Wellington’s artillerymen also noticed, even though it seemed impossible, that the enemy fire had become still more intense. Captain Samuel Bolton, on horseback amid his guns, was talking with Lieutenant Sharpin, who was standing beside the captain’s horse with his hand on one of the stirrups. Sharpin later recalled, “The shot from a French Battery at that time flew very thick among us.” A ball passed right between the two officers, and Bolton, with admirable coolness, “remarked that he thought we had passed the greatest danger for that day.” Scarcely had he spoken when another ball struck the ground in front of him and bounded up, smashing the horse’s shoulder and crushing the captain’s chest. Man and beast collapsed in a single heap, and when the gunners succeeded in pulling Bolton out from under the animal’s carcass, the captain was dead.
Another French battery advanced to a position on the flank of Captain Mercer’s battery and opened fire from less than five hundred yards away. “The rapidity and precision of this fire was quite appalling,” Mercer reported. “Every shot almost took effect, and I certainly expected we should all be annihilated. Our horses and limbers, being a little retired down the slope, had hitherto been somewhat under cover from the direct fire in front; but this plunged right amongst them, knocking them down by pairs, and creating horrible confusion. The drivers could hardly extricate themselves from one dead horse ere another fell, or perhaps themselves. The saddle-bags, in many instances were torn from the horses’ backs, and their contents scattered over the field. One shell I saw explode under the two finest wheel-horses in the troop—down they dropped.” Under the pressure of the French fire, Mercer’s battery was literally pushed back, because his guns recoiled with every shot, and his surviving gunners were too exhausted to haul them forward again. In the end, Mercer noted, his pieces “came together in a confused heap,” well back from their original position and “dangerously near the limbers and ammunition wagons, some of which were totally unhorsed, and others in sad confusion from the loss of their drivers and horses, many of them lying dead in their harness attached to their carriages.” Later, when the order came to change position, Mercer did not have enough horses left to move his guns.
Only the extraordinary discipline of the artillerymen made it possible for some batteries to maintain their positions. Captain Rudyard, who served in Major Lloyd’s battery, described the scene: “The ground we occupied was much furrowed up by the recoil of our Guns and the grazing of the shot, and many holes from the bursting of shells buried in the ground. As horses were killed or rendered unserviceable, the harness was removed and placed on the waggons, or elsewhere. Our men’s knapsacks were neatly packed on the front and rear of our limbers and waggons, that they might do their work more easily. Every Gun, every carriage, spokes carried from wheels, all were struck in many places.” Rudyard much admired the fact that the Duke of Wellington, the Prince of Orange, and their staffs were often in the rear of the battery under fire, taking the same chances, running the same risks. “I saw the fore-legs taken from the horse of one of his Highness’s A.D.C.’s at the shoulders, and [he] continued rearing for some time with his very fat rider, dressed in green. My own horse was shot through by a 9-pounder shot behind the saddle flap, and did not fall for some time.”
The Allied line was exposed not only to artillery fire but also to the musketry of a multitude of tirailleurs, who became masters of all the dominant positions behind La Haye Sainte, from the farm itself to the mound overlooking the sandpit, all of which had been occupied that morning by British and German fusiliers. “We began to be annoyed also by a well-directed fire from behind a small hillock, almost in the heart of our position,” one of the officers in Pack’s brigade later recalled. “A knowing, enterprising fellow, holding the post of La Haye Sainte, which we had lost, had sent a strong detachment, which got to the hillock under cover of the brow, and opened a kind of masked battery upon us.” The fire of these tirailleurs took a heavy toll, especially on the Twenty-seventh Regiment, the Inniskillings, who had been stationed in the most exposed place of all: in the northeast corner of the crossroads, barely two hundred yards behind La Haye Sainte and right beside the knoll on whose top French skirmishers had been posted. The Inniskillings remained there, formed up in square, until the evening, obedient to Sir James Kempt’s orders to not abandon their position at any cost; only their presence in that spot prevented the enemy from penetrating deep into the center of the Allies’ defensive line. In three or four hours, without ever moving a step, the regiment lost more than two-thirds of its men, the highest casualty rate of any battalion that fought at Waterloo. According to Kincaid, by seven in the evening “the twenty-seventh regiment were lying literally dead, in square, a few yards behind us.” At that point in the battle, the regiment was commanded by a lieutenant, and eight of his ten companies were commanded by sergeants.
During the course of those few hours, remarkable things happened in the Twenty-seventh’s square, one of which involved a soldier’s pregnant wife, who had stayed with him rather than take shelter in the rear; she busied herself with caring for the wounded until a shell fragment struck her in the leg. Her husband fared worse: He lost both arms. In British military historiography, the tragedy of the Inniskillings has come to symbolize the most inhuman aspect of Waterloo: As John Keegan has suggested, the men must have been extremely tired, having marched some fifty-six miles in the previous seventy-two hours and slept very little, and their exhaustion may have helped them endure the horror to which they were subjected. Twenty years later, when Captain Siborne started building his grand model of the Battle of Waterloo, Sir John Lambert insisted that the knoll where the French skirmishers were stationed had to be represented, “as it was so important in that part of the line, and so honourable and fatal to the 27th Regiment, which kept its formation and lost more men and Officers than any Regiment during the day, and would otherwise have afforded an opportunity to the Enemy to have made an impression in a very serious part of the Line.”
A great number of Wellington’s generals and aides were killed or wounded in this particular phase of the battle, particularly in the area behind La Haye Sainte. The duke’s secretary, Lord Fitzroy Somerset, who was at his side a short distance behind the crossroads, was struck in the arm by a musket ball fired from the roof of the farm and had to be carried to a field hospital, where the surgeons cut off the injured limb. One of the aides-de-camp, Lieutenant Colonel Canning, was preoccupied with keeping some German troops in line—they were on the verge of disbanding—when a musket ball penetrated his abdomen; a witness reported that the colonel, “although perfectly collected, could hardly articulate from pain.” Canning was “raised to a sitting position by placing knapsacks around him,” but “a few minutes terminated his existence.” Another of Wellington’s aides, Sir Alexander Gordon, who was also the duke’s personal friend, had a leg shattered by a cannonball while he was encouraging a Brunswick square that had begun to waver; he was carried back to Waterloo and his leg amputated, but he did not survive the night. The quartermaster general, Sir William de Lancey, a young man of thirty-four whom Wellington had described as “the idlest fellow I ever met,” was struck off his horse by a cannonball that passed so close to him it caused serious internal injuries; although no trace of the damage could be seen on his person, he was to die a few days later in the arms of his wife, whom he had married only two months before the battle. Having watched one of the squares in General Kielmansegge’s brigade backing up under a pelting fire of canister and ordered the general to put a stop to this retreat, Sir Charles Alten was wounded by a shell fragment and obliged to leave the field; Kielmansegge took over command of the division, or what was left of it, but soon afterward he too was wounded; Colin Halkett became their new commander—though by this point almost nobody remained for him to command. A little farther to the west, a cannonball had pulped the right arm of the commander of the Guards Division, Major General George Cooke.
At this critical moment, the German infantry stood fast,
but barely, and only thanks to the laborious efforts of its officers; but the British infantry gave a clear demonstration of the tenacity for which it was justly famous. Macready noted, “[The battle] had now become what I more than once heard the smothered muttering from the ranks declare it, ‘Bloody thundering work,’ and it was to be seen which side had most bottom, and could stand killing longest.” His men would have greatly preferred to attack the French guns, whose positions were only a few hundred yards away, but they could not, because the French cavalry was always hovering near their cannons, ready to strike, while the Allied cavalry had disappeared from the battlefield. Another officer reported, “Our men were saying it was bloody murdering work, and growling much at not being allowed to charge.” At one point, Wellington himself took refuge in this square, and some of the men started to complain aloud: “Are we to be massacred here? Let us go at them, let us give them Brummagum!”29 The duke heard them and replied at once, “Wait a little longer, my lads, you shall have at them presently.”
In truth, the situation could not have lasted much longer. In the square formed by the 3/1st Foot Guards, the sergeants were standing behind their men, leveling their pikes to compel them to remain in formation. “The fight, at one time, was so desperate with our battalion,” a sergeant remembered, “that files upon files were carried out to the rear from the carnage, and the line was held up by the sergeants’ pikes placed against their rear—not for want of courage on the men’s parts (for they were desperate), only for the moment our loss so unsteadied the line.” The Hanoverian square where Captain von Scriba was posted came “under artillery fire again” and “lost its original shape; at first, it became an irregular triangle, and then a mass closed up on all sides, without any identifiable shape.” All along the front, in the centers of infantry squares filled with the dead and wounded, suffocated by smoke, and running shorter and shorter on ammunition, a growing number of officers were becoming convinced that the battle would be lost. In a letter to his brother, Ensign Howard of the Thirty-third confessed, “I thought that things were going badly”; the surviving officers decided to send the battalion’s colors to safety in the rear, and soon afterward the same was done with all the colors from Halkett’s brigade, a measure that was without precedent. Captain Kincaid, who was still holding the sunken lane behind the knoll with a handful of riflemen, was “weary and worn out, less from fatigue than anxiety.” When he looked around, peering through the increasingly dense smoke, he could see nothing but the dead and the dying: “I had never yet heard of a battle in which everybody was killed, but this seemed likely to be an exception, as all were going by turns.”
FIFTY - SIX
THE RENEWED ATTACK ON PLANCENOIT
According to tradition, more or less at this time the Duke of Wellington was heard to say, “Night or the Prussians must come.” The absence of news from those allies was all the more frustrating because the Prussian vanguard, which hours before had advanced as far as Papelotte, had disappeared back into the woods, and despite their promises, no Prussian troops had come marching in after them. “The time they occupied in approaching seemed interminable,” Wellington later wrote. “Both they and my watch seemed to have stuck fast.” Certainly, the smoke rising in the distance around the bell tower of Plancenoit church and the sound of cannonading off to the south might have indicated to him that the Prussians were already in action; but for the moment the duke could not perceive any visible consequences of their intervention for the desperate battle that was being fought on the ridge.
In fact, although Wellington could not know this, there were already consequences, and they were decisive. That morning, along the main Brussels road between Rossomme and La Belle Alliance, Napoleon had massed thirty-seven battalions, which were supposed to constitute his strategic reserve, to be sent forward at the opportune moment to break through the weakest point in the Allied deployment; of these thirty-seven, no fewer than twenty-three, already withdrawn from the reserve and sent to stop the Prussian advance, were slowly being consumed in the combat around Plancenoit. On the Prussian side, the last two brigades of IV Corps, exhausted by their interminable slog through Belgian mud, had finally arrived in front of the village; one of these brigades, General von Ryssel’s Fourteenth, was incomplete, having left two battalions behind at Wavre, but old Blücher nonetheless had at his disposition the equivalent of thirty-four battalions, or something like twenty-four thousand muskets, against the ten thousand that formed the French defensive line. Obviously, since both sides had already been severely battered, and since the Prussians, as they advanced, had scattered their forces to a much greater extent than had been the case with the French, these figures are uncertain, but they are indicative of the enormous numerical disproportion between the two sides.
The Prussians returned to the attack, led this time by the two battalions of the Eleventh Infantry, commanded by Colonel von Reichenbach. This regiment, recruited in Silesia, had been part of the regular army since its reconstitution in 1808, and it was the first seasoned Prussian line regiment that Blücher had been able to put on the battlefield that day. The two Landwehr regiments that made up Ryssel’s brigade along with the Eleventh were also probably of good quality, having been recruited in Pomerania, one of the most patriotic regions of the old Kingdom of Prussia.30 Under this redoubled pressure, Duhesme’s troops were forced to abandon the first houses on the edge of the village, and the battle started to rage again in the narrow streets of Plancenoit, with the bloody ferocity of a house-to-house struggle fought with bayonets and musket butts. Carried forward by their numbers and their enthusiasm, the Prussians reached the village center, and there, around the church and the walled cemetery, the combat became even more savage; but in the end, worn down by the terrific fire that the French poured into them from the houses and the graveyard, Blücher’s men were once again driven out of the village.
The tenacity of the defenders of Plancenoit was notable. The southernmost houses of the village, where there was a palpable danger that the advancing Prussians might debouch upon the flank or even in the rear of the French, were defended by the Fifth Ligne, which was no ordinary regiment. Its troops had been deployed by their monarchist officers a few miles south of Grenoble on March 7, with orders to bar the way to Napoleon, who had escaped from Elba and disembarked in France barely a week before. Napoleon had approached the regiment alone and, standing a few meters from the soldiers’ musket barrels, had asked, “Would you fire on your emperor?” whereupon the troops revolted against their leaders and carried him in triumph. Remarkably, Colonel Roussille, though he disapproved of his men’s defection, asked Napoleon to allow him to remain in his command, declaring, “My regiment has abandoned me, but I do not wish to abandon it.” And so the emperor had left Colonel Roussille in command of the Fifth Ligne, and in the evening of Waterloo the colonel was mortally wounded while his troops successfully defended Plancenoit.
By an irony of fate, the other division of VI Corps, fighting tooth and nail to defend the high ground north of Plancenoit, included the Tenth Ligne, which until a few weeks previously had been fighting in the south of France under the Duc d’Angoulême, the Bourbon who had tried to incite the southern populations against Napoleon. As they entered Laon at the start of the Waterloo campaign, the soldiers of the Tenth Ligne had refused to shout, with the others, “Vive l’Empereur,” shouting instead “Vive le roi de Rome.” In the opinion of many, this slogan augured ill, being nothing more than an expedient way for the men to underline their loyalty to the king. And yet the monarchists of the Tenth Ligne fought as hard as the Bonapartists of the Fifth at Plancenoit.
In the end, the factor that probably explains the stubbornness of the French resistance better than any other is the presence of the Young Guard. These four regiments of light infantry had been constituted only after Napoleon’s return from Elba by recalling veterans from leave, accepting a large number of volunteers in Paris and Lyon, and combining them into units of uneven experience that
, while they were certainly not as solid as the Imperial Guard’s grenadiers or chasseurs à pied, made up in enthusiasm what they lacked in homogeneity. Their commander, Duhesme, was exceptional. Although not at all exempt from criticism on a personal level—he was an old Jacobin fire-eater who, like many others, had grown rich in nebulous ways, and he had been involved in so many shady affairs, including accusations of murder, that in 1810 the emperor had dismissed him from his service and exiled him from Paris—Duhesme, having been restored to his rank, was an extraordinary battlefield commander, a specialist in precisely the sort of light infantry combat that led his troops to chase the Prussians out of the village a second time.
Their flight was so precipitous that the skirmishers of the Young Guard, pursuing the fugitives, left the village behind and moved forward through open country until they came within musket range of the hollow where the other Prussian battalions, which had taken many casualties in the previous fight, were still laboriously reordering themselves. The accurate and unexpected fire of the French caused a momentary panic in the ranks of the exhausted Prussian infantry, but then a squadron of the Sixth Hussars charged the tirailleurs, overwhelming some and compelling the others to return in haste to the village. Nevertheless, the progress made by the Prussians had once again been canceled out, and for the second time Blücher’s attack was back where it started.
The Battle Page 31