by Peter Snow
‘No one who was there could have forgotten the “awful grandeur” of that charge,’ wrote Rees Gronow, who had been transferred from Picton’s staff back to his Guards regiment, themselves now in square. He described it as ‘an overwhelming, long moving line, which, ever advancing, glittered like a stormy wave of the sea when it catches the sunlight … the very earth seemed to vibrate beneath the thundering tramp of the mounted host. One might suppose that nothing could have resisted the shock of this terrible moving mass. In an almost incredibly short period they were within twenty yards of us, shouting “Vive l’Empereur!”’ Tom Morris of the 73rd, thought the approaching cuirassiers – tall, powerfully built men in every saddle – looked so formidable that ‘we could not have the slightest chance with them’.
Moments after his men had dragged their guns into the front line, Mercer spotted the first French horsemen emerging out of the dense smoke straight ahead. His leading gun was unlimbered within seconds and its team loading and firing their first case shot. The effect of it, once the canister left the barrel and disintegrated, was to hurl forward forty-four three-ounce balls in an ever expanding cone. ‘The effect is hardly conceivable, and to paint this scene of slaughter and confusion impossible. Every discharge was followed by the fall of numbers while the survivors struggled with each other, and I actually saw them using the pommels of their swords to fight their way out of the mêlée.’ Soon all Mercer’s six guns were firing, and he continued to make his men disobey Wellington’s orders to take shelter in the squares: they were to stay with their guns even when the French survivors of each charge ran right past them. Better that than risk disrupting the fragile squares. Besides, the Brunswickers’ resolve was stiffening, encouraged by the carnage wreaked by Mercer’s guns.
Mercer had to watch his best spongeman, Private Butterworth, receive a mortal wound when he slipped in the mud as he rammed a shot down the barrel. He lost both arms when the gun went off before he could jump clear. After a time Mercer’s battery and the Brunswickers had the measure of their attackers. Mercer would shout ‘Fire!’ when the leading Frenchman was only fifty yards away. ‘The ground, already encumbered with victims of the first struggle, became now almost impassable. Still however those devoted warriors struggled on, intent only on reaching us. The discharge of every gun was followed by a fall of men and horses like that of the grass before a mower’s scythe.’
Tom Morris was in the front rank of his square as it faced attack after attack by cuirassiers. He was kneeling and one Frenchman, ‘reaching over his horse’s head … made a thrust at me with his sword. I could not avoid it and immediately closed my eyes. When I opened them again, my enemy was lying just in front of me.’ Fortunately for Morris a man in the rank behind him had stopped the Frenchman in his tracks. ‘Whether it was anguish at the wound or the chagrin of being defeated I know not: but he endeavoured to end his existence with his own sword. But that being too long for his purpose he took one of our bayonets which was lying on the ground and raising himself up on one hand placed the point of the bayonet under his cuirass and fell upon it.’ Tom Morris’s square held out, but he watched the cuirassiers break into the next-door square, which was restored only when the Life Guards charged in to the rescue. Morris recalled: ‘Our poor old Captain’ – the one who had been so nervous at Quatre-Bras – ‘was horribly frightened, and several times came to me for a drop of something to keep his spirits up. Towards the end of the day he was cut in two by a cannon shot.’
As his square dwindled in size, Sergeant William Lawrence was ordered to take the regimental colour. Each regiment carried just two colours, a Union flag and a regimental colour. Two yards square, they were a regiment’s most precious possession and, like the French eagle, a prize trophy for an enemy. The colours were very heavy and very visible, and Lawrence thought twice about accepting the honour of carrying them. ‘This was a job I did not at all like … There had been before me that day fourteen Sergeants already killed and wounded in charge of those colours … I had not been there more than a quarter of an hour when a cannon shot came and took the Captain’s head clean off.’
Wellington was everywhere, darting about from unit to unit, apparently impervious to danger, shouting words of encouragement, constantly reassuring his men and watching for critical points of weakness in his line that would need reinforcement. ‘Without his personal exertion, his continued presence wherever and whenever more than usual excitement were recognised, the day had been lost,’ wrote Augustus Frazer.
It wasn’t long before the alternating battering of the French cannonades and the charges of their cavalry caused the squares to present what Gronow called a ‘shocking sight … Inside we were nearly suffocated by the smoke and smell from burnt cartridges.’ He couldn’t move without treading on a dead or wounded comrade. ‘Our square was a perfect hospital, being full of dead and dying and mutilated soldiers.’ Gronow said he actually found the cavalry charges a great relief, because that was when the French guns stopped firing at them. And when the cuirassiers came, they were beaten off. ‘I never shall forget the strange noise our bullets made against the breastplates … I can only compare it with a somewhat homely simile to the noise of a violent hailstorm beating upon panes of glass.’ The ground, recalled Gronow, was ‘strewed with the fallen horses and their riders which impeded the advance of those behind and broke the shock of the charge. It was pitiable to witness the agony of the poor horses …’, and then a little later, ‘the heart sickened at the moaning tones of agony which came from men and horses as they lay in fearful agony.’ At one stage Wellington entered Gronow’s square at one of the corners. ‘As far as I could judge, he was perfectly composed but looked very thoughtful and pale.’ The only other sign of nervousness anyone noticed in the Duke was that he was constantly looking at his watch and fiddling with his telescope.
By late afternoon Wellington had no more reinforcements available to plug any gaps. When Tom Morris’s brigade commander, General Halkett, appealed to the Duke for some respite or relief, saying his men were ‘dreadfully cut up’, Wellington replied, ‘Impossible. I must have British troops in the front line.’ The efforts of Mercer’s gunners had persuaded the wavering Brunswickers to stand fast, but others ran for it. One entire regiment, the Hanoverian troopers of the Cumberland Hussars, never even took their position in the front line: they fled to Brussels and caused panic by shouting that the French had won the battle.*
For two hours, from four o’clock to six, the French cavalry fought on, desperate to break the stubborn resistance of the British infantry. The noise was deafening – the thunder of hooves, the roar of the guns, the yells of the charging horsemen and the screams of the wounded. And the French kept coming back for more. Wellington was to say later that the repeated French cavalry charges were the bravest action he had ever seen. But his squares stood steady. French horses were shying away from impaling themselves on the bristling ranks of bayonets. Those which, with their riders, survived the artillery and musket fire were skirting the squares and galloping round behind them and then back the way they had come. Uxbridge and what was left of his cavalry picked off any who tried to penetrate further. Many British gunners who stayed with their guns, like Mercer’s, or briefly sought safety in the squares as the cavalry thundered past them, returned to their batteries and fired a shot or two after the retreating French horsemen. And Wellington was relieved that the French infantry – still preoccupied with Hougoumont – made no major effort to support Ney’s cavalry against the squares, a tactic which might well have won Napoleon the day. Already some men in the squares were greeting the charging cavalry by shouting, ‘Here come those fools again.’ As the Anglo-allied line held firm, Wellington was overheard saying, ‘The battle is mine; and if the Prussians arrive soon, there will be an end of the war.’
It wasn’t long before Wellington learned that the Prussians had indeed – finally – arrived. Alexander Gordon, his ADC, cross-questioned the man who brought the news: was he sure it was th
e Prussians? He replied that there was no doubt: the Prussians had arrived after a difficult march. The road from Wavre was narrow in places and hopelessly boggy in the Lasne valley. General Bülow, the lead commander, with some 20,000 troops had moved as slowly as one mile an hour at times. But he was now engaging Napoleon’s extreme right and advancing on the village of Plancenoit. Napoleon sent reinforcements to the village and ordered the rumour to be spread to the rest of his army that it wasn’t the Prussians who had arrived but Grouchy. In fact, far from coming to the rescue, Grouchy was still trying to pin down the remaining Prussians near Wavre. Months later in exile in St Helena, Napoleon blamed Grouchy’s ‘imbecility’ and said he believed some of the ‘staff officers whom I had sent to Grouchy betrayed me and went over to the enemy’.
Napoleon was still confident of victory. But he was to miss another major opportunity. All afternoon French infantry, artillery and cavalry kept up the pressure on Wellington’s centre: their prime target was the farmhouse of La Haye-Sainte which stood a few hundred yards forward of Wellington’s front line and was a major obstacle to any assault on the middle of the Anglo-allied position. A battalion of the King’s German Legion, excellent fighters, many of them armed with rifles, defended it against as fierce a set of attacks as any that had hit Hougoumont. They were commanded by a British major, George Baring. Thousands of French attacked. A total of 800 Germans were sent in to defend the farm. The night before, the German garrison had foolishly dismantled one of its large wooden doors and burned it for firewood. Fortunately for the defenders, French corpses soon piled up and helped block the opening as Baring’s fire brought them down. But ammunition stocks were low, and, in spite of frantic appeals from Baring, the supply ran out. It was a blunder for which Wellington personally took the blame. Baring now had no choice but to try and escape. Somehow he and his men extracted themselves from the farm. They squeezed through a passage in the farmhouse and out of the back door. One young ensign, called Franks, couldn’t make it. He hid under a bed and survived – even though the French bayoneted two wounded soldiers left in the bedroom with him. The fall of La Haye-Sainte left Leach’s men of the 95th Rifles, who had returned to their forward position, once again gravely exposed on their hillock. The French ‘kept up a dreadful fire from loopholes and windows in the upper part of it [La Haye-Sainte], whereby they raked the hillock so as to render it untenable by our battalion’. In the earlier firefights, George Simmons, lucky to have survived his severe wound in the Peninsula, was ‘laughing and joking’ with another young officer when he ‘received a ball, which broke two of my ribs near the backbone, went through my liver and lodged in my breast’.
Ney soon had a battery of guns alongside La Haye-Sainte pouring a destructive hail of fire into Wellington’s front line only 200 yards away. In the rush to deploy reinforcements to fill the gap in Wellington’s centre, two of his most trusty ADCs, Fitzroy Somerset and Alexander Gordon, both of whom had been at his side all the way from his early days in Portugal, were seriously wounded, Gordon in the leg, Somerset in the arm. Wellington said later that he and Somerset were riding together near the chaotic fighting around La Haye-Sainte when a stray musket ball shattered his aide’s arm. ‘The finger of providence was upon me and I escaped.’ Of Wellington’s staff there were now few – apart from himself – still unscathed. Frazer, who was with him most of the time, reckoned that at this moment of supreme crisis Wellington was at his best. ‘Cold and indifferent, nay, apparently careless in the beginning of battles, when the moment of difficulty comes intelligence flashes from the eyes of this wonderful man …’ At one time Wellington’s Spanish liaison officer, General Álava, believed the danger to the Duke was such that he suggested they move a few paces back to get out of the line of fire. Wellington agreed but kept his telescope to his eye as usual, and while he was ‘reining back his horse’s head, he never for a moment took his eye off the enemy’s line’.
This serious reverse for Wellington, the loss of La Haye-Sainte, at around 6.15 in the evening, prompted Ney, who had now called off the cavalry charges, to suggest to Napoleon that he could now administer the coup de grâce. Thirteen thousand elite grenadiers and chasseurs of the Imperial Guard, with a record of crushing all before them, were still standing in reserve in the centre of the French line. Commit these troops now, said Ney, and Wellington will be beaten. But Napoleon refused. ‘Troops?’ he shouted at Ney. ‘Where do you expect me to get them? Do you expect me to make them?’ Instead he moved 3,600 of the Imperial Guardsmen to reinforce his right, which was being pushed back by the Prussians. They were men of the Young Guard, junior guardsmen, always the first of the Imperial Guard to go into battle. Ney was furious at the opportunity this delay gave Wellington to reinforce his line. Besides, ‘What was my astonishment (I should rather say indignation) when I learned … that so far from Marshal Grouchy having arrived to our support, as the whole army had been assured, between thirty and forty thousand Prussians were attacking our extreme right and forcing it to retire.’
Wellington knew that the Imperial Guard could yet attack and he knew their reputation. Paid more than twice as much as their equivalents in the line regiments, they had a special status in the French army which Napoleon had done much to restore in the days since his return. The reconstituted Old Guard in particular, veterans of many of the great battles against Austria, Russia and Prussia, were unmistakable with their huge moustaches which Napoleon wouldn’t allow them to wax. Wellington, some of his units down to half strength, put every reliable unit he had in the front line. He knew he faced his deepest crisis of the day, yet by all accounts he remained calm. One top divisional staff officer witnessed him reacting with ‘precision and energy’ to each problem that required decision. He described Wellington at this critical juncture as ‘confident of his own powers of being able to guide the storm which raged around him’.
The whole Anglo-allied line was under severe pressure. Over to the right some of Wellington’s best men – Colborne’s 52nd Light Infantry in particular – were sheltering from direct French artillery fire just behind the ridge. Some of the roundshot aimed at the top of the ridge bounced down the slope beyond. Willam Leeke, the regiment’s most recent Johnny Newcome, remembered one rolling down gently towards him ‘like a cricket ball’. His colour sergeant just managed to prevent him putting out his foot to stop it. Leeke noticed the ‘peculiar smell of gunpowder mixed with the downtrodden wheat’. He spotted a dead kitten lying in front of him, ‘probably frightened out of Hougoumont’, which wasn’t far away. ‘The circumstance led me to think of my friends at home.’ Mercer’s battery too was coming under murderous gunfire. ‘Every shot almost took effect, and I certainly expected we should all be annihilated … One shell I saw explode under the two finest wheel-horses in the troop – down they dropped … The whole livelong day had cost us nothing like this … I sighed for my poor troop.’
At around 7 p.m. some of Colborne’s men saw a French cuirassier colonel approaching, shouting ‘Vive le Roi! Vive le Roi!’ He explained that he had been in some of the futile cavalry charges and had decided to desert. He brought with him the news that Napoleon had finally decided to commit the Imperial Guard. It was Napoleon’s final throw, a last attempt to break the resolve of Wellington’s infantry. It was a brave decision. Napoleon could have retreated with the forces he had left and an intact Imperial Guard, to fight another battle. But he must have concluded that that would only have postponed his eventual defeat by the Austrians and Russians gathering in the east. He had one last window, and one last resource – his undefeated Imperial Guard – to turn Wellington’s line.
The Battle of Waterloo: 7.30–8.00 p.m.
Minutes later the Emperor himself led up to eight Guard battalions, around 5,000 men, forward to the start of the slope up to the British line and handed them over to Ney for the assault. The Young Guard were, temporarily at least, holding the Prussians at Plancenoit. The Middle Guard were the spearhead of this final act in the Battle of Waterloo �
�� with the Old Guard held in reserve behind them. Slowly the Guard began to tramp up the slope. They were used to delivering the decisive stroke that usually secured victory for their Emperor. They were still fired up by the report that Grouchy had arrived. No one had told them it was false. They advanced, not in line, but in open squares, to protect themselves from cavalry attack, or in massed columns such as D’Erlon’s that morning. Once again they would be unable to fire all of their weapons for fear of killing comrades in front of them.
Leeke heard ‘continued shouts of “Vive l’Empereur” … and the drummers beating the pas de charge’, which, he thought, ‘sounded very like this: the rum dum, the rum dum, the rummadum, rummadum, rum, dum’. The Guard tramped up the slope, struggling to keep in step on the uneven ground, battered by Wellington’s guns firing case shot at short range. But still they came on. Wellington’s regiments were waiting in lines in the dead ground on the reverse slope, some lying down, some standing, every weapon ready and pointing straight ahead. As the Guard advanced, Colborne, towards the west end of the British line, saw an opportunity. The Guard’s assault wasn’t heading for his men. It would strike the British line well to his left. So Colborne told his men to move forward into the empty ground ahead of them, and then wheel to their left so that they faced the flank of the advancing Guard battalions. He then ordered them ‘to make that column feel our fire’. The French guardsmen were caught in a murderous crossfire, Colborne’s men firing at their flank and the main British line shooting straight at their front. Colborne’s battalion was unusually strong, a thousand men in lines, nearly all of them able, unlike the French, to fire their weapons at the enemy. Assuming each musket fired a round every thirty seconds, the 52nd discharged around 2,000 balls a minute at the French guardsmen. It was too much even for Napoleon’s Imperial Guard. The westernmost end of their advance was destroyed in an action that, Leeke says, ‘the Duke of Wellington was … much pleased with’.