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

by Bernard Cornwell

  A real carnage followed. Everyone was separated from his comrades and fought for his own life. Sabres and bayonets slashed at the shaking flesh for we were too close packed to use our firearms.

  Canler was at the back of the column, but the horsemen hacked their way through and split the battalions apart. Canler suddenly found himself alone and did the sensible thing, he surrendered. Infantry had come with the horsemen and they took his weapons and his knapsack, which held all his belongings. The French knapsacks were much prized as plunder; they were better made and more comfortable than the British issue.

  Off to the east, where Corporal Dickson is riding Rattler into the enemy, Captain Duthilt is trying to rally his men who, he thought, had become disorganized because of their enthusiasm.

  Just as I was pushing one of my soldiers into the rank I saw him fall at my feet because of a sabre cut. I whirled round. English cavalry was forcing their way into our midst and cutting us to pieces. Just as it is difficult, if not impossible, for the best cavalry to break infantry who are formed in squares … so it is true that once the ranks have been broken and pierced then resistance is useless and nothing remains but for the cavalry to slaughter at almost no risk to themselves. This is what had happened. Our poor men stood up and stretched out their arms, but they could not reach far enough to bayonet those cavalrymen mounted on powerful horses and the few shots fired in this chaotic mêlée were just as fatal to our own men as to the English. And thus we found ourselves defenceless against a merciless enemy who, in the intoxication of battle, sabred even our drummers and fifers. That is where our eagle was captured.

  Duthilt’s 45th Regiment of the Line is being destroyed by the Royal Scots Greys, one of whom is Sergeant Charles Ewart, a particularly powerful man. He graphically described his capture of the Eagle. It must have occurred fairly late in the fight between the 45th and the Scots Greys, because he mentions the presence of a lancer, so it is probable that Ewart spurred down the slope and caught the colour party of the French regiment as it tried to escape back across the valley, by which time French cavalry had ridden to attempt a rescue.

  It was in the first charge I took the Eagle from the enemy; he and I had a hard contest for it; he thrust for my groin, I parried it off, and I cut him through the head; after which I was attacked by one of their Lancers who threw his lance at me, but missed the mark by my throwing it off with my sword by my right side; then I cut him from the chin upwards, which cut went through his teeth. Next I was attacked by a foot soldier, who, after firing at me, charged me with his bayonet; but he very soon lost the combat, for I parried it, and cut him down through the head; so that finished the contest for the Eagle. After which I presumed to follow my comrades, Eagle and all, but was stopped by the General saying to me, ‘You brave fellow, take that to the rear; you have done enough till you get quit of it,’ which I was obliged to do … I took the Eagle into Brussels, amidst the acclamation of thousands of the spectators who saw it.

  Ewart was rewarded with a commission, and to this day there is a pub named for him on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. Napoleon, watching from the far ridge, is supposed to have said, ‘Those terrible grey horses, how they fight!’

  The Royals also captured an Eagle, this one from the 105th Regiment, which was ahead of Louis Canler’s battalion. Captain Kennedy Clark described the incident. His squadron, he said:

  had advanced 200 or 300 yards beyond the second hedge, and the first line of French infantry had been broke, I perceived, a little to my left, an enemy’s ‘Eagle’ amongst the infantry, with which the bearer was making every exertion to get off towards the rear of the column. I immediately rode to the place calling out to ‘Secure the colour!’ and at the same time, my horse reaching it, I ran my sword into the officer’s right side, who carried the ‘Eagle’, who staggered and fell forwards but I do not think he reached the ground, on account of the pressure of his companions.

  A Corporal, Francis Stiles, who was following Kennedy Clark, managed to grasp the Eagle’s flag and ride away with it.

  Not all the cavalrymen did as well as Ewart or Stiles. Private Hasker was a stocking weaver who had joined the cavalry. He was a Methodist and, charging at the cuirassiers, he crossed swords with an enemy, but neither he nor the Frenchman wanted to fight to the death so they rode away from each other. The Frenchman had rather impressed Hasker by yelling his war cry, presumably ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ and Hasker thought he should have a war cry too, but all he could think of on the spur of the moment was ‘The sword of the Lord and Gideon!’ So he shouted that aloud, and just then his horse stumbled and fell:

  Before I had well recovered my feet, one of the cuirassiers rode up and began slashing at my head with his sword. I soon fell down with my face to the ground. Presently a man rode by and stabbed at me with a lance. I turned around and was then stabbed by a sword by a man who walked past me. Very soon another man came up with a firelock and bayonet and, raising both his arms, thrust his bayonet (as he thought) into my side near my heart … one of my fingers was cut off and there I lay bleeding from at least a dozen places, and was soon covered with blood. I was also at that time plundered by the French soldiers of my watch, money, canteen, haversack and trousers, notwithstanding that the balls from the British army were dropping on all sides.

  Poor Hasker spent the rest of the day and all the following night where he fell. Eventually he was rescued and managed to clamber onto a wagon which took him to Brussels where, at last, his wounds were treated.

  But the assault of the British Heavy Cavalry threw d’Erlon’s great attack into utter disarray. The great columns had been broken apart and the horsemen were riding among the scattered men slashing with their swords, while the British infantry had come down from the crest to pillage and take prisoners. Lieutenant Scheltens, the Belgian officer whose captain had musket wadding smoking in his jacket sleeve, helped gather in the captives:

  One French battalion commander had received a sabre cut across his nose which was now hanging down over his mouth. ‘Look,’ he said to me, ‘what they do to us!’ The poor fellow might have suffered far worse. I gave protection to two French officers in this débâcle. They gave me the masonic sign, so I had them taken to the rear where they were not, as usually happens, searched and robbed.

  The French had come tantalizingly close to victory on the ridge top. The massive columns had been checked by the infantry fire, but the disparity in numbers must have counted in the end, except the British cavalry had streamed across the crest and driven deep into the panicking ranks. In the minutes after the charge there was chaos. Horsemen were still attacking isolated Frenchmen, other French infantrymen were retreating as fast as they could and, though no one mentions it, they must have formed rallying squares to protect themselves as they returned the way they had come. ‘Hundreds of the infantry threw themselves down and pretended to be dead while the cavalry rode over them,’ Kincaid recalled. ‘I never saw such a scene in all my life!’ The cuirassiers who had threatened Kincaid were driven back by the Household Cavalry, who charged at the same time as the Scots Greys, Inniskillings and Royals. ‘Charge’ is too strong a word, because their path was across the road, through the hedges, across ditches and, as Captain William Clayton remembered, ‘the ground presented a surface of mud … which, soon after the commencement of the action became so deep … as to render it very difficult, when advancing to the charge, to push our horses into a trot.’

  Nevertheless around 800 heavy cavalry of the Household Brigade charged a similar number of cuirassiers. The French had the advantage of wearing breastplates and of carrying swords with blades that were six inches longer than the British, while the British had a slight advantage in numbers, the downward slope and surprise. The sound of heavy cavalry fighting heavy cavalry was like ‘tinkers at work’ one officer recalled. The French were forced back and some were unlucky enough to be trapped in the sunken road beside La Haie Sainte, where they found their retreat blocked by an abatis, a crude but effective
barricade made of heavy branches, and those men, crammed together and unable to extricate themselves, were ruthlessly slaughtered. The carnage continued till some French infantry, still clinging to La Haie Sainte’s orchard, fired down at the British cavalry. Those French infantry retreated soon after, leaving the King’s German Legion still in control of the isolated farm.

  British–Dutch infantry were shepherding around 3,000 prisoners to the rear, stripping them of weapons and possessions. On the right of the French advance the easternmost column had attacked the farm of Papelotte, but they now withdrew as the other columns retreated. The great attack on Wellington’s centre-left had come so close to success, but was now routed, and the survivors of d’Erlon’s Corps trudged, limped or crawled back across the valley.

  While off on Wellington’s right the crisis had come at Hougoumont.

  And the British cavalry, elated by their victory, decided to win the battle all on their own.

  Lady Elizabeth Butler’s splendid, though entirely misleading, ‘Scotland Forever’ painted in 1881: ‘They were all Gordons, and as we passed through them they shouted, “Go at them, the Greys! Scotland for ever!” My blood thrilled at this, and I clutched my sabre tighter. Many of the Highlanders grasped our stirrups, and in the fiercest excitement dashed with us into the fight. The French were uttering loud, discordant yells. Just then I saw the first Frenchman. A young officer of Fusiliers made a slash at me with his sword, but I parried it and broke his arm; the next second we were in the thick of them.’

  42nd Highlanders at Waterloo, 1815.

  Thomas Picton, by Sir Martin Archer Shee: Picton was seriously wounded at Quatre-Bras, two of his ribs being broken by a musket ball – he died leading his men to charge at Waterloo.

  A damaged cuirass of the 2nd French Carabiniers.

  ‘The Fight for the Standard’, by Richard Ansdell, which now hangs in the Great Hall of Edinburgh Castle, depicting Sergeant Charles Ewart’s capture of the French Eagle: ‘… then I cut him from the chin upwards, which went through his teeth. Next I was attacked by a foot soldier, who, after firing at me, charged me with his bayonet; but he very soon lost the combat, for I parried it, and cut him down through the head; so that finished the contest for the Eagle.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  We had our revenge! Such slaughtering!

  HIS NAME WAS LEGROS and his nickname l’Enfonceur. He was a Sous-Lieutenant in one of the infantry battalions besieging Hougoumont and he was a big man, some described him as ‘gigantic’. He had risen through the ranks and was about to write his name in history.

  The north gate of Hougoumont faced towards the British-held ridge. A lane led down to the gate, and still does, though the walls either side of the present gateway are much lower than they were in 1815. The gate opened inwards, and was left unbarred for much of the time because that was the best route whereby ammunition and reinforcements could reach the hard-pressed garrison which, by mid-afternoon, is under fire from three sides.

  And sometime that afternoon the gigantic l’Enfonceur led a group of about thirty or forty infantrymen and forced the north gate open. He carried a pioneer’s axe. The pioneers served the engineers of the army as labourers and they had big axes to cut down trees, but in the hands of a man like Legros it was also a lethal close-quarters weapon. It is not quite certain whether l’Enfonceur found the gate open or whether he broke it down. Some accounts claim he smashed through a panel of the gates with his axe, but it seems more likely that a French attack drove some British skirmishers out of the ground to the château’s east and those skirmishers retreated through the gate and did not have time to close it. Sous-Lieutenant Legros burst into the courtyard, followed by his men and a single drummer boy.

  The situation was desperate for Macdonell. The ferocity of Legros’s attack was clearing the big courtyard, and if more French troops managed to get through the gate then the defenders would be gutted from the inside. And those French reinforcements were coming.

  Macdonell realized that the most important task was not to kill Legros and his companions, but to close the gates so that no more Frenchmen could enter. He led a small group of men past the intruders and together they forced the big gates shut. They heaved against the pressure from outside, some men shot through the slowly closing gap, and they ignored Legros’s men who were fighting behind them. Other defenders shot from windows and doorways, pouring musket fire into the invaders. Then, finally, the gate was closed and barred and Macdonell and his men turned on Legros. All the French, except for the drummer boy, were killed.

  The Duke of Wellington famously said that a man might as well write the history of a dance as write the story of a battle; too much is happening at once in a swirl of colour, noise and confusion. Few battles have been studied so closely, researched so comprehensively or written about so often, yet still there are mysteries. Was Legros’s attack coincident with the assault of d’Erlon’s Corps? Or was it later? Were the Coldstream Guards actually garrisoning Hougoumont when the French first attacked? Captain Moritz Büsgen was an officer in one of the Dutch Nassauer battalions, and in his description of the fight at Hougoumont it would appear that Macdonell had been ordered out of the buildings before the attack commenced and that Büsgen’s men took over their abandoned positions; ‘from the existing defence preparations … it was obvious that this post had already been occupied,’ Büsgen wrote. One historian suggests that Slender Billy ordered the British Guards out of Hougoumont, which he was certainly stupid enough to do, but it is almost inconceivable that Macdonell would have obeyed, knowing as he did the trust that the Duke had placed in him. Büsgen also mentions a French incursion around 3:30 p.m., this one through a side gate, which no one else records. When Matthew Clay, the young guardsman who had been stranded outside the walls, retreated safely through the gates he saw:

  Lieutenant-Colonel Macdonell carrying a large piece of wood or the trunk of a tree in his arms. One of his cheeks was marked with blood and his charger lay bleeding a short distance away. With this timber he was hurrying to bar the gates against the renewed attack of the enemy which was most vigorously repulsed.

  Clay probably did not carry a watch and he does not attempt to say what time he made his bolt for safety and saw Macdonell carrying the baulk of wood, but he does talk of another French incursion later, and that second invasion seems to be referring to Legros’s men because Clay notes that a drummer boy was the only survivor. It was Clay who lodged the boy safely in an outhouse. He reckons the gates were forced by artillery, which no one else mentions, though sometime in the afternoon the French did bring artillery to join in the fight for the château.

  It seems probable that there were two French incursions into Hougoumont, both of which were defeated, just as it seems likely that the garrison was composed of both British and Dutch troops, though to read the eyewitness accounts is to risk confusion. The problem stems from patriotism. British accounts stress British achievements and rarely offer credit to allies other than the King’s German Legion, while Dutch, Hanoverian or Nassauer accounts carry a similar bias in favour of their own exploits. One source for what happened in Hougoumont is the unpublished memoirs of Private Johann Leonhard, a Nassauer; like Büsgen he contends that it was the Nassauers who garrisoned the farm and there is no mention of any British Guards in the repulse of the attacks coming from the wood:

  We had hardly taken up position at the loopholes when masses of French came out of the wood … but too late! A shower of balls that we loosed off … was so terrible that the grass in front was soon covered with French corpses … we were attacked four times … but each time the French were again repelled.

  That seems clear enough: the Nassauers defeated every French attack. Captain Büsgen says much the same, though he allows that some Coldstreamers were sent ‘in support of the battalion under my command’, which suggests that Büsgen commanded the garrison. But against that we have the memoirs of George Evelyn, a British Guards officer, who recollects that ‘the Frenc
h attacked with a much superior force and the Dutch instantly gave way and fled’. Lieutenant-Colonel Francis Home, second in command to Macdonell, writes that the British occupied the château on the evening of the 17th and were not reinforced by any Nassauer troops until 11 a.m. on the day of the battle; ‘these at first might be 600 strong,’ he writes dismissively, ‘but after the first hour there was not one of them to be seen; they had all vanished … and were never seen afterwards excepting a few stragglers.’ Who was right? The suspicion is that the truth lies somewhere in between. Macdonell certainly commanded the garrison, but it is also certain that Dutch troops were still fighting when Legros attacked because one of them, a Nassauer Lieutenant, had his hand chopped off by an axe which was probably wielded by l’Enfonceur. It is inconceivable that the British Guards evacuated Hougoumont on the morning of the 18th, whatever Slender Billy ordered. No memoir mentions it, and we have several. So why did Büsgen insist Hougoumont was deserted when he arrived? It is possible that he led his men into the château itself which, not being on the perimeter of the buildings, could well have been empty, but that suggestion is tentative. As for the flight of the Dutch, there is plenty of evidence that they stayed. Private Leonhard describes the hornbeam trees of the ornamental walk in the formal garden being razed and the château walls collapsing from the ‘heavy bombardment or from the severe thunderstorm that raged above us’, though no other participant mentions a severe thunderstorm during the battle. ‘The skies,’ he wrote: