Waterloo The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles

by Bernard Cornwell

  The British Guards advanced down the slope, herding the panicked Imperial Guard, and presumably at that moment the Grenadiers of the Guard, who had assaulted Halkett’s Brigade, also retreated. Marshal Ney had his last horse shot from under him, but the French Guard had not finished with their assault. Some eyewitnesses claim that the second, larger attack was composed of two columns, not one (or two formations in square). What they saw was the 4th Chasseurs of the Guard who had lagged behind the others, probably because they had to march the farthest, and who were now climbing the ridge to make their own attack. They were the closest Imperial Guard to Hougoumont, out on the British right, and their disciplined fire checked the British Guards, and at the same moment French cavalry was seen in the smoke of the valley and an order was shouted for the British Guards to form square. There was a moment’s confusion as, apparently, other officers tried to keep the men in line to take on the 4th Chasseurs, and the confusion was only resolved by taking the Guards back to the ridge’s crest where, once again, they formed in four-deep line.

  There is a natural tendency to make order out of disorder, to describe a battle in the simplest terms to make chaos comprehensible. In most accounts of Waterloo the charge of the Imperial Guard is the climactic moment, an isolated event that decides the day, but though it was decisive, it was not isolated. Virtually every man who remained on the battlefield was engaged in fighting. All the surviving guns were firing. To the east of the main highway d’Erlon’s men were pushing up the ridge’s slope, fighting against British, Dutch and now Prussian troops. The noise is deafening, so intense that men cannot hear orders shouted by an officer or by a sergeant next to them. The Imperial Guard who have reached the ridge top and been pushed back by Dutch and British musketry have not retreated into the valley, they are still on the forward slope, supported there by General Reille’s infantry, ready to advance again into that terrible musketry. They are in some disorder, but they are not yet beaten, and their enemies are in disorder too. And the whole curving ridge of Wellington’s line is shrouded in smoke so that men cannot see what happened just a few paces away. We know that four of the five attacking battalions of the Imperial Guard have been checked and pushed backwards, but to the men in General Adam’s brigade, only some two or three hundred yards eastwards, that was all hidden. They just saw smoke lit by gunfire, they heard the unending percussion of the guns, the crackling noise of muskets, the screams. And they heard the pas de charge, the drum-driven chant of France’s warriors marching to glory. It came from the 4th Chasseurs, the last of the Imperial Guard’s attacking battalions, coming up the slope. Ensign Leeke of the 52nd could not see them yet because they were still on the forward slope, but he could hear them:

  The drummers were beating the pas de charge, which sounded, as well as I recollect, very much like this, ‘the rum dum, the rum dum, the rummadum dummadum, dum, dum’, then ‘Vive l’Empereur’. This was repeated again and again.

  The 4th Chasseurs were the last of the brave trying to break Wellington’s line, but on their left, at the ridge’s crest, was General Adam’s brigade, which contained the 52nd, the big Oxfordshire battalion that was under the command of Sir John Colborne. Sir John was thirty-seven years old and an immensely experienced soldier who had fought through the Peninsular War. At a time when most officers gained their promotion by purchase, buying their way up the hierarchy, Colborne had gained every step by merit. He had been a protégé of the great Sir John Moore, who had promoted him to Major, and it had been Moore’s dying wish at the battle of Corunna that Colborne should get his Lieutenant-Colonelcy, which was granted. He was as efficient as he was popular, and now, as the 4th Chasseurs of the Guard reached the ridge-top plateau and tried to deploy into line, he made himself famous.

  He took the 52nd out of line. Half Colborne’s men were Peninsular veterans, they knew their business. Sir John marched his battalion forward, then wheeled it round so that his men faced the left flank of the Guard Chasseurs. His brigade commander, Sir Frederick Adam, galloped to discover what he was doing and Colborne later thought he answered that he was going ‘to make that Column feel our fire’. General Adam, just thirty-four years old, had the sense to let Colborne continue; indeed he rode to the 71st and ordered them to follow the 52nd, who were now on the forward slope, their own flank exposed to whatever enemy lurked in the valley’s smoke, but they were in position to slaughter the Guard and they did. They began firing volleys into the French flank so that the Imperial Guardsmen were being attacked from their front and from their left. It was merciless. The Unbeaten were being killed by the Unbeatable. Colborne’s men took heavy casualties from the French Guard, but his own volleys were tearing the 4th Chasseurs apart and the frontal fire of the British Guards was hammering into their leading ranks and, like the other battalions of the Imperial Guard, they broke. They did not just retreat, they broke. They had been beaten by British volleys and they fled that terrible musketry and when they fled so did the rest of the Guard.

  And when they broke, so did the hopes of France. ‘Fortune is a woman,’ Napoleon had said, and now she spat in his face. When the 4th Chasseurs broke, so did his army. The morale of the French troops collapsed, panic set in, men saw the undefeated Guard fleeing in defeat and they fled too. Even Napoleon admitted it:

  Several regiments … seeing part of the Guard in flight thought it was the Old Guard and were shaken; shouts of ‘All is lost! The Guard is beaten!’ were raised. The soldiers even declare that at some points ill-disposed men shouted, ‘Every man for himself!’ … a panic spread over the whole battlefield; a disorderly rush was made towards our line of retreat; soldiers, gunners, wagons all crowded to reach it.

  It was so sudden. All afternoon and evening the battle had raged, the French pushing hard and bravely against Wellington’s line, and suddenly, in an instant, there was no French army, just a rabble of panicked fugitives.

  Wellington rode back towards the centre of his line. Leeke had seen him just before the 52nd marched out of line to destroy an Emperor’s dreams. The Duke’s clothes, Leeke said, ‘consisted of a blue surtout coat, white kerseymere pantaloons, and Hessian boots. He wore a sword with a waist belt, but no sash.’ The plain blue coat and black cocked hat made Wellington instantly recognizable to his men, and now, as the French began to flee, he watched from the ridge’s centre for a few moments. He saw an enemy in panic, a retreating enemy that was dissolving into chaos. He watched them, then was heard to mutter, ‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’ He took off his cocked hat and men say that just then a slanting ray of evening sunlight came through the clouds to illuminate him on the ridge he had defended all day. He waved the hat towards the enemy. He waved it three times, and it was a signal for the whole allied line to advance.

  Not every man saw the signal. Just as it took time for the panic to infect the whole French army, so it took a time for the relief of victory to become apparent to the allies. Captain John Kincaid had been fighting French skirmishers with his riflemen when:

  presently a cheer, which we knew to be British, commenced far to the right, and made everyone prick up his ears; it was Lord Wellington’s long-wished-for orders to advance; it gradually approached, growing louder as it drew near, we took it up by instinct, charged through the hedge … sending our adversaries flying at the point of the bayonet. Lord Wellington galloped up to us at the instant, and our men began to cheer him; but he called out, ‘No cheering, my lads, but forward, and complete your victory.’

  Moments earlier the 52nd, who had advanced across the face of the forward slope before turning right to march up the highway towards La Belle Alliance, had mistaken some British light cavalry for French horsemen and emptied some saddles with their musket fire. Wellington had been there. ‘Never mind!’ he had shouted at Colborne. ‘Go on! Go on!’ Some 95th Riflemen advanced with Colborne’s battalion, ‘such a carnage I never before beheld,’ wrote Captain Joseph Logan of the Greenjackets:

  That noble fellow Lord Wellington moved on with
the 95th and frequently cried out ‘Move on my brave fellows.’ I feared for his safety; myself I did not care about. My god! Had he fallen what a bitter day it would have been for England.

  So the whole allied line advanced into the valley, except it was no longer a line because the casualties had been too great. Baron von Müffling, the Prussian liaison officer, recalled:

  When the line of infantry moved forward, small masses of only some hundred men, at great intervals, were seen everywhere advancing. The position in which the infantry had fought was marked, as far as the eye could see, by a red line caused by the red uniforms of the numerous killed and wounded who lay there.

  A red line of dead, dying and suffering men. It is a terrible image. And in front of them, in the valley, were more casualties, and thousands of wounded and dying horses. Leeke said some horses were:

  lying, some standing, but some of both were eating the trodden down wheat or rye, notwithstanding that their legs were shot off … there was a peculiar smell at this time, arising from a mingling of the smell of the wheat trodden flat down with the smell of gunpowder.

  And it was over that trodden-down wheat and rye, and past the dying horses, and through the litter of battle that the allied infantry advanced. ‘I have seen nothing like that moment,’ Sir Augustus Frazer, commander of the Royal Horse Artillery, remembered, ‘the sky literally darkened with smoke, the sun just going down.’ And in that lurid, unearthly light the allied army advanced into the valley. ‘No language can express how the British army felt at this time,’ Sergeant Robertson of the 92nd Highlanders remembered:

  their joy was truly ecstatic … We did not take time to load, nothing was used now but the bayonet … all was now destruction and confusion. The French at length ran off throwing away knapsacks, firelocks, and everything that was cumbersome, or that could impede their flight.

  The British cavalry joined in the rout, cutting ruthlessly into the panicked French units. Captain Henry Duperier, of the 18th Hussars, remembered charging, and ‘in an instant we fell on the cavalry, who resisted but feebly; and in running, tumbled over their own infantry’. Duperier’s men, many of them Irish, then massacred some gunners before turning on a disorganized battalion of infantry. The French infantry tried to surrender. It was ‘nothing but “Vive le Roi”,’ Duperier said, ‘but it was too late, besides our men do not understand French, so they cut away.’

  Captain Pierre Robinaux had spent the day in fruitless attacks on Hougoumont, and now the panic spread to the soldiers still besieging the château. They retreated fast. ‘We were being fired on from behind,’ Robinaux wrote:

  and our soldiers, already frightened, caught sight of our Polish lancers and mistook them for British cavalry, shouted ‘We’re lost!’ The cry was echoed everywhere and soon we were in total disorder. Each man thought only of his own safety. Frightened men are impossible to control. The cavalry followed the example of the infantry; I saw Dragoons fleeing at the gallop, riding over unlucky infantrymen and trampling their bodies with their horses. I was knocked over once.

  Robinaux might have thought ‘frightened men are impossible to control,’ but he managed to control some. He threatened some dragoons with a musket and succeeded in stopping their flight. He collected some sixty or seventy soldiers and led them south, but was sensible enough to avoid the main road where the pursuit was in full cry. He escaped, but in the valley, beneath the long rays of the setting sun, the killing was still not done. Not yet.

  * * *

  The French army died, but it was not an instantaneous death. It took time for the news to reach the men defending Plancenoit and they continued to fight till around 9 p.m. Some gunners in the Grand Battery kept on firing while the army disintegrated around them. It was one of those final shots that seared past Wellington, missing him by inches, and took off his second in command’s leg. ‘By God, Sir,’ Uxbridge is supposed to have said, ‘I’ve lost my leg!’ ‘By God, Sir,’ the Duke responded, ‘so you have.’

  Then there were those three battalions of the Old Guard who had stayed in the valley’s floor. They were still there, still in square and still under discipline. They retreated slowly, pressed by allied infantry. A squadron of the 10th Hussars charged one of the Old Guard squares and was blasted away; their commanding officer, Major the Honourable Frederick Howard, son of the Earl of Carlisle, was among the last British officers killed that day. He fell unconscious from his horse in front of the Old Guard square and a guardsman was seen stepping out of the ranks to beat in Howard’s head with his musket butt. Some panicked French infantry tried to take refuge in the squares, but the grognards were too experienced to allow that to happen; men clawing their way into a square could open a passage for enemy horsemen and so the Guards shot indiscriminately at friend and foe.

  General Pierre Cambronne commanded a brigade of the Guard and was in one of the squares. Their position was hopeless. British and Hanoverian infantry had caught up with them and officers were calling on the Guard to surrender. And so was born one of Waterloo’s most persistent legends, that Cambronne replied, ‘La Garde meurt, mais ne se rend pas!’ The Guard dies, it does not surrender! They were fine words, and almost certainly invented by a French journalist some years after the battle. The other version has Cambronne shouting the one word ‘Merde!’ as his answer, Shit! Both responses have become famous, a fine defiance in the face of inevitable defeat. Cambronne himself claimed that he said, ‘Buggers like us don’t surrender,’ but surrender he did. He was struck from his horse by a musket ball that grazed his head and knocked him unconscious. Colonel Hugh Halkett, a British officer in Hanoverian service, took Cambronne prisoner, and the squares he had commanded shrank under the flail of musketry and canister, they became triangles and then, somewhere close to La Belle Alliance, they finally dissolved and the French guardsmen joined the panicked flight.

  An officer of the 71st Foot claimed to have fired the last gun at Waterloo. The 71st, what was left of it, advanced with Sir John Colborne’s 52nd and, somewhere near the last defiant squares of the Old Guard, the Grenadier company of the 71st found an abandoned French cannon with a burning portfire nearby. A firing-tube, which carried the fire to the gunpowder in the barrel, was jutting from the cannon’s vent, suggesting the weapon was loaded. Lieutenant Torriano and some of his men turned the gun till it faced the Old Guard, touched the portfire to the firing-tube, and shot into the ranks of the Old Guard.

  It was almost night. The sun had set, the smoke hung thick across the valley, but it was no longer lit by those lurid flashes of gunfire. Blücher rode through the wreckage of Plancenoit to the Brussels high road where, somewhere south of La Belle Alliance, he met Wellington. It was about half past nine when the two commanders shook hands. Some say they leaned from their saddles to embrace. ‘Mein lieber Kamerad,’ Blücher said, ‘quelle affaire!’ My dear comrade, what an affair!

  ‘I hope to God that I have fought my last battle,’ the Duke said to Frances, Lady Shelley, just one month after the battle. Wellington was always more forthcoming with women than men, and especially with young, beautiful and clever women, and the young, beautiful, clever Lady Shelley became a lifelong friend to the Duke. ‘It is a bad thing to be always fighting,’ he told her:

  While in the thick of it, I am much too occupied to feel anything; but it is wretched just after. It is quite impossible to think of glory. Both mind and feelings are exhausted. I am wretched even at the moment of victory, and I always say that next to a battle lost, the greatest misery is a battle gained. Not only do you lose those dear friends with whom you have been living, but you are forced to leave the wounded behind you. To be sure one tries to do the best for them, but how little that is! At such moments every feeling in your breast is deadened. I am now just beginning to retain my natural spirits, but I never wish for any more fighting.

  It really was over.

  ‘The Battle of Waterloo, 18th June 1815’, (detail) by Nicolas Toussaint Charlet. The last square of the Imperial Guard.
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  Defiant to the last: General Cambronne’s last stand – ‘The Guard dies, it does not surrender!’ But surrender, he did.

  ‘The Total Defeat and Flight of the French Army at the Battle of Waterloo commanded by Napoleon Bonaparte, June 18th 1815’, English School, 1816.