Waterloo: The True Story of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles

by Bernard Cornwell

  He claimed to have slept ‘like a top’, but if so he was one of the few. Another cavalry surgeon, John Gordon Smith, remembered how his dragoons needed food, drink and fire:

  Of the first our men had received a supply; the horses had also been, at least partially, cared for, but water! There was a draw-well close to the village, or hamlet of St Jean, and that was the only resource to which thousands of thirsty ones had access. The first attack upon it was the last; for snap went the rope, and down fell the bucket, to a depth from which it could not be recovered. Disappointed in the article of water, our attention was drawn to that of fire, in procuring of which we were eminently successful. The adjoining village furnished fuel in abundance. Doors, and window-shutters, furniture of every description, carts, ploughs, harrows, wheelbarrows, clock-cases, casks, tables etc etc were carried or trundled to the bivouac, and being broken up, made powerful fires, in spite of the rain. Chairs were otherwise disposed of. Officers were paying two francs each for them, and the men seemed, at first, to be able to keep up the supply. This, at last, failed, and for one, I was fain to buy a bundle of straw. In front of the field which the horses occupied, ran a miry cart-road (upon which the officers’ fires were kindled) and by the side of this road was a drain, or shallow ditch. Here a party of us deposited our straw, and resolved to establish ourselves for the night, under cover of our cloaks; but such was the clayey nature of the bottom, that the rain did not sink into the earth, but rose like a leak in a ship, among the straw, and we were, in consequence, more drenched from below than from above.

  The chairs, of course, were to keep officers’ backsides out of the mud. The Duke of Wellington was fiercely opposed to the pillaging of civilians and he punished men severely for such thefts. His motive, beyond the preservation of discipline, was to prevent making unnecessary enemies. In Spain the French armies had incurred the hatred of almost all Spaniards by their rapacious behaviour, and the result had been the guerrilla war which had done as much as the formal fighting to defeat Napoleon’s armies. When Wellington had invaded southern France in 1814 he had exercised savage control to keep his men from robbing the civil population, yet here, on the eve of battle, the soldiers were given leave to plunder. It was General Sir Frederick Adam, not Wellington, who permitted the behaviour. Second Lieutenant Richard Cocks Eyre, whose Rifle battalion had been at ‘play’ with French lancers near Mons two days before, says that on the evening of 17 June his men were ‘like so many half drowned and half starved rats’. Then they received:

  leave from General Adam who commanded our Brigade to plunder three farm houses … The idea of a fire was a most consoling one! Chairs, tables, sofas, cradles, churns, barrels and all manner of combustibles were soon cracking in the flames, our fellows then proceeded to the slaughter of all the living stock the yard contained, and in less than an hour we had as delicious a breakfast of beef, pork, veal, duck, chicken, potatoes and other delicacies as I ever made an attack on.

  Second Lieutenant Eyre was lucky, some men did not even have the comfort of a fire, let alone a feast. Private Matthew Clay, a Guardsman, spent the night on the edge of a ditch, partially sheltered by a thick hedge. Other men slept in the open, using their knapsacks as pillows. There was little sleep for any. Thunder rolled across the dark that was occasionally split by lightning, and horses, picketed in the wet soil, broke loose and galloped in panic through the bivouacking troops. One of the horses that bolted belonged to Captain Johnny Kincaid, of the 95th Rifles. He had tied the horse’s reins to one of his men’s sword-bayonets (riflemen carried a bayonet with a sword handle and a 23-inch blade), rammed the blade into the earth and gone to sleep. He woke to find the beast gone and despaired of finding him, but after an hour the horse was discovered grazing between two artillery horses, the bayonet still tied to the reins. And all that night the rain went on falling, pelting down, soaking the ground, beating down the crops and flooding the ditches. Captain Mercer huddled with other officers:

  I know not how my bedfellows got on, as we all lay for a long while perfectly still and silent, the old Peninsular hands disdaining to complain before their Johnny Newcome comrades, and these fearing to do so lest they should provoke remarks as ‘Lord have mercy on your poor tender carcass! What would such as you have done in the Pyrenees?’ or ‘Oho, my boy! This is but child’s play to what we saw in Spain!’ So all who did not sleep (I believe the majority) pretended to do so, and bore their suffering with admirable heroism.

  It was worse for the French. At least Wellington’s men had reached Mont St Jean in daylight and had time to plunder and break up furniture to feed their fires, but Napoleon’s troops kept arriving through the first half of the night and the British, almost a mile away, heard the sound of wagon, gun and limber wheels rumbling on the Brussels highway. The gathering darkness meant the French had small opportunity to scavenge for fuel or food. Some of their cavalrymen slept on their horses’ backs, or tried to sleep, and must have envied the British–Dutch fires glowing through the incessant rain.

  One hundred and fifty thousand men had come to the valley and 150,000 men tried to sleep through that rain-swept darkness, knowing that in the morning there would be a battle. It is impossible to give the exact numbers, except for the artillery, but Napoleon’s army had about 77,500 men with 246 guns. Wellington waited for him with around 73,200 men and 157 cannon. Blücher, with another 100,000 men and 240 guns, was 12 miles to the east. For the moment Blücher can play no part in the battle, but he has promised to send half his men and 134 guns to Mont St Jean. Napoleon, then, must defeat Wellington before those Prussian troops can arrive.

  Napoleon’s troops outnumbered Wellington’s, though not by a great deal. The Emperor’s real advantage was that his troops were, on the whole, better. Wellington had complete faith in his British and King’s German Legion units, but the rest, about half of his army, was of dubious quality and of uncertain loyalty. Napoleon’s second advantage was in the number and efficiency of his artillery. Napoleon was an artilleryman by training. The guns were his ‘beautiful daughters’, but the effectiveness of those daughters was going to be hampered by mud.

  Just as the mud at Agincourt had slowed and wearied the French men-at-arms, so the mud of Waterloo would help Wellington’s men. Napoleon liked to use his guns to batter an enemy, to weaken him at long range, just as he had torn apart the exposed Prussian infantry at Ligny. A battalion in line, square or column was an easy enough target, but at long range the gunners liked to ‘graze’ their roundshot. Grazing was a little like skipping a stone across a pond, except that the heavy roundshot would be aimed short of the target and would bounce once, twice or many times before striking home. It was, perhaps surprisingly, a more accurate method than shooting directly. If a gunner aimed to hit his target directly, without grazing the roundshot, then any small variation in the powder charge or in the missile itself could affect the flight, and a shot which went high would do no damage. A grazed shot kept low and hit home almost every time, but the mud slowed such grazing shots, even stopped them. The mud affected the shells too. Roundshot was solid, a shell was a hollow iron sphere packed with powder, and the ground at Waterloo was so soft that many of the shells buried themselves before exploding, or else the burning fuse was extinguished by the damp earth. Howitzers were cannon that fired in a high arc, enabling gunners to drop shells over intervening obstacles, or onto the hidden reverse slopes where Wellington liked to shelter his troops, and the howitzer shells were particularly prone to being engulfed by mud on landing.

  Napoleon had around 53,000 infantry, almost the same number as Wellington, though again Wellington’s troops were of varying quality. Artillery might hammer an enemy, and cavalry could destroy vulnerable units, but infantry were the battle-winners. It was the infantry that had to make the attacks which captured the enemy’s ground and hold it. Cavalry might pierce deep into the enemy’s territory, but as Kellerman had discovered at Quatre-Bras, once there they were horribly vulnerable to musket and cannon f
ire. To overwhelm infantry a general needed his own infantry, and here Napoleon really had no advantage. To break Wellington the Emperor’s infantry had to advance across half a mile of open ground, all the while under the flail of the British–Dutch cannons, while their opponents could lie low till the last moment, and that last moment would be an infantry versus infantry firefight, fought at very close range. We have already seen how it was impossible to move men in line across open country. The French would have to advance in column, and they would be met by lines. The French, of course, would deploy into line when they reached the enemy, but they needed to cross the valley in column and a column was a fat target for an artilleryman.

  As dawn came on that wet Sunday, the French could see an enemy waiting on the far ridge even though many of the British–Dutch troops were hidden on the reverse slope. Nevertheless, the shape of the battlefield was clear, and it was small. Waterloo is one of the most cramped battles ever fought; three armies struggling in three square miles.

  The French centre was at the tavern called La Belle Alliance which stood where the highway crossed the southern ridge. A man standing by the tavern and looking north along the road would see the valley spread left and right in front of him. The ridges were not parallel, both were curved, with the northern ridge forming a semicircle facing south and the southern almost a mirror image, so that the wide valley formed a natural arena in the shape of a human eye. The eastern limit of that arena was marked by a scatter of stone buildings, some woods and, beyond those, broken countryside. Those small hills, cut with streams and by the headwaters of the River Lasne, were easily defended and difficult to attack, so the eastern edge of the battlefield was defined by that rougher country. There was a scatter of hamlets and big farmsteads on the margin of that rougher land: Papelotte, La Haie (not to be confused with La Haie Sainte), Smohain, Frichermont, all of them capable of being stout stone fortresses, so that flank, the British–Dutch left flank, was no place to try and manoeuvre around Wellington’s forces. Behind the French lines, still on their right, was a large village called Plancenoit. Most Frenchmen probably gave Plancenoit very little thought. It was behind them, so unlikely to be a part of any battle against Wellington’s men, but by day’s end it would be a place of butchery.

  Napoleon spent most of the day close to La Belle Alliance. Wellington was far more active than the Emperor, but when he had no business elsewhere he tended to stay near an elm tree which stood by the crossroads at the centre of the northern ridge. The distance from La Belle Alliance to that elm was three-quarters of a mile (1,400 metres), and from the crossroads east to Papelotte was again three-quarters of a mile. A minor road ran along the northern ridge’s crest. The French could see the road’s hedges, and between the French and that road was the wide valley with its tall crops of rye, barley and wheat. To an observer at La Belle Alliance that stretch of open country between the elm tree and Papelotte would appear as a long, gentle slope leading to the low crest of the ridge where Wellington’s forces waited. An attack across that open ground was very possible.

  A direct attack straight up the highway towards the elm tree was far more difficult, because halfway down the far ridge’s gentle slope was the stoutly built stone farm of La Haie Sainte, and the French could plainly see that the enemy had put a garrison into that farm. Any attack on Wellington’s centre would have to deal with the fortress of La Haie Sainte and with the green-jacketed riflemen who were in a large sandpit across the road from the farmhouse. The farm and the sandpit lay some 200 metres, a little more than 200 yards, in front of the ridge’s crest.

  To the left of La Haie Sainte was another stretch of open country, this one about two-thirds of a mile wide and another place where an attack would find few obstacles, though it would have to be funnelled between the garrison in La Haie Sainte and the defenders of the great complex of Château Hougoumont.

  Hougoumont was a rich farmhouse built forward of Wellington’s ridge. It was much larger than La Haie Sainte. There was a substantial house (the château), barns, a chapel, stables and other outbuildings, all surrounded by a high masonry wall. There was a walled garden and a hedged orchard. This was another formidable fortress, and here the two ridges came closest together, though the slopes between them were at their steepest. Hougoumont would be a tough nut to crack, but there was enough space between Hougoumont and La Haie Sainte for a major infantry assault.

  Beyond Hougoumont, to the west, the country was more open. Napoleon would find it difficult to turn the British–Dutch left flank, the broken country beyond Papelotte was too easily defended, but Wellington’s right flank, beyond Hougoumont, might have tempted him. If he sent an attack past Hougoumont, to the west, he could force Wellington to abandon his ridge and turn his army to face the new threat. Wellington feared such a manoeuvre and had placed most of his reserve troops in the village of Braine l’Alleud, which lay behind his right flank. Those troops could confront a flanking attack, but if all went wrong and Wellington was forced to retreat, he had another 17,000 men in the village of Hal, ten miles west of Waterloo, stationed there to provide a rearguard if his army was forced to retreat towards the sea. In the event those 17,000 troops would play no part in the day’s fighting.

  Napoleon had also detached part of his army, Grouchy’s 33,000 men and 96 guns, to pursue the Prussians. Their job was to find the Prussians, engage them and so stop Blücher’s men coming to Wellington’s aid.

  So, by dawn on Sunday, 18 June, the three armies are expecting battle. The rain stops at last, though there will be passing showers for much of the day and, though it is summer, it is still bitingly cold. Johnny Kincaid’s riflemen, shivering beside the highway a little north of the elm tree, boil a big cauldron of water and throw in tea, sugar and milk; ‘all the bigwigs of the army had occasion to pass,’ he said, and ‘I believe every one of them, from the Duke downwards, claimed a cupful.’

  The French were no better off. Louis Canler, an eighteen-year-old infantryman, spent a bone-chilling night in the rain, but at least there was breakfast in the dawn. His company butchered a sheep and boiled it with some flour to thicken the broth, but they lacked salt for seasoning, so one of the men threw in a handful of gunpowder instead. The mutton, Canler recalled, ‘tasted foul’.

  Private Matthew Clay, the guardsman who had spent a miserable night beside a ditch in the orchard of Hougoumont, had much the same experience. At dawn, he said:

  we procured some fuel from the farm of Hougoumont and then lighted fires and warmed ourselves. Our limbs were very much cramped sitting on the side of the wet ditch the entire night. The Sergeant of each section gave a small piece of bread, which was about an ounce, to each man, and enquiry was made along the ranks for a butcher.

  A pig was slaughtered and the carcass cut up. Clay received a portion of the pig’s head, but though he scorched the meat, he found it inedible. Then he readied his musket. It was loaded, because Hougoumont’s garrison had feared a night attack which never came, so he fired the weapon into a muddy bank. All along both ridges men were clearing their muskets. The powder could have become damp and none wanted a useless musket when the enemy came, so they fired their weapons to get rid of the overnight charge. Clay checked his ammunition, tightened his musket’s doghead, the screw-driven vice which held the flint in place, then oiled the powerful spring and trigger. The damp had swollen the wood of some muskets, hampering the springs.

  Clay, like every other redcoat, carried a Brown Bess musket, though in truth there was no such weapon. There were Land Pattern muskets, India Pattern muskets and New Land Pattern muskets, all carrying the nickname of Brown Bess. The basic musket was developed during the early years of the eighteenth century, a hundred years before Waterloo, and a soldier of Marlborough’s army would have had no trouble using a New Land Pattern musket made in the early nineteenth century. The muskets were heavy, weighing a little over 10 lbs, and cumbersome, with a barrel length of either 39 inches or 42 inches, firing a ball three-quarters of an inch in d
iameter. It was possible to fire five shots in a minute, but that was exceptional, and the normal rate of fire was between two and three shots a minute, and even that was optimistic. As a battle progressed the touch-holes became fouled with burned powder and the barrels caked with powder residue, and the flints chipped and needed replacing. Nevertheless a British battalion of 500 men could expect to fire between 1,000 and 1,500 shots a minute. If fired at too great a range, say anything over 100 yards, most of those shots would miss because the smoothbore musket was notoriously inaccurate. Much of the inaccuracy was caused by ‘windage’, which is the difference between the barrel’s interior width and the musket ball’s width. This was usually about a twentieth of an inch, which made the ball easier (and thus quicker) to load, but the ball literally bounced as it sped down the barrel and the last bounce would dictate the direction of the flight. There were various tests made of a musket’s accuracy, and a typical one was conducted by the Prussians, who discovered that a battalion firing at a target 100 feet wide and 6 feet high scored 60 per cent hits at 75 yards, 40 per cent at 150 yards and 25 per cent at 225 yards. Colonel George Hanger, who was an expert marksman, wrote in his book To All Sportsmen, published in 1814:

  A soldier’s musket, if not exceedingly ill-bored (as many are), will strike the figure of a man at 80 yards; it may even at a hundred; but a soldier must be very unfortunate indeed who shall be wounded by a common musket at 150 yards, provided his antagonist aims at him; and as to firing at a man at 200 yards with a common musket, you may as well fire at the moon.

  Estimates were made during the Napoleonic Wars of the musket’s efficiency. At the battle of Talavera it was reckoned that in half an hour 1,300 French were either killed or wounded, but it had taken 30,000 musket balls to achieve that! 3,675,000 rounds were fired by Wellington’s army at Vitoria and caused 8,000 casualties, which is one hit in every 459! At close range the results were much better, and the British especially were trained to wait until the enemy was very close before opening fire.