TWENTY
NAPOLEONIC INFANTRY TACTICS
In order to appreciate what happened from the moment the battle began, some fundamental principles of infantry tactics in the Napoleonic age are needed to make clear how infantry was generally maneuvered and what options officers had when they found themselves under enemy fire.
The infantry battalion, with its five or six hundred men, constituted the basic unit of maneuver and could be deployed in different formations. Manuals prescribed in detail the movements that had to be executed in order to pass most quickly from one formation to another while causing the least possible confusion. A great part of infantry training consisted in teaching the officers the correct sequence of orders for every eventuality and in accustoming the soldiers to carry out those orders rapidly and automatically, even when they were under fire.
The three basic combat formations for a battalion were the line, the column, and the square. For a century and a half—ever since the musket had become the foot soldier’s main weapon—the line had been the normal combat formation used by European infantry. A battalion deployed in line, two or three ranks deep, covered a fairly broad front, a hundred meters or more. Thus disposed, every man was able to shoot, and the battalion’s firepower reached its maximum level. Under normal conditions, the British infantry was trained to deploy in two ranks only; this arrangement extended the line as far as possible and optimized the troops’ firing capacity. Continental infantry preferred the shorter, more solid three-deep line. In reality, this difference proved unimportant at Waterloo, because although the British infantry was excellently trained in shooting, it fought virtually the entire battle in an emergency formation four ranks deep, renouncing—for reasons we shall discuss—the firepower advantage that even its adversaries acknowledged.
The column, which had come into wide use during the Napoleonic Wars, was a more compact formation, broader than it was deep, that sacrificed the battalion’s firepower for the psychological advantage of depth and mass. A French battalion in column consisted of nine ranks, lined up one behind the other; the battalion’s total frontage was approximately forty meters, and if the troops closed ranks the column’s depth could be reduced to only fifteen meters or so. The column was preferred by both the French and the Prussians for bayonet attacks, because it guaranteed moral support to the men, who were surrounded on all sides by a multitude of comrades, and because of the force of impact it could develop along such a narrow front. However, the column’s firepower was comparatively reduced, and it offered enemy artillery an ideal target. The awareness of these disadvantages and the attempt to find a solution for them played an important role in the way the French generals fought the Battle of Waterloo.
But neither the column nor the line was a suitable formation for facing a cavalry charge. Gambling on its speed and the force of its impact, the cavalry could maneuver in such a way as to avoid the fire of the infantry and burst upon it from an unexpected direction. All training manuals emphasized the injunction that infantry soldiers facing cavalry had to form square, a term not to be taken in its literal geometric sense. The British manual of arms directed that a battalion, which comprised ten companies, should rather form what was called an oblong, with three companies in front, three in the rear, and two on each flank. The eyewitness account of a former staff officer stated that an unusual sort of oblong was also tried at Waterloo, with four companies front and rear and only one on each flank. Often two undermanned battalions were united in a single square; although even this maneuver was covered in the manual, the results could not have been regular, geometrically speaking. Casualties, too, made maintaining an ordered, symmetrical formation impossible.
The “square” therefore was a formation of variable geometric configuration, whose short side might cover as little as a dozen meters, while the long side could extend to sixty or seventy. In any case, the square enclosed many hundreds of men, crowded shoulder to shoulder and presenting four ranks of bayonets in every direction. Against such a formation, cavalry generally failed to charge home, because it was impossible to induce horses to impale themselves on a hedge of steel; and even if occasionally the cavalry, instead of milling around at a distance, actually made physical contact with its adversaries, so many bayonets thrusting at each horse’s chest made the outcome a foregone conclusion. That is, of course, provided that the men in the square kept their nerve; if instead they started wavering at the cavalry’s approach and a soldier panicked and abandoned his post, the cavalry could force a passage amid the infantry, and in such cases the square inevitably collapsed.
On the battlefield at Waterloo, Wellington’s foot soldiers had to remain in square for a great part of the day, and this explains why the infantry, even when it deployed into line, almost always adopted an unusual four-deep formation. The transition from a line of this type into square, and vice versa, was much faster, especially if the emergency necessitated a creative interpretation of the rules. At such times, the standardized, rote-learned procedures that guaranteed the automatic cooperation of so many men often clashed with the advisability of simplifying or ignoring those procedures, and this tension was one of the chief problems that armies of the time had to deal with. It is a veritable leitmotif in the accounts of the officers who fought at Waterloo.
In particular, the British troops in this battle often deployed from square into line without heeding the prescriptions of the training manual published by Sir David Dundas in 1788. At one point in the battle, the men of the 3/1st Foot Guards, under fire from some enemy troops, advanced to dislodge them. In order to drive off the enemy, one of the Foot Guards’ officers explained, the battalion chose not to waste time by deploying into line—a maneuver that would have been imprudent at best, given the great masses of enemy cavalry that were roaming this part of the field. Instead, the guardsmen split the rear face of their square in the center; pivoting left and right, this face and the two lateral faces wheeled into line with the front face of the square, thus forming an irregular line four ranks deep. Later in the day, faced with the advancing Imperial Guard, the battalion commander had the idea of using the same unorthodox method once again. He was killed shortly thereafter, and twenty years later a colleague, despite the pity he felt for his fallen comrade-in-arms, still couldn’t help being scandalized by the thought of such a flagrant violation of the rules: “The Duke of Wellington ordered the 1st Brigade of Guards to take ground to its left and form line four deep, which poor Frank D’Oyley did by wheeling up the sides of the Square, putting the Grenadiers and my Company (1st Battalion Company) in the centre of our line. What would Dundas have said!!!”
TWENTY - ONE
THE SKIRMISH LINE
Although the different infantry battalion formations absorbed the majority of an army’s manpower, a successful outcome in battle depended on the cooperation between these mass formations and a minority of selected troops trained in individual combat. Even when deployed on the front line, an infantry battalion was never in direct contact with the enemy for very long. Most of the troops stood in formation, crowded together shoulder to shoulder; the noncommissioned officers strove to maintain proper alignment; in the midst of the ranks, the banners fluttered overhead; but only at critical moments did the battalion receive the order to advance with fixed bayonets while the drums beat the charge. Even the occasions when the troops fired their weapons—all together and at an officer’s command—were relatively rare; an infantryman carried a leather pouch that contained, at the most, fifty or sixty cartridges, enough for thirty minutes of sustained fire. The emphasis that infantry training placed on developing the ability to shoot as rapidly as possible shows that the combat was expected to be brief and decisive.
Only a small number of men were actually in contact with the enemy throughout the battle, maintaining a constant if irregular fire. These soldiers, trained to fight in pairs and in open order, moved ahead of the main body and started the firefight as soon as they spotted the enemy’s forward look
outs. During the latter part of the eighteenth century, the use of these skirmishers had become more and more general; they complemented the lines of infantry deployed in close formation and maneuvered in cadence by officers. In the French military, the number of such soldiers, known as tirailleurs, was steadily increased, so much so that they contributed heavily to the great victories of the revolutionary and Napoleonic armies. By the time of Waterloo, all European armies had so thoroughly integrated tirailleurs that their use was virtually automatic. Every line battalion present on the battlefield had a company of men, known as the light company, trained to perform this role. In the case of the German armies, each battalion had at least one squad of selected marksmen, the Scharfschützen, or sharpshooters. Agility and quickness were the chief physical qualities required of such soldiers; they were usually chosen from among those who happened to be both short in stature and crack shots.
These shooters or skirmishers were armed with the same smoothbore muskets as the line soldiers used, except that the skirmishers were trained to use them better. The British army had begun to introduce into some units the use of flintlock muskets with rifled barrels, which had far superior range and accuracy. These weapons were called Baker rifles, and they were carried by the battalions of the Ninety-fifth Rifles, an entire, elite regiment trained to fight in open order, and also by the light infantry of the King’s German Legion. The French tirailleurs all used the ordinary 17mm caliber musket, which was decidedly more accurate and manageable than the standard-issue British musket, the 18 caliber familiarly known as “Brown Bess,” to say nothing of the heavy 19 caliber musket carried by the Prussians. Speaking of the French, a British officer observed that “their fine, long, light firelocks, with a small bore are more efficient for skirmishing than our abominably clumsy machine,” and he added that the Brown Bess too often displayed defects of manufacture. British soldiers, he said, “might be seen creeping about to get hold of the firelocks of the killed and wounded, to try if the locks were better than theirs, and dashing the worst to the ground as if in a rage with it.”
Armed with rifled muskets or, more often, with smoothbores, the skirmishers awaited the signal to advance. When the officers blew their whistles, the men moved forward and formed the army’s outpost line. Wellington’s entire front was covered by a line of skirmishers a few hundred meters forward of the main positions. These men held their ground as best they could all day long, except when the approach of enemy cavalry or an advance in force by enemy infantry compelled them to withdraw to the nearest friendly formation. Similarly, every French attack was preceded by a thick chain of tirailleurs, who tried to beat the Allied skirmishers in a firefight and force them to evacuate the no-man’s-land between the armies.
If skirmishers got the upper hand and advanced so far that the defensive battalions were in range, they began peppering the serried ranks with isolated, well-aimed shots designed to fray the nerves of men standing in a packed and unmoving mass and, if possible, to pick one of their higher officers off his horse, thus softening up the defenders before the real attack came. Artillery batteries, too, provided an ideal target for the shooters; when they drew within range of a battery, they would aim for the gunners or, at least, for the horses. Seldom could a battery commander allow himself to waste precious ammunition firing at such elusive targets; it was indispensable, therefore, to cover the batteries also with a screen of skirmishers solid enough to prevent those of the enemy from getting too near the guns.
This form of combat ate up skirmishers fairly quickly. The light companies were not adequate to their task, not even when they were reinforced, as was common practice in critical moments, by all the soldiers in the battalion who were distinguished for marksmanship. The first tactical problem that all armies tried to solve, therefore, was how to reinforce their skirmishers. The solution most widely adopted was to establish entire units trained to operate in open order and for that reason called light infantry; when judiciously placed, these battalions could support a line of skirmishers along an entire front, continually sending in men to replace the fallen or demoralized. The Prussians—whose infantry battalions had no light company, only a squad of Scharfschützen—went so far as to furnish each of their line regiments with a battalion of light infantry, known as fusiliers, so that in the Prussian infantry regiments the ratio of fusiliers to musketeers was one to two.
In addition, the Prussian army experimented with the even more drastic practice of training a third of all the men in their line battalions to fight as skirmishers. When continental infantry deployed in line to fire or to advance, the troops were normally disposed in three ranks; when necessary, the men in the third rank, where there was the greatest difficulty in firing effectively anyway, employed as reinforcements for the line of skirmishers. Although this measure could hardly be applied with insufficiently trained troops—those of the Landwehr (militia), for example—it nevertheless allowed the Prussian army of 1815 to attain a significant degree of tactical flexibility, covering its battalions with swarms of skirmishers even more numerous than the French.
Despite their exposure, the skirmishers did not bear the brunt of the fighting alone. Throughout the battle, until they ran out of ammunition, the big guns of both armies kept up a constant fire aimed at any available and appealing target, chiefly presented by the battalions of infantry and the regiments of cavalry drawn up in formation about a thousand yards away. Furthermore, the skirmishers, whenever they could, directed their fire against the formed-up troops, upon whom they could inflict considerable damage, officers being the targets of choice. When the commander in chief decided that the enemy troops in a certain sector had been sufficiently worn down by the firefight and that the time had come to seek a decisive breakthrough, the line infantry was ordered to move out, marching in step, and such an advance—in the open, under fire—was absolutely the worst moment for the soldiers, the time when they risked the greatest number of casualties. But it remains generally true that the persistent battle, the one that burned like wet powder all along the front, marking the line of contact between the two armies with an irregular series of gunshots and puffs of white smoke, was carried on by the skirmishers. Even Dundas’s manual of arms acknowledged that the light infantry had “become the principal feature” of the British army, and this affirmation would have sounded even more self-evident to a French or Prussian officer.
Considering the effectiveness of the tirailleurs, one could ask why the whole infantry was not used in this way, and why instead most of the men were kept in closed order and maneuvered mechanically, according to the prescriptions laid down in the manual of arms. One answer is that innovations take hold only gradually, meeting stiff opposition before at last unequivocally establishing themselves: not until 1914 did the armies of Europe, by then carrying firearms incomparably more potent than those of Napoleon’s day, realize the necessity of deploying all their troops in open order instead of closed formations. And yet the use of skirmishers with a battalion in formation fairly close behind them presented concrete advantages. Not every soldier had the intelligence necessary for operating with a degree of individual autonomy; most troops were kept under much better control if they were marching shoulder to shoulder and responding to their officers’ rote commands. Furthermore, given that it took twice as long to train a good skirmisher as a regular infantryman, there was not enough time to prepare all the recruits for open-order combat. Not coincidentally, perhaps the most significant difference between regular troops and militia was that the latter, precisely because it was insufficiently trained, was nearly or completely useless as light infantry.
In addition, the close-order formation packed an undeniable moral wallop. The fire of several hundred men discharging their weapons all together on command had more of an impact, physical and psychological, than the individual fire of the skirmishers, even though theirs was much more accurate; and that multitude, marching to the attack with bayonets fixed and drummers beating the cadence, produced a sho
ck effect—primarily psychological in this case—that no general could do without. The skirmishers themselves would not have fought without the reassuring certainty that the battalion was formed up behind them, offering a shelter they could run to in case of danger, especially if the rumble of hooves and the ring of sabers unsheathed announced the approach of enemy cavalry, for skirmishers dispersed about the countryside were certain to be massacred if cavalry took them by surprise.11
For their part, the light infantry units, accustomed to individual initiative and much more thoroughly trained in marksmanship than the line infantry, were the troops best adapted to defending or attacking fortified positions, where it wasn’t possible to deploy the men in the formations recommended in the manual. As we shall see, the fights around Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte essentially involved light infantry, engaged in furious hand-to-hand combat in the gardens and orchards of the two farms, and inside the buildings themselves; not by chance had both Wellington and Napoleon from the start assigned the bulk of their light battalions to these two sectors, even at the cost of exposing other parts of their lines by stripping away indispensable skirmishers.
The Battle Page 10
