Like Mercer unable to resist temptation, other battery commanders began to respond to the French fire. Captain Samuel Bolton, who commanded six 9-pounders drawn up six or seven hundred yards behind the château, detached three of them to engage a French battery that, according to one of his officers, “was committing great devastation amongst our troops in and near Hougoumont.” Those three guns kept firing at the enemy battery for more than an hour, trying to force it to change position. However, the artillery support was scarcely appreciated by the British infantry deployed in that area of the field. Things were going fairly calmly for the Seventy-first Regiment, whose soldiers were lying in a hollow. But then Bolton’s guns arrived and took up positions right in front of them, “which, attracting the Enemy’s attention, brought down a heavy fire of shot and shell, very destructive in its consequences to our Columns lying in the rear,” as an officer of the Seventy-first remembered with annoyance many years later.
Major Bull’s howitzer battery, which had directed such effective fire against the French infantry that penetrated Hougoumont wood, also came under attack from the enemy artillery, and Bull, too, lost no time in responding in kind. Later, he justified his actions by declaring that no fewer than twenty-two French guns had been firing directly at his position. In the long run, the losses in men, horses, and wagons and the expenditure of shells wore down the battery to such a point that, no more than two hours after the beginning of the battle, Bull’s guns were compelled to abandon the line of fire. Wellington, who was still in the area, was so irritated by the disobedience of his artillery that he gave his aides orders to place the first battery commander he came upon under arrest. The commander in question nevertheless succeeded in convincing the duke that his guns were firing at the enemy infantry and not—as most of his colleagues were doing—at the enemy artillery. Gritting his teeth, Wellington agreed to let the matter drop.
TWENTY - FIVE
THE ATTACK ON THE NORTH GATE
Although the battle flared up throughout the Hougoumont sector between noon and one o’clock, for the majority of the soldiers massed there this meant only that they had to remain stretched out on the ground in hollows or sunken lanes, while every now and then a shell exploded in their vicinity or a cannonball passed hissing over their heads. The artillery was more and more engaged in dueling, battery against battery, while losses of men and horses mounted, guns overheated and became less accurate, and ammunition chests were emptied at an alarming rate. But this situation, which seemed to be a stalemate, actually favored the French infantry, which was no longer pinned down by the enemy guns. Though the French were incapable of taking the south wall of the château by storm, they could still maneuver around the flanks: through the pastures to their right, where Bull’s howitzers had pounded them not long before, and through the stretch of flat country to their left, under cover from the horse artillery troops that had advanced beyond the Nivelles road.
Prince Jérome’s division, therefore, began to maneuver. Having sent their light companies forward into the wood, Soye’s battalions marched in column through the pastures, got past the hedges, and invaded the orchard. The British and German defenders commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Lord Saltoun were forced to abandon the orchard and were chased back into the hollow way that ran in front of the château. There, however, Soye’s attack came to a halt. The so-called hollow way was deeply entrenched, bordered with thorny hedgerows, and defended by hundreds of muskets, as was the garden wall, and they were equally difficult to get over. Incapable of going forward, the French troops who had passed through the pastures and into the orchard started to engage the defenders in an intense firefight that was unlikely to turn to their advantage. In an attempt to dislodge the defenders from their positions, the French hauled a cannon into the orchard. A worried Lord Saltoun responded by ordering his men to make a sortie and capture the gun, but the withering enemy fire compelled them to scamper back to their covered positions. Their young lieutenant colonel, commanding from horseback and offering the easiest of targets, escaped without a scratch, though in the course of several hours’ fighting he had four horses killed under him. The cannon, however, proved less effective than the French had hoped, and the exchange of musketry went on, more or less inconclusively; but the French, being more exposed, suffered greater losses.
During this time, the troops of Bauduin’s former brigade were also maneuvering, but over the flat land on the west side of the château. Captain Mercer, from his position on the high ground overlooking the Nivelles road, watched the French and British light troops engage in an interminable skirmish amid the tall grain. Under enemy pressure, the British skirmishers were obliged to give ground, not enough to endanger the position, but enough to allow the enemy infantry to maneuver unmolested on the plain. Colonel de Cubières, who had taken command of the entire brigade after Bauduin’s death, had already lost many men in the wood, but he had enough left to try another way. His soldiers, less troubled by the British artillery, advanced in the open, went around the west side of the château, descended into a sunken lane, and found themselves in front of the north gate. This large wooden portal was the only means of communication between the Hougoumont garrison and the reserves deployed farther to the rear, and therefore it was not barricaded; a short while before, in fact, the Guards had brought an ammunition cart through the gate and into the farmyard.
The appearance of Cubières and his men before the north gate marked the most critical moment for Hougoumont’s defenders, and it is no coincidence that more than one British officer, many years after the battle, still remembered the French commander on his horse, one arm in a sling because of a wound he had suffered at Quatre Bras two days before, urging on his tirailleurs.
Colonel de Cubières, baron of the empire, was by birth the Marquis Despans de Cubières and was, therefore, one of the many young nobles of the ancien régime (no more than children at the time of the French Revolution) who had sided with the emperor and made a career in the Grande Armée. When Napoleon had returned from Elba three months previously, the twenty-nine-year-old Cubières was second-in-command of the First Légère, and he had been present at the moral crisis of his soldiers, divided between the oath they had sworn to the Bourbons and their old loyalty to the emperor. Very soon after Napoleon’s arrival in Paris, the regiment passed in review before him, and he asked who its commander was. Cubières took a step forward and said, “Sire, it’s Colonel de Beurnonville, but he’s ill.” Napoleon replied, “Beurnonville’s not one of ours. From now on, it is you, Colonel Cubières, who will take command of the 1st Légère.” Then the emperor walked away, bringing the colonel’s protests to an end with a wave of his hand.
Napoleon’s exit line is indicative of an often overlooked aspect of these events—how profoundly ideological was the 1815 Armée du Nord, which had been purged, insofar as possible, of everyone who was not “one of ours.” But, even for those times, Cubières was an exceptional man, and he commanded an exceptional regiment. On May 2 the soldiers, like all French citizens, had been called to vote in a plebiscite on the so-called Acte additionnel, the new constitution that Napoleon had devised for France. In front of his regiment assembled on the parade ground, Colonel de Cubières declared that he would vote against the constitution because it gave the emperor too much power and could not be the foundation of a genuinely liberal France; furthermore, such a hastily arranged plebiscite was in itself undemocratic; and therefore he, Cubières, called upon the soldiers of his regiment to vote against the measure. The First Légère was the only regiment in the army to vote against the Acte additionnel, and it did so nearly unanimously. (The sole exception was a captain, who explained, “I love the colonel with all my heart, but when it comes to making constitutions, he’s not so clever as the Emperor, who’s made plenty of them.”) Napoleon was not pleased with the regiment’s vote—before very long, all record of it conveniently disappeared—but Cubières got off with a letter of censure and retained his command.
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bsp; Lieutenant Colonel Macdonell’s two light companies of British Guards were positioned outside the château when Cubières and his men arrived at the north gate. Surprised by the sudden appearance of the French, the Guards beat a hasty retreat, passing through the still-open gate into the farmyard. In the course of this brisk withdrawal, a British sergeant standing very close to Cubières fired on him and knocked him from his horse. The sergeant sprang into the saddle and urged the beast through the gateway, reaching the safety of the farmyard just before his comrades closed the big door. Cubières, who was only wounded, managed to rise to his feet and reach safety, and ever after he was convinced that the British, seeing how disabled he was, had deliberately refrained from shooting at him anymore. Many years later, when he was in the service of the pope as governor of Ancona, Cubières met an officer of the Coldstream Guards, a veteran of Hougoumont, and expressed to him his gratitude for their chivalrous conduct.
While Cubières was being carried to safety, the situation of his men could easily have become precarious; the only way to get in was to hack through the gate, and one of the officers of the First Légère, Lieutenant Legros, whose bulk and strength had earned him the nickname “l’Enfonceur” (“the Basher”), took a sapper’s ax, positioned himself before the gate, and started hacking away. Once a sapper himself, Legros knew how to wield his instrument; soon he smashed through the wooden bar that held the gate closed. Then the rest of the barrier yielded to the pressure of many bodies, and a large number of Frenchmen burst inside. At the beginning of the savage melee that followed, the panicked defenders sought refuge in the surrounding buildings, leaving Legros and his men, for a brief time, masters of the yard. A Frenchman armed with an ax chased a German officer into one of the houses, caught up with him at the door, and chopped off one of his hands.
That morning, Müffling had expressed to Wellington some doubt about the defenders’ ability to hold the château. The duke’s only answer was “Ah, but you don’t know Macdonell.” At a moment of crisis, the lieutenant colonel proved himself worthy of his fame as one of the army’s most formidable warriors. Together with some other officers and a sergeant, the thirty-four-year-old Macdonell was able to fight his way through the enemy, close what was left of the gate, and set another timber in place, after which all the French who had entered the compound were killed, including Legros, except one: Rushing into the farmyard in time to see Macdonell, his face covered with blood, finish barricading the gate, Private Matthew Clay ran into a French drummer boy, whose life had been spared because of his age. Clay took the boy into his care and brought him inside the château, to the room where the wounded had been assembled, telling him to stay there and not to be afraid, because no one was going to hurt him. Meanwhile, the French troops who had remained outside the château compound, raked by the defenders’ precise fire, were beginning to disperse, while those who tried to climb over the wall were struck down one by one.
But many tirailleurs, instead of withdrawing to their own lines, climbed the slope in the direction of the Allied positions, concealing themselves amid the high-standing grain. Directly above them, Lieutenant Colonel Webber-Smith had positioned the six 9-pounder guns of his battery. Like other British artillery commanders, Webber-Smith was completely indifferent to Wellington’s orders prohibiting long-range dueling, and he immediately began firing at the French horse artillery batteries on the other side of the plain. The battery was fully engaged in the combat and had already suffered its first casualties when the French skirmishers hidden in the nearby grain suddenly opened fire. In the course of a few minutes, many gunners and horses were hit, and Webber-Smith had to give orders to limber up the guns and abandon the position before it was too late.
At this point Sir John Byng, who commanded the Guards brigade deployed on the rising ground behind Hougoumont, decided to counterattack in force to alleviate the pressure on the château’s defenders. His two battalions—the Second Coldstream Guards and the 2/3rd Foot Guards—went down the slope in companies, one after the other, and reached the hollow way. Surprised by their arrival, the tirailleurs withdrew in disorder, abandoning even the orchard. After a brief fusillade, some of the guardsmen succeeded in entering the farmyard, the rest got into the garden through a small side door, and soon Lord Saltoun’s exhausted men were relieved. Notwithstanding the losses suffered by the Allied troops, the château was now defended by more than 1,500 muskets, and the chances that the French might overrun it were more and more remote. Not coincidentally, at about one-thirty in the afternoon—precisely when the reinforcements were taking up their positions in and around the château—Wellington left the high ground above Hougoumont for the first time and went to oversee the center of his battle line, where the roar of cannon indicated another thickening storm.
TWENTY - SIX
THE GRANDE BATTERIE
Alittle after eleven in the morning, Count d’Erlon and his artillery commander, General Desales, were observing the French troops as they took up positions on the slope to the right of La Belle Alliance when they were joined by an imperial aide-de-camp, General de La Bédoyère.12 He was carrying the order dictated by the emperor at eleven, commanding I Corps to begin the attack at one o’clock that afternoon in the direction of Mont-Saint-Jean, first sending forward the division on the left and then supporting it with the others in turn, from left to right. The order added that the three reserve artillery batteries attached to I, II, and VI Corps were to mass their powerful 12-pounder guns and attack the center of the enemy position.
After handing Desales the order, La Bédoyère verbally informed him that the emperor was putting him in command of all the artillery deployed in the center. This included not only the three reserve batteries but also I Corps’s four divisional batteries, with seven or eight 6-pounders each. All these cannon would form a Grande Batterie of fifty-four guns, which Desales was to deploy in a single line halfway down the slope of La Belle Alliance. This arrangement sounded familiar to Napoleon’s generals; the emperor hadn’t been an artillery officer in his youth for nothing, and he had always taught that it was necessary to wear down the enemy with a bombardment before attacking him, and that this meant concentrating the highest possible number of guns on the point where the breakthrough was to be made.
A battery was an extremely cumbersome organization. Every 12-pounder piece required about fifteen gunners, many of whom shuttled to and from the ammunition wagons, which for security reasons were parked at least thirty or forty yards to the rear. For every gun, there were two or three wagons, each drawn by four horses, in addition to its limber. This, too, waited at a certain distance, with its six draft horses and their drivers. Each cannon weighed, on average, about a ton, and since there was no mechanism to absorb the recoil, the gun rolled back a couple of yards after every shot and had to be hauled back into position by the gunners. Main strength was also required to carry the cast-iron cannonballs from the wagons to the guns; each ball weighed about ten pounds. Obviously, every gun required a great deal of room to maneuver, so that a French battery with eight pieces, 200 men (gunners and drivers), and almost 150 horses ended up occupying a hundred-yard front, with a depth of around fifty yards. Once the 12-pounders were in position, mired in the sticky mud of the Flemish hills, moving them again was extremely difficult.
The position that Napoleon had chosen for the Grande Batterie presented advantages and disadvantages. The lay of the land, gradually sloping down toward the opposing lines, seemed expressly designed for deploying a great many guns directly in the face of the enemy, with a guaranteed effect on his morale; indeed, the accounts given by the British officers confirm that the arrival of the French batteries, which took up their positions one after the other, was observed with growing uneasiness. Captain Kincaid of the Ninety-fifth Rifles, who was stationed on a little hill a hundred yards behind La Haye Sainte, had been scanning the field with idle curiosity when he realized what was happening in the sector right in front of him, which until a few minutes before ha
d been deserted. From that moment on, he was unable to take his eyes off the “innumerable black specks” which he could see “taking post at regular distances” in advance of the opposing line; “recognizing them as so many pieces of artillery, I knew from experience, although nothing else was yet visible, that they were unerring symptoms of our not being destined to be idle spectators.”
Squinting through telescopes, the French artillery officers scanned the enemy position, trying to identify possible targets. A great many batteries could be seen all along the ridge of Mont-Saint-Jean, some out in the open, some covered by the hedges that bordered the sunken lane. Behind La Haye Sainte, nothing else was visible; to the right, however, a long line of infantry was in plain sight, deployed on the exposed forward slope of the ridge ahead of and below the British guns. It is doubtful that Desales’s artillerymen knew that this line, part of Perponcher’s Netherlands Division, represented only a fraction of the enemy’s left wing, and that most of his soldiers were deployed farther back, lying on the ground on the reverse slope of the ridge, protected and invisible. Nevertheless, the French regarded this visible fraction as a target more than sufficient to justify the artillery concentration ordered by the emperor.
The Battle Page 12
