The Battle

by Alessandro Barbero

  THIRTY - ONE

  THE FIRST ATTACK ON LA HAYE SAINTE

  A little after one o’clock, in accordance with Napoleon’s orders—which required I Corps to begin its attack from the left, directly south of La Haye Sainte, and to extend it gradually rightward—the first of d’Erlon’s divisions, under the command of Donzelot, advanced against Baring’s and Kincaid’s riflemen. Although d’Erlon’s four divisions were identical in structure—each division had two brigades, each brigade had two regiments, each regiment had two battalions—Donzelot’s division was the strongest; many of its battalions comprised six or seven hundred men, whereas the others ranged between four and five hundred. More important, one of the division’s two brigades, namely that of General Schmitz, included the only light infantry regiment assigned to I Corps, the Thirteenth Légère, and was therefore particularly suited to make an assault upon La Haye Sainte.

  The old, experienced Donzelot sent forward his two brigades; Schmitz’s headed straight for the orchard, and Aulard’s advanced farther to the right, with the idea of bypassing the southern boundary of the farm and attacking its eastern flank. At that moment, the sunken position of La Haye Sainte unexpectedly revealed itself to be dangerous for the defenders: Baring, who was in the orchard with half of his men, was surprised to see the line of enemy skirmishes appear, already within musket range, and he had barely had time to order his troops to lie down and hold their fire, so that their volley would have a greater effect when the tirailleurs started firing first. Baring later reported, “The first shot broke the bridle of my horse, and the second killed Major Bösewiel, who was standing near me.” The French, obviously, were aiming at officers. The fusiliers in the orchard fired back, but at that relatively close range the superiority of their Baker rifles was more than offset by the greater time it took to reload them. The defenders, moreover, were heavily outnumbered by the attacking skirmishers, and it quickly became clear that any further defense of the orchard was out of the question. The French generals also realized this, almost at once ordering their men to advance in column. Soon, “demonstrating the greatest contempt for our fire,” they burst into the orchard.

  The sapper companies of I Corps were at the head of the column. These units were made up of men selected for their physical strength and equipped with axes; the emperor had expressly ordered them to be ready to construct barricades around the conquered buildings and prevent the enemy from reoccupying them. One of Marshal Ney’s aides-de-camp, Colonel Levavasseur, had come upon these troops a few minutes previously, sitting at their ease behind a rise in the ground while awaiting the order to attack. The officer in command, recognizing that the colonel was wearing the uniform of an aide-de-camp and was therefore an influential person with access to the powerful, decided that this was his chance to get himself noticed and earn a promotion; he approached Levavasseur, therefore, handed him his visiting card, and exclaimed, “Monsieur l’aide-de-camp, please take this, here is my name!” Then he ordered his drummers to beat the charge and led his sappers toward the orchard.

  When the French burst in, the surviving fusiliers took to their heels and sought refuge in the barn; Baring followed them, still on his horse. A musket ball broke the animal’s leg, Baring was thrown to the ground, and he quickly ordered his adjutant to dismount and took his place. Though he thereby offered the enemy a conspicuous target, it was unassailable dogma that a battle leader had to remain on horseback, and for good reasons: He could see much farther from the saddle, and he could be seen more easily by his men, thus positively and decisively reinforcing their morale. Once they had retreated to the barn, the German riflemen quickly regained their courage, and their fire successfully checked the French in the orchard. French soldiers tried to set the building ablaze, but all the straw had been removed during the night and the barn was empty, so for the moment, the fire failed to catch.

  Meanwhile the other French brigade, commanded by Aulard, had advanced in column along the road. When they came to the abatis, preceded by a line of skirmishers, they were compelled to move farther to the right and into the fields east of La Haye Sainte, while accurate fire from the riflemen in the farm and the sandpit claimed the first victims. Lieutenant Graeme of the King’s German Legion was stationed behind the abatis with a squad of fusiliers, and he was surprised by the great number of skirmishers in front of the enemy column, “as thick almost as an advancing line of our troops.” Despite the heavy fire, the French skirted the barricade and attacked the farm; Graeme and his men barely had time to enter the yard by the main gate and close it behind them. Then they climbed onto the roof of a structure that stood next to the wall, and which everyone called the piggery. From the roof, the riflemen could keep the road under fire even better than they could from behind the abatis, and with relief they watched the French give them a wide berth, not even trying to climb the wall or break through the gate, and continue up the slope toward the sandpit.

  From atop the knoll, Kincaid had watched with mounting concern as the French columns took up positions right in front of him; now, urged on by the obsessive rolling of the drummers and by cries of “Vive l’Empereur,” shouted in unison from hundreds of throats, the French began to advance again. The closer they got, the louder they shouted; Kincaid attributed this to a mistaken belief that such roaring could scare his troops into running away. With true British pride, he compared the noisy advance of the French to the somber silence with which his men, around him and down the slope in the sandpit, awaited the attack. In the beginning, the tirailleurs, though numerous, were held in check by the riflemen of the 1/95th. Firing from such a position of advantage, they soon reduced the enemy to silence. But Aulard’s response was to send his column forward, and despite the terrible losses they suffered, they passed through the skirmish line and in a few instants reached the mound and the sandpit. Outnumbered and overcome, Kincaid’s riflemen ran from their positions and joined the rest of the battalion, lying down on the ridge behind them. Before clearing off in their turn, some of the riflemen’s officers effectively exchanged a few saber blows with the officers who were leading the enemy column. The two guns that Sir Hew Ross had positioned on the road had been destroyed almost at once by the fearfully concentrated fire of the Grande Batterie.

  THIRTY - TWO

  CRABBÉ’S CHARGE

  From the viewpoint of the German generals observing the situation from the Mont-Saint-Jean ridge behind La Haye Sainte, the moment was critical. A French column had occupied the orchard and chased the British from the knoll and the sandpit, and the enemy skirmishers were already moving toward the kitchen garden behind the farmhouse, threatening to take the defenders in the rear; despite the fire from the roof, other tirailleurs had managed to reach the wall and were firing into the courtyard through one of the loopholes opened by Baring’s troops that morning. Most of the men in this second French column, however, were in the fields on the other side of the road and therefore the responsibility not of the Germans but of Sir Thomas Picton. For their part, the Germans had to reinforce Baring’s men, who were at risk of being overwhelmed in the barn. It was decided to send a battalion forward, and for this duty General Kielmansegge selected one of his two battalions of light infantry; once again, these were the most suitable troops for the ground that was being fought over. The nearly six hundred men of the Lüneburg battalion, commanded by Colonel von Klencke, rose to their feet, advanced up the reverse slope to the crest of the ridge, crossed it, and began to descend the open slope west of La Haye Sainte. Some witnesses say they moved out in line; according to others, they were in open order; in any case troops attacking downhill, especially inexperienced troops, would have been hard-pressed to maintain an ordered formation.

  The arrival of reinforcements convinced Baring that the time was right for a counterattack. Therefore, he and his men issued from the barn and had the satisfaction of seeing the tirailleurs, temporarily overwhelmed, disperse and turn back. His satisfaction, however, did not last long. An officer ru
shed out of the building and notified him that enemy troops were behind the house, occupying the garden. Shortly after receiving this news, Baring, who because he was on horseback had a view of what his men could not yet see, looked to his right and discovered that a mass of French cuirassiers had suddenly appeared on the horizon. Given the configuration of the terrain, they would have been only a few hundred yards away, moving rapidly toward the German troops through the high grain.

  One of the important rules followed by Napoleonic generals was that cavalry should be kept close at hand to support advancing infantry. While d’Erlon’s soldiers were taking up their positions for the attack on La Haye Sainte, Marshal Ney gathered all the cavalry colonels and had them detach from their regiments a certain number of squadrons that would be directly under his command. Seizing the occasion, Ney gave over command of these squadrons to one of his adjutants, Colonel Crabbé, and ordered him to cut down everything in his path. Forty-seven years of age and therefore Lord Uxbridge’s exact contemporary, Crabbé (a Belgian, curiously enough, and a native of Brussels at that) was a veteran cavalry officer. Between Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte, the terrain formed a kind of elongated hump: The ground rose from the château, crested, and then sloped down again toward the farm. No one in the fields immediately west of La Haye Sainte could see what was happening on the other side of this crest, and so the French cuirassiers were shielded from the enemy’s sight. Crabbé formed up his squadrons in column, one behind the other, and advanced over the dead ground on the Hougoumont side of the hump. And then, suddenly, they appeared on Baring’s flank.

  Of all the forces at a Napoleonic commander’s disposal, the cuirassiers were capable of producing the weightiest impact. In 1815, there was already a recognizable tendency in many armies, which would grow progressively stronger until the First World War, to reduce the distinction between heavy cavalry, whose main purpose was to smash enemy lines, and light cavalry, which was mostly used to make reconnaissance and to provide cover for forward positions. But the French cuirassier was unquestionably the incarnation of heavy cavalry. Like their mounts, cuirassiers were of greater than normal stature, and they rode protected by helmets and cuirasses. In prior years, Napoleon’s standards had required recruits to be at least 1.8 meters (about 5 feet 10 inches) tall and veterans of at least twelve years and three campaigns; even though the reconstituted cavalry of 1815 could not allow itself such demanding criteria, the cuirassiers were still veteran, physically powerful, and privileged warriors who received special pay. Each man with all his equipment weighed more than three hundred pounds, and he mounted a horse sufficiently robust to carry that kind of weight, even if only for short distances, at a gallop.

  The force of impact generated by cavalry, provided it was engaged at the proper moment, was out of all proportion to its numbers. Had this not been the case, after all, governments would not have spent so much money on maintaining mounted troops, which represented a heavy cost to the national treasury. After Napoleon returned from Elba, he authorized the expenditure of a million francs for the purchase of horses; this sum sufficed to acquire just over six thousand animals, more than two-thirds of which were for the light cavalry. Horses that could be used by the heavy cavalry cost more than triple the price of the others. A single cavalry regiment consumed four metric tons of fodder every day; putting such a regiment in the field and maintaining it for the duration of a campaign cost as much as it did to equip and maintain twelve infantry battalions. A single cuirassier cost the state the equivalent of twenty infantrymen. Nevertheless, the results obtained were generally worth the expense.

  When he saw the cuirassiers descending the slope, Major von Baring realized at once what was about to happen. He shouted to his men to form ranks around him and fall back immediately into the barn, but the catastrophe overwhelmed them all before they could obey him. When the German soldiers heard the sound of the horses’ hooves, they did the first thing that skirmishing troops caught in the open by cavalry tended to do, which was also the worst choice they could make: They started running for their lives. Most of them tried to reach the ridge, where in the meantime the other battalions, realizing the danger, were beginning to form squares. Baring had not been in command of his battalion for very long, and his men were not familiar with his voice, which could not have been easy to hear in these circumstances; in any case, no one rallied to him. In a few seconds, the cuirassiers caught up with the fleeing troops and began sabering them. Colonel von Klencke was cut down and his battalion destroyed: According to the rolls compiled after the battle, 228 men of the Lüneburg battalion were lost at Waterloo, including dead, wounded, and missing. This figure by itself is equivalent to nearly half of Klencke’s force; add the men who were taken prisoner and released later in the evening as well as those who simply vanished until the following day, and the battalion had ceased to exist. One of its two colors fell into the hands of the French and was recovered only after the battle.

  Baring’s men fared little better. The major, who was on horseback, managed to reach the crest, but in the meantime tirailleurs had occupied the kitchen garden, and they shot down many of the KGL riflemen as they ran past. Seized by the general panic, a number of the troops who were in the farm buildings and the yard also took to their heels and joined the mad dash for the ridge. Fortunately, a small group of men remained inside the farm: Lieutenant Graeme and a dozen fusiliers were on the roof of the piggery, while Lieutenant Carey and Ensign Frank, with another squad, were in the farmhouse itself.14 For the moment, their fire made it difficult for the tirailleurs to get out of the garden and the orchard and continued to inflict casualties on Aulard’s columns, which were mounting the slope beyond the sandpit; but the situation made it seem quite unlikely that the defense of La Haye Sainte could last for long.

  Meanwhile, the French cuirassiers continued their gallop up the slope of the ridge, where Kielmansegge’s and Ompteda’s battalions, formed up in square, were waiting for them. Quite soon, however, it became clear that the French had no intention of charging all the way into these formations. How many squadrons Colonel Crabbé had with him is unclear, but there were probably only four or five, no more than half a thousand sabers. It hadn’t been necessary to employ them all in the destruction of the Lüneburgers; when cavalry squadrons charged, one after the other, with their men deployed in two lines, each squadron covered a front at least fifty or sixty yards long, so that two or at the most three squadrons would have been sufficient to assail the unfortunate Hanoverian battalion in front and flank. In any case, however, Crabbé no longer had troops fresh enough to launch a serious attack on the enemy squares, especially since the cuirassiers’ chargers were winded by the time they reached the ridge. Captain von Scriba, who was in a large square formed by two Hanoverian battalions, saw the French move forward at a trot, take a few losses caused by the massed fire from the squares, and then, still forty or fifty paces away, change direction and disappear without even trying an attack.

  Scriba’s recruits, most of them boys and young men in their first battle, watched the departure of the French cavalry with relieved shouts of “Hurrah!”; but their joy was at the expense of Sir Hew Ross’s men, positioned a little farther on, who were continuing to fire their four remaining guns from the slope behind La Haye Sainte. As the cuirassiers came back down from the ridge, they suddenly found themselves in the midst of the battery, and many gunners were cut to pieces before they could run to the nearest squares, as they were instructed to do in cases of this kind. The survivors flung themselves into the shelter of the sunken lane or under their own cannons, where the cuirassiers’ sabers couldn’t reach them. At the same time, the first French cavalry troops were urging their mounts across the main road and reaching the sandpit, which was occupied by tirailleurs; La Haye Sainte was surrounded.

  THIRTY - THREE

  D’ERLON’S ADVANCE

  While the fight was raging around the farm, Wellington, who up to that moment had been observing the defense of Houg
oumont, must have realized that the enemy’s main push was going to be made much farther to the left; he galloped along the line, followed by the throng of his adjutants, to get a better view of what was going on. The group halted under the great, solitary elm, visible for miles around, that marked the intersection of the main road and the chemin d’Ohain. From this crossroads, a few hundred yards behind La Haye Sainte, Wellington and his companions could see the entire French line, including the farmhouse inn of La Belle Alliance, which with its whitewash and its tile roof marked the center of Napoleon’s position. Farther to the left, in plain sight, d’Erlon’s other divisions were following up Donzelot’s advance; they, too, were drawing near the Allied line, crowded so thickly together that the entire hollow between the two ridges seemed to be full of soldiers on the march.