At that moment, Baring’s situation became desperate. A count of the ammunition remaining to his men revealed that they each had only three or four shots left. The newest arrivals, the Nassauers, had much more ammunition than this, but it did no good, because their musket cartridges were unusable in Baker rifles; as to the Nassauers themselves, Major Baring preferred, in his account, not to elaborate on their performance, but they were inexperienced recruits, surely incapable of adequately replacing the riflemen. The farm was enveloped in the thick smoke of the fire, and the French, having successfully brought forward some artillery pieces to within sight of the external wall, were beginning to breach it. Although the defenders were taking advantage of every moment of respite to fill up the breaches with debris, it was evident to Baring that, under these conditions, they would not be able to last very long.
Baring ordered one of his officers to try to deliver a message to Colonel von Ompteda, explicitly putting him on notice that the garrison would not be able to withstand another attack. When the tirailleurs started making a fresh attack on the barn and the fire flared up again, and while his soldiers were using up their last grains of powder, Baring wrote another note, insisting that if he didn’t receive some ammunition he would be forced to abandon his position. Meanwhile, the French, seeing that the defenders’ fire was growing steadily lighter, attacked the side of the farm nearest the road, and some sappers armed with axes started knocking down the carriage gate. Finally, as the men of the Thirteenth Légère were scaling the walls and bursting into the farmyard, Major Baring made the most difficult decision of his life: “Inexpressibly painful as the decision was to me of giving up the place, my feeling of duty as a man overcame that of honor, and I gave the order to retire through the house into the garden.”
This turned into not so much a retreat as a disorganized flight, with the French, enraged by the defenders’ obstinate resistance and determined to give no quarter to any of them, hot on their heels. The passage through the house was narrow, and many prisoners were taken; the most fortunate suffered a thrashing, followed by a brutal march to the rear of the French lines, but others did not fare so well. Some of the wounded vainly cried out in French, “Pardon!”—the conventional plea of one begging for his life—but they were finished off with bayonets. Ensign Frank, with one broken arm, took refuge in the house, hid behind a bed, and stayed in his hiding place until evening; when two fusiliers tried to hide in the same room, the French burst in behind them, crying out, “Pas de pardon à ces coquins verts!” and shot both of them to death. Lieutenant Graeme found his way blocked by an officer and four men; the officer grabbed him by the collar while one of the men thrust at him with his bayonet, but Graeme was still holding his sword and parried the blow. The officer, who had let him go, seized his collar again and gave him a jerk, whereupon Graeme twisted out of his grasp and took to his heels. With shouts of “Coquin!” the French fired after him, but they did not pursue him, and Graeme was able to rejoin his commanding officer. Baring led the lieutenant and the few other survivors of the garrison in a sprint up the slope and into the two companies of the First KGL Light Battalion, which were formed up in a small square behind the hollow way. “Although we could not fire a shot,” he remembered, “we helped to increase the numbers.”
Private Lindau took refuge with some comrades and an officer behind the fence that closed off a corner of the farmyard, and there they surrendered to the French. Pricking them with bayonets, their captors made them jump the fence to exit their hiding place, all the while furiously screaming, “En avant, couillons!” As soon as they reached the road, they were stripped of all they had, and Lindau lost his bag of gold, as well as two watches. The violence of their treatment exasperated the prisoners to such a degree that a few of them began to stoop down and gather stones to defend themselves; but the officer, a captain, managed to calm them, thus saving the whole lot from being massacred. Among their captors, the prisoners recognized an officer whom they themselves had captured a year before “in the Jewish cemetery in Bayonne.” In an effort to protect the prisoners, this man ordered that they were not to be robbed, but his soldiers responded to this prohibition with catcalls and whistling. At last, the prisoners were turned over to a group of cuirassiers, survivors of the afternoon’s fighting, who were ordered to escort them to the rear. “Most of the French cuirassiers had bandaged heads. They forced us to run as fast as their horses, and when a man from the first battalion couldn’t run fast enough, they killed him with a saber blow.”
As was the case in the Hougoumont sector, around La Haye Sainte the French succeeded in coordinating their infantry with their cavalry much more effectively than they managed to do in any other part of the battlefield. Despite hours of charging, the cuirassier squadrons of Milhaud and Kellermann appeared once again at the crest of the slope as soon as Donzelot’s skirmishers took possession of the farm. Lieutenant Graeme had no time to take a breath before the cavalry charged the square he had just taken refuge in. To his relief, the riflemen stationed in the hollow way still had enough ammunition to keep the French at a distance, but meanwhile the tirailleurs had approached so close under the protection of the cavalry that the position of the square was rapidly becoming untenable. At this moment, Graeme was standing with other officers on the edge of the hollowing road, swinging his cap in the air to cheer on his men, when a musket ball shattered his right hand and he was obliged to quit the battlefield.
The tirailleurs’ advance after the fall of La Haye Sainte was so sudden as to provoke panic and consternation among the Allied troops. Noticing that the defenders’ fire was lessening, Wellington had ridden to a dangerously advanced position well past the sunken lane in order to see if he could discern a way to send the garrison more ammunition, and he remained there until the first enemy skirmishers appeared from around the corner of the house, close enough to take aim at him. Only then did the duke and his aides decide that the time had come for them to withdraw, but there was only one passage in the thick hedge bordering the chemin d’Ohain, and it took several moments for everyone to get through. As Lieutenant Cathcart, the last man, was awaiting his turn and keeping an uneasy eye on the approaching tirailleurs, only two hundred yards away, one of them fired at him. The ball struck his horse, which crashed to the ground; Cathcart tried frantically to make the animal rise again, but then he realized that it was too badly wounded. Leaving it there to die, Cathcart bolted through the hedge behind the others.
At this point, the generals observing the action from the ridge behind La Haye Sainte began to lose their heads. Sir Charles Alten rode up to Colonel von Ompteda and ordered him to recapture the farm with the only battalion he had left that was still near full strength, the Fifth KGL. The idea of descending the slope with a single battalion, exposed both to the enemy infantry, which was now entrenched behind the walls of La Haye Sainte, and to the cuirassier squadrons that were patrolling the area, struck Colonel von Ompteda as so risky that he did the unthinkable: He objected to the order and told his general that he thought the situation precluded an advance. The Prince of Orange, who outranked both of them even though he was only twenty-three years old, curtly ordered Ompteda to obey. “Well, I will,” the colonel replied, and summoned Colonel von Linsingen, the battalion commander, and murmured to him, “Try to save my two nephews.” Like many senior officers in a period when patronage and nepotism of the most blatant sort were the order of the day, Ompteda had procured officers’ commissions in his unit for a couple of his nephews, aged fourteen and fifteen; evidently he was afraid that he was about to get them killed.
Until this moment, Lieutenant Wheatley of the Fifth KGL had remained in square with the rest of his battalion, comforting himself with frequent pinches of tobacco and mental recitations of some of Robert Southey’s verses. (“But ‘twas a famous victory”). Suddenly, the order came to deploy into line and advance at a walk; when his men were some sixty yards away from the enemy, Ompteda had the bugler sound the charge and urged his
horse into the midst of the thick line of French skirmishers. The tirailleurs scattered, and Wheatley had just taken off in pursuit of a drummer boy, who was trying to escape by jumping a ditch, when French cavalry appeared on the battalion’s flank and charged home. Wheatley heard someone cry out, “Cavalry! Cavalry!” but paid no attention, determined as he was to seize the drummer boy, who was caught in some brambles; but as the lieutenant reached out for his prey, a blow to the head with the flat of a sword knocked him unconscious to the ground. Colonel von Ompteda was encircled by enemy infantry, and the French officers, amazed by his courage, shouted to their men to take him alive; but Ompteda, who was by then, like his colleagues, beside himself, started aiming saber-strokes at the heads of the men surrounding him, and someone lost patience. When Lieutenant Wheatley regained consciousness, the colonel lay dead two steps away from him, with his mouth open and a hole in his throat, and Wheatley himself was a prisoner. Colonel von Linsingen had seized the commander’s two nephews and hauled them to safety; the rest of the battalion had been cut to pieces, and its standard had been lost.
Captain Kincaid, who was stationed a short distance away with the survivors of the 1/95th Rifles, witnessed the destruction of the Hanoverian battalion. From where he stood, it seemed to him that their doom had come upon them with lightning swiftness. The cuirassiers came within range of Kincaid’s men, who were about to open fire on them when some British light dragoons appeared. These horsemen went among the enemy, but apparently without much enthusiasm. “A few on each side began exchanging thrusts; but it seemed likely to be a drawn battle between them, without much harm being done,” Kincaid wrote. In the end, the riflemen lost patience and started firing into the melee, and the cavalry on both sides cleared off in a moment. In an impotent rage, Kincaid watched the retreating cuirassiers as they leaned down from the saddle, saber in hand, and stabbed at the wounded Allied soldiers who were lying on the ground.
This and other firsthand accounts leave the impression that the French cavalry, despite the effects of an entire afternoon of continuous combat, still retained a capacity for action that their Allied counterparts had by then lost. Sir Colin Halkett, in an effort to raise the spirits of the few remaining men in his battalions, tried to lead a Netherlands cavalry regiment deployed behind them in a charge; but after a few steps the Dutch-Belgians stopped, refusing to go any farther, turned their horses around, and headed back. Halkett’s infantry squares, formed nearby, grew indignant at this behavior and started firing at the retreating horsemen, bringing many down from their saddles. General van Merlen’s Second Light Cavalry Brigade, composed of the Belgian Fifth Light Dragoons and the Sixth Dutch Hussars, conducted themselves more honorably, charging the French artillery that was taking up positions beside La Haye Sainte; but the results were no better. Van Merlen, whom Napoleon had created a baron of the empire barely three years before, was killed when a cannonball struck him in the abdomen, and his brigade fell apart: Colonel Van Boreel, who commanded the Hussars, tried to take over command of the brigade, but the survivors of the Fifth Light Dragoons refused to obey a Dutchman and joined another light brigade, which was commanded by the Belgian Baron de Ghigny.
By this point, the Netherlands Cavalry Division was so badly damaged that it could no longer be considered operational: Ghigny’s brigade had lost more than half of its men. The division commander, Baron de Collaert, seriously wounded by a shell fragment, had been compelled to leave the battlefield. His division, which was the last cavalry reserve available behind the center of Wellington’s line, was for all practical purposes useless, and the French cavalry, although crippled by their losses and weakened by fatigue, remained masters of the field. Sir James Kempt, in command of the division that had been Picton’s, watched in consternation as La Haye Sainte fell into the hands of the enemy. Kempt was about to order Sir John Lambert to counterattack with the Twenty-seventh and recapture the farm, but almost at once he was compelled to the realization that it would be impossible for the Twenty-seventh or any other regiment to abandon their formation in square, because the enemy cavalry had them surrounded.
FIFTY - FIVE
THE ADVANCE OF THE FRENCH ARTILLERY
After La Haye Sainte fell, the French generals were finally able to do what they had not dared until that moment: to bring forward their artillery, supported by those cuirassier squadrons that still had enough men in the saddle and sufficiently fresh horses to keep fighting. A few guns were advanced all too daringly, and the gunners paid the price for their recklessness. The French unlimbered two pieces, brought them into battery right in front of the 1/95th Rifles, and began firing canister at Kincaid’s riflemen, but the battery was so close to them that the fire from their Baker rifles struck down most of the gunners within a few minutes, reducing the guns to silence. In general, however, the French brought forward so many guns and such an apparently inexhaustible supply of munitions that the Allied skirmishers found it difficult to maintain their advanced positions. The French even fired canister at the skirmishers, a rare indulgence of ammunition, and this ostentatious abundance of firepower wore on the morale of the already decimated skirmishers deployed ahead of Wellington’s line.
After every cavalry charge up to this point, Lieutenant Pratt, commander of the light company of the Thirtieth Regiment, had successfully led his men out of their square and returned to a more advanced position, almost at the bottom of the slope. But once the French artillery advanced, his every attempt to move his troops forward was greeted with a regular barrage of case-shot. Pratt tried to stand fast, but he was well aware that before long he would have to retire and leave the enemy master of no-man’s-land. “It was at this period that I was wounded,” he noted, “and, of course, I ceased to be an eye-witness of what took place afterwards.” The Seventy-third, which formed a single square with the Thirtieth, had no more skirmishers to send out, and so the captain who was in command of the regiment at that moment asked for volunteers willing to make a foray out of the square with him. Tom Morris and his brother William, together with a few others, agreed to accompany him, but they were hardly out of the square before case-shot felled almost all of them. The two Morrises, the only members of the party to emerge unscathed, took the captain by the arms—one of his legs was broken—and carried him to the rear.
Ensign Macready, who had taken over command after Pratt was wounded, decided that the few men remaining in his unit would be of more use inside the square, where they could fill the gaps made by the canister. After some time, “French artillery trotted up our hill, which I knew by the caps to belong to the Imperial Guard,” Macready reported, “and I had scarcely mentioned this to a brother officer, when two guns unlimbering at a cruelly short distance, down went the portfires and slap came their grape into the square. They immediately reloaded, and kept up a most destructive fire. It was noble to see our fellows fill up the gaps after each discharge.” As Macready had supposed, his men were much needed in the square, however guilty the young officer may have felt for exposing them to danger like that. “I had ordered up three of my light bobs [infantrymen], and they had hardly taken their places when two falling sadly wounded, one of them (named Anderson) looked up in my face, uttering a sort of reproachful groan, when I involuntarily said, ‘By God! I couldn’t help it.’” Lieutenant Rogers, who was in the same square, remembered those two French guns very well: “Every discharge made a regular gap in the square. It surprised me with what coolness our men and the 73rd closed them up.”
The conduct of the noncommissioned officers, particularly those veterans who had fought in Spain, contributed decisively to keeping their men at their posts. Sergeant Major Ballam of the Seventy-third was pale as a corpse when he addressed the commander of the regiment, murmuring, “We had nothing like this in Spain, sir.” And yet, having watched one of the men duck from time to time when the balls flew too close, Ballam stepped over to him and bawled him out: “Damn you, sir, what do you stoop for? You should not stoop if your head was off!�
� The man, a thin-skinned fellow, took this reprimand badly. A few moments later, a ball hit the sergeant major in the face, killing him instantly, and the soldier leaned over his disfigured corpse and exclaimed, “Damn it, sir! What do you lie there for? You should not lie down if your head was off!”
Slightly farther east, the officers of the 1/1st Nassau, which had already been nearly overwhelmed by a cuirassier charge, watched horrified as a French battery boldly advanced to within three hundred yards and opened fire on the square with case-shot. In the course of a few minutes, the battalion took so many casualties that the commander, Major von Weyhers, ordered his recruits to charge with fixed bayonets and capture the French guns. Dazed by the din and the smoke, the Nassauers had barely started moving when the major was cut down by case-shot. His men halted and hesitated; then most of them turned back, but two companies started firing a disordered volley at the French gunners. An instant later, a squadron of cuirassiers appeared from behind the guns and overwhelmed the Nassauers, cutting them down with their sabers. The Nassauer officers, whose professionalism must have been truly extraordinary, managed to halt the flight of the survivors and form them back up into something that once again resembled a square.
The Battle Page 30