Waterloo: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles

by Cornwell, Bernard

  Or perhaps, she suggested, Henry Percy might have had the decency to whisper the news to the Prince Regent who, she was sure, ‘would have shown consideration enough for my feelings not to have published the news till next morning’. In that hope she would almost certainly have been disappointed, because a guest at the ball recorded the Prince’s reaction on hearing of the victory; she wrote to her husband that the Prince ‘fell into a sort of womanish hysteric. Water was flung in his face. No, that would never do. Wine was tried with better success, and he drowned his feelings in an ocean of claret.’

  The news reached Edinburgh the following day, preceded by rumours of a great defeat which claimed that the Prussians had been annihilated and that Wellington had been trounced at Quatre-Bras. Not everyone believed the rumours and bets were taken on their veracity. Then the official news came from London. James Taylor, a lawyer, heard it in court:

  The bearer of the glad tidings was soon in the Court where the judges were sitting; the cheers of the Outer Hall were suspended only to be renewed in the Inner. Further law proceedings were out of the question; adjournment was ruled; and judges, advocates, agents and officers were speedily in the street, already crowded by their excited and exultant townsmen. Nobody could stay at home. The schools were let loose. Business was suspended, and a holiday voted by acclamation.

  Edinburgh Castle’s 24-pounder cannons fired a nineteen-gun salute. The mail-coach that brought the London newspapers arrived garlanded with laurels and bright with flags. The losers paid the winners their wagers which, Taylor said, were speedily handed over to the fund that had been started for the wounded and for the widows and orphans made by Waterloo.

  And they were far too many.

  * * *

  The news reached London on the Wednesday, and that night, a full three days after the battle had ended, there were still wounded men lying untended on the battlefield. The last would not be rescued till the Thursday. Many who might have been saved had died in the meantime. The dead lay in heaps. Major Harry Smith, the Rifleman-hero of the Peninsular War, rode over the battlefield the day after the fight:

  I had been over many a field of battle, but with the exception of one spot at New Orleans and the breach of Badajos, I had never seen anything to compare with what I saw. At Waterloo the whole field from right to left was a mass of dead bodies. In one spot, to the right of La Haie Sainte, the French Cuirassiers were literally piled on each other; many soldiers not wounded lying under their horses; others, fearfully wounded, occasionally with their horses struggling on their wounded bodies. The sight was sickening … All over the field you saw officers, and as many soldiers as were permitted to leave the ranks, leaning and weeping over some dead or dying brother or comrade. The battle was fought on a Sunday, the 18th June, and I repeated to myself a verse from the Psalms of that day – 91st Psalm, 7th verse; ‘A thousand shall fall beside thee, and ten thousand at thy right hand, but it shall not come nigh thee.’

  At night the scavengers moved onto the field to plunder the dead and wounded, and if the wounded resisted they were killed. Men and women used pliers to pull teeth from the dead and, for years after, false teeth were known as Waterloo Teeth.

  Some of the wounded had been taken back to Waterloo. Sergeant Johann Doring, a Nassauer infantryman, marched through the small town on the day after the battle:

  as we passed the last buildings of Waterloo, a place in front of a barn was full of amputated arms and legs, some still with parts of uniforms, and the surgeons, with rolled-up sleeves like butchers, were still busy at work. The scene looked like a slaughterhouse.

  Other casualties were carried all the way to Brussels where, for lack of any other accommodation, they were laid on straw in the city’s squares. Edward Costello, the Rifleman, was astonished at the sight:

  The scene surpassed all imagination, and baffles description: thousands of wounded French, Belgians, Prussians and English; carts, waggons and every other available vehicle, were continually arriving heaped with sufferers. The wounded were laid, friends and foes indiscriminately, on straw, with avenues between them, in every part of the city, and nearly destitute of surgical attendance. The humane and indefatigable exertions of the fair ladies of Brussels however, greatly made up for this deficiency; numbers were busily employed – some strapping and bandaging wounds, others serving out tea, coffee, soups, and other soothing nourishments.

  Charles Bell, a surgeon, heard the news of Waterloo in England and travelled at his own expense to Brussels where, to his horror, he discovered wounded men still being fetched from the battlefield. The worst cases were in a hospital where badly wounded Frenchmen were taken and where no surgeons were working. Bell began operating at six in the morning and worked till seven at night, three days in a row:

  All the decencies of performing surgical operations were soon neglected. While I amputated one man’s thigh, there lay at one time thirteen, all beseeching to be taken next; one full of entreaty, one calling upon me to remember my promise to take him, another execrating. It was a strange thing to feel my clothes stiff with blood, and my arms powerless with the exertion of using the knife.

  We shall probably never know exactly how many men died or were wounded at Waterloo. The various regiments kept records, of course, but in the chaos that followed the battle thousands of men were unaccounted for, and when at last musters could be taken there was no telling whether such men had simply deserted, were prisoners or were among the casualties. That was especially true of the French army. We know that Napoleon began the battle with about 77,000 men and that a week or so later the musters showed that over 46,000 were missing. Mark Adkin, who has done so much careful work on the statistics of the battle, provides the best estimates. The British–Dutch forces under Wellington were missing 17,000 men after the battle, of whom 3,500 were killed, 10,200 were wounded, and the rest deserted. Most of those deserters were Dutch–Belgians, close to home, and the Cumberland Hussars who, despite their English name, were a regiment of Hanoverian cavalry who simply ran away. The Prussians suffered badly over the three days of Ligny, the retreat to Wavre and Waterloo, in all losing over 31,000 men. Ten thousand of those deserted during the retreat, the rest were battle casualties. The fighting in Plancenoit was especially vicious, and some 7,000 Prussians were casualties there. The French lost far more. Probably over 30,000 Frenchmen were killed or wounded at Waterloo, but the figures are at best an estimate. We do know that 840 British infantry officers fought at Quatre-Bras and at Waterloo, and that very nearly half were casualties. A third of the British cavalry was killed or injured. The Royal Scots Guards lost thirty-one of their thirty-seven officers, the 27th Foot sixteen out of nineteen. As night fell on 18 June there were probably around 12,000 corpses on the battlefield and between thirty and forty thousand wounded men, all within three square miles. Many of the wounded were to die in the subsequent days. The 32nd, a British regiment, had 28 men killed during the fight and 146 wounded, but 44 of those wounded died in the next month.

  Local men were hired to clean up the battlefield. Trenches were dug for the allied dead, though never deep enough and one tourist noted how faces and limbs showed above the soil. The French corpses were burned. A visitor to the battlefield ten days after the fight saw the funeral pyres at Hougoumont:

  The pyres had been burning for eight days and by then the fire was being fed solely by human fat. There were thighs, arms and legs piled up in a heap and some fifty workmen, with handkerchiefs over their noses, were raking the fire and the bones with long forks.

  A year later there were still visible human remains, some of them dug up by people hoping to find a souvenir. In the end a contract was given to a company to collect the visible bones and grind them up for fertilizer.

  * * *

  The battle was over, but controversy does not die.

  Who won the battle? That might seem a ridiculous question, but it has generated much hot air and anger over the years and still does. But at least one theory can be dismiss
ed. Victor Hugo, in his great novel Les Misérables, wrote passionately about Waterloo, but in the process he established various myths that are still believed in France. ‘The cuirassiers’, he claimed, ‘annihilated seven squares out of thirteen, took or spiked sixty pieces of ordnance, and captured from the English regiments six flags, which three cuirassiers and three chasseurs of the Guard bore to the Emperor.’ No, they did not. Not one square was broken, not one cannon was spiked by the French, nor was any British colour lost. The defenders of Hougoumont, he declared, tossed living prisoners down the château’s well:

  This well was deep, and it was turned into a sepulchre. Three hundred dead bodies were cast into it. With too much haste perhaps. Were they all dead? Legend says they were not. It seems that on the night succeeding the interment, feeble voices were heard calling from the well.

  The well has been explored by archaeologists and not one trace of human remains was discovered; the legend of the living dying slowly in its depths was spread by Victor Hugo himself. ‘Was it possible’, he asked, ‘that Napoleon should have won that battle? We answer No. Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blücher? No. Because of God.’ That blurs the victor’s identity somewhat, which was Hugo’s purpose. Waterloo, he declared, was not a battle, but ‘a change of front on the part of the Universe’. Such legends and lyricism moved the battle onto a mythic plane where the French are not beaten fairly and squarely, but are victims of a cosmic fate.

  Slender Billy reckoned he had won the battle. He wrote to his parents: ‘We had a magnificent affair against Napoleon today … it was my corps which principally gave battle and to which we owe the victory.’ It is fairer to say that the allied victory owed a great deal more to the French skirmisher who managed to put a musket ball into the Prince of Orange’s shoulder.

  A more convincing argument was advanced by the Reverend William Leeke when, in 1866, he published his book, The History of Lord Seaton’s Regiment (The 52nd Light Infantry) at the Battle of Waterloo. ‘It is beginning to be more and more widely understood’, the preface to the book begins, ‘that very great injustice has been done to Lord Seaton and the 52nd Light Infantry.’ Lord Seaton was Sir John Colville; he was ennobled in 1839 after a successful spell as Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada. Leeke’s complaint is that Colville and the 52nd were not given the credit for defeating the Imperial Guard. The advertisement for the book, printed in bold letters on the title page, reads:

  The author claims for Lord Seaton and the 52nd the honour of having defeated, single-handed, without the assistance of the 1st British Guards or any other troops, that portion of the Imperial Guard of France, about 10,000 in number, which advanced to make the last attack on the British position.

  Leeke claims that the 52nd:

  had moved down 300 or 400 yards from the British position by itself, and had, single-handed, attacked and routed two heavy columns of the French Imperial Guard, consisting of about 10,000 men, and further we saw with our own eyes that this defeat was followed by the flight of the whole French army …

  Leeke was a muscular Christian, much exercised by Sabbath Observance, a cause to which he devoted many years, as he did to the scandal that Protestant officers and men of the British army were ‘forced’ to attend ‘the idolatrous ceremonies of the Roman Catholic and Greek Churches’. This ‘forced’ attendance was an irrelevant, temporary and quite harmless effect of Britain’s participation in the Crimean War. The Reverend Leeke, it seems, could become very hot under his dog-collar, and his book caused a considerable stir.

  Undoubtedly Sir John Colville’s action at Waterloo was brave and effective. On his own initiative he took the 52nd out of line, placed them on the flank of the 4th Chasseurs of the Imperial Guard, and poured a devastating fire into their ranks. One question is whether this last attack by the Imperial Guard even reached the crest of the ridge. Patrick Campbell, an officer of the 52nd who had fought through some of the hardest battles of the Peninsular War, wrote that the French Guards were ‘retreating and in confusion’ when the 52nd made their flank attack, which suggests that the British Guards had already begun the defeat of the enemy before the 52nd made it complete. Then, to complicate matters, Captain John Cross, another experienced soldier in the 52nd, reckons it was the fire of Colborne’s battalion which halted the French column: ‘The instant that the French columns felt the fire of [the 52nd’s] skirmishers they halted, appeared to be in some confusion and opened a heavy fire on the 52nd.’ The British Guards, Cross claims, were ‘stationary and not firing’, which would suggest that this last French battalion had not advanced into musket range of the British Guards. So, if Cross and Leeke are right, then the 52nd did defeat the last assault of the Imperial Guard, but Leeke is surely wrong in saying that the 52nd routed the Guard ‘single-handed’ because the British Guards had already defeated a larger attack, as had the Dutch and British further along the ridge.

  Leeke may not even have been aware of those previous attacks. There was so much smoke, noise and confusion that it is very unlikely that Leeke, a seventeen-year-old in his first battle and carrying one of the regiment’s colours at the centre of the 52nd’s line, was aware of what happened uphill beyond the battalion’s left flank or what had occurred farther eastwards along the slope. The battalion had formed two lines of half-companies with ten paces between them, and Leeke was almost certainly in the rearmost of those lines where the regimental colour would be most protected, which, if true, would have restricted his view even more. Nor did the 52nd defeat two columns as Leeke maintains. They attacked the final battalion of the Guard, but the other four battalions had already been driven down the slope. And 10,000 men? No doubt in the horror of the firefight, in which so many of Colville’s men died, it felt that way, but the French Guard numbered far fewer than 10,000.

  Sir John Colville’s own account shares the credit with the British Guards and ‘the appearance of a general attack on its flank from Sir F. Adam’s Brigade and Sir Henry Clinton’s Division’. None of this should detract from Sir John Colville’s initiative and achievement. What he did was courageous and magnificent, and Leeke and some others of the 52nd’s officers felt ill-used that their regiment was not singled out for praise in the Duke’s despatch. They have a point. The Duke did mention the British Guards, saying they ‘set an example which was followed by all’, and that rankled with Leeke, who felt his own battalion deserved equal billing. The survivors of other regiments could feel the same. The 92nd, hugely outnumbered, checked one of d’Erlon’s columns with the bayonet and drove it backwards. The 27th held the most vulnerable place in the Duke’s line and died there, almost to a man. They all contributed to the victory. When the Duke was asked, late in life, what he regretted most, he answered that he should have given more praise, and that surely lies at the heart of Leeke’s complaint. He felt aggrieved that the Guards received the laurels of victory in the Duke’s despatch and he wrote a powerful book of rebuttal, but the 52nd did not cause the French collapse ‘single-handed’, any more than the British Guards did.

  Yet the bitterest controversy is between the school of Gneisenau and the school of Wellington. Somehow Gneisenau’s unforgiving and vituperative attitude towards the Duke has persisted down to the present. Broadly speaking, the accusation is that the Duke failed to give the Prussians their due and claimed the victory as all his own, but there are more specific charges too. It is contended that he deliberately deceived his allies before the battles of Ligny and Quatre-Bras, that he failed to fulfil his promise to reinforce Blücher at Ligny, and that after the campaign, for the rest of his life, he used his fame and eminence to suppress any suggestion that the Prussians saved the day.

  The first accusation is the most serious. It maintains that Wellington had news of the French concentration much earlier on 15 June, the eve of the battles of Ligny and Quatre-Bras, but for his own nefarious reasons pretended not to know till the evening. To believe this we must also believe that a Prussian officer, bringing the news to Wellington, told
no one else in Brussels about the imminent French attack. And we must also ask what possible advantage could accrue to the Duke by concealing the news. The usual answer is that it left Blücher exposed, thus giving Wellington time to retreat. It makes no sense. If the Duke was so frightened of confronting the French, then why not begin the retreat as soon as he hears the news? To ask the question is to realize its stupidity. And what does the Duke gain if Blücher is defeated? The whole campaign was predicated on an alliance, on the knowledge that neither Wellington nor Blücher could defeat the Emperor alone, and that they must therefore combine their armies. By exposing Blücher to defeat the Duke ensures the defeat of his own army. In the event Blücher was defeated, but the campaign survived by the skin of its teeth because the Prussians were not routed and so lived to fight another day. Victory came because Blücher made the brave decision to retreat to Wavre instead of Liège, which he would only have done if he was convinced Wellington was prepared to fight, and because Wellington made a desperate defence of the ridge at Mont St Jean, which he would only have done if he was convinced Blücher was coming to his aid. In brief the campaign was successful because Blücher and Wellington trusted each other, and to suggest that Wellington would have risked that trust by deceiving his ally is to fly in the face of probability and everything we know about Wellington’s character.

  So did he promise to come to Blücher’s aid at Ligny? The answer is simple, yes, but only if he was not attacked himself. He was attacked and so there was no possible chance to help the Prussians. The promise, qualified as it was, was made at the meeting between Blücher and Wellington at the windmill in Brye. Prussian accounts of the meeting make no mention of the qualifying ‘providing I am not attacked myself’, while von Müffling does record those words. General von Dornberg, Prussian-born but serving in the British army, recalled something similar; he claimed Wellington said, ‘I will see what is opposing me and how much of my army has arrived and then act accordingly.’ Yet three Prussian accounts claim that not only did the Duke promise to come, but that he even offered Blücher the exact time he expected to arrive, though as one account says the expected arrival time was 2 p.m., the second 3 p.m. and the third, von Clausewitz, who was not even present, 4 p.m., those claims are dubious at best. So the accounts differ, but Wellington had already seen for himself the French presence at Quatre-Bras and he would hardly have given a promise that he knew was most unlikely to be kept. He expected a fight at Quatre-Bras and must have warned his Prussian allies of that strong possibility. Gneisenau always blamed Wellington for the outcome of Ligny, describing it as ‘the defeat we had suffered because of him’, but that tells us more about Gneisenau’s small-mindedness than about Wellington’s truthfulness.