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

by Bernard Cornwell

  Sire, all the reports and information confirm the fact that the enemy is retiring on Brussels, either to concentrate there or to give battle after joining Wellington … fortunately the weather in the night was so wretched that they cannot have advanced very far … I am going to start immediately for Sart-à-Walhain from where I shall proceed to Corbais and Wavre.

  In other words Grouchy had no real idea where the Prussians were, or what they were doing, and he was moving north under the impression that they were marching from Wavre towards Brussels. He was certainly in no position to stop Blücher marching to Mont St Jean. Napoleon must have known all this. The Prussians were coming to Wellington’s help, they were in sight, and Grouchy was still marching on Wavre. But the Emperor’s reply to Grouchy, dictated to Marshal Soult, was astonishingly complacent:

  Your movement from Corbais to Wavre agrees with His Majesty’s arrangements. Nevertheless the Emperor requests me to tell you that you must keep manoeuvring in our direction and seek to draw near to our army before any corps places itself between us. I do not point out any particular direction to you.

  Once again the meaning is, at best, opaque. The Emperor approves of Grouchy taking his troops north towards Wavre, but at the same time suggests he manoeuvres westwards to prevent Blücher’s men from joining Wellington. But before the despatch was sent Marshal Soult added an urgent and more cogent postscript:

  A letter which has just been intercepted tells us that General Bülow is to attack our right flank. We believe we can see that corps … Therefore do not lose a minute to draw nearer to us and crush Bülow who you will catch in the very act.

  ‘Do not lose a minute to draw nearer to us.’ That is clear enough, an instruction for Grouchy to hurry west towards the Emperor’s battle and attack the Prussians as they close on Napoleon’s right wing, but that despatch did not reach Grouchy until late in the afternoon, by which time he was fighting the rearguard that Blücher had left in Wavre. Grouchy’s 33,000 men and 96 guns were winning a victory, but it meant nothing because the real battle, the deciding battle, was happening to their west.

  Grouchy will be no help to Napoleon. It is unclear when the Emperor realized that those 33,000 men were not coming to support him, but it should have been obvious from around 1 p.m. The Prussians are in sight and Grouchy is not. Napoleon now faces a dilemma. He has Wellington’s army in front of him, but he must have known that a heavy force of Prussians was approaching to his right. He will be greatly outnumbered, yet he still insisted that he had a good chance of winning the battle. ‘This morning we had ninety chances of winning,’ the Emperor told Soult, ‘we still have sixty.’ A more prudent general might have thought of disengaging and retreating southwards, then looking for another chance to divide the allies, but Napoleon believed he had victory in his grasp. All he needed to do was shatter Wellington’s line, put the British–Dutch to panicked flight, then turn to face the new enemy. Blücher’s men were still far away, the vanguard about 6 miles distant, but the rest had to be in columns of march strung along narrow country lanes. It would take a long time for those columns to reach Mont St Jean and even more time for the arriving troops to arrange themselves for a fight. The Emperor believed he had enough time, but nevertheless he sent 3,500 cavalry, 7,000 infantry and 28 guns to make a new line facing east that could defend his right flank against any Prussian assault. The battle has scarcely begun and Napoleon’s plan is to attack the British head-on, yet already 9,000 men are tangled in the fight at Hougoumont, and now more men are being sent to the opposite flank. The Emperor had hoped to force Wellington to send reinforcements to Hougoumont, thus weakening the centre of his line, but instead it is the French who are using up their reserves to reinforce their flanks.

  Yet even so, in the early afternoon, Napoleon still reckons he can destroy Wellington’s army before the Prussians get involved, and the immediate instruments of that destruction are the four attack columns of d’Erlon’s Corps.

  The cannons of the Grand Battery ceased firing because 18,000 infantrymen were marching through the gun line. The cannon would not start firing again until those infantry had descended into the valley and it was safe to fire over their heads, but that would take some time, because the battalions had filed through the guns and now they had to form their attack columns. Sergeants shouted, officers checked the dressing of the ranks, and the British–Dutch roundshot ripped through files and the shells cracked apart in gouts of flame and vicious scraps of casing.

  Then they were ready. The drums began again, beating the pas de charge, the Eagles flew bright above the tricolour flags, the guns of the Grand Battery readied to open fire again, and the four mighty columns marched to the attack.

  ‘View from Mont St Jean of the Battle of Waterloo, 1816’. The sound of Napoleon’s guns pounded the air above the fields of Mont St Jean.

  An 1817 aquatint, ‘Delineated under the inspection of Officers who were present at that memorable Conflict’, showing the intensity of the battlefield.

  ‘Portrait of Count Jean-Baptiste Drouet d’Erlon, Marshal of France’, by Ary Scheffer: d’Erlon’s superior numbers and crack troops came within a whisker of breaking Wellington’s army.

  Portrait of Jérôme Bonaparte, by François Joseph Kinson. Jérôme wanted to show that he was not base, cowardly and spoiled by stupidity and, ordered to attack Hougoumont, he was determined to capture it.

  ‘The Battle of Waterloo’, by Denis Dighton. French hussars and Polish lancers fighting British infantry.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Those terrible grey horses, how they fight!

  GENERAL JEAN-BAPTISTE DROUET, COUNT d’Erlon, had something to prove. His escapades on 16 June, when he had marched his 1st Corps from one battlefield to the other and had engaged the enemy on neither, had infuriated Napoleon. But all that would be forgiven and forgotten if he broke through Wellington’s line. And by chance his great attack would be launched against the weaker half of the Duke’s position.

  Wellington’s concern for his right flank had persuaded him to make that wing almost twice as strong as the eastern side, and so his strongest forces and most of his guns were all west of the great highway to Brussels, and d’Erlon’s Corps was now attacking the eastern side. There were 18,000 infantrymen marching in the four columns, and again it is worth remembering that ‘column’ is a misleading word. It suggests an elongated formation with the narrow end aimed like a spear at the enemy’s line, while in truth it was much more like a brick advancing sideways, and d’Erlon’s assault was made by four such bricks, each one a division of French infantry. They did not advance together, but in echelon, with General Quiot’s 1st Division leading the way on the left. Quiot’s men were marching close to the highway, indeed some of them straddled the road, and those men would attack the King’s German Legion garrison in La Haie Sainte as well as the ridge beyond. They were protected by 800 cuirassiers, heavy cavalry, who rode on their left flank. Quiot’s Division would strike Wellington’s line first, quickly followed by the 2nd, 3rd and 4th Divisions one after the other. The 2nd was just to Quiot’s right, and so on to the 4th Division, which would assault the eastern end of the ridge with some men attacking the strong farmstead of Papelotte. Thus the assault covered the whole of Wellington’s eastern line from La Haie Sainte to Papelotte. More cavalry rode on the outer flank of the 4th Division.

  In all there were thirty-three French battalions marching across the valley, and waiting for them were seventeen allied battalions: five from the Dutch army, four Hanoverian and, crucially, eight experienced British battalions. The statistic is misleading because French battalions were usually smaller than British, around 550 men as against 650, but the French do have an advantage in total numbers. Four of the attacking battalions were drawn into separate fights on the flanks, either to assault La Haie Sainte or Papelotte, but the vast majority of d’Erlon’s Corps were aiming for the bare hilltop that stretched for three-quarters of a mile between those two makeshift fortresses.

 
It looked like a bare hilltop. True, there were those allied guns on the forward slope, but beyond those cannon all that the attacking infantry could see were the hedges lining the road which ran along the ridge’s summit. The hedges were no great obstacle. Captain von Rettburg, of the King’s German Legion artillery, recorded that sections of the hedges had been cut down to allow guns and troops to pass through. Between the hedges was the shallow sunken road, then the gentle reverse slope where most of the defenders waited, either lying flat or sitting to avoid the roundshot skimming the ridge’s crest.

  Typically a French battalion in column would be two companies wide and nine ranks deep, which meant there were about sixty men in each rank, but for this assault d’Erlon ordered his four divisions to form their columns in an unusual configuration. Each battalion would be in line, a normal three-deep French line, and then the battalions would be stacked one behind the other to form a gigantic rectangle. Thus General Marcognet’s Third Division had eight battalions in line, making 24 ranks, three for each battalion. The Division went into battle about 4,000 strong, so each of the 24 ranks had approximately 160 soldiers. In truth the ranks were slightly shorter because the eight battalions sent their skirmishers forward to scour ahead of the column, but those light troops would rejoin their battalions when the clash came at the ridge’s crest. Twenty-four ranks containing between 150 and 160 men each form a massive column, and such a formation was unusual, though not unknown. Why did d’Erlon choose it? Like many other French officers at Waterloo, he had faced British infantry in the Peninsula, and he knew that the two-deep British line gave the redcoats a wide frontage and allowed every musket to be used against the head of the column, which could only offer a sparse reply because most of the men were deep inside the formation and unable to fire.

  So how could a column defeat such a line? One answer was to hope that the line had been weakened by artillery and by skirmishers, but the reverse slope had taken away much of the artillery’s effectiveness and the French skirmishers had to deal with the British–Dutch skirmishers, so d’Erlon must have known his men would have to face those lethal British lines. The answer to the problem was to combine line and column. The column’s leading battalion was already in line, a French line three ranks deep, and every man in that line could use his musket, while the following battalions could be marched sideways, like sliding doors, to extend the line to left and right. French doctrine insisted that a column should always deploy into line at the moment of attack, but that deployment was often a moment of weakness, especially when faced by disciplined troops in a wider line who could fire inwards from their flanks, and this unusual formation seemed to promise a solution. The leading battalion, after all, did not need to deploy, but could use its volley fire to shelter the succeeding battalions as they spread wider.

  But before that theory could be put to the test they had to reach the crest of the British ridge, and to do that they needed to cross the wide valley under fire from the allied artillery. The British and Dutch guns on the forward slope were being offered an unmissable target, and their solid roundshot slashed through French ranks, shrapnel exploded overhead and, as the French struggled further forward, they were hit by canister.

  Canister was the most effective anti-personnel weapon available to Napoleonic armies. It was simple and nasty, merely a tin can filled with musket balls. There were two types, heavy and light, the difference being in the weight of the balls inside the can. When a round of canister was fired the can split apart at the gun’s muzzle and the musket balls spread out, turning the cannon into a giant shotgun. Gunners frequently double-shotted their weapons, firing canister and a roundshot together. Canister was a short-range weapon, useless above 600 yards, while the British generally reserved its use until the range had shortened to about 350 yards, at which distance the cone of spreading balls would be just over 100 feet wide. Some, of course, were wasted in the air or on the ground, but at short range, against massed formations, canister was a fearsome weapon. D’Erlon’s Corps was fortunate that there were only thirty-six allied cannon facing them and some of those had already been disabled, but those that remained did immense damage to the French. Captain von Rettburg, the King’s German Legion gunner officer, watched as his 9-pounders tore huge holes in the nearest French column. That column was to his right, so he could fire across the huge formation and he saw how the French lost cohesion as their ranks were mowed down by roundshot and canister. The death those guns delivered was savagely effective, but they were too few to check the advance of the great columns. A rough estimate would suggest that the allied guns were able to deliver about 600 rounds, either roundshot, shell, spherical case or canister, at the advancing French.

  Captain Pierre-Charles Duthilt was an officer in the 45th Regiment which had the dubious honour of being the leading battalion in General Marcognet’s column, the third to march forward. ‘Our turn came,’ he wrote:

  and the order to attack was greeted with a fervent shout of Vive l’Empereur! The four columns moved down the slope … with ported arms. We were to climb the opposite slope where the English held the ridge and from where their batteries blasted us. The distance was not great and an average person on foot might have taken no more than five or six minutes to cover the ground, but the soft, rain-soaked earth and the tall rye slowed our progress considerably. As a result the English gunners had plenty of time to destroy us.

  Louis Canler, the young conscript whose breakfast had been flavoured with gunpowder, was in the 28th Regiment of the Line in the 1st Division, the one closest to the highway. He saw d’Erlon position himself at the centre of the columns and heard the General shout, ‘Today you must conquer or die!’

  The shout of Vive l’Empereur came from every mouth in reply to this brief speech and with the drummers beating the charge the columns moved off … At that moment the enemy batteries which had only sent cannon-balls and shells decimated our columns with canister. We had scarcely gone one hundred paces when the commander of our second battalion, Marins, was mortally wounded. The Captain of my company, Duzer, was struck by two balls. Adjutant Hubaut and Eagle-bearer Crosse were killed … at the second discharge of the English guns the grenadiers’ drummer, Lecointre, lost his right arm.

  Lecointre kept beating his drum with his left hand until he collapsed from loss of blood, though he survived the battle. Like all the French drummers he was beating the pas de charge, the rhythm that always accompanied French attacks. A young British officer remembered the rhythm as ‘the rum dum, the rum dum, the rummadum dummadum, dum, dum’, followed by a pause in which the massed troops would shout ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ Captain Johnny Kincaid, waiting with his riflemen in the sandpit which lay close to La Haie Sainte, remembered the rattle of those ominous drums, backed by the blare of trumpets and punctuated by shouts of ‘Vive l’Empereur’, and over it all was the deafening pounding of the big guns. This was the cacophony of battle. It was as if, Kincaid reckoned, the French had hopes ‘of scaring us off the ground’ by noise alone.

  The French officers, Canler remembered, were forever shouting ‘Close ranks!’

  The third discharge reduced the frontage of our battalion to that of a company. The dreadful command of ‘Close ranks!’ was heard again. This command, far from bringing dread or despair to our hearts, encouraged a totally opposite effect. It boosted our courage and inspired not only the idea of victory but of avenging our unfortunate comrades who were dying in front of us.

  Canler reckoned it took the column twenty minutes to cross the wet, rye-thick ground, a walk that Captain Duthilt supposed should only take five or six minutes, yet slow as the advance was, Duthilt still felt that the French were hurrying too much, risking indiscipline, because of the fervour they felt:

  The haste and enthusiasm were becoming dangerous because the soldiers still had a long march before meeting the enemy and were soon tired out by the difficulty of moving on the heavy, churned soil which tore off gaiter straps and even took off shoes. There was soon
disorder in the ranks, especially as the head of the column came within range of the enemy fire.

  It took fifteen or twenty minutes to cross the valley, and for all that time the columns were being raked by roundshot, by shell and by canister, but still they marched, uphill now, though the slope was gentle. A battle was already being fought ahead of the columns where the skirmishers of both sides were shooting at each other, but as the huge columns closed on the ridge’s crest the French skirmishers fell back to join their parent battalions. They had driven back the allied skirmishers, but did not cross the crest to fire on the troops beyond. That would be the job of the great columns.

  The allied gunners deliver a last blast of canister to rip bloody holes in the approaching ranks, then the gunners abandoned their cannon and ran back to shelter with the infantry beyond the crest. One British gunner sergeant panicked and spiked his gun by hammering an iron nail into the touch-hole for fear that the enemy would capture and use the weapon. The allied guns are quiet now, and then the French cannon cease fire for fear of hitting their own infantry, who are now almost at the ridge’s top. On the left French troops have succeeded in driving the King’s German Legion riflemen out of La Haie Sainte’s orchard and into the farm buildings, where a small battle like that fought at Hougoumont flares up. La Haie Sainte is surrounded by a high stone wall, but it has few loopholes. Nevertheless the German garrison holds a much larger number of enemy at bay. Slender Billy, the Prince of Orange, sees the farm threatened and sends a Hanoverian battalion to help and, just as at Quatre-Bras, he insists the battalion forms line. The battalion advances on the right of the main road, the opposite side from where the columns are nearing the hilltop, but that flank of the French is covered by 800 cuirassiers. The Hanoverians see the cavalry too late and are destroyed, their colour lost.