The Battle

by Alessandro Barbero

  NINE

  “AS BAD A NIGHT AS I EVER WITNESSED”

  Like all his comrades, Sergeant William Wheeler, of the Fifty-first Light Infantry, was soaked through, “as wet as if we had been plunged over head in a river.” His regiment had camped for the night in a rye field on the extreme right of the Allied line, behind the château of Hougoumont, in a no-man’s-land where there was always the possibility that an enemy patrol might suddenly appear out of the darkness. The officers, therefore, had forbidden their men to light fires and wrap themselves up in blankets, and so the soldiers remained seated on their knapsacks under the cold rain all night long, smoking incessantly in an attempt to keep warm and stay awake. Wheeler later wrote to his family, “You often blamed me for smoking when I was at home last year but I must tell you if I had not had a good stock of tobacco this night I must have given up the Ghost.”

  Other factors helped the men of the Fifty-first make it through the night. The previous evening, a man from the nearest village had come to their bivouac, selling bread, cheese, and the local juniper brandy. As it happened, during the march one of the soldiers in Wheeler’s squad had picked up a moneybag dropped by a Belgian light cavalryman and had seen fit not to return it. Well aware that such opportunities were not infrequent in wartime, Wheeler’s veterans had already agreed to share whatever booty should come their way, and so that night they were able to buy themselves a variety of comforts. Despite this abundance, however, the incessant rain eventually put all of them in a bad humor. Those who had fought in Spain remembered that many great battles had been preceded by storms and thunder and lightning, and all such struggles had been victories; but not even this provided much consolation to men soaked with rainwater and shivering from cold. The only real satisfaction was the knowledge that the enemy was suffering the same misery.

  Wheeler and his men had already been drinking and smoking for a while when Sergeant Mauduit of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard, also drenched and exhausted, finally arrived at his bivouac. The Guard’s march that day had been turbulent and undisciplined. The men had broken into houses, looking for food, and had stopped and plundered supply wagons, laughing in the faces of the outnumbered gendarmes assigned to maintain order along the road: General Radet, commander of the military police, was so disturbed by this behavior that he tendered his resignation that very evening. When night fell, the troops were still on the march and far from the villages where they were supposed to be billeted. In the darkness and the driving rain, some units lost their commanders and no longer knew what direction to march in. The road was so muddy that many men tried to take shortcuts through the fields, only to get lost and wander all night long in search of their units. The veterans of the Guard cursed their commanders, accusing them of not knowing what they were doing; more than one soldier, suspecting the top brass of sympathizing with the Bourbon monarchy, muttered “Treason!” At midnight, Sergeant Mauduit’s regiment arrived at a farmyard and received the welcome order to stop there for the night after a heavy day of marching. The men’s trousers and overcoats were encrusted with mud. Many had even lost their shoes and were marching barefoot.

  In the fields behind the château of Hougoumont, Captain Cavalié Mercer was trying to sleep in the field tent he shared with the four other officers in his battery. When he realized that closing his eyes was impossible because the rainwater was dripping through the saturated tent, he and his lieutenant left their comrades and found a hedge that offered a little more shelter. Mercer’s companion had an umbrella with him, brought from his home. This piece of equipment had caused him to be the object of merciless ragging, but now it turned out that he’d been right after all; sheltered by the umbrella, the two managed to make a fire and sat down to smoke a tranquil cigar. After a while a German soldier, a straggler or a deserter, passed by and lit his pipe at their fire. The two officers persuaded him to let them have a hen that he’d stolen from some barnyard and immediately put their prize in a cooking pot. Quite soon, however, the other officers exited the tent and claimed their portions, and the meal, shared among so many, turned out to be distinctly frugal.

  Captain Duthilt, an aide-de-camp to one of the brigade commanders in Count d’Erlon’s corps, watched the troops making camp for the night along the main road, on the heights above the village of Plancenoit. Men and horses were entirely covered with black, oily sludge, which the captain thought could be explained by the nearby coal mines and the fact that the road was used to transport the mineral. Bread was distributed, and in the village—which had been abandoned by its inhabitants—the men cooked their rice as best they could; but there wasn’t enough to go around, and as for wine and brandy, the soldiers had to do without them. The day before, in fact, I Corps’s supply train had been seized by a sudden panic; many drivers had fled, and many wagons had been plundered. In the midst of a surreal landscape of burst baggage and opened trunks, Captain Duthilt had found his valise, ripped open with a knife and completely empty; he had lost his gear, his papers, and the little money he possessed, and his general and the other aide found themselves in the same situation.

  Captain Cotter of the Sixty-ninth Regiment, camped on the ridge behind La Haye Sainte, had given up trying to sleep. The night was too cold—a steady, frigid wind whipped the ridge—and the rain had so flooded the marshy ground that one sank ankle-deep in mud with every step; it seemed to Cotter that lying down in such a bog was out of the question. In his efforts to keep warm, the captain walked back and forth all night, examining the sky for the first signs of dawn, which with all its uncertainties would at least put an end to this particular torture. Inevitably, there came into his mind (and into the minds of who knows how many other British officers that night) the famous scene in Shakespeare’s Henry V in which the two encamped armies, the night before the Battle of Agincourt, await the morning light; Captain Cotter found himself repeating, more and more nervously, the dauphin’s words: “Will it never be day?”

  The Second Light Battalion of the King’s German Legion, stationed around La Haye Sainte farm, had a somewhat easier time of it than their comrades who were camped out in the open. The rifleman Friedrich Lindau, nonetheless, was mightily displeased with his company’s assignment to the orchard, where there was nary a dry spot to be found: “It kept on raining, the orchard was full of mud, and no one was comfortable. Some leaned against a tree or part of the wall, while others sat on their knapsacks; lying down was impossible.” Having heard that there was wine in the farmhouse cellar, he went down to see for himself and found a half-full bottle. He filled his canteen with its contents and went out in search of his two brothers, who were serving in other units. As soon as he reappeared, however, his comrades surrounded him and drank all his wine, and Lindau, though he descended into the cellar and refilled his canteen several times, never succeeded in his plan to share a little drink with his brothers. In compensation, all his comrades drank their fill in his company, and the wine helped them bear the night in the muddy orchard.

  Not far away, the men of the Seventh Hussars were on their feet next to their horses and passing “as bad a night as I ever witnessed,” as Sergeant Cotton later recalled. “We cloaked, throwing a part over the saddle, holding by the stirrup leather, to steady us if sleepy; to lie down with water running in streams under us, was not desirable, and to lie amongst the horses not altogether safe.” Finally, one of the Hussars—a comrade of Cotton’s, Robert Fisher, a tailor by trade—proposed that they go in search of something they could lie on. Sergeant Cotton went off and returned a little later with a bundle of leaves and stalks obtained from Mont-Saint-Jean farm. The Hussars strewed the cuttings on the ground and lay down on their improvised bed. “The poor tailor,” Cotton reported, “had his thread of life snapped short on the following day.”

  Major Trefcon, chief of staff in a division of the French II Corps, spent a large part of the night sheltered from the rain in an abandoned barn while working with his commander, General Bachelu. The two men received reports from
their colonels and brigade commanders, calculated the number of available troops, and took all the measures necessary for going into battle the following day. Then they ate something, divided a bale of straw, and flung themselves down to sleep. During the night, one of the division’s two brigadiers, unable to find other lodgings, sought shelter in the barn, and Trefcon had to share his straw with the newcomer. “The soldiers were no less exhausted than we were,” the major observed. “They lay down wherever they could. Most of them simply went to sleep in the mud.” The difference between recruits and veterans showed in their ability to arrange for a modicum of comfort, even in those exceptional conditions. Almost all the troops in bivouac that night, of whatever nationality, had a blanket to wrap themselves in (although the Scots of the Forty-second Regiment, the Black Watch, had secretly sold the blankets distributed to them after they disembarked in Flanders), but only a resourceful few, veterans who knew all the tricks, smeared their blankets with mud and slept as though covered by some impermeable fabric.

  TEN

  ON THE BRUSSELS ROAD

  The men who had the most trouble sleeping were those in the regiments camped near the main road, because the pavé was crowded with traffic all night long. Corporal Dickson of the Scots Grays was kept awake by an incessant rumbling that reminded him of the sound of wind in a chimney; it was the French army wagons, arriving continuously at La Belle Alliance. The traffic was still heavier on the Allied side, because the military convoy had to make its way through a throng of wounded soldiers and fleeing civilians. The Fortieth Regiment had taken shelter from the rain in the stables, barns, and piggeries in the surroundings of Waterloo; but according to Sergeant Lawrence, a veteran who at twenty-four had already seen six years of war in Spain and North America, “All that night was one continued clamour, for thousands of camp-followers were on their retreat to Brussels, fearful of sticking to the army after the Quatre Bras affair. It was indeed a sight, for owing to the rain and continued traffic the roads were almost impassable, and the people were sometimes completely stuck in the mud; and besides these a continual stream of baggage-wagons was kept up through the night.”

  Sergeant Costello, of the Ninety-fifth Rifles, had suffered a shattered right hand at Quatre Bras, but the cries of the seriously wounded men who were being transported to Brussels in wagons prevented him from sleeping even more than his own suffering did. Searching for a familiar face, a number of people, mostly women, crowded around each vehicle as it passed with its load of wounded. Costello, with his arm in a sling, thought he heard an outburst of Homeric laughter, approached the wagon it seemed to have come from, and asked the men inside to tell their tale. One of them—whom Costello recognized—explained that he had seen a woman he knew well, the wife of a comrade, as she was drawing near the wagon, and had mimicked her husband’s voice so well that she mistook him in the darkness. Believing he was her husband, she handed him a bottle of liquor and kept walking anxiously alongside the wagon, trying to get a good look at his face. Finally, the man gave the empty bottle back to her, accompanying it with a wish that her husband might not be wounded at all. The woman’s disappointment and anger had been greeted with loud laughter by all the soldiers present, and Costello did not fail to join in their merriment, complimenting his friend on his spirit of initiative.

  Soldiers at Waterloo were not infrequently accompanied by their wives, and just about everything imaginable was part of an army’s train. When Major Harry Smith landed in Belgium, he was accompanied by his Spanish wife, Juana, a brother who was with him as an army volunteer, two servants, one chambermaid, six horses, and two mules. A certain number of rank-and-file soldiers also had permission to bring with them, and to maintain at the army’s expense, their wives and children, who otherwise would have ended up on the street. When the Forty-second—the Black Watch—embarked in Ireland for the voyage to Ostend, every company was allowed to bring along four women, each of whom was entitled to half rations. Having arrived in Flanders, the regiment had to board barges to continue the voyage on the canal, and orders came down limiting each company to only two women. Without much ceremony, the others were returned weeping to a barracks, but they all managed to escape and quickly rejoined their husbands. If the proportions were the same in every regiment, many thousands of women must have followed Wellington’s army to Belgium, and many more joined them after the troops disembarked. Jack Parsons, a grenadier in the Seventy-third Regiment, collected a Flemish girl and brought her with him all the way to Waterloo; at dawn on the day of battle, waking from a bad dream and afflicted by dire premonitions, he asked his captain to help him make a will in which he left the girl his back pay, all that he possessed in the world.

  In the first days of the campaign, women and children had stayed close to their respective husbands and fathers, sometimes running the same risks as they did. During the retreat from Quatre Bras, some riflemen from the Ninety-fifth found a woman lying dead with a musket ball in her head and a living child in her arms; they gathered up the little boy and carried him along until they found his father and turned his son over to him. But the night before the Battle of Waterloo, the duke ordered all noncombatants sent back behind the lines so as not to interfere with the army’s operations. Not everyone obeyed. Elizabeth Watkins, a five-year-old child, claimed to have remained on the field, together with her mother, throughout the battle, helping her tear cloth into strips for bandages; she was still alive, and she still remembered, in 1903. Most of the women and children, however—like most of the other civilians, servants, workmen, and peddlers—thronged the high road in the darkness, headed for the relative safety of Brussels.

  In order to be rid of anything that might encumber his army’s mobility the following day, Wellington also ordered that all baggage, whether conveyed in wagon trains for the regimental rank and file or privately transported for officers, was to be sent back to Brussels and from there directed to Antwerp. This multitude of vehicles and beasts of burden joined the crowd of refugees who were already packing the road, fleeing from the imminent devastation of what had been, until a few days ago, a tranquil stretch of countryside. Terrified by the soldiers’ destructiveness, all the country people in the region had left their homes and hastened into the forest of Soignes, with their pitiful household goods piled on carts and whatever animals had escaped requisitioning. Numerous wagons loaded with bread, victuals, and rum for the troops tried to make their way to the front against the tide of refugees but had to be abandoned in the middle of the road; the horses pulling these wagons had been requisitioned by Wellington’s officials from the local peasantry, and in the general confusion the owners of the beasts had managed to reclaim them and run off into the forest. This seems to have been the coup de grâce as far as the road was concerned. Soon it was transformed into an immense jam, a mass in which it was almost impossible to move. That night, the men of Sir John Lambert’s brigade, on the march from Brussels to Waterloo, had to clear a path for themselves by roughly dumping abandoned or stuck vehicles into the nearest ditches, thus preserving from total strangulation the only line of retreat available to Wellington’s army.

  ELEVEN

  LETTERS IN THE NIGHT

  The fear that the enemy might resume his march and slip away in the night prevented Napoleon from sleeping. The emperor’s servants had prepared a camp bed for him in one of the rooms in the farmhouse of Le Caillou, and a fire was burning in the chimney. Shortly after dinner, the emperor lay down to rest, but before one o’clock he was awake again. Unable to fall back asleep, he went out, accompanied by a single aide-de-camp, reached the bivouac area on foot, and walked along his entire line, examining the horizon. In the intervals between one downpour and the next, the soldiers of both armies had managed to light fires, and thousands of glimmering beacons distinctly marked out their positions in the darkness. Sometime later, Napoleon seemed to recall the scene: “The forest of Soignes looked as though it were in flames; the horizon was aglow with the fires of the bivouacs. The most
profound silence reigned.” About two-thirty in the morning, when he reached the woods around Hougoumont, the emperor heard the sounds of a column on the march and grew worried; should the enemy withdraw, Napoleon had decided, he would awaken his troops immediately and take up the pursuit in the darkness. But the sounds faded away almost immediately, and the rain started up again, harder than ever.

  At least, that was the story the emperor told in his memoirs. Unfortunately, there is no trace of this thrilling nocturnal reconnaissance in the accounts left by his servants, all of whom agree that the emperor did indeed sleep very little, because the traffic along the road was quite noisy and officers were continually arriving at Le Caillou to give reports or request instructions, but nonetheless he remained in the house until morning. Marchand, his valet, saw him walking around undressed, absently trimming his fingernails with a pair of scissors and looking out the window at the rain that continued to thrash the countryside. Around three in the morning, the emperor actually did decide that a reconnaissance was necessary, but he sent one of his orderly officers, General Gourgaud, and he was under the covers again when the general returned to report that the roads were in terrible condition and the ground impracticable because of the rain, so there would be no hurrying to get an early start.