The Battle

by Alessandro Barbero

  In this case as in the case of Bourgeois’s brigade, the lead regiment, which had led the victorious attack, which had been the most exposed, and which had suffered the most casualties, was the regiment most thoroughly routed when the turning point came; moreover, it suffered the shame of losing its regimental Eagle. Sergeant Ewart of the Scots Grays, a giant well over six feet tall, had just decapitated a French officer with a saber blow and was looking about him in search of other victims when he saw the Eagle of the Forty-fifth Ligne swaying over the heads of the fleeing French infantry. Ewart spurred his horse, caught up with the standard-bearer, exchanged a few saber strokes with him, and finally, having split his opponent’s head open, triumphantly took possession of his war trophy. This was the second Eagle captured during the Battle of Waterloo, and it would be the last: a testament to the obstinacy with which the French, even in the moment of final defeat, continued to defend their “Cuckoos.”

  Immediately after overwhelming Grenier’s brigade, the Grays attacked the first regiment of Nogues’s brigade, the Twenty-first Ligne. Since it was still some three to four hundred yards from the sunken lane, the Twenty-first had time to observe what was happening and quickly form square. As the British dragoons drew near in what was by then almost complete disorder, they came under fire from the square, which struck down a great many horses and men. Lieutenant Wyndham, despite having received one wound, continued to charge together with his men; he was wounded again, this time in the foot, and compelled to leave the battlefield. But the impetus of the oncoming British dragoons was so great—as was, in all probability, the terror of the French recruits, given what was happening all around them—that the square broke up as the cavalry advanced, and the Twenty-first was overwhelmed. Its colonel, a veteran of the revolutionary wars named, ironically enough, Carré (“Square”), was wounded and captured; a great many of his soldiers threw away their muskets and fell on their knees, begging for mercy. One of the Grays remembered that the French “cried out ‘Prisoners!’ and threw down their arms, and stripped themselves of their belts and ran to our rear. Ay, they ran like hares!”

  In the meantime, the Royals and the Inniskillings had followed the fleeing infantry all the way to the bottom of the slope. There they, too, like the Household Brigade on the other side of the main road, came under fire from some enemy infantry formed on the opposite slope. The squadron commanders tried to assemble their men and lead them back to their lines, but the regiments were so widely dispersed that only a few troopers could hear these orders. Those few, commanders and men, retired back up the slope, pushing their prisoners before them.

  Many French soldiers who had thrown themselves on the ground or raised their hands started gathering up their muskets and firing again. Captain Clark found the enemy lacking in a sense of fair play: “The French on this occasion behaved very ill, many of our soldiers falling from the fire of men who had surrendered, and whose lives had been spared only a few minutes before.” He was attacked by a Frenchman who leaped to his feet, pointed his musket at the captain’s head, and pulled the trigger; a sudden turn of the head saved Clark’s life, but the ball carried away the tip of his nose.

  Infantry units from the brigades of Ompteda, Kempt, Bijlandt, and Pack were already advancing in support of the cavalry, and they completed the roundup of prisoners. This advance, however, was carried out in the utmost confusion: The British infantry fired on the Belgians, whose blue uniforms resembled the enemy’s, and shortly thereafter, having realized their error, they mistook French troops for Belgians and let them get away. An officer went so far in pursuit of the fugitives that eventually they ganged up on him and took him prisoner, stripping him of nearly all his clothes and leaving him in his shirt. The ferocity of the action seems to have been equal to the confusion. The Scottish troops of the Forty-second Regiment had lost their colonel, Sir Robert Macara, at Quatre Bras; wounded in the battle, he was being carried off the field when French cavalry surrounded his party and cut it to pieces. Now, some of the Scots shouted, “Where’s Macara?” as they bayoneted unarmed French soldiers who were trying to surrender. Sergeant Robertson of the Gordons heard a Frenchman who spoke excellent English offer his money and his watch to whoever would agree to protect him. Lieutenant Scheltens saved the lives of two French officers who gave him a secret Masonic sign as they were surrendering; fortunately for them, the Belgian was a Mason, too, and he made sure they were brought to the rear, among at least two thousand French troops taken prisoner and escorted behind the Allied lines. “They were, generally speaking, fine soldierlike men,” observed a British officer, “but appeared a little cast down from their want of success.”

  Durutte’s division was the only one in d’Erlon’s corps that escaped the disaster. According to Napoleon’s orders, this division was to go into action last, and so it began its march after the others. The French troops advanced toward the high ground where two brigades of inexperienced Hanoverian militiamen, commanded by Colonels Best and Vincke, awaited the attack with mounting anxiety.

  The state of mind that prevailed in this sector of the Allied line—which up to now had been the least engaged—is illustrated by the vicissitudes of the surgeons attached to Vincke’s brigade. Having set up their dressing station in the rear, they were ordered to withdraw farther in order to be safe from the artillery bombardment. They complied, found a peasant’s house that suited their purposes, and were preparing to operate on the first casualties when they heard shouted warnings that they had to leave the house at once. One of the physicians, Dr. Oppermann, went outside to see what was happening and met the brigade’s chief surgeon, who told him, “You will have to fall farther back.” The surgeons obeyed, and after a march of some ten minutes they halted and finally set about their work. Troops wounded by artillery attacks and by the fire of the tirailleurs were carried by comrades all the way to this spot, and no doubt some healthy men took advantage of the opportunity to abandon the front lines. According to Oppermann’s account, “[The surgeons] worked together for half an hour. Outside, however, the tumult was continuing to increase, and I was forced to make a quick decision, because men on horseback were arriving every minute, totally in the grip of panic and shouting, ‘Back! Back! Move it! Move!’” Eventually, the surgeons cleared off completely and did not stop until they reached Brussels. In the turmoil, they lost all their expensive instruments, for which the War Ministry later obliged them to pay.

  But General Durutte either did not wish to commit his entire division or had insufficient time to do so. After a march of many hours that morning, his men had taken up their positions in the front line only a short while before, and Durutte later admitted that he had only half believed that an attack organized in such a way could succeed in the first place. Properly concerned about the strong force of enemy pickets he glimpsed on his right, among the hedgerows and walls of the farms of Papelotte and La Haye and even beyond them as far as the Fichermont wood, he kept a part of his force in reserve, and this prudent approach led to a reduction in the damage done by the British cavalry when it appeared in that part of the field and put an end to the French advance. Durutte’s men promptly formed square and repelled the uncoordinated attempts to charge them made by a few isolated groups of Grays. An officer in Pack’s brigade, stationed a few hundred yards away, noticed that the Dragoons had lost nearly all cohesion: “Flushed with their victory, they galloped up by twos and threes, and even singly, to the French columns, prancing about, and brandishing their swords, as if in defiance. An officer was attempting to bring them off: I could distinctly see a French soldier level his piece, fire, and bring him rolling to the ground.” When the British cavalry finally withdrew, Durutte’s men remained practically the only organized force left in d’Erlon’s corps. In the course of a few minutes, five other French brigades had been transformed into a mob of fugitives.

  THIRTY - NINE

  DRAGOONS AGAINST GUNS

  The Scots Grays, who according to Lord Uxbridge’s orders were supp
osed to remain in reserve, were instead the regiment that kept charging longest. While the officers of the Royals and the Inniskillings, satisfied with the results of the action and worried about the losses they had suffered, tried to reassemble their scattered squadrons and lead them back up the slope, Colonel James Hamilton of the Grays decided that he and they had not yet had enough.

  At the age of thirty-eight, Hamilton had a curious history. He was born in a British army encampment during the American Revolutionary War. He returned home with his father, a sergeant named Anderson, and grew up like any other child of the Glasgow slums. But General Hamilton, who had commanded Sergeant Anderson’s former regiment, took young James Anderson under his protection and sent him to school at his own expense; eventually, he assumed full responsibility for the boy, raised him in his own house with the help of a spinster sister, and in the end adopted him and gave him his name. When James was sixteen, General Hamilton bought him an officer’s commission in the Scots Grays. Twenty-two years later, James Hamilton was the commander of the regiment; the Scots Grays were his entire life, and this was the first time that he led them into battle, because during his tenure the regiment had never before been sent outside the United Kingdom. Their zeal to show at last what they were worth, together with the total lack of experience on the part of both Hamilton and his officers, explains what happened next. Having sighted the guns of the Grande Batterie in the distance, the colonel decided to capture them. He resolutely spurred his horse in that direction, followed by a large part of his regiment.

  The attack on the Grande Batterie is one of the more obscure episodes in the Battle of Waterloo. Very few accounts were left by eyewitnesses who actually took part in the action, and yet historians generally take it for granted that the cavalry reached a great many guns and rendered them useless. Lord Uxbridge himself wrote that his men seized (“or rather passed,” he prudently adds) a vast number of guns, but as to the effective results of the charge, he is reduced to quoting a French general, whose name he does not recall, who is said to have told him that the charge put forty guns out of action. The most vivid account was provided by one of the Grays’ noncommissioned officers, Corporal Dickson. The corporal remembered Colonel Hamilton in the act of indicating the objective to his men, and he gave a particularly raw description of the dragoons’ behavior once they got among the guns: “Such slaughtering! We sabred the gunners, lamed the horses, and cut their traces and harness. I can hear the Frenchmen yet crying ‘Diable’ when I struck at them, and the long-drawn hiss through their teeth as my sword went home. The artillery drivers sat on their horses weeping aloud as we went among them; they were mere boys, we thought.”

  From the absence of eyewitness accounts by members of the other regiments, it seems that no other cavalry followed Colonel Hamilton and the Scots Grays to the guns in their half-mad charge. Considering that none of the guns could be taken away, and that a short time later the surviving Grays had hastily to abandon the position, one could reasonably conclude that the Grays’ attack was without significance, and accept Napoleon’s curt summary of the matter, according to which the British cavalry restricted itself to taking momentary possession of a few cannon that were quickly recaptured. But another account, from a most credible source—General Desales—confirmed that the British cavalry’s sudden appearance in the midst of the guns of the Grande Batterie did indeed produce a disastrous effect, not so much for the material losses the Grays inflicted as for the panic that seized the gunners, just as it had seized the infantry a few minutes before.

  Desales was engaged in coordinating the fire of the more than fifty guns the emperor had put under his command when the chef d’escadron, Waudré, who commanded I Corps’s two horse artillery batteries, came to notify him that the enemy was deploying great masses of cavalry. The worried Waudré asked the general whether they should inform the emperor. With some impatience, Desales told him to return to his post, because the emperor had an excellent telescope and surely needed no advice from them. Then Desales turned back to his artillery and decided that the time had come to carry out the order he had received and begin moving the guns forward, one battery at a time under the covering fire of the others. He rode over to Marshal Ney to inform him of what he intended to do, but shortly after he arrived at the marshal’s side, Desales noticed that the colonel in command of the three 12-pounder batteries had already moved them on his own initiative; in fact, they were taking up their new positions, a few hundred yards farther down the slope, almost level with La Haye Sainte. Desales anxiously followed these movements. With relief, he watched the guns get into position and reopen fire, but just as he relaxed, Marshal Ney cried out, “They’re charging you!”

  In that instant, the routed French infantry surged around the guns, followed by the British cavalry. The French gunners had stopped firing, “for fear of killing our own” (although Captain Martin was convinced they had fired into the mass for a little while, killing many of his men), and a moment later they were swept away in the rout. It took but a few minutes for the British dragoons to pass the line of 12-pounders and, in the midst of the crowd of fugitives, to reach the 6-pounder batteries, which were still in their original positions. Most of the gunners took to their heels as the dragoons sabered horses and men. Desales claimed he rushed into the center of this disaster, took command of one of the 12-pounder batteries, redeployed it along the main road, and immediately started firing on the cavalry; but in spite of his efforts, the panic that had overcome the gunners could not be calmed.

  In the end, when the Scots Grays abandoned the position, the French guns were all still in place because the dragoons had no means of carrying them away. Had the surviving gunners come back into line, the damage would have been small, “and honorable men should have returned to their post, because not one piece, not one caisson had been taken by the enemy.” Instead, Desales concluded bitterly, most of the runaways did not show their faces again. The colonel who had brought the 12-pounder battery into its new position tried in vain to call back the fugitives and was the only battery commander to report to Desales. The general, beside himself, received the officer with an angry exclamation: “Monsieur! When one has committed such a military error as this, he does not report, he gets himself killed!” Years later those ill-judged words, uttered in the excitement of the moment, continued to prick Desales’s conscience. The colonel was little more than a boy and full of fervor; he had been promoted a few months previously by Napoleon in person, when the emperor passed through Grenoble after his flight from Elba. “The poor young man! He galloped away at once. I heard nothing more about him.”

  This account, given by the commander of the Grande Batterie, is in complete accord with the one an anonymous general gave Lord Uxbridge in a conversation that took place some time after the battle. According to this general, the charge had rendered forty guns useless, a declaration that justifies the suspicion that he may have been Desales himself. Perhaps the general, exasperated at the cowardice of the gunners and desirous of saddling them with the responsibility for the disaster, exaggerated the number of batteries that remained effectively out of commission. The catastrophe of the Grande Batterie did not really have a decisive material effect, because Napoleon was in possession of immense reserves of cannon, more, in fact, than he could possibly deploy on such a narrow front. But from a psychological point of view, the panic that seized Desales’s artillerymen, just as it had seized the infantry, was an ominous sign.

  FORTY

  JACQUINOT’S LANCERS

  However good his telescope may have been, Napoleon, from his position on the ridge at La Belle Alliance, had not had sufficient time to forestall the disaster. But before the enemy cavalry had reached the end of its ride, stopping to catch its breath in the shallow valley or among the guns of the Grande Batterie, the emperor was already reacting. He ordered Milhaud’s corps, which constituted the cavalry reserve of the right wing, to counterattack. General Farine, who had already been wounded at Ligny an
d would soon receive another wound at Waterloo, and General Travers, with their four cuirassier regiments, ten fresh squadrons totaling almost 1,300 sabers, set out in pursuit of the exhausted British cavalry, whose troops were remounting the slope in disorder, trying to return to their original positions.

  From his position on the extreme right of the French line, in front of Papelotte, General Jacquinot, commander of I Corps’s light cavalry, had also watched incredulously as the rout unfolded, and had immediately wheeled his squadrons into line to intervene. One of his four regiments, Colonel Marbot’s Seventh Hussars, had been detached to reconnoiter the Prussian advance. Jacquinot held another in reserve, but he sent his two regiments of lancers—some seven hundred riders in all—galloping into the fray. For some time, Napoleon had been increasing the number of French cavalry units armed with lances, following the examples of the Austrian uhlans and the Russian Cossacks. As the new weapon was nearly nine feet long, weighed seven pounds, and had a steel point on a wooden staff, it was awkward to carry, and cumbersome, it had its detractors, and the British cavalry had not yet considered adopting it; but Jacquinot’s men would demonstrate the lance’s terrifying efficiency. The two regiments fanned out and started a mopping-up operation over the entire length of the ground where catastrophe had struck the I Corps only a few minutes previously.