4 Creevey Papers, I, 228. See also Becke, 149.
King's German Legion infantry battalions where he thought the danger was greatest, but left no part of the battlefield without them. He had received in the small hours of the morning, before retiring to sleep, Blücher's assurance that he would join him in the course of the day with not less than two corps—a force as large as his own. His anxiety was, therefore, for his right rather than his left. Believing it to be to Napoleon's interest to shift the battle away from the Prussians' impending flank march, he expected him to incline to the west, possibly even striking as far as the Mons-Brussels road to seize the Belgian capital in his rear and break his communications with England. For this reason he had retained at Hal and Tubize, some ten or twelve miles to the west, 15,000 Dutch and Hanoverian and 3000 British troops to guard the Mons-Brussels road, protect the capital and keep open his lines to Ostend, where more veterans from America were expected. In the event of the battle shifting to the west this force might have an important effect, either against an offensive or in pursuit of a French retreat towards Maubeuge or Lille.1
There was a more immediate reason why Wellington felt anxious about his right. The unobtrusive but fine defensive position he had chosen had one flaw—a narrow, winding, shallow depression which, passing under the walls of a country house called Hougoumont in the plain below the ridge, afforded an approach by which a column could climb round the west shoulder of the plateau out of direct gunfire and debouch on to the reverse slope where his army was drawn up. For this reason he placed near the danger spot on the right of his front line the First or Guards Division and behind it, in reserve and en potence, Clinton's fine 2nd Division which, with its two brigades of veteran British and King's German Legion infantry, was the nearest he possessed to his old Peninsular Light Division—a force which could manoeuvre quickly. Beyond it he stationed at Merbe Braine and Braine l'Alleud his less mobile reserve of Brunswickers and Chasse's Belgians. In addition, since the winding hollow which his experienced eye had perceived could be commanded by musketry fire from Hougoumont, he adopted the unorthodox expedient of fortifying and garrisoning an outpost nearly a quarter of a mile in advance of his main position on the ridge. With its chateau, barns,
1 As a similar Spanish force at Alba, had it only retained its position, would have converted his victory at Salamanca into a virtual annihilation of Marmont's army. See Ellesmere, 105, 183; Fortescue, X, 351, 355; Frazer, 267, 270; Greville (suppl.), I, 82-3; Tomkinson, 297.
orchards, gardens, park and woods, the estate of Hougoumont formed a 500 yards square whose wooded southern border extended almost to the ridge occupied by the French. Without its possession Napoleon could neither move a column up the hollow nor, unless he divided his army in the presence of his enemy's best troops, envelop the Allied right. Wellington, therefore, placed seven hundred Hanoverians and Nassauers in the Hougoumont woods, and four light companies of the Guards, detached from the Guards' Division on the ridge behind, to hold the house, gardens and orchard and command the sunken way. To the west, defending the avenue to the house from the Nivelles road, he stationed Mitchell's British brigade with some light cavalry in rear. Thus garrisoned, the Hougoumont estate outflanked from the west the plain between the rival armies; if it could be held till the Prussians arrived, Napoleon's position would become untenable. In the meantime it would gravely delay and impede his attack.
Having secured his right, Wellington strengthened the remaining two miles of his front in his usual way by placing his formations, except for the guns and skirmishers, on the reverse slope of the ridge. They were thus out of sight, though not out of range, of the enemy's cannon. They were deployed in broken and staggered lines and so disposed as to present single rather than double targets for the enemy's round-shot. The artillery, save for the reserve batteries, Wellington placed along the summit of the ridge, with orders to reserve its fire for the enemies' columns. The skirmishers and riflemen were stationed on the forward or southern slope, concealed, as were all his troops, in the corn which, almost shoulder-high, covered the entire battlefield. By this arrangement the French masses would have to advance through three successive zones of fire—the rifle fire of picked marksmen, the round-shot and grape of the guns, and, as they came over the crest, the musketry volleys of deployed and, till then, invisible infantry.
Apart from Hougoumont on the west, Smohain, Papelotte and La Haye on the east, and the little farm of Mont St. Jean just behind the British lines, there were no buildings on the open ground Wellington had chosen for battle except the farm of La Haye Sainte. This lay a hundred yards or so down the slope on the southern side of the ridge, abutting on to the straight-paved chaussee from Charleroi to Brussels which, ascending the hill here through a cutting, intersected it and the British line at right angles. Here, in the centre of his line of skirmishers, Wellington placed a battalion of the King's German Legion under Major Baring. Behind it and at the top of the ridge the Charleroi-Brussels road was crossed at right angles by a sunken lane which following the crest from west to east joined, north of Hougoumont, another highway that fanned out of the Brussels road at Mont St. Jean and ran through a cutting south-westwards towards Nivelles. This road, like the orchards and woods of Hougoumont, had the effect of constricting the frontage on which the French could assail Wellington's right.
It was generally believed by the British—though not by Wellington, who knew his adversary's overweening confidence and impatience—that there would be no attack that day.1 But in the course of the morning, it became clear that the enemy advance-guard, which had bivouacked during the night on a parallel ridge three-quarters of a mile to the south, was being joined by the entire French army. Presently the sun came out, and watchers could see the long lines of massed troops, with their glittering helmets, cuirasses and arms, forming a magnificent spectacle, on the ridge of La Belle Alliance—named after the solitary, red-tiled public house of that name. At one time there was a burst of cheering as a grey figure on a white horse, accompanied by a cavalcade, rode down the lines. For the French were not only intending to attack, but in their resolve to conquer, were partaking of a sacrament. Napoleon might not have France, or even all his anxious generals behind him, but there was no question of the devotion of his fighting men. Between him and his old moustaches was a bond to be found in no other army on earth. For all his grandiloquent pretensions, he and they were familiars. Cam Hobhouse, watching him review the Imperial Guard just before the campaign began, was amazed at the way he mingled with his troops, leaving the saluting base and marching in time beside each column; once he went up to a grenadier and affectionately pulled his nose. He might be prodigal of his men's lives, but, unlike Wellington, who was not, he valued his command of their hearts. It was the foundation of his fortunes. At that moment as he rode along the lines amid shouts of" Vive VEmpereur!,99 Leipzig, the Retreat from Moscow and the Abdication were as though they had never been.
1 H. M. C. Bathurst; Bessborough, 242; Frazer, 546; Kincaid, 338; Smith, I, 268; Gronow, L 68-9; Leeke, 187; Gomm, 363-4; Hamilton ofDalzell MS., 49-50; Jackson, 7-8.
Neither Napoleon nor his men doubted their ability to destroy Wellington's army and reach Brussels by nightfall. Their triumph over the Prussians two days before—achieved against superior numbers—had whetted their appetite for glory. They saw themselves, for all their difficulties, on the verge of a new Marengo. Nor was the urgent victory Napoleon needed the key only to political salvation. It would be a revenge for all the humiliations the English had heaped on him. Wellington was the one commander with a European reputation whom he had never beaten and the British the one army. "Because you have been defeated by Wellington," he told his Chief of Staff, Soult, who dwelt on the British capacity for recoil, "you think him a great general! I tell you that Wellington is a bad general, that the English are bad troops and that this will be a picnic!" His only fear was that they would vanish before he could attack them, as they had done on the previous day at Quatre-Br
as and seven years earlier under Moore on the Carrion. As, however, they now appeared to be calmly waiting for him, their doom was certain. "We will sleep to-night," he told his officers, "in Brussels."
Owing to the usual dispersal in search of food and plunder the last of the French only reached their battle stations at midday, three hours after the time originally ordered. Napoleon, however, was not hurrying, since to make full use of his superior artillery and cavalry, he wanted the ground to dry. Despite warnings from those who had fought in Spain, he was quite sure that, once he struck in overpowering force, there would be little need to waste time in manoeuvring. Most of Wellington's foreign auxiliaries, he reckoned, would bolt at the start, and the stiff redcoats would then break under the triple shock of his massed bombardment, veteran columns, and discharge of grape at close range. "I shall hammer them with my artillery," he announced, "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."1
As for the Prussians, he was so convinced that they had retreated eastwards, as he wished, that he never considered the possibility of their appearance on the battlefield at all. After the hiding he had given them at Ligny they were manifestly incapable of further fight for the present. Having detached Grouchy to shepherd them out of Flanders, he felt he could discount them. They could be trusted, as
1 Foy, 278-9, 345.
in the past, to act selfishly and leave their allies to their fate. It had never been his habit to keep faith with anyone unless it suited him. That a Prussian commander should endanger his army and strain his communications to keep faith with Wellington never occurred to him.
The Emperor, therefore, decided to open his main attack at one o'clock. In the meantime, while he massed eighty field-pieces on a spur of high ground in the middle of the valley opposite and about 600 yards short of the British centre, he ordered the troops on his two flanks to engage the extremities of the defenders' line at Papelotte and Hougoumont in order to distract attention from his impending blow, and probably—though of this there can be no certainty—to clear a way for the use, at the decisive moment, of the sunken hollow leading to the heart of Wellington's right. In that case, however, he was unfortunate in his adversary.
The first shots of the battle were fired at about half-past eleven in front of Hougoumont. After a short preUminary bombardment, four battalions of Prince Jerome's division advanced against the wood to the south of the chateau. During the next hour they succeeded in driving out its not very numerous German defenders. But they then went on to attack the gardens and mansion and in doing so came up against a far more formidable adversary, the four light companies of the British Guards under Lord Saltoun. The attackers not only attracted the close attention of Wellington, but brought upon themselves exceedingly heavy casualties—1500 in the first forty minutes, both from the steady aim of the British guardsmen, firing through embrasures in the walls, and from the accurate fire of Bull's howitzer battery stationed on the ridge behind the house. When the Guards counter-attacked and drove them back, Jerome threw another brigade into the assault and tried to gain a lodgment in the courtyard of the chateau. So furious was his attack that at one moment a detachment of his men broke open the great gate with an axe and swarmed in, only to be surrounded and destroyed inside, while four officers and a sergeant of the Coldstream closed the door behind them by main force. Once again the British counter-attacked with four companies of the Coldstream whom Wellington sent down from the ridge. "There, my lads, in with you," he said as they moved off, "let me see no more of you."
Jerome's answer and that of the commander of the French left,
General Reille, was to undertake—a quarter of an hour before Napoleon's main attack on the centre was due to begin—a third attack on Hougoumont with still larger forces. For every regiment they committed, the frugal Wellington staked no more than a company or whatever smaller force was necessary to hold the position. All the while his guns continued to shell the wood with such effect that, as one unending column of fresh attackers poured into it, another—of wounded—as continuously poured out.1
So far Napoleon had been only partially successful. His diversion to the east had made little effect on the Netherlander in Papelotte and La Haye, while the more important one to the west, though occupying Wellington's attention, had failed either to by-pass or capture Hougoumont. It was now one o'clock, the hour at which the bombardment of the Allied centre was due to begin. But before its smoke enveloped the battlefield, Napoleon, watching the preparations from a knoll beside the Brussels road, observed through his telescope a suspicious movement on the high ground towards Wavre, five or six miles to the east. It might—at first it seemed to him that it must—be Grouchy, from whom he had just heard that the Prussians were retiring, not on Liege as both men had thought, but on Brussels. Yet this was scarcely likely, as Grouchy in his dispatch, dated at six that morning, had announced his intention of following them northwards on Wavre. And, as Grouchy, like Napoleon, had been wrong once about the Prussians' movements, there was another and less pleasant possibility.
At that moment, this terrifying suspicion was confirmed. For a Prussian hussar, captured by a French vedette to the west of the battlefield, was brought to Napoleon bearing a dispatch from Blücher to Wellington which showed that the troops visible on the heights of St. Lambert were Billow's corps, advancing from Wavre, and that the rest of the Prussian army had spent the night around that town, only thirteen miles away.
Napoleon, in other words, had been "making pictures"—the crime against which he had always warned his subordinates. He had made his dispositions to fight under conditions that did not exist. Instead of having only the English and their feeble auxiliaries to contend with, he would have, if he proceeded with his attack, to face
1 Stanhope, 47. See also Ellesmere, 105-6; Frazer, 556; Gronow, 1,198-9; Greville (suppl.), I, 83; Cotton, 51-7; Kennedy, 89-92; Houssaye, 187-9; Morris, 229-2.
before nightfall the intervention of another army. The attempt to separate Wellingtons and Blücher's forces had failed, at least in any but the most temporary sense. The French must either withdraw— the prudent course—or defeat the British in the next three hours. For after that they would have to contend against two foes.
Being a gambler, and being, both politically and strategically, in desperate need of an immediate victory, Napoleon decided to proceed with the battle. It still seemed unthinkable to him that the breach he was about to blast in the British centre could fail to defeat Wellington, and, with him out of the way, Blücher could be dealt with in turn. Indeed, with Grouchy in his rear and his army committed to the muddy defiles between Wavre and Mont St. Jean, the old Prussian might end the day in an even worse disaster than Ligny. Napoleon, therefore, detached part of his reserve to delay the still distant Prussian advance, and ordered the attack on the British to proceed.
The eighty-gun bombardment, which opened at one o'clock, fully came up to expectations. Twenty-four of the guns were Napoleon's great twelve-pounders, with a 2000-yard range. It took away the breath of Wellington's young recruits and militia men, and surprised even Peninsular veterans by its intensity. Captain Mercer, commanding a reserve battery of horse artillery in a hollow several hundred yards and in rear of the British right flank, found, even in that sheltered position, the shot and shell continually plunging around him. One shot completely carried away the lower part of the head of one of his horses. Fortunately the ground was still wet and many shells burst where they fell, while the round-shot, instead of hopping and ricochetting for half a mile or more, frequently became embedded in the mud.1
But though very alarming, owing to Wellington's skilful dispositions the bombardment did comparatively little harm except to a brigade of Belgians, whose commander, General Bylandt, misinterpreting his orders, had drawn it up, in the Continental manner, on the forward slope of the ridge. During its half-hour of bombardment in this exposed position i
t lost one man in four, and, had it not been hastily withdrawn to a less conspicuous position, its loss might have been still greater. When, therefore, at half-past one, D'Erlon
1 Becke, 168; Cotton, 87-8; Fortescue, X, 360; Houssaye, 203; James, 223; Kennedy, 107; Kincaid, 341; Mercer, I, 294-6; Siborne, 327-8; Tomkinson, 297, 303.
in charge of the French right moved his corps forward to the attack, with all the panoply and terror of a Napoleonic offensive—drums beating at the head of dense column, bearded grenadiers marching four hundred abreast shouting at the top of their voices, and clouds of tirailleurs running and firing ahead—the customary conditions for success seemed to have been ensured. Four divisions of infantry— more than 16,000 men—each moving in close column of battalions at a quarter of a mile's distance, tramped down the slope and up the hill against the British centre and left through clouds of sulphurous smoke. Behind came companies of sappers, ready to turn the village of Mont St. Jean beyond the British centre into a fortress as soon as it was captured.
A hail of shot from the artillery on the crest greeted them. But it did not halt the men who had conquered at "Wagram and Friedland. One column, supported by cuirassiers, swept round La Haye Sainte, encircling it and its German defenders and driving back the two companies of the Rifles—the most formidable marksmen in Europe —who were stationed in a sandpit on the opposite side of the chaussee. Another, to the west, forced the Dutch out of Papelotte and La Haye and temporarily occupied Smohain. In the centre about 8000 men approached the summit simultaneously. As they did so, Bylandt's Belgians—raw troops who had endured to the limit of their capacity—fired one hysterical volley at the advancing, shouting column and took to their heels, carrying away the gunners of the reserve batteries behind. They never stopped till they reached the Forest of Soignes, where they remained for the rest of the day.1
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