The Battle

by Alessandro Barbero

  Understanding the grammar, as it were, of Napoleonic warfare provides insights into what happened on the battlefield at Waterloo, starting at noon on that June 18, when Reille’s artillery opened fire on the enemy troops deployed on the high ground behind the château of Hougoumont, and his infantry columns, preceded by a host of skirmishers, started marching toward the farm, toward the hedges and ditches that marked the limits of its orchard and wood.

  TWENTY - TWO

  HOUGOUMONT

  The Hougoumont château was a robust noble residence and compound, entirely surrounded by walls, with stables, barns, sheds, and houses for the farmer and gardener. There was a massive wooden gate on the south side, leading to an inner courtyard, and the facade of the main residence, the château itself, faced north and the Allied lines. A covered, sunken lane, to become famous as “the hollow way,” permitted the troops deployed on the high ground in front of the château to send its defenders ammunition and reinforcements at any moment. On the eastern side of the building—the right side, from the French viewpoint—was a large formal garden, whose walls extended eastward for some two hundred yards, and beyond it was an orchard. A spacious wooded park, on which Reille advanced, extended five or six hundred yards to the rear of the château, and next to the park were a couple of pastures. The whole was enclosed by extremely thick hedgerows and a flooded ditch to keep in livestock. This topography, however, was known only to the German infantrymen who were occupying the château; all the French could see from their lines were the trees of the wood.

  In normal conditions, an attack was always preceded by a prolonged cannonade, but the French, unable to see the enemy, could not fire upon him, nor could they know for a fact that he was really there. Had they been a little more familiar with the position, they might have bombarded the château. Although the artillery of the time consisted mostly of smoothbore cannon that fired projectiles in a flat trajectory, every battery included one or two howitzers, specifically designed to fire in a high arc and strike concealed objects. But Reille judged it useless to open fire against a complex of buildings about which, except for what he could glean from the map, he knew practically nothing. The only thing to do was to send light infantry into the wood and see what would happen.

  Reille’s II Corps comprised three divisions. To begin the attack, he selected the one commanded by Prince Jérome, which with approximately 6,500 bayonets was also the largest, accounting for half of the corps. The prince’s division, which occupied the extreme left of the French army, was deployed at an oblique angle to the southwest corner of the wood and covered a front about half a mile long. A soldier burdened with his equipment and marching in the mud would have taken at least ten minutes to traverse this section of the French line. Prince Jérome did not owe his command to any particular military ability; in fact, his performance as commander of the army of Westphalia during the Russian campaign—when he was king of that realm invented by his brother—had been a failure. Within the army, the prince was better known for his frequent duels and for a scandalous American wife, whom Napoleon had refused to allow into France. But his family ties were strong, and so Jérome had a division at his command, though the real work was handled by his second-in-command, General Guilleminot, who had been assigned to direct the prince.

  Jérome’s division was made up of two large brigades commanded by two barons, Bauduin and Soye. Both brigades contained expert regiments at full strength, composed in large part of Grande Armée veterans who had already fought against the British in Spain. The prince decided that General Bauduin’s brigade would lead the advance into the wood. His men were particularly adapted to this sort of combat, including an excellent light infantry regiment of three battalions, the First Légère. Two days previously, the squares of this regiment, commanded by Colonel de Cubières, had thrown back Wellington’s cavalry charges of Quatre Bras, and its fire had killed the young Duke of Brunswick. Bauduin ordered the colonel to advance his battalions to the edge of the wood and to send a line of skirmishers to explore it.

  Cubières’s men, like all those in Reille’s corps, had bivouacked along the main road far behind the front lines. Awakened at five o’clock, they had marched north to Le Caillou, arriving at the farm in the early morning, when the emperor was still there. After a halt, they had started marching again and had barely taken up their positions before Hougoumont when the order came to advance into the park. While the tirailleurs of the First Légère, ahead of the columns, were running toward the wood, leaping the ditch, getting through the hedge, and darting among the trees, Reille’s artillery started firing on the little that could be seen of the English line, deployed on the high ground on the other side of Hougoumont. Hearing this first cannonade, Ensign Leeke of the Fifty-second Light Infantry, a seventeen-year-old lad who had joined the regiment little more than a month before, convinced himself in his innocence that the enemy was firing at the Duke of Wellington, who as it happened had stopped with a group of his aides not far away. Shortly thereafter, he saw something go hissing through the grain. A sergeant wryly instructed him, “There, Mr. Leeke, is a cannon shot, if you never saw one before, sir.”

  In their turn, the British artillery positioned on the high ground began to fire at Cubières’s battalions, which had advanced into the open while their skirmishers disappeared into the wood. The first balls struck the files of the First Légère with mortal precision, claiming many victims; battalions in column order always presented an excellent target to artillery. Therefore, to give their men some shelter from the bombardment, the French officers ordered them down into a little lane—sunken, like all those in the region—that ran right along their front; and since an intense exchange of musketry continued to resound ahead of them, the officers started sending a growing number of men into the wood, a few at a time.

  TWENTY - THREE

  THE DEFENSE OF THE CHTEAU

  As early as the previous evening, it had been apparent to Wellington that Hougoumont must be defended at all costs. The responsibility for this defense devolved upon the Guards Division, deployed on the high ground immediately facing the estate on the north. Each of the division’s two brigades, commanded by Sir John Byng and Sir Peregrine Maitland, consisted of only two battalions, but they were much larger than normal and made up of troops selected and trained with the meticulousness that characterized the Guards; in reality, however, the majority of these men had received their baptism of fire only a few days before at Quatre Bras. In the evening of June 17, the division commander, knowing that he could send reinforcements into the château whenever he chose, had limited himself to occupying the buildings and grounds with his four light companies, each numbering about a hundred men. He placed two of these companies, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Macdonell, in the main building and the garden, and the other two, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Lord Saltoun, in the orchard. In reaching their assigned positions, the British had come upon a French patrol, which they had been obliged to chase off in a firefight before they could take possession of the château.

  But before they defended the buildings they would have to defend the park, and Wellington had decided that German light infantry was better for this sort of combat than their British counterparts; the men in such German units were called Jäger, “hunters,” and for good reason. By tradition, they were recruited among gamekeepers, and their dark green uniforms served to camouflage them among the trees. By order of the duke, some Hanoverian Jäger companies had been detached from their units the previous evening and sent to occupy the park on the south side of the château; but when Wellington examined the position on the morning of the battle, he became convinced that he needed more troops and ordered the 1/2nd Nassau, which belonged to the Prince of Weimar’s brigade, to leave Papelotte and move into Hougoumont wood. When this battalion arrived with its seven hundred to eight hundred men, the Guards officers, believing they could leave to the Germans the responsibility of the defense of the château, withdrew their men from th
e premises and occupied a position nearby.

  The selection of the Nassau battalion to defend the château and especially the park seems questionable in retrospect. Nassauer infantrymen did wear green uniforms and were officially designated as Jäger, which may have caused the Guards officers, according to some of their accounts, to see the new arrivals as light infantry. Instead, however, they were probably a normal infantry battalion, not at all trained for this type of combat. Major von Büsgen, who commanded them, took possession of the empty château and sent some of his men, including the light company, to the edge of the wood. At that moment there were about a thousand muskets at Hougoumont, of which perhaps half were defending the perimeter of the park.

  The first French skirmishers understandably found it difficult to advance very far into the wood, requiring first Cubières’s regiment and then Bauduin’s entire brigade to send in increasing numbers of men. To get to the park, the tirailleurs had to cover a certain amount of open ground under the disagreeably accurate fire of the British artillery; once they were in the wood, which was not particularly thick, they found that the trees offered only partial shelter from the Germans’ lively fusillades. Since all commanding officers of the time had to be able to move quickly on the battlefield, General Bauduin urged his men forward from horseback, thus presenting an excellent target; he was killed almost at once, the first of seven French generals who would be mortally wounded that day.

  Even after Bauduin’s death, however, his regimental commanders knew what they had to do: keep their troops under cover, as close to the wood as possible, and send in more and more men. Although the German defenders held on tenaciously, eventually the French were able to bring a considerably superior number of muskets to bear on them. Before long, the Jäger, running short of ammunition and demoralized by the growing number of enemies pouring into the wood, were driven back to the residence and the garden. The Nassauer’s regiment had already been severely battered at Quatre Bras; at Hougoumont, many of the men managed to get inside the compound and kept on fighting, but some of them decided they’d seen enough and slipped away. Wellington himself observed their flight, but when he tried to stop a group of them, one fired a random shot in the duke’s direction before taking to his heels. “Do you see those fellows run?” Wellington observed to the Austrian attaché, who happened to be by his side at that moment. “Well, it is with these that I must win the battle.”

  Thus the French light infantry reached the wall protecting the garden and the rear of the chäteau. Since it was more than six feet high, this wall looked difficult to climb over; but farther along to the left, in the back of the building, there was a large entrance with a heavy door, and the orchard, which stood farther to the right, was not walled but merely surrounded by a hedge, albeit taller than a man and extremely thick. The French, therefore, went resolutely forward. All along the wall and the hedge, however, the surviving Germans were waiting for them, together with the light companies of the Guards, who had precipitously returned to their former positions as soon as the British generals realized that the Germans were evacuating the wood. In the course of the previous night, the Guards had had time to fortify the château by making loopholes in the rear of the building, barricading the big door, and building makeshift platforms that allowed the defenders to fire over the garden wall, while the French, when they emerged from the wood, found themselves in the open. Their first assault failed, and the tirailleurs, demoralized by their losses, fell back into the wood.

  Up to this point, Wellington had remained on the high ground beyond Hougoumont, anxiously watching the development of the conflict. He then decided to push back and retake Hougoumont wood. For the most part, it was impossible for the British artillery to fire on the French, who were well hidden by the trees of the park; but Wellington had at his disposal a battery of six howitzers, under the command of Major Bull. The howitzers had been recently purchased, and this was the moment to see whether they were worth all the sterling they had cost. Cannon fired either cast-iron balls capable of killing or mangling many men at a time, one after the other, if they were struck while in formation, or canister—also called “case-shot”—which had an effective range of only three or four hundred yards. Howitzers, by contrast, could lob their shots in from a high angle, and they fired a different type of ammunition: explosive shells, which burst into fragments that could cause great slaughter, or the even more deadly shrapnel, an English invention, which exploded in midair, pelting a wide area with a murderous hail of musket balls. The only drawback to this technology—whose future was obviously assured—lay in the difficulty of adjusting the fuse so that the shell would burst at the proper distance from the ground. But Major Bull (one of the very few British officers of the time who wore a beard) knew his business. The shells and shrapnel began to explode above the tirailleurs hidden among the trees and in the midst of the infantry columns that had advanced as far as the hedgerows, and almost at once the French started retreating in disorder, while the Guards went forward with fixed bayonets and retook possession of the wood.

  TWENTY - FOUR

  THE BOMBARDMENT IN THE HOUGOUMONT SECTOR

  When he perceived that all the progress made by his men in more than an hour’s hard fighting had been nullified, Prince Jérome must surely have felt frustrated. His brother—or so the prince asserted in his memoirs—had personally ordered him to take Hougoumont “at all costs.” Obviously, he needed to send in more men; Soye’s brigade, therefore, was ordered to move forward in support of Bauduin’s. While Bauduin’s battalions, feeling the effects of the losses they had suffered, stayed in the shelter of a sunken lane, Soye’s men advanced into the open, and in their turn drew the fire of the British artillery. When they reached cover at the edge of the wood, the brigade sent in its skirmishers. Many trees were by then stripped of their branches and in some cases half down, and the tirailleurs who went forward among them once again gained numerical superiority and compelled the defenders to retreat to the château and the garden. There, however, the attack stalled, because taking the barricaded gate and the garden wall by storm was clearly impossible.

  A bombardment by the French artillery broke the stalemate and allowed the embattled brigades to return to the attack. Right from the beginning of the action, Reille’s guns had been firing at everything in sight, and even though the distance (a good thousand yards, on average) represented the limit of his 6-pounders’ range, a disconcerting number of cannonballs nonetheless reached their targets. All the British eyewitness accounts confirm that the infantry massed on the high ground beyond Hougoumont came under fire from the very first moment and suffered a steady attrition that gradually began to wear on the men’s nerves. The column of companies, the formation in which most of Wellington’s battalions were deployed, waiting to enter into contact with the enemy, was a deep formation, with all ten companies lined up one behind the other, like rungs on a ladder. It was easy to maneuver units so deployed—a column could transform itself into a line in a few minutes and into a square in even less time than that—and therefore this was the ideal formation for waiting troops; but it certainly wasn’t suitable for withstanding artillery fire.

  The Twenty-third Fusiliers, whose position was behind the Guards, came under fire from some French guns that had been brought up as far as the Nivelles road; after several men had already been wounded, a ball scored a direct hit on a captain, killing him instantly, whereupon Colonel Ellis ordered his troops to lie down. The Fifty-first Light, holding the extreme right of the Allied line, west of Hougoumont, faced an expanse of grain fields, taller than a man, in the midst of which French skirmishers were hiding, and so the British regiment was under both musket and artillery fire. Sergeant Wheeler found the experience anything but pleasant, and the men of the Fifteenth Hussars, who had been detached to cover this flank, must have felt the same. “A shell now fell into the column of the 15th Huzzars and bursted,” he recalled. “I saw a sword and scabbard fly out from the column…. grape and she
lls were dupping about like hail, this was devilish annoying. As we could not see the enemy, altho they were giving us a pretty good sprinkling of musketry, our buglers sounded to lie down.” One after the other, all the regiments eventually took the same precaution, and all that multitude of soldiers lay facedown on the wet earth while French cannonballs whizzed over their heads.

  A first consequence of the bombardment, therefore, was that the British infantry was kept under pressure and forced to remain under cover as much as possible. But, even more important for the French, their guns distracted the British artillery, which had demonstrated its effectiveness early in the attack, whenever Reille’s battalions had exposed themselves in closed formation. Napoleon’s artillery outnumbered that of his foe, and it had been ordered to deliver counterbattery fire—that is, to fire on the enemy’s guns—whenever possible. Wellington, on the other hand, had expressly ordered his battery commanders not to let themselves be lured into artillery duels, which were a waste of precious ammunition. As Napoleon himself observed, for artillery to respond to enemy fire in kind was practically an automatic reflex. “When artillerymen are under attack from an enemy battery, they can never be made to fire on massed infantry. It’s natural cowardice, the violent instinct of self-preservation: men immediately defend themselves from their attackers and try to destroy them, in order to avoid being destroyed themselves.”

  As soon as the British artillerymen in the batteries stationed behind Hougoumont realized that the French guns were firing on them, Wellington’s prohibition was promptly forgotten. Captain Mercer’s troop, placed at the end of the artillery line with orders to fire on any French cavalry that advanced too far, quickly came under fire and lost a few horses; since his battery had more than two hundred of them, they presented the most obvious target. Irritated, Mercer decided to flout his orders and opened fire against the French artillery (“a folly, for which I would have paid dearly had our Duke chanced to be in our part of the field”), but had to desist almost at once, because he realized he was drawing the attention of too many enemy batteries and risked getting the worst of it in a protracted duel. A short distance behind his troop, the infantry of the Fourteenth Regiment (waggishly nicknamed “the Peasants,” because they were all extremely young recruits just arrived from rural Buckinghamshire) were lying on the ground, but still in square, as the French cavalry wasn’t far away: Mercer caught glimpses of their lances, with their white and red banners flying above the fields of tall grain that bordered the Nivelles road.