by Peter Snow
Picton may have been given his orders, but it wasn’t until most senior officers were at the ball and the dancing and drinking were well advanced that Wellington finally gave them the green light to move. Before midnight he heard the news he had been waiting for: there was no French force about to strike from the south-west. Napoleon’s full force was moving north from Charleroi. Wellington’s suspicion that Napoleon would deliver a blow at him from further west appeared unfounded. He could now move decisively. The Prussians were across Napoleon’s path at Ligny. He would try to stop Napoleon at the crossroads of Quatre-Bras, on the road to Brussels from Charleroi seven miles north-west of Ligny. That way he could block Napoleon sweeping around Blücher’s right and heading for Brussels. Quatre-Bras was twenty miles away. The Anglo-Dutch army would have to move fast. Wellington gathered his senior commanders around him at the ball and told them to move their men off in the early hours. But the speed of Napoleon’s advance and the earlier uncertainty about its precise direction had caught Wellington off balance. ‘Napoleon has humbugged me, by God! He has gained twenty-four hours’ march on me,’ he told the Duke of Richmond in a chat just before he left the ball. Wellington asked Richmond if he had a map. Richmond replied that he had, and took Wellington into his dressing room to show him. As Wellington looked at it, Richmond asked him what he would do. Wellington replied that he had ordered his army to concentrate at Quatre-Bras. ‘But we shall not stop him there, and if so, I must fight him here.’ And Wellington ‘passed his thumbnail over the position of Waterloo’. It was halfway between Brussels and Quatre-Bras.
17
Blücher has had a damn good hiding
Quatre-Bras, 16 June 1815
NOBODY GOT MUCH sleep that night. Fred Ponsonby and William Hay had both been invited to the ball. Ponsonby had accepted, Hay had wisely refused. At 3 a.m. Hay woke up when his servant walked into his bedroom, handed him his uniform and said that Ponsonby, his colonel, wanted to see him at once. He jumped out of bed, and raced over to Ponsonby’s quarters. ‘You were lucky not to go to the ball,’ said Ponsonby, who had just ridden back from it. ‘I am quite knocked up, the French are coming out in great numbers, and yesterday attacked and drove the Prussians back.’ He told Hay to arrange for three days’ rations and forage for the horses. As soon as that was done, the men should be ordered to march. Then Ponsonby, exhausted after a lively night on the dance floor – he was never a man to leave a party early – told Hay to leave him: ‘I should like to be left quiet … to get some rest.’ Before he set off in the morning, he managed to write a letter to Lady Georgiana Lennox, the Duke of Richmond’s daughter: ‘We had a great ball last night and fancy the horror of having the news in the middle of it and of seeing all one’s friends fly to the right and to the left.’
Kincaid boasted that his regiment, the 1/95th Rifles, were ‘to the credit of our battalion’ assembled and ready to march before midnight, ‘where it was nearly two o’clock in the morning before we were joined by the others’. While they waited they grabbed an hour or two’s rest on the pavement. ‘But we were every instant disturbed, by ladies as well as gentlemen; some stumbling over us in the dark – some shaking us out of our sleep to be told the news.’ Creevey was informed of Napoleon’s first clash with the Prussians when his son and daughters returned from the ball at around 2.30 a.m. They told him there had been plenty of officers at the ball and there were some tender scenes ‘upon their ladies parting with them’.
Some of the less experienced soldiers avoided overloading their heavy packs by cutting back on provisions. Those who knew that they could be days away from their next food supply furnished themselves with three days’ worth. A number of the young cavalrymen remembered to fill their horses’ nosebags with corn and loaded up with a good twenty-four hours’ supply of hay, but neglected to take a stock of bread and bacon for themselves.
Wellington depended for his food on his devoted chef, James Thornton, who had tried but failed to serve him a whole dinner the evening before. Before the Duke could eat his dessert, a new set of messages had him striding off to meet his staff. Thornton was warned to be ready to move at a moment’s notice. Early on 16 June he sent ahead a basket of cold food in the hope that he could prepare some lunch for his commander in the field. In the event the Duke and his chef were not to meet for forty-eight hours.
Wellington managed a couple of hours’ sleep before dawn, and then rode south. His infantry was already on the move, led by Picton’s division which included the Rifles. They had left Brussels before dawn for Quatre-Bras, several hours’ march to the south. The Duke rode past the Rifles as they halted for breakfast some miles south of Brussels. Ned Costello said his riflemen were ‘merry as crickets, laughing and joking with each other … for even the old soldiers could not believe the enemy were so near … Alas! how many of our brave companions, ere that sun set, were no more!’ Fred Ponsonby’s light dragoons and his cousin Major General William Ponsonby’s heavy cavalry were preparing for the road. Wellington’s gunners also were under way. Cavalié Mercer was shaken awake by his servant in the small village west of Brussels where he and his horse artillery troop were billeted. The servant handed him a written order that had just arrived instructing him to get on the road. As Mercer pulled on his breeches, he shouted for his sergeant major and his supply officer, and within minutes three days’ provisions for men and horses had been prepared, and ‘the fine martial clang of “boot and saddle” resounded through the village … making the woods ring again and even the frogs stop to listen’. Officers from two of Mercer’s gun crews had been up late at the ball in Brussels, so it took some time to get the whole troop on the move. It was a beautiful sunny morning, but some of the tracks they had to negotiate were quite steep. They had to double the number of horses on each of their carriages, which meant that only half the troop could move at any one time.
As Mercer’s horse artillery struggled on and the advanced British infantry units such as the Rifles marched down the road from Brussels, they began to pick up a ‘dull, sullen sound that filled the air, somewhat resembling that of a distant water mill or still more distant thunder’. Ned Costello heard it too. It was the sound of the French and Prussian guns at Ligny twenty-five miles south-east of Brussels. By mid-afternoon this was drowned out by the much closer roar of Wellington’s battle with the French at Quatre-Bras.
Wellington had ridden fast on his favourite charger, Copenhagen,* to Quatre-Bras where he arrived at about 10 a.m. He found 8,000 Dutch–Belgian troops in the woods – the Bois de Bossu – just south-west of the crossroads. They, at first, appeared confident of holding the position until they could be reinforced by Wellington’s other forces, which were now moving south from Brussels and south-east from Nivelles towards the crossroads. Wellington sent a message to Blücher at Ligny seven miles away to the south-east, assuring him that he would have most of his forces in place by the middle of the day and strongly implying that he would be able to come to the aid of the Prussians if they needed him. But Wellington’s forces were in fact still several hours away: he wouldn’t be ready to fight till at least mid-afternoon and he decided to ride over to meet Blücher at the Brye Windmill above Ligny and tell him that he would come to his support ‘provided I am not attacked’.
It was just as well he gave this proviso, because, soon after he returned, the Dutch–Belgians were fighting for their lives against a powerful attack on Quatre-Bras by Marshal Ney. It was all part of Napoleon’s strategy: divide and destroy. He would throw most of his army against Blücher’s force at Ligny. If he could destroy the Prussians or force them to wheel away and retreat to the east, he could then fall on Wellington and defeat him in turn. But his first priority was to stop Wellington reinforcing the Prussians. So Napoleon despatched Marshal Ney, the flamboyant but often reckless commander, who had faced Wellington at Bussaco five years earlier, to pin him down at Quatre-Bras. Ney had 20,000 troops, more than twice the number of Wellington’s Dutch–Belgian troops, who were soon dr
iven back from most of their positions. If the French could reach and secure the road that ran east and west through the Quatre-Bras crossroads, Wellington would be facing defeat.
But time was on his side. In the early afternoon Picton’s units began pouring in from the north and took up positions along the east–west road. They were some of the best troops Wellington had. He sent the Rifles way over to his left to secure his flank. In the centre he posted his British battalions. Most of them stood in long lines to receive the French attacks with a great fusillade of musket fire. The tactic was as successful as it had been in the Peninsula. The advancing French columns suffered such high casualties that their attacks lost momentum. But still they came back for more. Wellington dashed from one battalion commander to another personally issuing orders and slowly advancing his men beyond the east–west road and across the fields beyond. This was relatively flat country. It was the only time that the Duke had been unable to deploy on a battlefield of his own choosing. He could not use the shelter of reverse slopes, and his men suffered dreadfully from superior French gunfire.
Wellington was constantly exposed to danger. At one moment he attempted and failed to rally some allied cavalry who had been forced back by the French. He was surrounded by French lancers and hussars and escaped being seized or killed only by leaping over a defensive line of Gordon Highlanders, shouting at them to lower their bayonets so that his horse could jump over their heads.
Ney could see the balance of numbers turning against him as British reinforcements moved up. So he decided to commit the most fearsome French cavalrymen of all – the cuirassiers. Few British soldiers – even in the Peninsula – had ever had to confront these men before. Only one regiment of cuirassiers, the 13th, had been deployed by Napoleon to Spain, but it served exclusively in the eastern part of the country and did not fight Wellington’s Peninsular army. The cuirassiers looked like medieval knights. Their horses were massive chargers bred in Normandy. They were the armoured elite of the French cavalry, specially selected men, each at least six feet tall. Clad in helmets with their glittering steel breastplates or cuirasses edged with gilded copper rivets, they weighed over 300 pounds. These protective cuirasses strapped around their dark-blue tunics were proof against sword, lance and bayonet. Their weakness was that, although they could stop a ball fired from a pistol, they could not stop the higher velocity of a musket ball. They were far less agile in close combat than an opponent without body armour. But a charging cuirassier, leaning low over his horse’s neck and stretching his sword arm forward without any bend in his elbow, was a terrifying sight to an infantryman on the ground. Nothing less than a well-aimed musket shot or the security of the infantry square offered any protection. Only men with the courage and discipline that came from years of campaigning could stand unflinching shoulder to shoulder against such a formidable foe.
This discipline was now put to serious test at Quatre-Bras as Ney launched 800 cuirassiers against the British battalions. One regiment, the South Lincolnshire, the 69th, lost 153 officers and men when it failed to form a square. Tom Morris’s Highland Regiment was also attacked. He and his comrades had marched no less than twenty-seven miles through the night and then through the burning morning sun to the battlefield where they were soon immersed in a great field of rye seven feet tall. ‘We were not advancing unobserved,’ wrote Morris. A body of cuirassiers ‘must have seen the glittering tops of our bayonets’ because they ‘came on us by surprise, and having no opportunity to form square, we were compelled to retire as rapidly as we could out of the cornfield’. The cuirassiers then turned their attention to the neighbouring Royal Highland Regiment, and Morris saw them causing ‘great havoc in the Highland ranks’. James Anton was in one of those ranks which managed to form a square just in time to confront the cuirassiers. They charged two sides of the square and ‘their heavy horses and steel armour seemed sufficient to bury us under them had they been pushed forward on our bayonets’, wrote Anton. But miraculously the cuirassiers stopped short of penetrating the square and the redcoated British levelled their muskets. ‘A most destructive fire was opened; riders, cased in heavy armour, fell tumbling from their horses; the horses reared, plunged and fell on the dismounted riders; steel helmets and cuirasses rung against unsheathed sabres, as they fell to the ground; shrieks and groans of men, the neighing of horses and the discharges of musketry rent the air, as men and horses mixed together in one heap of indiscriminate slaughter.’
Wellington was still with the Gordons (the 92nd Regiment of Foot) next door to the Highland Regiment, when the cuirassiers charged. He remained as cool as ever. A young lieutenant, Robert Winchester, watched him steadying the front line when they were particularly hard pressed. ‘92nd, don’t fire until I tell you,’ he shouted, as the cuirassiers ‘under cover of their guns came charging up the fields in front of the regiment … and when they came within twenty or thirty paces of us, his Grace gave the order to fire, which killed and wounded an immense number of men and horses, on which they immediately faced about and galloped off’. Winchester saw one French officer, who thought his men were still following him, charge right through and beyond the Gordons. ‘“Damn it, 92nd,” shouted Wellington. “Will you allow that fellow to escape?” Some of the men turned immediately round, fired, killed his horse and a musket ball at the same time passed through each foot of the gallant young officer.’*
A little later Tom Morris’s light company of the Highlanders was detached to do some skirmishing away from the main force, but the company ‘was unfortunately commanded by a Captain, 60 years of age, who had been upward of 39 years in the service but was never before in action. He knew nothing of field movements.’ When a regiment of cuirassiers made for Morris’s company, the officer was ‘at his wits’ end and there is no doubt we should all have been sacrificed had we not been seen by the adjutant of our regiment, a fine spirited fellow’. He spotted their predicament and immediately rode up and exclaimed, ‘Captain Robinson, what are you about? Are you going to murder your men?’ He ordered Tom Morris and his comrades to rejoin the main regiment ‘just in time to form square. On the cuirassiers coming up and finding us so well prepared, they wheeled off to the left receiving from us a volley as they retired.’
Tom Morris felt a growing resentment of Wellington’s conduct of the Battle of Quatre-Bras as he watched one cuirassier charge after another. ‘Though it’s considered a sort of treason to speak against the Duke, yet I cannot help making a few observations upon the extraordinary fact that we had neither artillery nor cavalry in the field … fortunately for the Duke the result was successful: had it been otherwise he would have been deeply censured.’ Some units suffered particularly heavy losses. Lieutenant Alex Riddock described his Essex Regiment as being ‘reduced to a mere skeleton’. Particularly lethal were the French lancers: their long shafts tipped with steel blades could reach over the bayonets of the British infantry bunched in their squares and do terrible injury. As for those caught outside the squares, Riddock watched squadrons of French cuirassiers and lancers ‘sweeping the field in the rear, round and round every square, showing no mercy, dashing at and sticking the helpless wounded officers and men that unfortunately lay without the protection of the square. I could compare them to nothing but a swarm of bees.’
The British cavalry and artillery was, belatedly, on its way. Cavalié Mercer moved east as fast as his horse artillerymen could drag their huge load. When they reached Nivelles they found a town in horror and fear as the dreadfully disfigured wounded and dying struggled into its streets. ‘Some were staggering along unaided, the blood falling from them in large drops as they went. One man we met was wounded in the head; pale and ghastly … with affrighted looks and uncertain step he evidently knew little of where he was … At every step in short, we met numbers of more or less wounded hurrying along in search of that assistance which many would never live to receive and others receive too late.’ Mercer’s battery, which had been so sorely needed at Quatre-Bras, eventua
lly arrived ‘just too late to be useful’.
Fred Ponsonby’s and William Tomkinson’s light dragoons just missed the battle too. They had not wasted any time. As they rode through Nivelles, they threw away their forage to lighten their loads as much as possible, but they arrived on the battlefield to find the infantry had completed the task without them. William Hay accompanied Ponsonby in a tour of the field. Hay saw more men and horses lying there than anything he could have dreamed of. Ponsonby told him to look at a cuirass he had taken from one of the dead bodies. It was perforated with three holes. ‘I wanted to find out’, said Ponsonby, ‘if these cuirasses were ball proof or not: this plainly shows that they were not.’ Wellington was even more scathing about the cuirassiers. He recalled watching many of them being unhorsed and forced to the ground, and ‘those that were not killed were so encumbered by their cuirasses and jackboots that they could not get up, but lay sprawling and kicking like so many turned turtles’. When the men of the Gordons gathered to cook their dinner that evening at Quatre-Bras, they found that the discarded cuirasses made excellent saucepans.
Thomas Picton had been the hero of the Battle of Quatre-Bras. Time and again he rallied his men as they faced charges by cavalry and infantry and slowly but surely shepherded the long British line forward – shouting encouragement all the time, losing a horse under him and sustaining a serious wound that broke two of his ribs. At one stage Picton found the enemy both in front of and behind his division. ‘This was’, as John Kincaid observed, ‘a crisis in which … the victory was theirs, by all the rules of war, for they had superior numbers both before and behind us; but the gallant old Picton, who had been trained in a different school, did not choose to confine himself to rules in these matters; despising the forces in his rear, he advanced, charged and routed those in his front which created such a panic among the others that they galloped back through the intervals in his divisions with no other object in view than their own safety.’ Picton himself told his ADC, Captain Tyler, that he had never had such a hard day’s fighting and added, ‘I shall begin to think that I cannot be killed after this.’ Picton told no one that he was wounded and had to endure the agony of riding a borrowed horse with no saddle all through the retreat of the following day. Rees Gronow, who had persuaded Picton to let him join his entourage, was one of the few to know the old warrior was hurt. He passed by Picton’s bedroom the following night: ‘I heard him groan from the pain of the wound he had received at Quatre Bras, but did not of course venture to disturb him.’