ellesmere, 216-18; Fortescue, 238, 243-7; Gomm, 363-4; Basil Jackson, 10; Kincaid, 325. 329; Mercer, I, 93-4. 197-8, 281.

  at Quatre-Bras. They thus served—an old device of Wellington's— both as flank guards and reserves.

  The backbone of his polyglot, and what he afterwards described as "infamous army"1 was its 21,000 British regulars—of whom more than 2000 had arrived from Ostend only that morning—and their comrades of the King's German Legion. Yet of this vital 26,500—a smaller force than any he had commanded since his first Portuguese campaign—only about half had been under fire. Several of its units were weak second-line battalions, scarcely out of the goose-step. Even most of the eighteen infantry battalions that had fought in Spain had been brought up to strength by recruiting from the plough before they left England. Probably not more than 12,000 had served in the incomparable army that had marched from the Douro to Toulouse.

  Compared with his Peninsular army, Wellington's force was relatively stronger in cavalry than infantry. Its 7000 British and King's German Legion cavalry, though far outnumbered by Napoleon's cuirassiers and lancers, made an imposing spectacle, superbly uniformed and caparisoned—the Prince Regent saw to that —and mounted on the finest horses in the world. They could ride across country like a field of high-metalled foxhunters, for they came from a land where horsemanship was a passion. At a review they left Blucher speechless with admiration. "It did one's heart good," wrote a Rifleman, watching them on the retreat from Quatre-Bras, "to see how cordially the Lifeguards went at their work; they had no idea of anything but straightforward fighting and sent their opponents flying in all directions." Their chief, the Earl of Uxbridge, was the Lord Paget who had commanded Moore's cavalry so brilliantly during the Corunna campaign, but whose service in the Peninsula had been cut short by an elopement with the wife of Wellington's brother. Apart from his amatory exploits,2 he was an excellent officer, quiet and incisive, though, like his command, rather too dashing.

  What the British cavalry lacked, except for the King's German Legion and a few fine Peninsular regiments like the 23 rd Light Dragoons, was experience of war and, in their high-spirited younger

  1 Stanhope, 221.

  2 When someone mentioned to Wellington that Lord Uxbridge had the reputation of running away with everybody he could, he replied, "I'll take good care he don't run away with me." In this anecdote, Fraser adds, he was compelled to soften "the vigorous vernacular of the Duke." Fraser, 186. See also Frazer, 520.

  officers, discipline. Too many of the latter held their commissions, not because they wanted to be professional soldiers, but because a few years in a crack cavalry mess was a mark of social distinction. Their courage and dash was indisputable; their self-control and staying power less certain.1 The troopers, magnificent fighting material, were what the officers—so much less experienced and realist than their humbler infantry colleagues—made or failed to make of them. The same witness of the Life Guards' charge during, the retreat noticed with amusement that, whenever one of them got a roll in the mud, he went off to the rear as no longer fit to appear on parade.2

  In artillery, though he only acknowledged it sparingly, Wellington was brilliantly served. Its mounted branch was magnificently horsed,3 and, Horse and Field Artillery alike, officers and men were animated by the highest professional spirit. Only 96 of the 156 guns opposed to Napoleon's 266 pieces were British or King's German Legion, but they were probably better handled than any guns even on a battlefield where one of the commanders was the master gunner of all time. They were lighter metalled than the French guns, many of which were the dreaded twelve-pounders. Yet, thanks to the foresight of Sir Augustus Frazer, three of the seven mounted batteries had recently substituted nine-pounders for the normal six-pounders. There were also some howitzers.

  In the last resort, as Wellington well knew, everything depended on his British infantry. There were far too few of them; as he carefully sent them off after Quatre-Bras before the rest of his troops, he remarked, "Well, there is the last of the infantry gone, and I don't care now." A few weeks before, Creevey, encountering him in a Brussels square, had asked whether he and Blücher could do the business. "It all depends up
on that article there," the Duke had replied pointing at a private of one of the line regiments who was gaping at the statues, "give me enough of it, and I am sure."4

  He, therefore, placed his thirty-five under-strength British and

  1 "The real truth was that our cavalry never had much to do before this sanguinary battle; and the officers were, and always have been, very inferior to that of the infantry, being generally composed of country gentlemen's sons from the hunting counties of England. Such persons have no particular inclination for fighting but enter the Army as a genteel business, the oldest son being the squire, the second the parson, the next the dragoon." Hamilton of Dalzell MS., p. 80. See Kincaid, 161; Stanley, 105; Tomkinson, 296, 318.

  2 "I thought at first that they had all been wounded, but on finding how the case stood, I could not help telling them that theirs was now the better situation to verify the old proverb, "The uglier, the better the soldier.' " Kincaid, 334-

  3 "Mein Gott," said Blucher, after inspecting Mercer's battery, "dere is not von 'orse in diss batterie wich is not goot for Veldt Marshal." Mercer, I, 217.