by Colin Brown
It is hard to imagine now, this unlovely and unloved urban corner of Greater Manchester was the last resting place of one of the great heroes of the Battle of Waterloo. The wall is perhaps the last remaining trace of the non-conformist New Jerusalem Temple, a branch of a religious sect based on the beliefs of a Swedish philosopher called Emanuel Swedenborg, mixed with mysticism and spiritualism. A Victorian photograph shows the Temple with three nattily dressed men posing for the camera by the entrance in dark suits with waistcoats. They appear to be wearing top hats. It is a handsome, oblong, Georgian-style building, with a glass lantern in the roof, and five large windows down each side, surrounded by paving slabs, which appear to be shiny and wet, as though it has been raining. It is enclosed by a short brick wall topped by some railings. This could be a fragment of the brick wall that I can see. When it became redundant it was knocked down and the land cleared for the builder’s yard. I can find no sign that Ensign Ewart was ever buried here. There is no plaque or headstone. Just cinders, and cars.
Nearly the last resting place of a hero, a car park in Salford, until Charles Ewart was reburied in Edinburgh. (Author)
The hero’s grave remained totally lost and forgotten for ninety-two years, and would have stayed so, but for an inquisitive member of Ewart’s regiment called H. Otto, who spent twelve years trying to find his remains in the 1920s and ’30s. In 1936 Otto finally found Ewart’s bones under the rubble of the builder’s yard. Ewart’s remains were exhumed two years later and were carried to Edinburgh, the home of the Scots Greys. He was finally laid to rest with full honours on the Esplanade of Edinburgh Castle in 1938 as Britain prepared for the Second World War. The Scotsman reported:
About half the crowd had assembled when a motor hearse, with blinds drawn, appeared on the Esplanade, and came to a stop beside the spot where the hero’s remains now rest … The clock in Crown Square had just struck seven when the unpolished oak coffin was taken from the hearse and borne reverently to the grave. As it passed through the lines of onlookers – among them some women and children – heads were bared and policemen saluted.
A large stone memorial to Ensign Ewart was placed on the Castle Esplanade overlooking the city to ensure his name is not forgotten again.
Owen Davis, who has traced his family tree back to Ewart, said: ‘He without a doubt has earned his final resting place on the Esplanade of Edinburgh Castle, the accolades history has showered upon him and above all, the title of “hero”.’ A pub on the Esplanade at Edinburgh Castle was also renamed in his honour. The Ensign Ewart briefly hit the headlines in 2013, when staff at the pub refused to serve the Royal Navy crew from HMS Edinburgh because they were wearing military uniform.13 The sailors had been on a goodwill visit to their home city, and had taken part in a march with the bands playing up the Esplanade. It was all due to a misunderstanding about local by-laws banning bars from serving military personnel during the Edinburgh Tattoo but it seemed to some that it was a case of life imitating art. In his poem, Tommy, Rudyard Kipling anticipated just such an event:
I went into a public-’ouse to get a pint o’ beer,
The publican ‘e up an’ sez, ‘We serve no red-coats here.’
The girls be’ind the bar they laughed an’ giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an’ to myself sez I:
O it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ ‘Tommy, go away’;
But it’s ‘Thank you, Mister Atkins’, when the band begins to play,
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it’s ‘Thank you, Mister Atkins’, when the band begins to play.
Ensign Ewart would raise a glass to that.
Notes
* Shaw so inspired Sir Walter Scott he had a cast made of his skull. A copy is on show at the Horse Guards Museum, Whitehall.
* Ponsonby later met Major de Laussat of the Imperial Guard Dragoons in 1827 and discovered in their conversation that he was the French officer who had helped him.
* It is likely he was in the 5th Veteran Regiment, not the 3rd, as mentioned in the Torrens letter.
* Relict was an ancient term for a widow, though, as they belonged to different churches, they may not have been actually married.
1. Hougoumont Project website, www.projecthougoumont.com.
2. E. Bruce Law, ‘Life Guardsman Shaw – A Hero of Waterloo’, With Napoleon at Waterloo unpublished papers edited by Mackenzie Macbride (London: Francis Griffiths, 1911).
Ewart Monument, Castle Esplanade, Edinburgh. (Martin Hillman)
3. Major-Gen H.T. Siborne (ed.), Waterloo Letters, (London: Cassell and co., 1891), p. 57.
4. Mackenzie Macbride (ed.), ‘A Hero of Waterloo’, ‘With Napoleon at Waterloo’ and other unpublished documents of the Waterloo and Peninsular Campaigns (London: Francis Griffiths, 1911).
5. Gareth Glover (ed.), The Waterloo Archive Volume 1V: The British Sources (Barnsley: Frontline Books, 1999).
6. Charles Dalton, Waterloo Roll Call (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1904).
7. Major-Gen H.T. Siborne (ed.), Waterloo Letters, p. 69.
8. Return of killed, wounded and missing. Captain W. Siborne, History of the Waterloo Campaign (First published 1848; London: Greenhill Books, 1990), Appendix XXXVl.
9. Major-Gen H.T. Siborne (ed.), Waterloo Letters, p. 19.
10. Captain Rees Howell Gronow, Reminiscences of Captain Gronow (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1862).
11. James Paterson, Autobiographical Reminiscences (Glasgow: Maurice Ogle, 1871, American Libraries), pp. 205–13.
12. Richard Lawson, A History of Flixton, Urmston and Davyhulme (Urmston: Richard Lawson, 1898), p. 115.
13. STV News, 24 May 2013, www.news.stv.tv.
6
GUTS AND GLORY
Shortly after 3 a.m. on the morning after the battle, Monday, 19 June 1815, Wellington’s Scottish surgeon, Dr John Robert Hume, climbed the stairs to the room on the first floor at the wagoners’ inn in Waterloo, where the Duke was sleeping on a rough mattress on the floor. Hume was reluctant to wake the Duke because he went to bed exhausted and had only had three hours’ sleep, but Sir Charles Broke, De Lancey’s replacement as Quartermaster General, had arrived seeking orders for the movement of the army at dawn from the Commander-in-Chief. Worse, Hume was dreading breaking the news to him that his chief ADC, Sir Alexander Gordon, had just died in the surgeon’s arms. Hume recorded Wellington’s reaction in his medical notes, which are in the archive at the Royal Society of Surgeons, Edinburgh:
I went upstairs and tapped gently at the door, when he (Wellington) told me to come in. He had as usual taken off his clothes but had not washed himself.
As I entered, he sat up in bed, his face covered in the dust and sweat of the previous day, and extended his hand to me, which I took and held in mine, whilst I told him of Gordon’s death, and of such of the casualties as had come to my knowledge. He was much affected.
I felt tears dropping fast upon my hand and looking towards him, saw them chasing one another in furrows over his dusty cheeks. He brushed them suddenly away with his left hand, and said to me in a voice tremulous with emotion, ‘Well, thank God, I don’t know what it is to lose a battle; but certainly nothing can be more painful than to gain one with the loss of so many of one’s friends.’
Two of Sir Charles Bell’s watercolours of the Waterloo wounded. Bell’s own description of the injured:
‘A Sabre Wound … The soldier belonged to the 1st Dragoons. He could not speak and stooped languidly with a vacant and indifferent expression of countenance.’
‘Arm carried off by cannon shot close to shoulder joint. Patient is Sergeant Anthony Tuittmeyer 2nd Line Battalion King’s German Legion. He rode 15 miles into Brussels after being wounded.’ (From Wellington’s Doctors by Dr Martin Howard, courtesy of The Army Medical Services Museum)
Wellington went in to see Gordon’s body lying in his cot. He returned bitterly upset. Gordon, 29, was Wellington’s favourite among
the elite band of young Guards officers on his staff, having been with him since the Peninsular Campaign. He had been hit by a musket ball in the thigh, late in the battle, as he tried to rally the wavering allied ranks when Napoleon threw the Imperial Guard against their lines.
The use of the Imperial Guard – the Immortals – was the emperor’s last throw of the dice. They had never been beaten; they marched through the fields with one intention – to smash the faltering allied lines on the ridge. For the defenders on the ridge, the ‘Immortals’ seemed like giants in their bearskins topped by red plumes, as they climbed up the muddy slope, with ported arms, their officers waving their swords, ‘as if on a field day’, and pressed on by the insistent thumping of the drummer boys, ‘rum dum, rum dum, rummadum dummadum, dum dum’. Ney himself led his men, his face blackened by smoke.
Around 3,000 veterans of the Middle Guard tramped up the slopes to the west of La Haye Sainte (towards the ridge where the Lion Mound now stands) and formed three attack forces. Two battalions of French Grenadiers pushed back the first line of British, Brunswick and Nassau troops. Gordon and Lieutenant Colonel Charles Fox Canning, another of Wellington’s ADCs, were hit by musket balls – Gordon in the thigh, Canning in the stomach – as they tried to rally the young and largely inexperienced recruits from the city of Brunswick and the Nassau regiment on the ridge. Canning crumpled and bled to death on the battlefield, cradled by the Earl of March, another of Wellington’s ADCs and one of the two sons of the Duke of Richmond who were in the battle that day. It was in the same desperate action that the Prince of Orange was hit by a ball in the shoulder (now the site of the Lion Mound).
Wellington had ordered two battalions of more than 1,600 1st Foot Guards commanded by General Sir Peregrine Maitland to lie down behind the ridge so they could not be seen until the last moment. It was a tactic he had used before in the Peninsular War. They were attacked by two battalions of Chasseurs in the second prong of the Imperial Guard attack. Wellington shouted the order: ‘Stand up Guards!’ They rose up as if from the Belgian soil, and the men in the first of four ranks of muskets fired at point-blank range into the mass of blue coats; then the second, third, and fourth ranks fired in turn: ‘The French columns appeared staggered … and convulsed,’ said Lieutenant Colonel J.P. Dirom of the 1st Foot Guards.1
Captain H.W. Powell of the 1st Foot Guards wrote:
Those who from a distance and more on the flank could see the affair, tell us that the effect of our fire seemed to force the head of the column bodily back. Whether it was from the sudden and unexpected appearance of a corps so near them which must have seemed as starting out of the ground, or the tremendously heavy fire we threw into them, La Garde, who had never before failed in an attack suddenly stopped.
The third force of the Imperial Guard, a fresh Chaasseur battalion, came up to push the assault forward, but they were stopped by a surprise attack organised on their flank by Sir John Colborne – the officer who had squeezed up to let the young Ensign Keppel and his muddy servant warm themselves the night before. Colborne used his own initiative to bring his men of the 52nd Foot to the left side of the French column. Now he ordered his men to fire into the flanks of the Immortals, as they recoiled from the volleys in their front. The emperor’s ‘invincible’ Imperial Guard tottered under the shock of musket fire, and for the first time in their lives, they wavered. Wellington shouted: ‘Now Maitland … now’s your time.’ As the Imperial Guard turned and fled, Maitland’s Guards Brigade charged after them, down past Hougoumont with their bayonets. For the first time in their history, the Imperial Guard ran in confusion shouting: ‘La Garde Recule’ (‘The Guard Retreat’). With a wave of his hat, Wellington signalled the general advance. The defenders of Hougoumont only then realised that the battle was won.
Gordon was stretchered off the battlefield after 7.30 p.m. on a door scavenged from Mont St Jean by a sergeant major. He was in excruciating pain and had lost a lot of blood when they reached Dr Hume at the farm, where he was using the barn as a field hospital. The surgeon slashed away Gordon’s uniform trousers and quickly inspected the wound. Dr Hume noted the musket ball had entered on the inside of Gordon’s left thigh and had wounded the femoral artery a little above where it pierces the biceps muscle. Going downwards, the ball had shattered the femur in several pieces, lodging in the knee near the surface of the integument. Dr Hume thought Gordon would ‘suffer torture’ if he was stretchered down to Waterloo, over a mile away, along a road crowded by the chaos of war. There was also the added risk that carrying him further with broken bones moving in his thigh would sever an artery and he would bleed to death. Dr Hume decided he must operate immediately and called over Assistant Surgeon Kenny of the Artillery regiment to assist him. Using a knife and a saw that had seen plenty of work that afternoon, Dr Hume sawed off Gordon’s left leg high above the thigh. He later noted:
Notwithstanding it was necessary to take off the thigh very high up, he bore the operation well and though weak was in tolerable spirits asking me several questions about different officers whom he had seen carried from the field wounded and requesting me to tell him how soon I thought he would get well, whether he should not be able to ride …2
Gordon told Dr Hume through his pain he felt easy and asked to be carried to Wellington’s headquarters at the inn a mile down the road. Dr Hume went with him, but said he unfortunately entered the inn ‘at the moment when Mr Sunning was in the act of amputating Lord FitzRoy Somerset’s arm’. FitzRoy Somerset, who later commanded the army in the Crimea as Lord Raglan, had been wounded by a musket ball when he was riding alongside the Duke near La Haye Sainte, after it fell to the French. Wellington felt sure it had been fired from the roof of the farm. The ball smashed his right elbow. FitzRoy Somerset walked back to a room by the inn in Waterloo used as a field hospital and showed remarkable sang froid while having his arm sawn off. The Prince of Orange, lying wounded in the shoulder in the same room, was unaware that an operation had been performed until FitzRoy Somerset’s arm was tossed onto a growing pile of severed arms and legs outside and FitzRoy Somerset called out, ‘Hey bring my arm back. There’s a ring my wife gave me on the finger.’
Dr Hume, who was clearly worried he would be blamed for Gordon’s death, said he was convinced that the sight of FitzRoy Somerset’s bloody stump had a fatal psychological impact on Gordon’s condition. He noted:
From that instant, he became very restless and uneasy, sighing frequently and begging for a little wine. I gave him a small quantity with water and as soon as Lord FitzRoy and the Prince of Orange (injured by a shot in the arm) set out for Brussels, I had him put to bed and gave him a few drops of Laudanum with a little wine.
Gordon was in such pain that he sent for Dr Hume at 10 p.m., but the doctor was busy again.
One of the Earl of Uxbridge’s young ADCs, 24-year-old Captain Horace Beauchamp Seymour, rode back to the inn and told him the Earl had been badly wounded in the leg with one of the last shots of the battle. He told Hume Uxbridge was being carried to him in a gig, a small carriage. Dr Hume went out into the road to meet the gig, but he recalled there were so many wounded men that he felt obliged to deal with them first:
I had hardly got to the end of the town when his lordship made his appearance in a gig or Tilbury supported by some of his aides-de-camp.
I followed him to his quarters and found on inspection that a grape shot [canister] had struck him on the right knee close to the lower edge of the Patella [knee cap] and entered on the inside of the ligament, and having torn open the capsular ligament, had made its exit behind, externally fracturing the head of the tibia and cutting the outer hamstring in two.
The Duke and the Earl of Uxbridge were riding in pursuit of the routed French army across the fields below La Haye Sainte when a ball from canister fired by a French battery passed over Wellington’s horse and smashed into Uxbridge’s knee, shattering the knee joint. Uxbridge exclaimed, ‘I’ve got it at last!’ Wellington replied, ‘No? Have you by G
od?’* Wellington, who had been looking at the battery that fired the canister, snapped shut his telescope and held Uxbridge up in the saddle until he was helped down by other officers from his horse. Then the Duke spurred Copenhagen on towards the French gun that had fired the shot, shouting an order to Major General Frederick Adam in command of the 3rd British Brigade of foot soldiers, ‘Adam – you must dislodge those fellows.’
A worried aide urged him to be careful but Wellington said: ‘Never mind. Let them fire away. The battle’s gained. My life’s of no consequence now.’3
Wellington’s famously laconic exchange with Uxbridge is often seen as the ultimate example of the British ‘stiff upper lip’ and proof that Wellington was cold hearted. Uxbridge emphasised in a letter years later to historian Captain William Siborne that the Duke ‘throughout was invariably conciliatory and confiding’, but he was clearly being diplomatic. There was bad blood between Wellington and Uxbridge going back to Uxbridge’s cuckolding of Wellington’s brother. Uxbridge’s sister, Lady Caroline Capel, gave vent to her outrage at Wellington, when the Duke gave scant credit to her brother for the victory in his Waterloo Despatch. She called it ‘odious’.
Hume was amazed to find Uxbridge ‘perfectly cool, his pulse was calm and regular as if he had just risen from his bed in the morning’. Indeed, the surgeon said Uxbridge showed ‘excessive composure’ though his suffering must have been extreme. He was not ‘heated’ and did not show the least agitation, despite the pain or his exertions at being in the saddle all day, and taking part in many cavalry charges. Dr Hume decided to operate in Uxbridge’s quarters, a small cottage in Waterloo, but he clearly felt nervous about operating on the second most senior man in the British Army. He wrote that he felt he owed a duty to Uxbridge’s family to do nothing until ‘evincing to all the world’ that amputation was not only necessary but unavoidable. He went out to collect as many medical officers as he could to assist him and confirm his diagnosis. He met with several surgeons of Artillery who accompanied him, and he borrowed a knife from one of them because his own knife had ‘been a good deal employed during the day’ – it was blunt.