The Battle

by Alessandro Barbero

  However, there was such a great distance between the mouths of the guns and the positions they were to attack that the French cannonades seemed more likely to affect enemy morale than anything else. At a thousand yards, not even 12-pounders would fire their projectiles with any great accuracy, while firing 6-pounders at that distance was equivalent to shooting at random. But evidently Napoleon preferred not to risk his guns by sending them too far forward; the great concentration of fire from so many muzzles would compensate for the inaccuracy of their aim. Besides, the task of the Grande Batterie was, above all, to achieve a psychological effect; this is clear from the emperor’s order to Desales, in which the latter is expressly enjoined to open fire with all his guns at the same moment, “to astonish the enemy and shake his morale.”

  One of Napoleon’s artillery officers, however, was not content with morale-shaking. General Ruty, the overall artillery commander of the Armée du Nord, joined Desales as he was overseeing the deployment of his guns and observed that it would be a good idea to move the batteries forward during the course of the attack so that they would not have to fire from so prohibitive a distance. In anticipation of such an advance, therefore, Ruty ordered Desales to carry out a reconnaissance in the direction of the enemy lines and identify a suitable position. Convinced as he was “by theory and by practice” that moving so much artillery in the middle of a battle was always dangerous, Desales had his doubts, but nonetheless rode his horse down the slope, and within a few hundred yards, he discovered a spur of ground almost within musket range of La Haye Sainte. The terrain formed a natural platform on which he could deploy his guns in case of need.

  His reconnaissance complete, Desales turned back to start the attack, assigning commanders to the different sectors of the Grande Batterie. Desales wanted the most expert of his subordinates, Colonel Bernard, to command the 12-pounder batteries, but the colonel had lost an eye at the siege of Zaragoza and, as he pointed out to Desales, was not the most suitable man for the job; at that distance, the 12-pounders were the only guns one could still try to aim. Therefore, the one-eyed man was given command of the 6-pounder batteries, and Desales put another colonel, younger and still all in one piece, in charge of the 12-pounders. The general then reported to Marshal Ney, who was caracoling impatiently in the center of the deployment, and informed him that, as far as the artillery was concerned, the battle could begin.

  When the Grande Batterie opened fire between noon and one o’clock, fierce fighting had been going on around Hougoumont for some time; nevertheless, the roar of all those guns drowned out every other sound, and Desales felt the earth shuddering under his feet. From time immemorial, soldiers in the French army had referred to cannon with a nickname that mingled familiarity and revulsion—le brutal— and they were surely right. One of the first shots that struck the little hill where Captain Kincaid was stationed scored a direct hit on the only tree, sending a hail of branches showering down on the battalion’s two medical officers, who had set up an aid station in that spot, believing it to be safe. However, Wellington’s more experienced soldiers quickly realized that the enemy was carrying on this massive bombardment principally for psychological effect. An officer in Picton’s division later recalled, “The greater part, fortunately, went over our heads, carrying one off here and there. This fire was much too high; the old hands said it was meant to intimidate, as usual.”

  The cannonballs and shells that passed high above the ridge nevertheless came down vertically upon the troops massed in the second line. Perhaps the French batteries at a certain point deliberately began firing as high as possible in order to reach the dead ground behind the ridge, especially after the Dutch-Belgian infantry, initially deployed on the exposed forward slope, hastily withdrew to a more sheltered position. Firing blindly in this way meant that actually hitting someone was a matter of chance, but the bombardment was so intense that the infantry soldiers stretched out on the ground behind La Haye Sainte and behind the chemin d’Ohain all the way to Papelotte nevertheless began to take losses. A few too many shots reached even the reserve cavalry deployed on Wellington’s left wing several hundred yards behind the ridge, and Sir William Ponsonby, who commanded one of the two heavy cavalry brigades, had his men withdraw and search for less dangerous ground.

  Any calculation of the intensity of the fire produced by the Grande Batterie can only be based on statistical averages, which are best treated with suspicion. Desales had twenty-four 12-pounder guns and thirty 6-pounders, to which were added the horse artillery’s eighteen 6-pounders. The rate of fire was one shot per minute for the 12-pounders, which were more difficult to return to their positions after recoiling, and two per minute for the lighter guns, for a total of 120 shots per minute. However, the bombardment was dispersed along a front of more than two thousand yards, and the French gunners conscientiously did their best to pound it all. Even General von Vincke, who commanded the Hanoverian militia brigade stationed on the extreme left of Wellington’s line, reported that the enemy batteries took up their posts at noon, and despite a distance of two thousand paces, which should have rendered them harmless, they were able to strike the rear of his position, behind his lines, so that the brigade medical station had to be moved farther back.

  On average, therefore, one shot per minute was fired for every twenty yards of front. The front, however, was several hundred yards deep; the shots fired with the highest trajectories landed inside this rectangle at random, and the soaked, soft ground stopped projectiles from bouncing very far. This explains why the Allied losses seemed in the long run bearable, despite the fact that the occasional direct hit sent shivers down the spines of all those who had the misfortune to witness it. While Ponsonby’s cavalry was withdrawing to a more protected spot, Lieutenant Wyndham of the Scots Grays, a young officer who had joined the regiment barely a month previously, came across five or six Scottish soldiers who were carrying one of their wounded officers to the rear. Wyndham was considerably shaken “when a shell came and fell near them and destroyed nearly the whole [party].” As soon as the French guns began their bombardment, the Allied batteries duly replied, once again ignoring the orders of the duke. Through his telescope, Desales saw that the enemy cannon were protected by the sunken lane as though by a trench and that it would not be at all easy to silence them. The French artillery was more exposed, and the first casualties weren’t long in coming: A shell exploded a short distance from Desales, wounding all those around him. Struck in the shoulder by a shell fragment, the general felt himself to see if he was wounded, but to his relief he discovered that the fragment had lodged itself in the collar of his coat; however, his arm stayed numb from the contusion for a long time, and from that point on Desales maintained a healthy respect for the precision of the British counterbattery fire.

  Although the French general could not know it, the situation on Mont-Saint-Jean ridge was even more disconcerting. With mounting uneasiness, the officers of the Allied infantry watched artillery caissons struck by enemy cannonballs blow up before their eyes; as the smoke cleared, they could see that some batteries, running short of ammunition, were harnessing horses to limbers and preparing to clear out of that inferno. Les belles filles de l’Empereur, “the Emperor’s beautiful daughters”—as the French gunners affectionately called their 12-pounders—were doing their job well.

  D’Erlon’s infantry soldiers, massed immediately behind the guns, could tell from the movement of the couriers and the gesticulations of the commanders that the moment was about to arrive when they would begin marching toward the Allied positions and “comb their hair for them,” as the soldiers said. Captain Martin of the Forty-fifth Ligne, a Swiss barely twenty years old, was in a good humor, and so were all his troops; the night had been horrendous, but morning had brought a little cow meat, which seemed delicious to such hungry men, and a great deal of brandy, of which all had drunk their fill. “We were all getting ready, cleaning our weapons, urging one another to do well so we could finish the campai
gn with this one stroke. Alas! We didn’t know how right we were.”

  TWENTY - SEVEN

  NEWS OF THE PRUSSIANS

  On the high ground behind Rossomme farm, Napoleon waited for Marshal Ney to set d’Erlon’s infantry in motion. Major Lemonnier-Delafosse, General Foy’s aide-de-camp, was there, too, expecting the arrival of an artillery battery that he was to guide into position. While he waited, the major observed his emperor: “He was sitting on a straw chair in front of a rustic table and holding his map open on it. His famous spyglass was in his hand, and he often pointed it at various parts of the battlefield. When he rested his eyes, he picked up a wheat straw and put it in his mouth like a toothpick. To his left stood Marshal Soult, alone, awaiting his orders, while ten paces behind him all the members of his staff were grouped together on horseback. Sappers from the engineers were leveling the ground around and making ramps so that people could reach the Emperor more easily…. In the end, I had to go away with the artillery, and I never saw him again.”

  Napoleon didn’t remain seated in his straw chair the whole time. De Coster, the guide, described how the emperor walked up and down, sometimes with folded arms, but more often with his hands behind his back, or with his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his overcoat; now he looked at his watch, now he took a pinch of tobacco, now he brought the telescope to his eye and surveyed the battlefield. During one of these surveys he seemed to catch a glimpse of something in the distance, on the right, something that hadn’t been there before. The emperor asked Soult for his opinion, and after examining the horizon, the general affirmed that they were looking at troops in movement. The other officers hastened to point their telescopes, but since it was a hazy day, there was a variety of perceptions: One thought it was a grove of trees, while others saw troops at rest with their weapons stacked. But someone declared in agreement with Soult that not only were they troops, but they were moving in their direction.

  Comparing what they saw with the map, the French calculated that if indeed they were looking at marching columns, the head of those columns must be approaching Chapelle-St. Lambert, a village four or five miles away, just on the other side of the River Lasne; which meant that they would be able to reach the extreme right of the French line, deployed in front of Papelotte, in about three hours. Soult suggested that it might be Grouchy’s troops, and at first glance the hypothesis appeared to them plausible as well as pleasantly reassuring. But the fact that it was even taken into consideration indicates that the emperor and his general weren’t working with their habitual efficiency. In fact, Grouchy’s last dispatch, dated at six in the morning, revealed that at that time he was still in Gembloux; his plan was to march toward Sart-à-Walhain—that is, farther to the northeast—before turning northwest toward Wavre, after making sure that the bulk of the Prussian troops had retreated in that direction. Had the emperor bent over his map and calculated the distances with his compass, as had been his custom in the past, he would have seen at once the physical impossibility that Grouchy, given the time of his departure and the direction he proposed to take, could have already reached Chapelle-St. Lambert. But nobody took the trouble to make those calculations, and the dangerously vague idea that Grouchy would shortly appear on the horizon continued to waft through everyone’s head.

  In any case, the emperor, though still uncertain, ordered the two cavalry divisions commanded by Domon and Subervie to deploy as cover for the right flank as far as the Fichermont wood, which closed off the battlefield on that side. This decision suggests that Napoleon did not really believe that a threat was going to materialize from that direction; those six regiments of light cavalry, a little more than 2,000 horsemen in all, were certainly not the right troops to infiltrate the wood and deny the Prussian vanguard passage over the Lasne, and in fact they limited themselves to taking up positions on the near side of Fichermont. Had the emperor sent a couple of battalions of light infantry into the wood instead of cavalry, pushing out a line of skirmishers as far as the escarpment that overlooked the watercourse, General von Bülow’s advance might have been delayed almost indefinitely. But evidently, Napoleon’s intention was simply to reinforce the cavalry screen on that flank and multiply reconnaissances to identify the approaching troops, in the hope that they were really Grouchy’s. General Domon himself interpreted his mission in the most optimistic sense: He told his officers that the battle was won, that their task was to implement the linkage with Grouchy’s troops, and that they would sleep that night in Brussels.

  Nevertheless, all uncertainty about the troops that could be glimpsed beyond the bell tower of Chapelle-St. Lambert was soon dispelled, because a patrol from the Seventh Hussars arrived, bringing the emperor a Prussian prisoner. They had been sent by their commander, Colonel Marbot, who had that morning been ordered to make a reconnaissance beyond the French right flank. Once they were through the Fichermont wood, the Hussars were to patrol the roads and the bridges over the Lasne and the Dyle in anticipation of making contact with Grouchy’s vanguard. Marbot was an old fox who would later write one of the most colorful memoirs in the epic of Napoleon. He was also a soldier who knew his business; the first Prussian courier who tried to pass his way was caught and sent to the emperor, together with the dispatch he was carrying. It was a note addressed to Wellington, informing him that Bülow’s corps, marching as promised to the battlefield, had reached Chapelle-St. Lambert. The prisoner, who spoke French, did not hesitate to assure the emperor that the troops visible in the distance were indeed the vanguard of Bülow’s corps, that the entire Prussian army had spent the night at Wavre, and that during their march that morning, they hadn’t encountered a single Frenchman.

  By then, Wellington had been aware for some time that the Prussians were on the way. That morning, a Prussian Hussar officer at the head of a cavalry patrol had come into contact with a squadron of the British Tenth Hussars, which had been assigned to guard the extreme left of the Allied deployment. After communicating to Captain Taylor, commander of the British squadron, the momentous news that Bülow’s corps was now nearing the battlefield, the Prussian and his patrol turned back. Taylor immediately sent one of his officers to inform the duke, and then he and the rest of his men began anxiously scrutinizing the horizon, waiting for the Prussian columns to appear. But their wait turned out to be disagreeably long, and the occasional arrival of one of the duke’s aides-de-camp, sent out to Taylor’s position to determine whether anything had finally appeared, did nothing but add to the captain’s embarrassment. He saw—too far off for him to be able to do anything about it—some French cavalry leave the field on what appeared to be a reconnaissance mission, heading in the direction from which the Prussians were supposed to arrive; but of the Prussians themselves he saw no trace.

  Nevertheless, word that the Prussians were coming spread rapidly among the Allied officers. Sir Augustus Frazer learned it from one of Lord Uxbridge’s aides-de-camp, who was looking for the duke, wishing to report the news to him, and asked Sir Augustus to join him in the effort. Frazer diligently copied Captain Taylor’s report, according to which Bülow and his troops had arrived at a place that Sir Augustus transcribed as “Occey”; afterward, when he tried to find the place on the map, he was predictably unable to locate it anywhere. In any case, Frazer galloped off in search of Wellington but stopped on the way to communicate the news to Sir Thomas Picton and lingered to discuss the situation with him and to adjust the position of some guns; when, much later, he finally found the duke and delivered Taylor’s report to Wellington’s secretary, Lord Fitzroy Somerset, the latter icily informed him that “his Grace was aware of it.”

  TWENTY - EIGHT

  BÜLOW’S MARCH

  Although no one realized it, the information that the Prussian officer had given Captain Taylor was excessively optimistic; General von Bülow’s march turned out to be much more difficult than had been foreseen. The roads his troops were advancing on were dreadful; actually, they were simple dirt paths, in terrible condition a
fter days of rain. To follow them, the troops had to go up and down hills, traverse densely wooded areas, and pass over streams and rivers so swollen that only a few bridges would allow the men to cross them safely. It was the third consecutive day of marching for the exhausted men of the IV Corps, most of whom were inexperienced Landwehr recruits, and hardly any of whom had had anything to eat that morning except a little bread and brandy. Furthermore, they had to haul along with them some eighty-eight artillery pieces—howitzers and cannon—while sinking to their knees in mud.

  Worse yet, IV Corps, even though it was the only corps in the Prussian army whose troops were still fresh, was also the one that had bivouacked farthest away. The men began marching at the first light of dawn, but they had to go through the encampments of the other three corps, and then through the narrow lanes and alleys of the little town of Wavre, before they could even set foot on the first of the muddy tracks that would lead them to Waterloo. The main stone bridge across the Dyle was located in the center of Wavre, and the situation that developed there can be easily imagined by anyone who has ever been stuck in a traffic jam. At one point, a single 12-pounder gun broke an axle and blocked the entire column; the street had barely been cleared when a mill near the bridge caught fire, and the flames quickly leaped to the adjoining buildings. Since, at that moment, the bridge was crowded with ammunition wagons, panic spread through the troops, and the column dissolved into a mob of howling runaways; only with difficulty could their officers succeed in getting them in line again on the other side of the bridge. The cumulative effect of so many delays was such that the last of the four brigades of IV Corps got under way only at ten in the morning, by which time its men, having been roused at dawn, had been standing in formation for six hours. By then, also, Bülow’s column was strung out about six miles long, and his vanguard had already reached Chapelle-St. Lambert.