The Battle

by Alessandro Barbero

  It was past one-thirty, and the fight around La Haye Sainte had been raging for some time, when Ney gave d’Erlon the signal to bring his other divisions forward. And so they advanced, descending the slope, crossing the boggy lowland, and mounting the opposite slope: first, Quiot’s division, with Bourgeois’s brigade farther forward and Charlet’s in support, and next, Marcognet’s division, with Grenier’s brigade farther forward and Nogues’s in support. Still farther down the line, the first of Durutte’s two brigades had just started to move out, and the second was preparing to follow it (as we have seen, the emperor had ordained that the attack was to develop progressively from left to right). The drummer boys, marching in groups behind each battalion, beat the pas de charge over cadenced, unison shouts of “Vive l’Empereur!” Some officers, riding out in front of the ranks with their sabers unsheathed, barked out the most characteristic words of encouragement used in the imperial army, words that even British veterans remembered having heard many times and that always made a deep impression on them: “L’Empereur récompensera le premier qui avancera!”15

  D’Erlon had concentrated an astonishing number of muskets in a little space. All together, the front occupied by these six brigades, plus Aulard’s brigade at La Haye Sainte was about a thousand yards wide, starting from the Brussels road and stretching east, and in that relatively restricted space d’Erlon had massed twenty-eight battalions, which included some fourteen thousand men. All this infantry took about twenty minutes to traverse the lowland—flattening, as they marched, the fields of rye, whose crops had stood almost as tall as a man that morning—and climb the opposite slope to the Allied positions. D’Erlon’s troops marched through the mud at a rhythm of seventy-six steps per minute, as prescribed by French regulations, in cadence with the monotonous roll of the drums.

  The formation in which d’Erlon and his commanding officers deployed their men has been the subject of much contention. Customarily, a battalion of French infantry advanced in column, just as the First Légère did in attacking Hougoumont; an attack column was nine ranks deep, and at least the first two or three ranks, the most numerous, contained fifty or sixty men each, spread across a front some forty yards wide. That morning, however, d’Erlon had breakfasted with his emperor at Le Caillou, and after the breakfast he had joined the other generals in a discussion of their respective experiences in facing British infantry. All agreed that it would be too risky to attempt to deploy their troops into line when they were already under enemy fire; it was much preferable to advance in line rather than in column. That way, every battalion, after having sent out its tirailleurs, would be formed in only three ranks, with a frontage of nearly a hundred yards, and it would be capable of almost three times as much firepower as a column, since every man in the line’s three ranks would be able to fire his weapon.

  There was a single—but weighty—objection to an advance in line: The French infantry was accustomed to the deeper formation, the column, which guaranteed an indispensable boost in morale, since every soldier had an impenetrable mass of comrades behind him, supporting him and pushing him forward. That morning at Le Caillou, however, the French generals must have remembered the days before the introduction of the column formation, when the revolutionary armies had achieved the same effect on morale by having their battalions advance in line, one behind the other. D’Erlon decided that the divisions of Quiot, Marcognet, and Durutte, which represented the main attack force, would adopt this formation: Each brigade would form a column of four battalions in line, one behind the other, with barely five or six paces between them. There would be a total of six massed brigades in echelon, each with a front about a hundred yards wide, spread out over an arc barely a thousand yards long, and d’Erlon expected they would exert such pressure on the Allied line that it would break; moreover, the casualties suffered in the firefight by the lead battalion in each column would be easily made up by advancing the second battalion into the front line.

  Naturally, all twenty-eight battalions had sent out their tirailleurs; they amounted to something like 2,500 men and advanced in front of the columns in open order, but close enough together to form an unbroken chain. D’Erlon, unlike Reille at Hougoumont, was not just feeling out the situation; he had received orders to launch a breakthrough attack and open a breach in Wellington’s line. If up to this point the battle had burned—to return to Clausewitz’s image—irregularly, like wet powder, now the tempo of events was about to undergo a dramatic acceleration. The swarm of skirmishers was necessary to drive the enemy skirmishers from their hiding places, whether lying on their bellies amid the standing grain or crouched behind the hedge of the chemin d’Ohain, and to disturb the firing of the artillery batteries posted along the crest of the ridge; but at the moment of impact, the marching columns would reach the skirmish line and pass through it (as Aulard’s column had already done at the sandpit), assaulting the enemy position with all the weight of their close-order battalions.

  The first commander charged with defending the ridge in front of them was a Dutch officer, General Baron Perponcher-Sedlnitzky. His Second Netherlands Infantry Division constituted the Allies’ first line of defense, a line so extended that Perponcher’s two brigades ended up separated, and each had to fight on its own: The one on the left, in fact, commanded by Prince Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, had entrenched itself in the Papelotte area, while the one on the right, commanded by Graaf van Bijlandt, was deployed in front of the chemin d’Ohain, on the exposed slope in the very face of the enemy. One battalion of Bijlandt’s brigade, in open order, formed the chain of skirmishers, another three battalions were in line, and only one was held in reserve. In order to cover such an extensive front, these 2,500 men had been commanded to deploy in two lines, in the British manner, rather than the three favored by continental armies. The brigade covered almost the entire front that was about to receive d’Erlon’s attack; the rest of the first line, on Bijlandt’s right, was held by only four hundred men of the Ninety-fifth Rifles, First Battalion, commanded by Sir Andrew Barnard and positioned on the high ground above the sandpit.

  The Dutch position was an unhappy one, all the more so because Bijlandt’s brigade, formed entirely of inexperienced troops (more than half of them militia), had been sorely tested at Quatre Bras. Of its five battalions, one existed only in name, a handful of men gathered around a standard, and the other four were also decidedly below strength. Exactly why these troops found themselves in front of the sunken lane, rather than in the shelter of the thorny bushes and willow trees that bordered it, is the topic of a discussion that has not yet ended. Since General van Bijlandt’s light infantry battalion, the Twenty-seventh Dutch Jäger, had been chosen to form the forward skirmishing line defending the entire left wing, he had probably preferred not to spread out his exhausted battalions but rather to deploy them close to one another. Besides, the habitual practice of keeping infantry hidden behind features of the terrain, where the troops lay on the ground until the last moment, was one of Wellington’s characteristics but was much less popular with continental generals; and so after Perponcher, who commanded the Netherlands division, had been informed that his troops were to constitute the first line of defense, he simply did what anyone else would have done in his place.

  A little farther back, on the reverse slope of the ridge, the commander responsible for the second line was none other than Sir Thomas Picton. Two of his brigades, those commanded by Sir James Kempt and Sir Denis Pack, were exactly on the line of march of the leading French columns; farther to the left two brigades of Hanoverian militia, commanded by Colonel Best and General von Vincke, were deployed. Since d’Erlon’s divisions, in accordance with the orders they had received, were tending to converge toward the left, pointing in the direction of Mont-Saint-Jean village, the brunt of the attack, once the Netherlanders’ resistance had been overcome, was destined to fall essentially on the brigades of Kempt and Pack, whose men, except for those of the Ninety-fifth’s First Battalion, were lying on th
e ground perhaps a hundred yards behind the sunken lane. These brigades comprised eight battalions of select troops, all English and Scottish veterans of the campaign on the Iberian Peninsula, and their generals, including Picton, were well known for combativeness: They were all “fire-eaters,” as their soldiers said, and they also shared such character traits as impatience and irascibility. But both brigades had been badly mauled at Quatre Bras, so much so that their battalions were reduced to no more than four hundred men each; three of Pack’s four battalions had lost their commanders, and the brigade as a whole had lost nearly two-thirds of its officers. All things considered, Picton and Perponcher could rely on barely six thousand muskets to cover the eight or nine hundred yards of front toward which “Johnny”—the British veterans’ slang for the enemy; in this particular case, the fourteen thousand troops of d’Erlon’s I Corps—was marching up the slope.

  There were also guns defending the Allied position, but not enough of them. At the crucial moment, the artillery deployed along the front attacked by d’Erlon came to twenty-nine pieces at most, and the majority of the batteries were no longer operating at full efficiency. Captain Stevenart’s Belgian battery had lost six of its eight guns at Quatre Bras, and a junior officer was commanding the two that were left, because Captain Stevenart had been killed as well. Captain Braun’s Hanoverian battery had lost all six of its guns at Quatre Bras, and they had just been replaced the previous day with six old British 6-pounders. Another Hanoverian battery, commanded by Captain von Rettberg, had already used up half its ammunition at Quatre Bras.

  On the other hand, the majority of the guns had been posted not on the exposed forward slope but behind the chemin d’Ohain. In some cases, the gunners had forced open a passage for their cannon through the hedge that bordered the sunken lane. This explains why, when Desales’s guns opened fire on the Allied position, none of the batteries was wiped out, except for the two pieces that Lieutenant Colonel Ross had posted on the main road. All the same, the Allied gunners’ situation was anything but comfortable, and their accounts of the battle clearly evoked the frightening intensity of the French fire. Even before Braun’s battery took up its position, it had already lost its commander, wounded by a shell fragment in the thigh; the guns had not yet been unlimbered when a shell blew up one of the limbers, destroying the gun and killing three gunners and four horses; and when the first French tirailleurs advanced, the junior officer who had taken command of the battery was killed, too.

  All this notwithstanding, during d’Erlon’s advance the Allied artillery, firing over the heads of the Dutch-Belgian infantry deployed below them, opened broad gaps in the compact ranks of the attackers; yet the latter closed up and continued their serried march, undeterred. Supposing that all the Allied guns had fired without interruption on d’Erlon’s columns from the moment they began to march until the moment when the gunners had to abandon their pieces, about a thousand cannon shots would have been fired against those fourteen thousand men, a rate of one shot per second. However, the rapidity and efficiency of fire diminished under stressful conditions, while an extremely high percentage of shots generally missed their targets; in addition several Allied batteries, despite their orders, were in fact chiefly engaged in artillery duels with the Grande Batterie. Thus, the ordeal faced by the attackers was less intense than it could have been and was not enough to stem that human tide.

  Captain Duthilt, an aide-de-camp on the staff of General Bourgeois, was amazed by the soldiers’ enthusiasm; from the start, they moved out in double time, marching on the heels of the tirailleurs and bellowing shouts of triumph. Very soon, however, the heavy, viscous mud clogged their steps and slowed their advance; gaiters came apart, and some men even began to lose their shoes. Corporal Canler of the Twenty-eighth Ligne, feeling his foot coming out of his shoe as he marched, noticed that the instep straps on one of his gaiters had broken; he bent down to adjust them, and as he did so, a violent blow struck his shako: A bullet had passed completely through it, just grazing his skull. The corporal, with no time to stop and reflect, hurried, limping, back to his place. In fact, the officers “kept shouting the same awful order: ‘Close ranks!’” every time a gap opened in the formation, and the men, as though intoxicated by those urgent cries and by the dismal rolling of the drums, kept marching up the slope. Despite the strenuous efforts they were making, their roars of enthusiasm were so deafening that it became hard to hear the officers’ commands. “Soon there was a bit of confusion in the ranks, especially after the head of the column drew within range of the enemy’s fire,” Captain Duthilt later recalled; but the French advance seemed unstoppable, all the same.

  THIRTY - FOUR

  THE ATTACK ON THE SUNKEN LANE

  The sparse line of skirmishers covering the Allied front was quickly overwhelmed by the much more numerous enemy. Meanwhile, the Dutch generals had had sufficient time to realize that Bijlandt’s brigade, deployed in line on the exposed side of the slope without any defenses, did not have the slightest chance of withstanding the attack. Belatedly, the generals decided to withdraw the brigade to the sunken lane. The inexperienced Netherlands battalions, in blue uniforms that closely resembled those of the French, had already stayed too long in their initial positions, exposed to the cannonade of the Grande Batterie, and their withdrawal was likely not executed in good order. Seeing the Netherlanders withdraw, the British soldiers behind them jeered and hooted pitilessly, and even a few volleys were fired.

  When the line of French skirmishers, closely followed by the leading columns, approached the batteries stationed behind the sunken lane, a wave of panic began to spread among the artillerymen, too. Sir William Gomm, a member of Wellington’s staff, saw two cannon being moved back in great haste at the enemy’s approach, and he couldn’t help noting that this withdrawal was carried out with “considerable bustle.” But the majority of the guns were simply abandoned, not that the gunners could have done anything else; at that point, it was up to the infantry to repulse the attack and regain possession of the sunken lane, and therefore of the guns. At least one artillery sergeant thought such a recovery so unlikely that he spiked his gun before abandoning it, rendering it useless in the time-honored way, by driving a spike down the vent at the back end of the barrel. Since it was through this vent that the powder was lit, spiking a gun prevented the enemy (or anyone else) from using it.

  The bulk of Picton’s infantry was deployed at least a hundred yards behind the chemin d’Ohain and the thick, thorny hedge that lined it, and the soldiers remained there, flat on their stomachs, as long as they could, to reduce the casualties caused by the artillery barrage. Naturally, the result of this rearward deployment, which was necessitated by the concentration of guns that Napoleon had brought to bear on that sector of the Allied line, was that d’Erlon’s columns were able to reach the hedge without having to face the disciplined musket fire of the British troops, only the disordered volleys of the Dutch infantry, which had just withdrawn to the sunken lane. With the exception of the pickets, who were soon overwhelmed by the French skirmishers, the only British soldiers in a position to see d’Erlon’s advancing columns were the fusiliers of the 1/95th, armed with their short, deadly Baker rifles and already engaged in holding off the first of the attack columns, commanded by Baron Aulard.

  Unlike the other brigades, Aulard’s advanced in column, headed by the two battalions of the Fifty-first Ligne, and behind them the two of the Nineteeth Ligne. Despite the losses they suffered from the fire of the British fusiliers in front of them and from the fire of the German troops on the roofs at La Haye Sainte, the French stormed the sandpit and the mound behind it, forcing the outpost stationed there under Captain Kincaid to abandon the position in great haste. The rest of the battalion, stationed in the sunken lane, ought to have held out longer, but it had already suffered heavily from artillery fire, and when these troops saw Kincaid’s unit falling back, they experienced a moment of panic. Kincaid barely had time to urge his horse through an ope
ning in the hedge before he discovered, to his dismay, that Sir Andrew Barnard had been wounded and was unable to continue in command, that his second-in-command had already been incapacitated in his turn, and that the remainder of the battalion was retreating in some disorder, heading for the rear. Kincaid shouted to the men to halt, and since they were, after all, experienced veterans, he managed somehow to get them formed up in line a short distance from the road.

  He did so just in time, for the Fifty-first Ligne had reached the hedge and overrun the abandoned guns, and with the British infantry finally in sight, the French were briskly maneuvering to change from column of attack to a deployment in line. This maneuver, which officers learned by heart and men repeated a thousand times on the drill field, required the companies deployed in the second and third ranks to advance at an oblique angle until they were aligned with those in the front rank and thus able to fire on the enemy without obstruction. Before his troops discharged their weapons and everything disappeared in a thick cloud of smoke, Kincaid had time to see the advancing French quickly spreading out, “cheered and encouraged by the gallantry of their officers, who were dancing and flourishing their swords in front.” Another officer in Kempt’s brigade also remembered with admiration “the gallant manner the French officers led out their Companies in deploying.” Evidently, there was an instant in which the two opposing forces looked one another in the eyes from a distance that was probably no more than fifty or sixty yards. This moment lasted long enough to become indelibly stamped in the memory of many a soldier; then, of course, smoke enveloped everything.

  When the French column appeared, the troops in the other battalions of Kempt’s brigade rose to their feet and opened fire as well. Under these withering volleys, delivered at such close range, the Fifty-first Ligne’s deployment into line was brusquely interrupted, as was that of the Nineteenth, which came up behind the Fifty-first and was trying to deploy farther to its right. The brigade commander, Aulard, was killed, and then or shortly thereafter the commander of the Fifty-first, Colonel Rignon, met the same fate. The French companies took shelter behind the hedge, each man responding as he might to the enemy fire. The British infantry was not deployed in the usual line formation, two ranks deep, which would have permitted it to develop maximum firepower to the front, but rather in the more cautious four-rank line, because the British commanders feared an attack by the French cavalry while their men were engaged in opposing the infantry’s advance. This was an understandable decision, but it also explains why Picton’s men did not automatically gain the upper hand in the first exchange of fire. Incredulous, Kincaid realized that the ranks of his riflemen were growing dangerously thin; Picton must likewise have assumed that something was amiss, because he spurred his horse into the midst of Kempt’s men and ordered a bayonet assault: “Charge! Charge! Hurrah!”