But reinforcements continued to arrive on the road from Wavre. The II Corps, commanded by General von Pirch, had started marching in the late morning, on the heels of Bülow’s corps, and these men, likewise exhausted and covered up to their hats in mud, were starting to come into view. Thus assured that soon he would have new reserves at his disposition, Blücher ordered Bülow to attack again with what he had; this time, the worn-down battalions of the Fourteenth and Sixteenth Brigades penetrated past the village center and pushed all the way to the other end. Duhesme, who had spearheaded the resistance for so long, lay dying from a head wound; some of his men carried him to the rear, literally holding him in the saddle, and tried at first to bring him to safety; but that night they were obliged to abandon him, and the general was a prisoner of the Prussians when he died two days later. Around the cemetery, which had been fought over for so long, entire groups of the Young Guards were starting to raise their hands in surrender, although the Prussians, maddened by the stubborn defense the French had put up, were not always disposed to take prisoners.
As Napoleon was organizing his last reserves for the final attack against Wellington’s wavering line, he trained his telescope on his right wing, and what he saw compelled him to take hasty countermeasures. All the troops left to him were the thirteen battalions of the Middle Guard and Old Guard.31 All of which had already left their original positions on both sides of the main road just north of Rossomme and moved forward almost to La Belle Alliance, where they were waiting to advance against Wellington’s center. Napoleon hurriedly ordered that those troops to the right of the main road should deploy into squares to form a last line of defense in case of a Prussian breakthrough; and two of those battalions, selected from among the most elite in the French army, the 1/2nd Grenadiers and the 1/2nd Chasseurs à pied of the Old Guard, were ordered to turn back, march to Plancenoit, and recapture it.
They were little more than a thousand bayonets, but all veterans with ten or twelve campaigns behind them; their skin was covered with tattoos, and large golden earrings hung from their ears, giving them the look of old-time pirates. An Englishman who saw them at Fontainebleau the previous year wrote: “More dreadful looking fellows than Napoleon’s Guard I have never seen. They had the look of thoroughbred, veteran, disciplined banditti. Depravity, recklessness, and bloodthirstiness were burned into their faces. Black mustachios, gigantic bearskins, and a ferocious expression were their characteristics.” The other soldiers in the French army had no great love for the men of the Imperial Guard, although everyone desired in his heart to be called one day to join its ranks. The severity and arrogance of the Imperial Guard’s officers, the double pay and double rations that were the privilege of every one of its members down to the least drummer boy, and the precedence always given to the Guard’s needs, whether of quarters or provisions, aroused all the more anger because it was clear to anyone who cared to look that the Guard was sent into combat much more rarely than the cannon fodder that constituted the line regiments. But at Plancenoit, these two Old Guard battalions showed that they were worth the privileges that Napoleon had always granted them. General Morand quickly deployed his men into columns and moved them out. Plancenoit was little more than half a mile from La Belle Alliance, and they had barely begun to descend the slope that led to the village when they encountered Young Guard fugitives, running away from the fight, some of them declaring that the Prussians were hot on their heels. The drums beat the pas de charge, and the men of the Old Guard advanced on Plancenoit with cadenced steps and fixed bayonets.
What happened next can be explained only by acknowledging the fatigue of the Prussian troops, the inexperience of the large number of them who were new recruits, and the terrible losses that they had already suffered. Morand’s two battalions attacked and overwhelmed the first Prussian skirmishers, who had been cautiously peering out of the houses on the edge of the village. The French then fought their way through the rutted streets with bayonets and musket butts, amid burned houses and piles of dead and wounded, and the multitude of Prussians in front of them, a force many times their number, allowed itself to be driven back, first in disorder and then in a catastrophic rout. The Prussians were pitilessly massacred, trampled on by the triumphant French, and ejected from the village. It had taken the Old Guard twenty minutes to become masters of Plancenoit. They were so intoxicated with blood and victory that General Pelet, commander of the Second Chasseurs, found his men busy cutting prisoners’ throats and had to resort to forceful measures before he could manage to save a few. Behind them, the battalions of the Young Guard, brought back into line by their officers and encouraged by the Old Guard’s exploit, were returning to their earlier positions. At seven-thirty in the evening, Blücher’s offensive was back at its starting point yet again.
FIFTY - SEVEN
ZIETHEN AT SMOHAIN
Ironically, the attack on Plancenoit, delivered by Blücher with the bulk of his troops and at the cost of dreadful losses, was not what convinced Wellington that the Prussians were finally and unequivocally coming to his aid. The duke felt that conviction only when he saw other masses of Prussian troops pour onto the battlefield much closer to him than Plancenoit, in the area around Papelotte, and especially when he realized that this time they were not going to disappear into the woods to the south but were going into action against the French right wing. Finally accepting Bülow’s suggestions, the Prussian command had ordered the last army corps leaving Wavre, Count von Ziethen’s I Corps, to march along the more northerly road, following the course of the River Smohain and ending near the small group of houses that formed the village of the same name, right in the middle of the sector that Prince Bernhard’s Nassauers had been defending against Durutte’s men all day long. Lieutenant Colonel von Reiche, I Corps’s chief of staff, had barely reached this spot, ahead of the column, when an extremely agitated Müffling approached and informed him, “The Duke was most desirous of our arrival and had repeatedly declared that this was the last moment, and if we did not arrive soon, he would be compelled to retreat.” Together, the two went in search of General von Ziethen. Having found him, Müffling repeated that there wasn’t a moment to lose. Ziethen, however, like Bülow before him, had little desire to send his men blindly forward along that little sunken lane, where they could suddenly find themselves in the path of the French offensive. An officer sent to assess the situation reported that there were signs of disintegration all along Wellington’s line and that wounded soldiers and stragglers were thronging to the rear; the troops defending Papelotte and Smohain were also losing ground to the enemy. Should the Prussians continue to advance, they ran the risk of landing right in the middle of a defeat.
While Ziethen hesitated, another officer came galloping up from the south. Major von Scharnhorst, son of the famous reformer of the Prussian army, fallen two years previously in the wars of liberation, was an aide-de-camp on Bülow’s staff. The major reported that the attack on Plancenoit was failing, that IV Corps needed help, and that by Blücher’s orders Ziethen was to march his troops southwest and join the Prussian assault on the village. Reiche, who had just returned from a reconnaissance of his own, during the course of which he had formally promised immediate support to the officers of the Nassau forces engaged at Papelotte, tried to protest, but his commander signaled to the vanguard to turn for Plancenoit. Among the exhausted Allied troops deployed along the chemin d’Ohain, men who had withstood the bombardment of the Grande Batterie for hours and hours and were finding it increasingly difficult to stave off the infiltrations of enemy skirmishers, the sight of yet another Prussian column turning away from them and heading south as though withdrawing caused consternation.
Meanwhile, Müffling and Reiche continued the discussion with Ziethen, pleading with him to change his mind. Both of them were aware that Prussian reinforcements were indispensable to Wellington; moreover, Müffling knew that the duke was already on the verge of exasperation over the lack of Prussian support, that in gen
eral the British officers knew nothing about the action at Plancenoit, and that the Prussian army, despite all its efforts, was in danger of losing face before its ally. Faced with their insistence, Ziethen eventually assumed responsibility for ignoring the order to go to Bülow’s aid and proceeding according to the original plan. His columns resumed their march toward Papelotte, and soon they began to engage the French skirmishers who were once again putting heavy pressure on the exhausted Nassauers: The tirailleurs had penetrated the perimeter of Papelotte and driven the defenders out of Smohain.
Ziethen’s corps could not have started marching before two o’clock in the afternoon, and the column it formed on the narrow, muddy lane was so long, and so slowed down by sheer numbers and bad terrain, that in fact only its vanguard arrived in time to go into action before nightfall; only the three regiments of Steinmetz’s First Brigade took part in the combat, and they had taken such losses at Ligny two days before that the three of them together could not field even four thousand muskets. But these newly arrived troops, supported by several artillery batteries, were nonetheless more than sufficient to stop Durutte’s advance, all the more so because one of that general’s two brigades had just been sent in the direction of La Haye Sainte to take part in the final offensive against the center of Wellington’s line. Durutte was left with only four battalions, perhaps fifteen hundred muskets, and these had no chance of standing against the fresh forces deployed by the Prussians.
In the confusion of twilight, and in a part of the battlefield as thick with woods and hedges as the area around Papelotte, there was no lack of further incidents involving “friendly fire.” As they were advancing toward Smohain in open order, the Prussians, suddenly seeing a mass of soldiers, apparently wearing French uniforms, running toward them, opened fire at once on their presumed assailants. In reality, these men were Nassauers fleeing from Smohain, and Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar was in their midst, trying to bring some order among them. When he realized that the troops firing on him and his men were Prussians, the prince galloped off in search of their commander and was fortunate enough to come across General von Ziethen almost at once. Verbally assaulted by a foreign officer in excellent German, and unaware that he was speaking to a prince, Ziethen took offense and replied curtly, “My friend, it is not my fault if your men are dressed like Frenchmen.”
On the high ground above Papelotte, the last regiment of Steinmetz’s brigade, the First Westphalian Landwehr, was advancing with its skirmishers out ahead, moving toward the line held by Pack’s men. The latter were so nervous that they too, seeing a large number of unknown troops bearing down upon them, opened fire without further ado. But the officer in command of the first patrol quickly managed to get himself recognized, and before long, the Prussians were shaking hands with Pack’s Scotsmen and Best’s Hanoverians. The junction of the two Allied armies had finally been accomplished. Without losing time, the guns of one of Ziethen’s horse artillery batteries mounted the crest and took up positions alongside Wellington’s battalions, while two other batteries deployed a few hundred yards from Smohain and began firing point-blank at the buildings that the tirailleurs had just occupied.
The French disbanded under this unexpected fire, but Durutte, a tough warrior, managed to get his men under control, and a new, bloody combat erupted amid the enclosures, hedges, and tree-shaded lanes around Smohain. The Brandenburgers of the Twelfth Regiment were resupplied with ammunition before going into action. Private Johann Karl Hechel later recalled, “Each of us received 80 cartridges, borrowed from another unit’s munitions wagon, because ours had got bogged down far to the rear. We ate a few bites there, on our feet, and then we went forward to meet the enemy.” While they proceeded along the road to Smohain, taking cover behind the row of poplars that bordered it, the regiment’s skirmishers were targeted from behind by the men of the Westphalian Landwehr, who had mistaken them for French troops; advancing farther, the skirmishers found the enemy stationed along the final stretch of road—a sunken lane that descended toward the village—drove them off after a short, sharp clash, and burst in among the first houses of Smohain.
Hechel jumped a low hedge, looked around, and saw many wounded men lying on the ground. One was an enemy soldier, unable to move, who kept crying out a single word, “Italiano! Italiano!” Hechel, the son of a schoolteacher, spoke to the man in French and asked him if there were more of his comrades up ahead, to which the other replied, “Oui, Monsieur.” More Prussian soldiers arrived and wanted to finish off the poor fellow with their bayonets, but Hechel told them to leave him alone; the Frenchman clung to him and kissed his hand. Advancing among scattered corpses, Hechel saw a dead Prussian sergeant with a gold chain hanging from his breast pocket. He bent down to seize this prize, and at that moment a musket ball whizzed past his ear. The hand of the Lord is upon me, thought the devout Protestant, as a familiar Bible verse came into his mind almost immediately: “Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?”
Returning to the sunken lane, Hechel took up a position among the skirmishers, who were engaged in a lively firefight with a French unit stationed a stone’s throw away. Hechel joined in until he felt a sudden pain in his lower abdomen; his eyes glazed over, and he staggered, crying out, “Comrades, I’m wounded!” Two men swiftly caught him under the arms and carried him to the rear; “a third picked up my knapsack and followed us. He didn’t at all mind getting away from the firing.” An officer ran over to them and asked where they were going. “It’s not true that this man is wounded,” he exclaimed, because no blood could be seen. The men lowered Hechel to a sitting position and unbuttoned his pants; blood and intestines came pouring out. With a horrified gesture, the officer ordered Hechel’s two comrades to carry him to safety. “As for you,” he said to the man holding Hechel’s knapsack, “throw that thing down and get back to your post!” Hechel’s account bears witness to the stubbornness with which Durutte’s men (among them the ex-prisoners of the Eighty-fifth Ligne) continued to resist, even in that hour of extremity, still defending the ground that they and the enemy had fought over all day long; but the disproportion between the two forces was such that the inevitable outcome of the battle could be only a matter of time.
At Le Caillou farm, where Napoleon’s imperial equipment and all his baggage had stopped, his worried valet, Marchand, was listening to the rumble of artillery and trying to deduce from it the progress of the battle when Ali the Mameluke, one of the emperor’s most devoted servants, came galloping up, looking for something for his master to eat. Ali, who was in reality a quite normal Frenchman, a former employee in a notary’s office, stopped briefly, barely long enough to tell Marchand “It looks bad” and declare that the Prussians were arriving on the battlefield, before putting spurs to his horse and galloping away. Seized by evil premonitions, Marchand sought out General Fouler, the director of the imperial stable. The general told Marchand not to repeat their conversation to anyone, but had it been up to him, the emperor’s baggage and belongings would not have been allowed to remain so close to the battlefield. Only an order from the emperor could move them, however, and Marchand took solace in the thought that the emperor’s personal carriage, filled with gold and diamonds, was even farther forward, near La Belle Alliance, and was someone else’s responsibility.
FIFTY - EIGHT
NAPOLEON’S LAST ATTACK
All the eyewitness accounts left by men who were in the Allied infantry squares between six and seven in the afternoon greatly resemble one another, and together they give the impression that Wellington’s line would simply have collapsed, without the need of a French infantry attack, had the intense artillery bombardment gone on half an hour longer. In fact, however, the French batteries were using up their last rounds of canister, and they would not have been able to keep firing for another half hour. In the morning, no 6-pounder gun had been accompanied by more than three caissons of munitions, enough for a couple of hours of sustained fire. When La Ha
ye Sainte fell and all available guns were hastily brought forward, most of the caissons were probably already empty. The enormous expenditure of ammunition on the part of the French artillery in the last moments was not made, and could not have been made, with a view to sweeping aside the British and German infantry; the aim was only to weaken the enemy as much as possible in anticipation of the final attack. The junior officers in the middle of the tumult may not have known this, but Napoleon knew it, and Wellington knew it equally well; otherwise, he would not have been able to remain so calm while the shattered bodies of his generals and aides-de-camp fell all about him in an unprecedented slaughter.
The emperor had to attack, and he decided to do so all along the line and with his entire infantry, including those troops who had fought all day and had now reached the limits of their endurance. On the left, Reille’s corps was fully engaged in the siege of Hougoumont, and even though there was little hope of capturing the château, the tirailleurs ensconced in the park had to maintain pressure on the exhausted garrison. Farther to the right, d’Erlon’s regiments, overwhelmed and routed by the British heavy cavalry, had had several hours in which to catch their breath and reorder their ranks, and a large number of stragglers had been rounded up and compelled to go back into line. On the main road, the French threw together a picket line made up of a few infantrymen and mounted lancers. Corporal Canler, one of the pickets, later recalled, “[My comrades and I were] ordered to allow only wounded men to pass through; all soldiers still able to bear arms were to be turned back. In less than an hour, we stopped more than 400 fugitives.”
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