Sharpe's Waterloo

by Bernard Cornwell

‘I’ll think about it.’ Sharpe turned to stare at the newly stripped bodies of the dead which lay so white among the charred stalks of rye. ‘And start digging a grave, Harry. A big one.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  A soldier brought Sharpe a scorching mug of tea that he drank as he gazed into the valley. Smoke still drifted from the remains of the chateau of Hougoumont and from the farm of La Haye Sainte. The chateau had been burnt right out, leaving nothing but blackened roof beams above a scorched stone shell, while the corridors of La Haye Sainte were still choked with dead. At the foot of the slope beneath Sharpe a horse that had survived the night without its back legs sat on its gory haunches and whinnied pathetically for help.

  The first soldiers went down from the ridge. Some went to bury the dead while others searched for loot. A man found a French sword knot, its gilt braid beautiful and intricate, and kept it as a gift for his girl. Another man picked a silver-handled shaving brush from a stiff pool of congealed blood. Flies buzzed above the dead. A redcoat carefully collected a pack of playing cards that had been strewn around the body of a French skirmisher. The pages of a blood-stained book riffled in the small wind. Pistol shots sounded flat as men put horses out of their long misery. A group of cavalry officers, their uniforms oddly bright in the dull dawn, cantered down from the ridge to search the slew of bodies that marked the ride of the British horse from glory to defeat.

  The first civilians arrived from Brussels. They parked their carriages near the elm tree and walked in horrified silence into the valley where the working parties searched for the wounded. Crows were ripping at the white-skinned dead. A woman found her husband and vomited. A local priest, come to minister to the injured French, reeled hopelessly towards the road with a hand clapped to his mouth.

  Simon Doggett’s work party came back to the battalion with two tubs of salt beef, a sack of bread, and a barrel of rum. He proudly told Sharpe that he had stolen the food from the cavalry. ‘So what happens now?’ Doggett asked.

  Sharpe found it hard to think. It was as if the battle had deadened his senses. ‘We’ll go to Paris, I suppose.’ He could not imagine the Emperor recovering from this defeat.

  ‘Paris?’ Doggett sounded surprised, as though he had not realized till this moment just what Wellington’s army had achieved in this valley that stank of smoke and blood. ‘You really think we’ll go to Paris?’ he asked excitedly.

  But Sharpe did not reply. Instead he was watching a horseman pick his way up the face of the ridge and across the long dark scars of earth that had been gouged by the French cannonade. He recognized Captain Christopher Manvell and walked to meet him. ‘Morning.’ Sharpe’s greeting was curt.

  Manvell touched a gloved hand to his hat. ‘Good morning, sir. I was hoping to find you.’ He seemed embarrassed and turned to look at Sharpe’s men who, muddied and tired, stared malevolently back at the elegant cavalryman. ‘He’s dead,’ Manvell said without any more effort at politeness.

  ‘Rossendale?’

  ‘Yes. He’s dead.’ Manvell’s face showed sadness as he looked back to Sharpe. ‘I thought you should know, sir.’

  ‘Why would I need to know?’ Sharpe asked brutally.

  Manvell seemed nonplussed, but then shrugged. ‘I believe he gave you a note? I’m afraid it’s worthless, sir. He didn’t have a penny of his own money. And then there’s—’ Manvell stopped suddenly.

  ‘There’s what?’ Sharpe pressured him.

  ‘There’s Mrs Sharpe, sir.’ Manvell summoned the courage to say the words. ‘Someone will have to tell her.’

  Sharpe gave a harsh brief laugh. ‘Not me, Captain. She’s a Goddamned whore, and she can rot in hell for all I care. Good day to you, Captain.’

  ‘Good day, sir.’ Manvell watched Sharpe walk away, then turned his horse towards the road where, unknown to Sharpe, Jane waited in her carriage for news. Manvell sighed, and went to break her heart.

  Sharpe went back to the dying fire, took the promissory note from his pocket, and tore it into shreds. There would be no easy way of putting a new roof on the château after all. He scattered the paper scraps to the breeze, then turned towards his men. ‘Mr Price!’

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘We’ve got some bandsmen left alive, don’t we?’

  ‘Indeed, sir! We’ve even got a bandmaster!’

  ‘Then get the idle buggers to play us a tune! We’re supposed to be celebrating a bloody victory!’

  Somewhere in the valley a woman screamed and screamed, paused to take breath, then screamed again because her husband was dead. Behind the battle line in the farm at Mont-St-Jean the pile of amputated limbs grew higher than the dungheap. A white-faced surgeon came to take the air by the roadside while upstairs, where the wounded officers had been taken to recuperate or die, d‘Alembord twitched in his shallow sleep. Mr Little, the rotund bandmaster of the Prince of Wales’s Own Volunteers, launched his few musicians into a ragged version of ‘Over The Hills and Far Away’. Sharpe ordered the colours, that had been restored to the battalion, to be unfurled and planted above the deepening grave so that the shadows of the silk flags would caress the dead.

  A woman wept at the edge of the grave. She was one of the sixty wives who had been allowed to travel with the battalion and, though she was widowed now, she would probably be married again by the month’s end, for a soldier’s woman never lacked for suitors. Another newly widowed wife, Sally Clayton, sat next to Charlie Weller and Sharpe saw the nervousness with which the young man reached for her hand. ‘Make me a mug of tea, Charlie,’ Sharpe said, ‘and I’ll make you into a sergeant.’

  ‘Sir?’ Charlie stared up in astonishment.

  ‘Do it, Charlie!’ Sally was quicker to understand that Sharpe was offering them a sergeant’s wage. ‘And thank you, Mr Sharpe.’

  Sharpe smiled and turned away as a shout told him that Harper had returned from Brussels. The Irishman had brought Sharpe’s dog back with him, and now released Nosey who ran to Sharpe and leaped up to nuzzle and fuss his master. The men of the battalion grinned. Sharpe pushed the dog down, waited for Harper to slide out of the saddle, then walked with his friend towards the lip of the valley.

  ‘She’s well,’ Harper confirmed. Lucille had wept when she had learned that Sharpe was safe and unhurt, but she had made Harper promise not to reveal her tears. ‘And the boy’s well, too.’

  ‘Thank you for going for me.’

  Harper grunted. He had left for Brussels before dawn and now stared into the battlefield for the first time on this new day. His face showed no reaction to the horror. Like Sharpe he had seen it a hundred times before. They were soldiers; they were paid to endure horror, which is why they understood horror better than other men. They were soldiers and, like the men who dug the nightsoil from the pits of London, or like the women who tended the pestilent dying in the charity wards, they did a distasteful job that more fastidious men and women despised. They were soldiers, which made them the scum of the earth until a tyrant threatened Britain, and then suddenly they were red-coated heroes and jolly good fellows.

  ‘God save Ireland, but we made a right bloody shit-heap of this place,’ Harper commented on the valley.

  Sharpe said nothing. He was staring beyond the battlefield to where the sunlight glowed on trees unmarked by fire and where the air smelt summer sweet. The cloudless sky promised a day for haymaking, or a day for lovers to stroll through heavy-leafed woods to rest beside the green cool of a streambank. It was a midsummer’s day on the borders of France, and the world was at peace.

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  It was indeed a near run thing; ‘the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life,’ as the Duke of Wellington confessed on the day after the battle, but Napoleon, as the Duke also said, ‘just moved forward in the old style, in columns, and was driven off in the old style.’

  The Duke himself would probably have been content to let that stand as a full account of the campaign of Waterloo, for he was a man notorious both for the brevity of his de
spatches, and for his dislike of authors. He had, he explained later in his life, been too much exposed to authors. One of them, seeking the Duke’s assistance for a projected account of the battle, was sternly advised to leave well alone: ‘you may depend upon it that you will never make it a satisfactory work’. To another such hopeful scribbler he dismissively remarked that a man might as well seek to write the history of a dance as to write the story of a battle.

  Many, though, have defied the Duke’s advice, and I must confess my extreme debt to all those whose temerity has produced the vast library on Waterloo. There are too many books to cite here, but I would be shameless if I did not acknowledge two. Even the Duke might have approved ofJac Weller’s Wellington at Waterloo, the final volume of his impressive trilogy on the Duke’s military career. Whenever I found conflict among my sources, and felt unable to clear the matter from my own research, I relied on Jac Weller’s interpretation and I doubt he let me down.

  I tremble to imagine what the Duke would have made of a woman writing about his battle, but to my mind the best account of Waterloo is that which concludes Elizabeth Longford’s Wellington, The Years of the Sword. I used Lady Longford as my source for the Duke’s direct quotations, but also for very much more, and I doubt that anyone can ever again write about Wellington or Waterloo without relying on Lady Longford’s marvellous book.

  Hundreds of contemporary accounts exist of the battle, yet still there is controversy. Even at the time of the battle men did not always see what they thought they saw, which is why Britain now has a regiment called the Grenadier Guards. That is the regiment which defeated the larger column of the Imperial Guard, and they were convinced that they had beaten the Grenadiers of the Guard and, to mark their victory, took their enemy’s name. In fact they opposed and beat the Chasseurs of the Guard, but it seems a little late to make the correction now.

  There are other mysteries. Did the Prince of Orange really expose infantry in line to cavalry three times? I remain convinced he did, though some say he was not responsible for the débâcle at Quatre Bras. Nor is there agreement about what really happened in front of the smaller column of the Imperial Guard. Undoubtedly some redcoats ran away, but no two accounts agree quite how they were rallied to defeat the Guard, just as no two accounts agree on how many times the French cavalry charged the squares; men who survived those assaults gave fingers as various as six or twenty-six. At least one French officer bequeathed historians a fine tale of breaking one of the British squares; riding over and over its remains until it was red ruin, but fine as the account is, there is not a scrap of evidence to support it.

  There is, however, much evidence to support the story of the fattest officer in the Prussian army being entrusted with the news of the French invasion, just as it is sadly true that General Dornberg intercepted a despatch to Wellington and refused to forward it on the grounds that he did not believe it. Thus was Wellington humbugged by Napoleon, whose concentration of forces and the speed with which he advanced them across the Dutch border was one of his greatest feats of war.

  So who, then, won Waterloo? Or who lost it? The questions are still argued. The Prince of Orange, in a letter to his parents written on the night of the battle, had no doubts: ‘My very dear Parents. We have had a glorious affair against Napoleon this day, and it was my troops who bore the brunt of the fighting and to whom we owe the victory.’ He then goes on to say that it was the Prussians who really won the battle, thus fuelling the debate between supporters of Blücher and Wellington. The truth is very simple; Wellington would not have fought at Waterloo unless he believed the Prussians to be marching to his aid, and the Prussians, despite Gneisenau, would not have marched unless they believed that Wellington intended to make a stand. In brief it was an allied victory, and Blücher’s suggestion of La Belle Alliance as the battle’s name was surely more appropriate than the oddly named Waterloo upon which Wellington insisted simply because he slept there on the nights before and after the conflict.

  It is an irony that Gneisenau’s quite unreasonable distrust of Wellington probably made the victory complete. If the Prussians had come to the field in the early afternoon, when they were expected, Napoleon would undoubtedly have retired behind a tough rearguard action. His army would have been preserved to fight another day among the screen of fortresses that awaited the allies just across the French frontier. As it was, the Emperor’s army was so mauled by the evening of Waterloo, and was so deeply committed by the time the Prussians arrived, that Napoleon could not extricate it, and thus his men went down to utter defeat, a defeat so dire that the morale of the fortress garrisons and every other soldier in France collapsed at the news.

  If there is fruitless controversy about whether Wellington or Blücher were most responsible for victory, there is even more argument about the generalship of the Emperor. French accounts of the battle describe Waterloo as a glorious French victory that somehow went awry at the last minute. The worst General at the battle, one French historian confidently avers, was Wellington, and he then adduces an impressive list of the Englishman’s mistakes; all in aid of proving Napoleon’s supremacy. To which we might reply, like General Cambronne of the Imperial Guard when his surrender was demanded at the end of the battle, ‘merde’. Polite French history insists that Cambronne actually said, ‘The Old Guard dies, it never surrenders’, but that fine defiance was the invention of a newspaperman, and both versions ignore the fact that Cambronne surrendered anyway. The same historians who denigrate Wellington are also the first to plead that the Emperor had piles, or whatever other medical excuse is supposed to have put him off his stroke that day, which makes one wonder why he chose to fight at all. Napoleon did so choose, and he lost, and he spent the next, and last, six years of his life constructing a legend of his glory that is still believed in France.

  Nowhere outside France is that glory more visible than at Waterloo itself. The battlefield is a veritable monument to Napoleon and to his army, so much so that an ignorant visitor could be forgiven for thinking they visited the scene of a great French triumph. It is, nevertheless, a battlefield well worth a visit. The greatest change to the scene is, sadly, on the British right, on the ridge where the French cavalry was destroyed and where the Imperial Guard was defeated. The Dutch scraped four or five feet of soil from the top of that ridge to make their vast lion monument which now dominates the field. More merde. Nevertheless, the ridge remains, even though somewhat lower than it was in 1815, and it is now graced with a car park, cafés, museums and shops which sell a variety of the most vulgar, meretricious and shabby souvenirs. The one item worth purchasing is David Howarth’s excellent English-language guide to the battlefield. La Belle Alliance is a disco. La Haye Sainte is not open to the public, but if you brave the traffic which now speeds across the battlefield in a matter of seconds, it is possible to stand in the gateway and see into the farmyard. Hougoumont, still with its scars, is more welcoming and well worth visiting; it is signposted ‘Goumont’, and you can approach it through the gates which Colonel MacDonnell closed on the French intruders, which act, Wellington said, was the bravest done at the battle. In the town of Waterloo the house where the Duke spent the nights before and after the battle is a museum, while the church opposite has some fine memorials. Quatre Bras is worth a visit, and though the wood that was garrisoned by Saxe-Weimar has long disappeared, the field is relatively unchanged and is easily found by driving south from Waterloo.

  The campaign produced many heroes. Among the famous are Colonel MacDonnell who closed the gate at Hougoumont, and his immediate enemy, the giant Lieutenant Legros who wielded the axe in his assault on the château. Ensign Christie’s defence of his colour at Quatre Bras is memorable, as is Sergeant Ewart’s chilling account of how he took the Eagle during the British cavalry charge. Marshal Ney, whose last horse was shot during the attack of the Imperial Guard, raged with a broken sword to rally the defeated French. Ney, truly a brave man, survived only to be executed by a restored Louis XVIII, despi
te the Duke of Wellington’s appeal for clemency. A happy legend has it that the red-headed Marshal escaped that punishment and lived out his days anonymously in South Carolina. I wish that was true.

  The war was not ended by the victory at Waterloo, though almost so. Gneisenau, for all his bloody-mindedness during the day of battle, conducted a superb pursuit throughout the short summer night that ended any French hopes of rallying the army’s survivors. The allied armies then crossed the frontier and, on 4 July, Paris surrendered. Napoleon left France eleven days later, only to return as a sacred corpse in 1840.

  The nineteenth century was not to see comparable slaughter until the American Civil War. Gettysburg was a battle as awful as Waterloo, with similar numbers and casualties. Both battles decided great questions, but at the price of great horror. What made Waterloo so horrid was the smallness of the area into which so many men and killing machines were crammed. Today, standing where the elm tree stood (its remains were reduced to furniture), you can see virtually the whole battlefield. A third of the men who fought in the valley became casualties. No wonder Wellington prayed afterwards that he had fought his last battle.

  Not all of the men in the French and British armies fought at Waterloo. Napoleon had detached a whole corps to pursue the Prussians, which corps managed to pursue in the wrong direction and were thus absent from the battle. Their presence would undoubtedly have made a difference, but so would the presence of the 17,000 prime infantry that the Duke sent away to guard his expected line of retreat. Of course, if the French had won at Quatre Bras there would have been no battle at Waterloo and, extraordinarily, one French corps spent the whole of that day marching between Ligny and Quatre Bras. Just when they were about to be committed at Quatre Bras an order summoned them to return to Ligny, and just as they were about to fight at Ligny another order sent them marching back to Quatre Bras. If that Corps had gone into action against Wellington then I doubt we would have heard so much about the Emperor’s haemorrhoids over the last one hundred and seventy-five years.