By the time Major von Baring returned to the yard in La Haye Sainte, he was convinced that holding the farm much longer was unthinkable with only his single battalion, and he requested his superior, Colonel von Ompteda, to send him two more companies of riflemen. These reinforcements amounted to fewer than 150 Baker rifles, which joined perhaps an equal number remaining from Baring’s original command; with these troops, the major fortified his position as best he could, except for the orchard, which he decided not to reoccupy. He was just in time, because two columns of French infantry, preceded as usual by a swarm of tirailleurs, were once again advancing on both sides of the farm and threatening to surround it.
Astonishing the German major with the contempt they showed for his men’s deadly fire, the French were at the walls of the farm in an instant, trying to force their way inside. A ferocious combat ensued, particularly around the few loopholes that Baring’s men had opened that morning in the wall of the farmyard. The French grabbed the barrels of the defenders’ muskets, tried to wrest them out of their hands, and eventually succeeded in gaining control of one of the loopholes. Then a French soldier standing outside the wall started firing into the yard through the loophole, using the loaded muskets that his comrades passed him, one after the other. On the west side of the farm, the French tried to enter the barn, and in a few minutes a great many corpses were piled up in the doorway, which the defenders kept under fire. As more attackers arrived, they used the piled bodies as protection, firing into the farmyard from behind them.
Baring’s horse was killed, and the major went down with it. The major’s servant, convinced that he was dead, seized the opportunity and abandoned the position at once, so that when Baring rose again to his feet he found that he no longer had either his servant or his spare horse. However, by then a good many other officers had been knocked out of their saddles, and the major soon found a new mount in the farmyard. His servant’s bad behavior notwithstanding, Baring was touched by how faithfully his riflemen executed his orders and those of the other officers, in a situation where the probabilities of survival were getting lower and lower: “These are the moments when we learn to feel what one soldier is to another, what the word ‘comrade’ really means,” he observed in his report.
For a long time, a KGL rifleman, Private Lindau, watched an enemy officer on horseback as he trotted back and forth across the fields in front of the farm, urging his men to attack. Lindau waited until the Frenchman drew within rifle range, waited some more, and finally fired. The officer’s horse fell mortally wounded, dragging down its rider in the fall. Soon afterward, when the riflemen made a sortie from the main gate of the farm, scattering the French skirmishers who had advanced along the road, Lindau ran to his man and began searching him, quickly ripping away the golden chain that held his watch. But the officer, who was only stunned, raised his saber, hurling insults at the private, who unceremoniously killed him with the butt of his Baker. Then he cut off the bag attached to the officer’s saddle and was about to pull a gold ring off his finger when his comrades shouted to him, “Come on, leave that! The cavalry’s coming!” Lindau ran for the farm, carrying his booty, and just managed to reach the yard before the gate was bolted behind him.
In fact, during the tirailleurs’ repeated attacks, French cavalry was always present in force on the slope that led to the farm, passing it several times on the way to harass the Allied squares deployed farther to the rear. How much of this activity was undertaken by the cuirassier generals on their own initiative and how much was ordered by Marshal Ney or even by the emperor himself is unclear. Milhaud’s cuirassiers—those who remained after the destruction of the detached squadrons led by Crabbé—were the chief participants in the attack: perhaps some twenty squadrons in all, battle-weary, but still almost two thousand sabers strong.
Obviously, this cavalry did not advance all together, nor would it have been possible to do so, given the immense front it covered; the infantry squares deployed behind La Haye Sainte received charges involving several hundred cavalrymen at a time, succeeding one another as regiment after regiment sent a few squadrons forward and held the rest in reserve. Particularly in the case of troops who had received little training, the tension caused by the approach of cavalry often induced men massed in squares to fire too soon, and while the foot soldiers were busy reloading their muskets, the cavalry could take advantage of their mistake by advancing, in the hope that the infantry, aware of being temporarily disarmed, would allow itself to be seized by panic. When the cuirassiers presented themselves before Kielmansegge’s squares, his Hanoverian officers strove to prevent their men from firing too early; in one of the squares, Captain von Scriba heard the pistol-armed commander threaten to shoot anyone who fired before the order was given.
Scriba saw the cuirassiers “advance at a trot and stop some 70 or 80 paces away. The temptation to fire was great, but the whole square remained motionless with weapons cocked.” The French got jumpy and advanced a little closer, then decided to forgo the charge and trotted away, turning around the corner of the square. At this point, the Hanoverian recruits were ordered to fire. “Led by a brigade general, the cavalry passed at a distance of six paces along the right side of the square, which I commanded,” Scriba wrote. “I noticed that all the men on the right side aimed their muskets at the general’s horse when the order was given to fire, and he moved away from the danger.” As was so often the case, the troops’ fire turned out to be ineffective: “The cavalry suffered some losses in this attack, but not so many as I believed it should, given the close range. This made me think that our men were aiming too high. From then on, the officers kept warning them not to.”
Sergeant Lawrence, standing with the Fortieth in their square a little to the rear, was unimpressed by the cuirassiers’ first charges, though their magnificent helmets and gleaming cuirasses did impress the sergeant and his men, who genuinely believed that the cuirassiers were “Bonaparte’s Bodyguard.” The British officers, overestimating the enemy’s armor, which they were seeing for the first time, ordered their troops to aim not at the riders, but at the horses, and when the cuirassiers came within range, the infantry squares shot down so many of their mounts that the stricken animals impeded the progress of the others and the charge had to be aborted. “It was a most laughable sight to see these Guards in their chimney armour—trying to run away, being able to make little progress and many of them being taken prisoner by those of our light companies who were out skirmishing. I think this quite settled Napoleon’s bodyguards, for we saw no more of them,” Sergeant Lawrence concluded with satisfaction.
However, not all the squares got off so easily, especially when the French cavalry succeeded in coordinating its action with that of the infantry. One of the battalions in Ompteda’s brigade, the Eighth KGL, was composed of German veterans of the Spanish wars; under normal circumstances, they could have withstood the cuirassiers’ threatening maneuvers indefinitely. But the legionaries got into difficulty when, preparing to fight a solid line of advancing French infantry, they were surprised by the arrival of cavalry. Since a firefight between the two infantry formations—Allied square vs. French line—would have been decidedly unequal, with all the advantage going to the French, Colonel von Schroeder had ordered his men to deploy into line. But just as the troops of the KGL battalion, already under fire and in growing disorder, were trying to obey him, the enemy infantry opened their ranks to allow some cuirassier squadrons to pass through. Caught in the act of changing formations, the battalion was smashed, Schroeder was mortally wounded, and a triumphant cuirassier carried off the battalion’s color. Still, the men of the KGL were veterans, and after they had taken to their heels to escape the cuirassiers’ sabers, their surviving officers managed to reorder their ranks and lead them back, one way or another, to their position in the battle line; “but now the square was much smaller than before,” one of them recalled.
The French had once more seized the initiative; in order to snatch it ba
ck from them, the British commanders decided they needed to send in the cavalry again. Somerset’s brigade—or what remained of it—had barely had time to redeploy behind La Haye Sainte when one of Lord Uxbridge’s aides arrived, carrying the order to charge. The three squadrons of the Blues, the only ones that were still more or less intact, charged down the slope, and once again, through sheer momentum, got the best of the enemy squadrons in front of them and momentarily cleared the field. The French infantry crowded around the walls of La Haye Sainte had to run for cover, and the second attack on La Haye Sainte, like the first, was broken off. But it was clear that there would not be much of a pause; as soon as the French cavalry reordered their ranks, they would advance once more, and the siege would begin anew. Major von Baring’s men greeted the retreat of the enemy cavalry with howls of derision from the roofs and walls of La Haye Sainte, but the major had begun to be worried about running out of ammunition; when he ordered a tally, he discovered that they had already consumed more than half their supply. An officer sent back to the brigade command to ask for an emergency delivery was told not to worry; the battalion would be receiving fresh ammunition in a little while.
FORTY - FIVE
THE GREAT FRENCH CAVALRY ATTACKS AGAINST THE ALLIED SQUARES
While Major von Baring was counting the ammunition in his men’s cartridge pouches, all the Allied officers stationed along the Mont-Saint-Jean ridge between La Haye Sainte and Hougoumont, a front a mile long, realized with mounting concern that the French cavalry was preparing to advance in even greater strength. Alongside Milhaud’s indefatigable cuirassiers, who were about to ride up the slope for the third time, the emperor was sending into line the light cavalry of the Imperial Guard, a division under the command of General Lefebvre-Desnouettes. This most elite division comprised the light cavalry regiment known as chasseurs à cheval, which with 1,200 sabers was by itself as strong as three or four ordinary regiments, and a regiment of lancers with more than 800 men, one of whose squadrons, was still composed of Polish veterans who had shared Napoleon’s fortunes since the campaign of 1806–7 and had followed him to Elba. All told, a tide of at least 3,500 horses was about to surge up the slope through the slippery mud and attack the enemy line. The cavalry was so numerous that the squadrons quickly extended out to the left, threatening not just the infantry battalions deployed behind La Haye Sainte but Wellington’s line, all the way to the high ground behind Hougoumont.
Faced with this enormous force of cavalry massing but a few hundred yards away, the infantry stationed along the ridge could do nothing but stay in their squares and wait. Gradually, as the attacks developed, Wellington sent more and more reserves into the line of battle; in the end, he would have hardly any left. The three infantry battalions of the Brunswick contingent’s Second Line Brigade moved up behind Halkett’s squares; Adam’s British brigade formed four squares in support of the squares formed by Maitland’s and Du Plat’s brigades; Detmers’s brigade of Netherlanders, called back from the extreme right, deployed four of its battalions in the same area of the field; and even Vincke’s brigade, with its four battalions of Hanoverian militiamen, was withdrawn from the extreme left and redeployed in two squares as a reserve force in the center, on the reverse side of the slope a little south of Mont-Saint-Jean farm. Over the course of that afternoon, a total of thirty-six squares—of which twenty were German, twelve British, three Dutch, and one Belgian—faced the charges of Napoleon’s cavalry.
To protect them from the artillery bombardment, the squares were deployed on the reverse slope, where only rebounding cannonballs and blindly fired shells could strike them. Insofar as possible, the squares were positioned in a checkerboard pattern to maximize the effect of their fire. The idea was that whenever a squadron of French cavalry, cresting the ridge and confronting a square, should decide against charging and ride past or around, it would find itself faced with another and end up caught in a crossfire. Although fire from infantry squares had little effect, in the long run a situation of this kind was destined to take a toll on the attackers without leading to any tangible result. Wellington and his British and German generals anticipated such an inconclusive struggle as they peered through their telescopes at the French cavalry, massing at the foot of the slope. According to contemporary military theory, their expectations were correct: in a manual published in Paris in 1813, General Thiébault declared, if infantry formed two lines of squares deployed at the proper intervals and supported by artillery, “I cannot imagine what cavalry would be able to accomplish against them.”
Napoleon later tried to dissociate himself from the great cavalry attacks against the Allied squares; he let it be understood that they had been carried out without his authorization, or at least too soon. But such a large movement could not have been undertaken a few hundred yards from the emperor’s chair without an explicit order from him. More likely, Napoleon was unable to appreciate the depth of the infantry masses that Wellington had deployed on the back side of the ridge, and believed he could achieve a decisive breakthrough, as had happened at Eylau, where a cavalry charge, involving more or less the same number of sabers, had broken up the Russian line. That Napoleon believed this is demonstrated by a few sentences that Las Cases recorded on St. Helena not a year later, when the emperor confessed his regret that Murat, who had commanded his cavalry in so many battles, had not been with him that day. Murat would have succeeded, Napoleon said, “and with that, perhaps, he would have given us the victory. For what was it that we needed to do at certain points in the battle? Smash three or four British squares.”
If Napoleon was responsible for not having verified in person the solidity of the enemy line, which was formed in such a way that his own manuals would have shown him the impossibility of breaking it, then the person who was perhaps to blame for not having properly explained the situation to him was his representative in the field, Marshal Ney. But “le rougeaud”, “the Redhead,” as his troops called him, was anything but a student of military theory, and he laughed at manuals. Ney spent the day engaged in urging his squadrons forward, saber in hand, and in getting horses shot under him, each time emerging miraculously unscathed; apparently, he too believed a breakthrough was possible. If the cavalry, observing a wavering square, perhaps one made up of recruits, could have managed to get among them and scatter them in a rout, a breach would have been opened in Wellington’s line; and if the same sequence could be repeated in several neighboring squares, the breach would have become impossible to close.
In the beginning, the squares were not alone in facing the tide of advancing cavalry, even though in the end everything really did come down to that. There were six or seven Allied artillery batteries posted on the crest of the ridge, and much farther forward, almost at the bottom of the slope, every officer who commanded a square maintained a line of skirmishers, continually engaged in exchanging fire with the corresponding enemy line. The artillery officers and the officers in charge of the light companies all had received precise orders should the enemy cavalry advance—to keep firing until the last possible moment and then to abandon their positions and take refuge in the nearest square, since neither a line of skirmishers nor a battery of guns had the least possibility of holding off attacking cavalry. Repulsing the attack was the job of the squares; when that was accomplished, the gunners were to return to their pieces and open fire on the retreating cavalry. Then, using caution, the line of skirmishers could also be reestablished.
In fact, the attack of the French cavalry was carried out with such violence and with such a numerous force that many skirmishers, surprised in the open, were slaughtered before they had time to retreat. When Macready, the young officer who commanded the light company of the Thirtieth Regiment, assembled his men for roll call the morning after the battle, he discovered that, of the fifty-four troops present in the ranks the previous day, only ten remained; he didn’t know, he said, whether to laugh or cry. Later, Macready went over the battlefield, searching for any of his men wh
o might still be alive. The youth was able to find only one, and that one so severely wounded that he would not survive long. He was “a good religious soldier,” Macready wrote, with “life enough left in him to give me the disgusting details of their butchery.”
The artillery, too, found that obeying the instructions they had received was not easy. In a letter written some time afterward to Lord Mulgrave, master-general of the ordnance, Wellington himself, still frothing with rage, alluded to their difficulties. “The French Cavalry charged, and were formed on the same ground with our artillery, in general within a few yards of our guns. We could not expect the artillery men to remain at their guns in such a case. But I had a right to expect that the officers and men of the artillery would do as I did, and as all the staff did, that is to take shelter in the Squares of the infantry till the French cavalry should be driven off the ground, either by our cavalry or infantry. But they did no such thing; they ran off the field entirely, taking with them limbers, ammunition, and everything; and when in a few minutes we had driven off the French cavalry, and could have made use of our artillery, we had no artillerymen to fire them; and, in point of fact, I should have had NO artillery during the whole of the latter part of the action, if I had not kept a reserve in the commencement.”
The Battle Page 23