The Scum of the Earth

by Colin Brown

  He was preparing to operate with the other surgeons standing by when a young assistant ‘pushed himself forward’ and told Uxbridge without consulting Dr Hume that he would save the leg. The unnamed assistant said: ‘My Lord, this is a very nasty wound. It may be long of getting well, but a stiff joint will be the only consequence, there will be no need for taking off the limb.’ Dr Hume was furious: ‘I never felt myself so completely confounded and taken aback, however restraining myself, I said: “Sir, you have not examined the wound. When you have it will be time enough to give your opinion”.’ They then had an argument over the patient. Dr Hume angrily told the pushy young assistant:

  You see that the ball has passed through the centre of the joint, that the head of the tibia is smashed to pieces and that the capsular ligament which is torn open is filled with fragments of bone and cartilage from the middle external condyle of the femur, the outer hamstring is also divided: even were the capsular ligament simply punctured with a sword, my own opinion would be against risking the life of the patient under all the circumstances.

  Uxbridge remained unruffled by the argument among the surgeons over his body. He told Dr Hume:

  I put myself under your charge and I resign myself entirely to your decision … whilst I observe to you that I feel as any other man would naturally do, anxious to save my limb, yet my life being of infinitely more consequence to my numerous family … I request that you will … act in such a way as to the best of your judgment is most calculated to preserve that.

  Dr Hume said: ‘Certainly my Lord, but …’ Uxbridge interrupted: ‘Why any buts – are you not the Chief? It is you I consult on this occasion.’ He told Uxbridge that it was better to operate sooner rather than later. ‘Very well,’ Uxbridge replied, ‘I am ready.’ Having applied a tourniquet, probably a leather strap tightened around the thigh to snapping point to cut down the loss of blood, Dr Hume took up the knife in his hand. Uxbridge was lucky – the knife was sharp, because (unlike the knife he had used on Gordon) it was new. Lord Uxbridge said, ‘Tell me when you are going to begin.’ Dr Hume replied: ‘Now my Lord.’ Uxbridge laid his head on a pillow, put his hand up to his eyes and said, ‘Whenever you please.’

  The surgeon recorded the operation in eye-watering detail that made me wince when I read it:

  I began my incision … with one stroke of the knife I divided the muscles all round down to the bone and having retracted them on both sides I took the saw.* I had sawed nearly through the femur, but the person who held the leg, being over apprehensive of splintering the bone, raised up the limb, so that the saw being confined, could not be pushed forwards or backwards. I did not perceive what was the cause and said angrily, ‘Damn the saw’ when Lord Uxbridge said with a smile, ‘What is the matter?’ These were the only words he spoke and during the whole of the operation he neither uttered a groan or complaint, nor gave any sign of impatience or uneasiness.4

  Dr Hume noted he gave Uxbridge a very small quantity of weak wine and water and checked his pulse – it was only 66 beats per minute. ‘I am quite certain had anyone entered the room they would have enquired of him where the wounded man was …’

  Uxbridge (later made the Marquis of Anglesey by the Prince Regent) interred his leg in a ‘grave’ at the cottage, which became a bizarre tourist attraction. In the Victorian period, tourists armed with their edition of Baedeker’s Belgium were told:

  The garden of a peasant (a few paces to the N of the church) contains an absurd monument to the leg of the Marquis of Anglesey … the proprietor of the ground who uses all his powers of persuasion to induce travellers to visit the spot, derives considerable income from this source.

  The false leg that he later wore became a model for army prosthetics and is on show at the Horse Guards Museum, Whitehall. It is said he went back to the cottage with his sons, found the table on which he had his leg amputated and had his dinner off it. But today you cannot see the cottage opposite the inn where Uxbridge had his leg removed. It was recently demolished for flats.

  While Dr Hume was in the middle of the operation on Uxbridge, he had a message from Gordon’s bedside to say that his stump was bleeding and Gordon was very uneasy. He sent a surgeon from the 15th Hussars called Carter to see Gordon. Carter brought back word that Gordon was very restless, although nothing appeared amiss with the stump.

  As soon as he finished with Uxbridge, Dr Hume went to inspect Gordon’s wound:

  I found the ligatures on the arteries all perfectly secure but there was a very considerable venous oozing all over the surface of the stump and particularly from the great femoral vein round which I had put a ligature, cleaning away about eight or 10 ounces of clotted blood which had collected about the ends of the muscles and the integument. I again did up the stump carefully moistening the bandage with cold water and I repeated the anodyne draught.

  Surgeons like Hume are among the forgotten heroes of Waterloo. They had to operate in primitive conditions, with war raging all around them and no anaesthetic apart from weak wine or laudanum. It is hardly surprising that it was reckoned that one in three patients died from shock after amputations.

  Surgeon Samuel Good of the 3rd Foot Guards and Matthias Kenny, a second assistant surgeon with the Ordnance Medical Department, were also at work at the Mont St Jean farm, hacking off limbs while Hume was tending to Gordon.

  A mile away, the surgeon of the Coldstream Guards, William Whymper, operated throughout the ferocious siege at Hougoumont farm with a couple of assistant surgeons, ignoring the carnage all around them. There were hundreds of casualties lying around the farmyard with horrific injuries, including many who were burned to the bone when the chateau caught fire, and one who had a hand cleaved off by a French axe.

  On the battlefield, the recently-married wife of Private George Osborne of the 3rd Foot Guards, was injured while she was acting as a nurse. She was one of the female camp followers allowed by the army, and tore up her own clothing for bandages. She was hit in the left arm and breast as she tended to a wounded officer, Captain Edward Bowater. Mrs Osborne was later awarded the Queen’s Bounty for her bravery. But army surgeons were rarely mentioned in despatches.

  The horrific wounds they had to deal with were graphically illustrated by the Scottish surgeon Sir Charles Bell, who toured the makeshift hospitals in Brussels where many of the injured were sent to die or recover. He was a gifted anatomical artist and his archive of watercolours provides an invaluable medical record, but they are much more – Bell has managed to convey in harrowing detail the emotions of the patients.

  In one of his sketches after Waterloo, a soldier lies on a bed and lifts up a white shirt to show his intestines that have tumbled out of his stomach after being cut open by a sabre. The look on his face is one of horror and resignation at his own impending death. Bell’s skill with the paintbrush was apparently greater than with a knife: he allegedly had a mortality rate of 90 per cent with amputations.

  Dr Hume’s handwritten medical notes are an equally vivid reminder that mingled with the glory that day, there were piles of guts and gore. Army surgeons like Hume carried their own medical kit in a rosewood box with a red velvet inlay that would be recognisable to surgeons today. A typical set included knives, saws, a screw tourniquet, ligatures and a tenaculum for securing blood vessels. However, the lack of anaesthetics and the grime of the battlefield made the field-operating theatre more like a butcher’s shop. One surgeon reported:

  All the decencies of performing surgical operations were soon neglected, whilst I amputated one man’s thigh there lay at one time 13, all beseeching to be taken next. It was strange to feel my clothes stiff with blood and my arms powerless with the exertion of using my knife.

  Wellington finally climbed out of the saddle at the inn shortly after the village clock struck 10 p.m., but was too exhausted, physically and mentally, to celebrate the triumph of his victory over Bonaparte. He had ridden out from the inn after 6 a.m. at the head of forty horsemen, and had returned with no more
than five. All that Wellington wanted was sleep.

  He had pursued the French for a time and De Lancey’s ADC, Lieutenant Colonel Jackson, witnessed Wellington’s famous meeting with Blücher, the Prussian field marshal, at La Belle Alliance, although Wellington was later convinced it was at Genappe: ‘Mein lieber Kamerad,’ said the old Field Marshal. ‘Quelle affaire!’ Blücher later suffered mad delusions when he got to Paris. Wellington put it down to a bang on the head Blücher suffered when he was showing off to some ladies and fell off his horse: ‘Poor Blücher went mad for some time,’ the Duke told his astonished dinner guests at Walmer Castle in 1838. ‘When I went to take my leave of him he positively told me that he was pregnant! And what do you think he said he was pregnant of? An elephant! And who do you think he said had produced it? A French soldier! That is the human mind.’ Blücher retired home to Silesia and died in 1819 aged 76. The engineer George Stephenson later gave Blücher the best memorial – he named a steam engine after him. Blücher would have liked that. Fire and steam summed him up.

  The Duke, like his men, was too tired to go on with the pursuit of the French Army. He left the fresher Prussians to continue ‘hunting by night’. The Prussians were cock-a-hoop. They captured Napoleon’s dark-blue and gilded carriage, with his travelling case containing nearly 100 pieces in solid gold, and some diamonds worth an estimated million francs.5 The emperor had to climb out of his carriage and escape on a horse with his escort of Red Lancers.* Jardin Aine, Napoleon’s equerry, recorded: ‘He was at this time extremely pale and haggard and much changed. He took a small glass of wine and a morsel of bread which one of his equerries had in his pocket and some moments later mounted, asking if the horse galloped well …’6 Blücher’s chief of staff, Gneisenau, said it was ‘the best night of my life’.

  Wellington picked his way on Copenhagen across a landscape lit by moonlight that resembled Hell by Hieronymus Bosch. Corpses, some already stripped, lay in heaps; the mutilated bodies of dead horses littered the field; ghostly figures walked through the fields of dead and the dying, firing the occasional shot to deliver the coup de grace; and he had to pick his way through the wreckage of war strewn about the fields and roads – breast plates, broken gun carriages, abandoned muskets, piles of clothes, helmets and shakos and men lying moaning, wanting death. And there was the paper. One of the odder images of Waterloo is that the battlefield was strewn with paper: personal letters and diaries and pay books that were carried by every soldier, cast aside by the looters as they searched for gold. The paper fluttered in the night breeze.

  Wellington passed his horse to his groom and went inside the inn. In peacetime, it was chiefly used by wagon drivers carrying goods between France and Belgium. Wellington found it hot and packed with officers, including Dutch and German troops, celebrating their great victory. He went upstairs to see how Sir Alexander Gordon was faring. He had been laid in the Duke’s bed, a small wooden cot on the first floor of the inn. Gordon was weak through loss of blood and racked with pain, but raised himself up at the sight of the Duke and whispered: ‘Thank God you are safe.’ Wellington told Gordon about the great victory that they had secured, and told him he would do well.

  Downstairs in the spacious common room, Lieutenant Colonel Jackson found three or four small tables laid for supper and several foreign officers looking hungry and impatient. His friend, Colonel Robert Torrens, a fellow officer on the staff of the Quartermaster General and who was related to the Prince Regent’s ADC, Major General Sir Henry Torrens, secured a table and a smoking stew was quickly laid out. A Dutchman bowed and begged to join them. They agreed and he finished up eating their supper; they could not muster an appetite for food.7

  Jackson had spent the day riding around without orders after De Lancey had been mortally wounded and decided he might as well take De Lancey’s bed.* He went upstairs to claim his room, but found it already occupied by a seriously wounded French officer who had a gaping wound from a sabre cut to the back of his head, which went down to the bone of his skull. Jackson washed his enemy’s wounds and left him in the bed; he then went back down to the common room to grab some sleep on the floor.

  The Duke, leaving Gordon to rest, sat down to a melancholy supper in a private room next door with a few close members of his staff including Álava, who had been with him since the Peninsular campaign. Each time the door opened, the Duke hoped to see more of his young hand-picked staff officers. There were pitifully few to join him. He was in no mood to receive two of Napoleon’s senior officers, who had been captured – Marshal Cambronne, who commanded the last of the Imperial Guard and led a rearguard action to protect the emperor at the end of the battle, and Georges Mouton, the Comte de Lobau.

  Under the gentlemanly rules of combat, they expected to be invited to join Wellington at supper but the Duke coldly refused. Before Cambronne was captured he is alleged to have said: ‘The Guard dies and does not surrender.’ He became the butt of barrack room humour: ‘Cambronne surrenders, he does not die.’ Wellington told one dinner party twenty-four years later he had never heard anything so absurd as his request to join the supper party:

  Why I found him that very evening in my room at Waterloo – him and General Mouton – and I bowed them out! I said to them, ‘Messieurs, j’en suis bien fache, mais je ne puis avoir l’honneur de vous recevoir jusqu’a ce que vous ayez fait votre paix avec Sa Majeste Tres Chretienne.’ [‘Gentlemen, I am very angry, but I cannot have the honour to receive you until you have made your peace with his most Christian Majesty.’]

  They bowed. I added, ‘Ce n’est possible,’ and I passed on. I would not let them sup with me that night. I thought they had behaved so very ill to the King of France.8

  Around midnight, von Müffling, the beefy Prussian* who acted as Wellington’s go-between with the Prussian marshal, Blücher, sank into his seat at the inn and told the Duke that Blücher wanted to name the victory ‘Battle of La Belle Alliance’, after their meeting place. Wellington said nothing. The French, with superior local knowledge, still know it as La Bataille de Mont St Jean. The Duke had decided to follow military practice by naming it after the place where he began his despatch.

  Wellington drank a single glass of wine, toasting ‘the Memory of the Peninsular War’. He asked Carlo Pozzo di Borgo to pen an urgent note to Louis XVIII in Ghent, saying he would be restored to the throne in Paris. The French king trusted Pozzo, who – though a Corsican like Napoleon – was Tsar Alexander’s ambassador in France and had helped to restore Louis to the throne in 1814. Pozzo dispatched a Russian officer with his message. Then Wellington went to grab a few hours’ sleep on a rough mattress. He was too exhausted and depressed to face writing his official despatch until the morning.

  Hume said in his notes that he checked on Gordon after Wellington had retired to sleep:

  He [Gordon] said he felt easier and lay for some time more composed but about one o’clock in the morning, he became restless as before, frequently changing his posture, calling every moment and in this manner he continued till he became perfectly exhausted and expired soon after daylight. I should think [it was] about half past three o’clock in the morning.

  Dr Hume woke the Duke with the news of Gordon’s death and gave him the list of killed and seriously injured. The dead included Ponsonby, Picton, De Lancey, Canning (his ADC) and now Gordon. Wellington began his despatch at a desk in his private room but the list was too distressing and he could not go on. Wellington scribbled a note for Broke to get the army on the move again and prepared to leave. Jackson, sleeping on the floor downstairs, was roughly shaken and told to take it to the commanders who were still in the field. It said: ‘Memorandum – The troops belonging to the allied army will move upon Nivelles at daylight. Wellington.’

  Jackson had found it difficult to get to sleep while a group of Dutch soldiers caroused loudly into the early hours of the morning. He drowsily roused up the hostler to prepare his horse and was on the road to the battlefield before daybreak. The Duke needed to re
place his staff and decided to ride into Brussels to finish his official despatch for Lord Bathurst, the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. It would be a story of heroism and sacrifice – he would weep over the losses over dinner weeks later, but the common soldiers who died in their droves were hardly given a mention.

  Copenhagen, Wellington’s chestnut warhorse, had survived shot and shell without a sign of nerves, and had ridden into one of the British squares as coolly as his rider, but when Wellington got off his horse in Brussels, Copenhagen kicked out. It was the first sign of the stress they had both endured:

  ‘On the Duke dismounting, this noble animal kicked up his heels and scampered half over the town before he was caught,’ recorded Lady Shelley.

  The Duke sat down in the window of his rented ‘billet’ 54 rue Royale in the centre of Brussels to complete the despatch he had started in Waterloo, but first he had a few letters to dash off. One of the first was to Lady Frances Webster, the young and beautiful married woman to whom he had sent a note on the morning of the battle. To avoid impropriety, it was drafted as advice to her father, but the fact that the Duke felt it necessary to write to her that morning suggests he was clearly besotted with her: