by Peter Snow
Wellington himself was further east behind the ranks of the main British Guards regiments under Major General Sir Peregrine Maitland. Maitland had commanded the 1st Guards Brigade with Wellington at the Nivelle in 1813 and again at the crossing of the Adour at Bayonne. Now he and his men were right at the focal point of the Imperial Guard’s attack. They were lying down a few yards behind the crest of the ridge. On came the Imperial Guard over the skyline. Even after a day’s fighting many British hearts must have trembled at the formidable sight of the men – with their red epaulettes, white cross-belts over their blue greatcoats and tall hairy bearskin hats – who were advancing steadily towards them.
Wellington himself controlled the timing of Maitland’s order to fire. He waited until they were as little as twenty-five yards away. Then: ‘Now, Maitland,’ he ordered, ‘now’s your time!’ Gronow, who was there, remembers Wellington crying, ‘Guards, get up and charge!’ Up sprang the 1,400 British guardsmen and fired a massive volley at such close range that it stopped the Frenchmen in their tracks. Maitland quickly followed with a bayonet charge. Gronow recalled that the French Guard appeared almost ‘paralysed’ as he and his comrades lunged at them. ‘I witnessed several of the Imperial Guard who were run through the body apparently without any resistance on their parts. I observed a big Welshman of the name of Hughes, who was six feet seven inches in height, run through with his bayonet, and knock down with the butt end of his firelock, I should think, a dozen at least of his opponents.’ The close combat lasted as little as ten minutes before the Guard fell back down the hill.
It wasn’t long before Wellington – seeing the Imperial Guard in retreat and hearing the increasing roar of Prussian gunfire to the east – uttered the famous words, ‘Oh dammit, in for a penny, in for a pound.’ Then, raising himself in his stirrups, he waved his hat above his head and ordered a general pursuit. His soldiers everywhere gave a cheer, but as the Duke rode down past the Rifles John Kincaid heard him say, ‘No cheering, my lads, but forward and complete your victory.’ Kincaid, like most of the veterans, was an ardent admirer of Wellington, and he went on to write, ‘I will ever maintain that Wellington’s last advance would have made it the same victory had a Prussian never been seen there.’
It was remarkable then how quickly Napoleon’s army collapsed. As the remnants of the Imperial Guard, who had attacked the ridge, fell back, the word swept around: ‘La Garde recule [The Guard is retreating].’ The story that its commander, General Cambronne, defied a British offer to surrender his men with the word ‘Merde’ or, more romantically, with the avowal that ‘La Garde meurt mais ne se rend pas’ (‘The Guard dies but does not surrender’) is discredited by the fact that Cambronne himself surrendered to the advancing British troops. Ney, who had five horses killed under him that day, later said, ‘The brave men who have survived this terrible battle will I trust do me the justice to state that they saw me on foot with sword in hand … and that I was one of the last who quitted this scene of carnage.’ The French were soon in headlong flight. Houssaye describes Ney in the midst of the rout as ‘bareheaded, his face blackened with powder, his uniform in tatters, one of his epaulettes cut off, the hilt of his sword in his hand, shouting furiously to Count d’Erlon who was being swept past him in the swirling rout: “D’Erlon, if you and I escape, we should both be hanged.”’ Napoleon himself was reluctant to flee, but his guards hustled him into his carriage and they headed off to the south. Minutes later the Emperor had to take to the saddle to escape when the carriage got caught in the narrow street at Genappe. It was captured full of treasures including a hoard of diamonds and a fine gold travelling case.*
Wellington and Blücher met at La Belle Alliance, a farm on the French side of the battlefield. ‘We were both on horseback,’ Wellington remembered, ‘but he embraced me and kissed me and called me “Mein lieber Kamarad”.’ It was agreed that the Prussians would conduct the immediate pursuit of the French, which finally ended with the surrender of Paris on 4 July.
One of the last shots fired on the battlefield hit Uxbridge’s leg as he sat on his horse beside Wellington. The ball just missed killing Copenhagen. ‘By God, Sir, I’ve lost my leg,’ Uxbridge exclaimed. ‘By God, Sir, so you have,’ replied Wellington, removing the telescope from his eye for a moment. The two men’s language suggests that Uxbridge’s leg was blown right off: in fact it was shattered beyond repair by a piece of canister shot. Wellington ordered his aides to move Uxbridge and Gordon, both critically ill, to his own headquarters in Waterloo village. Then, like other survivors of Waterloo, he had the heartbreaking experience of riding through the dreadful scene of carnage.
In the relatively small space in which the fighting had taken place – not more than two miles wide by a mile deep – tens of thousands lay dead or wounded, writhing, groaning and crying for help, and ten thousand horses lay dead or injured. Wellington was as deeply moved as he had been by the loss of life at Badajoz three years earlier. He was to reflect to a friend later: ‘Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.’ His Anglo-allied army had lost 15,000 dead and wounded, Blücher had lost 7,000 and Napoleon in excess of 25,000. Casualties among officers were strikingly high. They had been out in front taking the lead in every action. The Royal Scots lost thirty-one out of thirty-seven officers, while the 27th Foot lost sixteen out of nineteen.
Tom Morris, another survivor wandering through the human wreckage, did what he could to help the suffering. He was shocked by the number of wounded horses with broken legs ‘looking piteously for relief. I put several of these poor creatures out of their misery by shooting them through the head.’ William Tomkinson saw local peasants begin to plunder the dead, and stopped one man pulling the boots off a guardsman who wasn’t yet dead. He offered his help to one of Wellington’s ADC’s, Colonel Canning, who had only a couple of hours to live, but Canning refused his help, except to ask Tomkinson to take his sword and watch, which would no doubt have been stolen from his body later. And it wasn’t only local peasants who robbed the dead. ‘When the bloody work of the day is over, the survivor’s first wish is to secure, in the shape of plunder, some recompense for the exertions he has made.’ And no plunderer worried ‘whether it is the dead body of a friend or of a foe from which he is seeking his booty’. The whole field was littered with other contents of the pockets of the dead – papers of every description, love-letters, letters from mothers to sons and from children to fathers – which looters scattered in their frantic search for valuables.
Rees Gronow visited some of his comrades in hospital. Captain Robert Adair was in terrible pain. His thigh had been smashed by a cannon ball: ‘The bones were sticking up near the hip in splinters. The surgeon, Mr Gilder, had much difficulty in using the knife, having blunted it and all his other instruments by amputations in the earlier part of the battle. Poor Adair during the operation had sufficient pluck to make one last ghastly joke, saying “Take your time, Mr Carver.” He soon afterwards died from loss of blood.’ Another Guards officer, Captain Percival, ‘received a ball which carried away all his teeth and both his jaws and left nothing of his mouth but the skin of the cheeks. He had to be fed with porridge and a few spoonfuls of broth for the rest of his short life.’
Wellington finally returned to his house in Waterloo. After a pat for Copenhagen that prompted a kick which the Duke only narrowly escaped, he met his cook, James Thornton. They hadn’t seen each other in three days. It was a quarter-past midnight when Wellington walked in and said, ‘Let’s have dinner directly.’ Uxbridge had been carried in earlier. The surgeons told him he risked death if his leg wasn’t amputated. ‘If it is to be taken off, the sooner it is done the better,’ said Uxbridge. His ADC was present at the amputation: ‘He never moved or complained: no one even held his hand. He said once perfectly calmly that he thought the instrument wasn’t very sharp. When it was over his nerves did not appear the least shaken and the surgeons said his pulse was not altered.’
Alexander Gordon,
his leg also removed, was carried back to headquarters just after Wellington had sat down to supper in his upstairs room. The ADC was laid in a bed in the next-door room. ‘I thought, as he had only lost a leg, we should save him,’ Wellington recalled. ‘I went to see him and said I was sorry he was so severely wounded, at the same time taking hold of his hand. “Thank God you are safe” was his reply. I then said “I have no doubt, Gordon, you will do well.” He raised himself and then fell back in the manner that indicated his being completely exhausted. Poor fellow,’ the Duke added, ‘he probably felt there was no chance. He died the next morning at 8.’ The following day Wellington wrote to Gordon’s brother Lord Aberdeen, who had exchanged so many letters with Alexander during the Peninsular War. Wellington told Aberdeen of his ‘extreme grief … The lad served me most zealously and usefully for many years and he had never distinguished himself more than in our late actions.’*
Fitzroy Somerset was luckier than Gordon: his arm was amputated successfully. When he saw it about to be thrown away, he shouted for someone to rescue the ring his wife had given him which was still on one of the fingers. Ned Costello noticed the quantity of amputations taking place after the battle and claimed that the British were braver about their suffering than the French. He said an Englishman had his arm cut off ‘without betraying the slightest emotion’. But when a Frenchman next to him started ‘bellowing lustily’ as a surgeon probed his shoulder, the Englishman laid into the Frenchman with his severed limb telling him to ‘stop your damn bellowing’.
Back on the battlefield, amid the groans of the wounded, lay one of the many heroes of Waterloo. Fred Ponsonby was critically – he thought fatally – wounded. But he was to live to tell an extraordinary story. His groom had failed to find him and returned weeping to his regiment earlier that evening. Ponsonby was still lying where he had been lanced through the lung. He found it very hard to breathe and impossible to move. ‘I thought all was over … Not long afterwards a tirailleur came up to plunder me, threatening my life. I directed him to a small side pocket, in which he found three dollars.’ Not satisfied with that the man tore open his waistcoat, searched him and left him lying in a most uncomfortable position. A more compassionate French officer came by and gave him a swig of brandy from his flask, placing a knapsack under his head. He then disappeared into the battle which was still going on, and Ponsonby wondered if he would ever again see the man ‘to whose generosity I was indebted, as I believe, for my life’. Another French soldier came up, ‘a fine young man, full of ardour’. He knelt down and fired several shots at the British, balancing his gun on Ponsonby’s body, chatting gaily to him and boasting that he killed a man with every shot he fired. At last he ran off with a cheery ‘Bonjour’, saying the French were retreating so he had better go with them. At dusk two squadrons of Prussian cavalry ‘passed me at full trot, lifting me from the ground and tumbling me about most cruelly’. Ponsonby was robbed again and thought the night would never end. At one stage a horribly wounded soldier crawled up and lay across his legs. The man’s groans and the air issuing through a wound in his side ‘distressed me greatly’. Ponsonby explained to one Prussian plunderer in his poor German that he was a British officer, but he was robbed just the same. Finally an English solder came up, and Ponsonby offered him money to guard him for the rest of the night. The man arranged a cart to take him to Wellington’s headquarters, where he found himself in the bed in which Gordon had died. Ponsonby knew he would be very lucky to survive. He was badly wounded in seven places.
One more of Wellington’s close associates was the object of an anxious search over the next few days. Harry Smith’s wife Juana, accustomed like most wives to the wretched business of searching for her husband after a battle, was horrified when some soldiers from the Rifles told her that Brigade Major Smith had been killed. ‘In my agony of woe,’ she recalled later, ‘I approached the awful field of Sunday’s carnage in mad search of Enrique.’ She saw newly dug graves and imagined to herself that he had been buried. ‘How can I describe the horror of my sensations, my growing despair?’ Suddenly she ran into an ADC and asked, ‘O where is he? Where is my Enrique?’ The officer replied that Harry was fine and not even wounded. ‘Oh why tell me this?’ she cried. ‘The solders tell me Brigade Major Smith is killed.’ ‘Dearest Juana, believe me,’ he said. ‘It is poor Charlie Smyth, General Pack’s Brigade Major.’ He swore to her that Harry was alive. ‘Then God has heard my prayer,’ she said and finally caught up with her husband in a nearby town. ‘O gracious God, I sank into his embrace, exhausted (after riding sixty miles since three in the morning) fatigued, happy and grateful – oh how grateful – to God who had protected him.’
20
See the Conquering Hero Comes
Aftermath
WELLINGTON ROSE EARLY on 19 June 1815 to write his celebrated Waterloo Despatch. He made no flowery claim to a glorious victory and was not lavish in his tributes. The letter he wrote to Lord Bathurst, the Secretary for War in London, was the work of a man physically exhausted and emotionally drained. He had had little sleep and was surrounded by dead or dying comrades. He wrote in measured tones about ‘the successful result of this arduous day’ and said it gave him ‘the greatest satisfaction to assure your Lordship that the army, never upon any occasion, conducted itself better … There is no officer nor description of troops that did not behave well.’ There were some notable omissions – such as Colborne’s Light Infantry – in the list of those he mentioned as deserving the ‘approbation’ of the Prince Regent. But he named a large number of units, including the artillery and the cavalry, and thirty-seven senior officers. He made it clear how much he owed to the ‘timely assistance’ of Blücher and his Prussians. It was typical Wellington – down to earth, undramatic, understated. Back in Brussels later that day he spoke to Creevey in the same manner ‘with the greatest gravity … and without the least approach to anything like triumph or joy. “It has been a damned serious business,” he said, “Blucher and I have lost 30,000 men. It has been … the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.”’ And then with sublime self-confidence he paid himself the ultimate compliment: ‘By God I don’t think it would have been won if I had not been there.’ ‘It was the most desperate business I ever was in,’ he wrote to his brother William. ‘I was never so near being beat.’
There was no vanity in this: it was the blunt recognition of the truth. His leadership, his grasp of the topography, his adroit disposition of his Anglo-allied battalions, his minute-by-minute control of the battlefield had been instrumental in the final destruction of Napoleon. His painstaking campaign from Portugal to Toulouse had gravely weakened and humiliated the French Emperor. At Waterloo he delivered the decisive blow that was to establish peace in Europe for the next four decades.
But for all the credit due to Wellington and Blücher for the victory, the actions of Napoleon did much to lead to his own defeat. He showed some of his old flair with his lightning advance into Belgium, his bold plan to split the two allies, his targeting of the Prussians and the blow that sent Blücher reeling back from Ligny. But then suddenly he lost imagination and momentum. He was slow to strike at Wellington after Quatre-Bras, and when he did, at Waterloo, his crude frontal attacks ignored the lessons his marshals had learned about Wellington in the Peninsula. British infantry, well drilled and motivated, could use the ground and their firepower to shatter any attack by massed columns. Besides Napoleon’s choice of two of his less competent marshals, Ney and Grouchy, for key roles, and his own failure to communicate urgently enough with Grouchy, led to disastrous mismanagement of vital stages of the battle.
The 18th of June 1815 was when the myth was born that Britain’s mission was to lead the world. With France out of the way and German unity still a dream, Britain was to emerge as the dominant power over the next few decades. Energised by the industrial revolution, the British economy expanded and the Royal Navy policed a huge and growing empire. The army by contrast enjoyed little innovation in the
years between Waterloo and the Crimean War in the mid-1850s. Although Wellington’s carefully crafted battlefield tactics had made Britain’s ‘thin red line’ a byword, he was no moderniser. He famously argued for the continuation of flogging and the purchasing of commissions. And it was some time before merit decided promotion, as it already did at the time of Waterloo in France and Prussia. The aristocracy – for a long time yet – was to retain command. But although Wellington was no reformer he did himself prompt one important change, a change of style. With the end of the Napoleonic War the flagrant excesses of the eighteenth-century upper classes gradually shifted to the more sober demeanour of the Victorian age. And the man who more than any other embodied this change was Arthur, Duke of Wellington.
The victor of Waterloo became, simply, the greatest living Briton. He was idolised, as was Churchill 130 years later, as the man who had saved Britain from disaster. His qualities of single-minded dedication to duty, which had seen him forgo any home leave during his campaigns, and his unemotional, understated public persona became part of the culture. He was lampooned mercilessly of course for his foibles, such as his eye for the ladies, but admiration for his military achievements lasted his whole long lifetime. He personified the stiff upper lip, the seriousness, the lack of frippery that was to become the hallmark of Victorian Britain. He remained a staunch conservative figure as politics replaced the army as his main preoccupation. He was an undistinguished prime minister for two years from 1828 to 1830 and briefly again in 1834. He was realistic enough to recognise that the country had to accept Catholic Emancipation, which would allow Catholics to stand for parliament and take senior public service jobs including commissions in the army, and he drove the reform through parliament against bitter opposition from King George IV (as the Prince Regent had become in 1820) and many in his own Tory party. But he was viscerally opposed to widening the franchise beyond men of property, and his rejection of electoral reform led to his departure from Downing Street.