The Battle

by Alessandro Barbero

  If Bülow’s troops, instead of stopping there, had gone down into the Lasne valley, crossed the river, and continued marching along the tracks that led to Fichermont wood, they would have met no resistance worthy of note and would have reached the battlefield by the early afternoon. Perhaps Bülow’s personal characteristics had some influence on the caution of his movements; the general was already an elderly man, a fervent Lutheran, and a composer of religious music, and at the same time much smitten with his own rank and quick to take offense. Gneisenau, his equal in rank but not in seniority, never sent him orders without couching them in the most obsequious terms. But Bülow was also a good general; in 1813, he had routed Marshal Ney at Dennewitz—a feat that had won him, among other things, the title of count.

  When Bülow reached Chapelle-St. Lambert, he saw nothing ahead of him but a steep slope, almost a precipice, where the path descended into the valley; beyond the swollen waters of the Lasne, there was an equally impracticable ascent, up which his guns would have to be hauled and pushed; and beyond that, a thick forest prevented him from seeing anything else. As if that weren’t enough, the instructions transmitted by Gneisenau the previous evening expressly directed Bülow to advance only as far as Chapelle-St. Lambert and not to proceed beyond that place without first having verified that Wellington’s army was indeed engaged in battle at Waterloo; for if at the last moment the duke had decided not to stay where he was and await Napoleon’s attack, the Prussians would not have exposed themselves to it, either.13

  Thus it is difficult to blame General von Bülow, arriving at Chapelle-St. Lambert with his vanguard and knowing that several hours would pass before his whole corps could be assembled there, for being wary of ordering his troops to advance beyond the village. The cannonade had yet to begin at Waterloo, and his orders expressly forbade him to proceed farther without knowledge that the battle was on. As he waited to acquire more information, Bülow decided that the enemy was too close for him to take any chances; he deployed his battalions in battle order, one beside the other, by having them pass from marching formation to attack columns eight ranks deep, preceded by a swarm of skirmishers, as prescribed in the Prussian manual.

  The passage from column of march to deployment by battalions in attack column was one of the most complex maneuvers that troops of those days had to perform. All officers knew, or should have known, the proper sequence of commands, but it was a long process at best, all the more so with exhausted and for the most part insufficiently trained troops like those of the IV Corps. While the Prussian commanders were intent on this maneuver, the opening cannonade at Waterloo could be heard in the distance. This convinced Bülow that there was indeed going to be a battle, but it also reinforced his belief that it was imperative to deploy his troops in battle order before proceeding. Several hours therefore passed between the moment when an officer of the Prussian Hussars, at the head of his patrol, met Captain Taylor near Smohain, and the moment when Bülow’s first battalions, having completed their deployment on the high ground behind Chapelle-St.-Lambert, began to advance. Around one o’clock, when Napoleon noticed that something was happening in that area, the line of Prussian skirmishers had just begun moving out to cross the Lasne and penetrate the Fichermont wood.

  TWENTY - NINE

  NEW ORDERS FOR GROUCHY

  Napoleon’s reaction to the discovery that the columns advancing toward his right wing were not Grouchy’s after all constitutes one of the enigmas of the Battle of Waterloo. In his memoirs, the emperor maintained that he ordered Mouton’s entire corps—or rather, his two remaining divisions, a total of 6,000 muskets and thirty guns—to leave La Belle Alliance, where the corps was lined up in front of the Imperial Guard, and take up a covering position on the right flank, facing the Fichermont wood. This was not a large force, but it was fresh, and the forty-five-year-old Mouton, whose heroism in the 1809 campaign had earned him the title of count de Lobau, was one of the boldest and most enterprising of the French generals. He could well have found a way to hold off the Prussians for a few hours, thus giving Napoleon enough time to win his contest with Wellington.

  Yet Mouton’s troops were not in position to oppose the Prussians when they finally emerged from the Fichermont wood several hours later. All the French managed to do, after much delay, was assume a defensive deployment much farther back than they could have wished. The account of Colonel Combes-Brassard, the VI Corps chief of staff, offered a credible explanation of this puzzling state of affairs and at the same time confirmed the unreliability of Napoleon’s memoirs. Combes-Brassard wrote that Mouton’s troops were indeed posted to the right wing in the early afternoon, but their mission was to support the attack of d’Erlon’s I Corps, and they were all taken completely by surprise when the Prussians appeared on their flank. This interpretation accords perfectly both with a situation that arose in the meantime and with the available accounts of other eyewitnesses. In all probability, the transfer of VI Corps to the right wing was intended to reinforce d’Erlon’s divisions, which were engaged in what the emperor at that moment considered the decisive attack; only later, in an attempt to avoid the accusation of having underestimated the threat posed by Bülow, would Napoleon claim that his maneuver had been directed against the Prussians right from the start.

  Did the emperor do nothing to meet the gathering threat on his right flank? His calculation makes sense in light of another element that formed an integral part of it—the hope and perhaps expectation that Grouchy’s columns would appear on the horizon and take the Prussian columns arriving from Wavre in the flank. That Napoleon cherished this illusion is quite clearly demonstrated by the orders he sent out at the time. When Marbot’s Hussars arrived with their prisoner, the Prussian courier, Soult had just finished writing a message to Grouchy, dated “from the battlefield at Waterloo, at one in the afternoon,” with orders to maneuver his troops in such a way as to approach Napoleon’s army as closely as possible, and moreover “to be always prepared to fall upon any enemy troops that may try to annoy our right, and to crush them.” The emperor had a postscript added to this dispatch: “A letter that has just been intercepted states that General Bülow is to attack our flank. We believe that we see this corps on the high ground at Saint-Lambert; therefore, do not lose an instant in drawing near to us, in order to join us and crush Bülow, whom you will catch in flagrante delicto.”

  Napoleon, in short, was persuaded that Grouchy would arrive on the battlefield in time to resolve any problem caused by the Prussian advance. He is inevitably accused of excessive optimism, but was his conviction genuinely unrealistic? Grouchy would have had to cover twenty-five kilometers, starting from Gembloux, where he spent the night, then passing by Sart-à-Walhain (in accordance with his plan as stated in his last dispatch) before reaching Chapelle-St. Lambert. Such a distance on paths and tracks in bad condition, in heavily wooded country, and with the River Dyle to cross would ordinarily have taken twelve or thirteen hours of march for a column of infantry with all its wagons and guns, but an energetic commander could have done it in less time. If Grouchy had in fact begun his march at six in the morning, as his dispatch claimed, his columns might have appeared in the neighborhood of Chapelle-St. Lambert in the late afternoon, in time to attack Bülow’s flank and rear before the Prussian could have time to organize an attack of his own. More than one field marshal had successfully carried out undertakings of this kind.

  This hypothesis, however, was based on the assumption that Marshal Grouchy, once he reached Sart-à-Walhain, would turn northwest immediately and cross the Dyle by the bridges of Mousty and Ottignies. (Not coincidentally, Napoleon had expressly included these two places among those he required Colonel Marbot’s Hussar patrols to reconnoiter.) Only in this case could Grouchy’s columns have appeared on the horizon in time, despite weary hours of marching, and engaged the Prussians, who would have been no less exhausted than the marshal’s men. Yet, while Soult was adding the postscript to his one o’clock dispatch, Grouchy’s c
olumns had already advanced too far north to use those bridges, and the marshal, positively informed that the bulk of the Prussian forces were concentrated around Wavre, had decided to head straight for them and was continuing his northward march.

  Grouchy has been harshly criticized for not having heeded the advice of his subordinates, who wanted to march not northward but westward, where the thunder of cannon fire was growing increasingly intense; but the orders Grouchy had thus far received from Napoleon left the marshal no other option, and the emperor should have known this. The previous day, when he charged Grouchy with pursuing the retreating Prussians, Napoleon had stressed to him the necessity of maintaining contact at all costs with the enemy: Follow him closely, the emperor said, “with your sword against his back.” At that moment, everyone in the French command was convinced that the Prussians were retiring on Gembloux and Namur—that is, toward the east—and Grouchy had naturally sent his columns marching off in that direction. The emperor’s following dispatch, dated from Le Caillou at ten in the morning and received by Grouchy in the early afternoon, acknowledged that at least a part of the Prussian forces had instead headed north, toward Wavre, but nevertheless obliged the marshal to follow them in the same direction rather than turn west toward Waterloo. (“His Majesty desires that you direct your movements toward Wavre … pushing before you the units of the Prussian army which have taken that direction, and which are supposed to have halted at Wavre, where you must arrive as soon as possible.”)

  While Napoleon’s ten o’clock dispatch, in addition to the instructions above, enjoined Grouchy to maneuver in such a way as to approach the main French force and to stay in contact with its operations, the emperor clearly wanted Grouchy to make this approach by way of Wavre. At ten o’clock, in fact, far from suspecting that they had already begun marching on Waterloo, Napoleon was still convinced that the Prussian columns were beating a breathless retreat. He knew that the Prussians could, theoretically, have turned west at Wavre, but he believed that the appearance of Grouchy’s cavalry would be enough to send the enemy fleeing northward again. Grouchy, he thought, would occupy Wavre, seize its bridge, and then, finally, turn west to bring the weight of his troops to bear on the battle. Around one o’clock, when Napoleon realized that things were not going as planned and that the Prussians were on the point of threatening his right wing, he sent Grouchy a fresh dispatch, very different from the previous one. The only urgent requirement of these new orders was that Grouchy should head for Waterloo at once in order to take Bülow “in flagrante delicto”; but the emperor forgot that the marshal was still obeying his earlier orders and would continue to do so for many hours before the new dispatch could come into his hands.

  If anyone should be held responsibile for the misunderstanding, therefore, it is Napoleon, not Grouchy; the emperor knew the orders he had sent the marshal, and had he checked them against a map, he could not have expected any help from Grouchy, who at that moment was marching north to reach Wavre “as soon as possible.” Even if he met no opposition, Grouchy could not have arrived at Chapelle-St. Lambert before night. Of course, he could have decided to disobey the orders, as his corps commanders proposed, but Grouchy had just been promoted to marshal and was exercising an independent command for the first time in his life; not surprisingly, he chose the more prudent course.

  Napoleon declared, in his memoirs, that he told Soult, “This morning we had ninety chances in our favor; now we have sixty against forty. And if Grouchy redresses the grievous error he made yesterday by wasting time in Gembloux and sends his troops quickly, our victory will be all the more decisive, for Bülow’s corps will be completely destroyed.” As is often the case in the emperor’s memoirs, these words must have been a mixture of recollections, some authentic and some conveniently revised; the allusion to the “grievous error” has all the appearance of having been imagined in the years following the event, after the legend of Grouchy’s fatal delay had already been created. But the hope that the marshal, in spite of everything, could still arrive in time to destroy not only Wellington’s army but also Bülow’s corps seems to reflect what was going through Napoleon’s mind while Mouton left to reconnoiter the ground where he would have to deploy his corps, Desales’s guns continued to pound away at Wellington’s position, and d’Erlon’s infantry, stirred by the rhythmic beating of its drums, prepared to advance against La Haye Sainte.

  THIRTY

  LA HAYE SAINTE

  The center of the Allied front was held by German troops. To the right of the Brussels road (from Wellington’s point of view), a brigade of the King’s German Legion was deployed, commanded by Colonel von Ompteda. This brigade contained four battalions, one of which was inside the buildings of La Haye Sainte. Farther to the right was another German brigade, composed of Hanoverian regulars: five battalions under the command of General Count Kielmansegge, a Saxon noble famous for his hatred of Napoleon and for his scandalous separation from his wife, who by contrast was an enthusiastic admirer of the emperor and had her permanent residence in Paris. In all, these two brigades counted fewer than five thousand muskets, since none of the battalions of the King’s German Legion, which had been partially demobilized the previous year in the belief that Europe was entering a long period of peace, could field as many as four hundred men.

  The main road formed the boundary between these troops, which belonged to Sir Charles Alten’s division, and those of Sir Thomas Picton’s division, which was deployed to their left. Since the main road cut into the hill at this point like a deep furrow, Picton’s men (except for the 1/95th, which was stationed right beside the road) were not involved in the defense of La Haye Sainte. The troops of Ompteda and Kielmansegge, after sending out a line of skirmishers to take up positions in the ravine at the bottom of the slope, were deployed in columns of companies; a traumatic encounter with French cavalry at Quatre Bras had left their officers rather nervous, and so they had decided to keep their men in this formation, which could be transferred into squares in a matter of seconds, rather than to deploy them in line. To avoid offering too conspicuous a target to enemy artillery, the men had been ordered to lie down on the reverse slope of the ridge. Two batteries, each with six 9-pounder guns, were positioned a few dozen yards ahead of them, on the face of the slope that descended toward the enemy. The battery on the right was German, commanded by Captain Cleeve, and it, too, belonged to the King’s German Legion; the one on the left, just behind the farm, was a British battery commanded by Sir Hew Ross.

  Colonel von Ompteda had posted a battalion of light infantry, the Second KGL, under the command of Major von Baring, to garrison La Haye Sainte farm. There were fewer than four hundred of these German riflemen, with their dark green uniforms and their special training in marksmanship, and they represented the first obstacle in the path of the French attack. Like the British fusiliers of the Ninety-fifth Rifles, the men of the KGL’s light infantry carried, instead of the common smoothbore musket, the Baker rifle; its grooved barrel permitted accurate fire at up to two or three hundred yards from the target, so that irregular fire from these rifles was much more deadly than that of the smoothbores used by the line battalions. However, since it was rifled, the Baker had an essential shortcoming: because the ball had to be forced down a grooved bore, and because riflemen did not use prepared cartridges, but a more old-fashioned procedure that involved pouring powder from a flask, the loading process was much slower. As a result, troops armed with Baker rifles could fire only one shot per minute, as opposed to the two or even three shots that could be fired by musketeers. Since for the military leaders of the day the importance of rapidity in firing was an indisputable dogma, nobody had ever considered arming the entire infantry with rifled muskets, and this fact led to a further drawback: Troops armed with rifles needed special munitioning, as they were unable to use the ammunition issued to the other troops, a decisive problem in the fight for La Haye Sainte.

  Although the farmhouse at La Haye Sainte was a respectable e
difice, as a defensive position the farm was in no way comparable to the château of Hougoumont. The rustic house, the stables, and the barn—all of them built of brick and stone and covered by tiled roofs—faced a walled courtyard. The main gate opened directly onto the road. On the other side of the barn, the side closest to the French, there was an orchard surrounded by a hedge, and there was a kitchen garden behind the house. That morning, upon being informed that they would have to defend the farm, Baring’s men had set about fortifying it, but the results weren’t as satisfactory as at Hougoumont. The greatest problem had been caused by the troops themselves: The previous evening, in a conspicuous demonstration of improvidence, they had torn down the barn door, which faced the fields to the west, and burned it as firewood to cook their soup. The farm, therefore, was open on that side. The mule that was carrying the battalion’s entrenching tools had gone lost the previous day, so there was not so much as an ax to work with, and the battalion’s sappers, who could have offered valuable assistance, had been sent to Hougoumont. The riflemen did what they could, opening three loopholes in the walls, but they could build no firing platforms, because all the available lumber, including the farm carts, had been burned during the night.

  Behind the house, not far from the kitchen garden but on the other side of the main road, three companies of the 1/95th Rifles occupied a hillock or knoll that, along with the sandpit that had been excavated at its base, offered an excellent position for crack sharpshooters, who could keep the road under fire. Sir Andrew Barnard had deployed the other half of his battalion a little farther back, along the chemin d’Ohain, and had ordered his adjutant, familiarly known to everyone as Johnny Kincaid, to command the advanced position. Since morning, the men of this battalion had been piling up tree branches and debris from the farm on the road, in an effort to erect an abatis, or barricade, that would obstruct the passage of enemy cavalry. Captain Kincaid was observing the work with satisfaction, when to his surprise a troop of British light dragoons passed that way and charged through the abatis, scattering it like straw. But the riflemen were stubborn, so they gathered their materials once more and again blocked the road. Despite their efforts, one of Wellington’s aides-de-camp, Lieutenant Cathcart, would later remark of this barricade, “If I recollect right it was not much of a one at any time.” Rather more than to this pile of bushes and branches, the defense of the position was entrusted to the rifled muskets of the Ninety-fifth, perhaps the most elite unit in the entire British army, and to two of Sir Hew Ross’s artillery pieces, which he had deployed on the road itself, next to the sandpit.