The Battle

by Alessandro Barbero

  Counterattacking with fixed bayonets after a brief exchange of fire was the British infantry’s favorite tactic. In this case as in others, faced with a thousand redcoats advancing toward them at full speed, the enemy began here and there to halt—but not everywhere—and kept up their fire throughout. Upon reaching the sunken lane, the troops of the Thirty-second Regiment found themselves in the midst of the enemy, who were retreating down the slope; the ensign who carried the regimental color fell wounded, and Lieutenant Belcher seized the standard. As he looked around for another ensign, he was suddenly confronted by a French officer, whose horse had just been killed under him. Instead of running to safety, the Frenchman barred Belcher’s way, took hold of the standard, and started to pull it away from him, while Belcher, taken by surprise, grabbed a handful of silk and hung on. The Frenchman tried to unsheathe his saber with his free hand, but before he could do so the color-sergeant struck him in the breast with the long pike that was the emblem of the noncommissioned officers of the British infantry, and which was ordinarily used for dressing ranks. Someone cried out, “Save the brave fellow!” but it was too late; another British infantryman had already leveled his musket and killed the wounded officer.

  A little farther left, the Scottish troops of the Seventy-ninth Regiment, the Cameron Highlanders, encountered such heavy fire that they chose to stop before reaching the hedge, content to respond with volleys of their own. In contrast to the standard British regiments, whose men came from all corners of the kingdom, the Camerons were an exceptionally homogeneous unit: The great majority of the soldiers were Scots, and no fewer than nine of their officers belonged to Clan Cameron. This was, in short, one of those units in which the relationships of blood and patronage among the men and their commanders guaranteed an uncommon degree of cohesion. Moreover, even the English officers least inclined to appreciate the northern barbarians had to admit that they made extraordinary defensive soldiers. Tomkinson of the Sixteenth Light Dragoons, for example, believed that Scottish troops were the best in the army in situations calling for coolness, steadiness, and obedience to orders; he thought them less valuable in skirmishes or, more generally, in any kind of combat where quickness of reaction was called for. But the Camerons had lost nearly half of their personnel at Quatre Bras, and the regiment, like others that had taken part in that battle, was still in shock from the carnage. Their French attackers seemed to have no intention of giving up easily, and Wellington himself, who wasn’t far away from the struggle, noticed that after a while the Camerons “seemed to have had more than they liked of it.”

  When Sir Thomas Picton saw, to his horror, that the Scots were starting to disband, he signaled to the first officer he came across, ordering him to go and stop them. The general was not known for mildness of manner (he was, in the duke’s pointed judgment, “as rough and foul-mouthed a devil as ever lived”), and in this case, too, his language matched the drastic occasion. But while he was speaking to the officer, who was the famous Captain Seymour, Lord Uxbridge’s aide-de-camp and “the strongest man in the British army,” Sir Thomas was struck in the head by a musket ball that passed through his top hat. He fell from his horse, and a moment later Seymour’s horse was mortally wounded and collapsed, too. The captain disentangled himself from the carcass just in time to see one of his soldiers already bending over the general’s body and emptying his pockets. Seymour recovered Sir Thomas’s purse and eyeglasses from the thief and called his aide-de-camp, Captain Tyler, but the two officers quickly realized that nothing could be done for Picton, who was dead. Tyler remembered the evening of Quatre Bras, not forty-eight hours before, when the general had confessed to having left his home with the feeling that he would never return to it again; after surviving the dangers of that battle, however, Picton had started to believe that no one would succeed in killing him.

  THIRTY - FIVE

  THE FIREFIGHT ALONG THE CHEMIN D’OHAIN

  While the brigades of Aulard and Kempt—both of them severely battered and neither of them deployed in a formation prescribed in the manuals—continued firing at one another amid the smoke on both sides of the sunken lane, Quiot’s battalions were also mounting the slope a little farther on; the first brigade, commanded by Bourgeois, had nearly crested the ridge. In front of them, Bijlandt’s brigade was rapidly losing cohesion. Withdrawn at the last moment to the shelter of the sunken lane, deployed in a two-rank formation unfamiliar to them, and running short of ammunition since the enormous expenditure at Quatre Bras, they were, predictably enough, unable to develop sufficient firepower to stop Quiot’s veterans. By this point, most of their officers were already dead or wounded, including General von Bijlandt, and the brigade was under the command of Colonel De Jongh of the Eighth Dutch Militia, who had been wounded in the battle of Quatre Bras and had ordered his staff at Waterloo to tie him to the saddle. When the first French regiment, the 105th Ligne, appeared before them, most of the Dutch stopped fighting and ran away. Only the brigade’s single Belgian battalion, the Seventh, remained in position and kept firing, while the last companies of Kempt’s brigade began to turn toward their left, where they could see the French advancing along their flank and clearing the hedge.

  Among the officers of the Seventh Belgian line, there was one Lieutenant Scheltens, who until the previous year had been a sergeant in one of the grenadier regiments of the Old Guard. He had fought in Napoleon’s armies from Spain to Russia before taking service with the new Belgian army, where professionals of his caliber were fully appreciated. “The battalion,” Scheltens later recalled, “remained lying down behind the road until the head of the French column was a pistol-shot away. Then the line received the order to rise and commence firing, and the French committed the error of halting in order to reply to our fire.” A “pistol-shot” was, in fact, just a few paces. According to Scheltens, “We were at such close quarters that when a musket ball wounded Captain L’Olivier in the arm, the paper wad from the cartridge was left smoking in the fabric of his coat sleeve.”

  Such firefights as this, where two lines of men stood upright and shot at one another from a few dozen yards away, are perhaps the most incomprehensible aspect of the Napoleonic battle. Admittedly, the mass-produced muskets used by the armies of the day were inferior weapons and soldiers were not taught to aim, so that, beyond a certain distance, their fire was pretty ineffective. In 1814, barely a year before Waterloo, Colonel Hanger, a veteran of the Revolutionary War in America, published a pamphlet in which he declared, “A soldier’s musket if not exceedingly ill-bored (as many are), will strike the figure of a man at 80 yards, perhaps even at 100; but a soldier must be very unfortunate indeed who shall be wounded by a common musket at 150, provided his antagonist aims at him; and as to firing at a man at 200 yards with a common musket, you may just as well fire at the moon.” But great distances were not involved in this firefight, where hundreds of men discharged their weapons all together, without aiming, at a distance of less than a hundred yards, and at a target which, to all appearances, it was impossible to miss.

  The most curious generals of the day had even developed tests to show how many projectiles could reach their target in such a situation. The Prussians, for example, had held test firings at a hundred paces, using a wooden target six feet tall and thirty feet long—more or less equivalent to the frontage of a French battalion in column—and had concluded that at least two-thirds of all bullets fired struck the target. In the English tests, carried out on the firing range of the Tower of London, three-quarters of the balls fired in a volley from a hundred yards away hit the target, which was fifty yards long. Based on these numbers, two battalions of between four and five hundred men each, shooting at one another across a space of a hundred yards, could have achieved mutual annihilation in the course of a minute. But in reality, such firefights could go on for ten minutes, and perhaps even longer, and yet there was no annihilation. The Cameron Highlanders, who engaged in a combat of this sort under unfavorable conditions and who, accordin
g to the duke himself, got more of it than they wanted, suffered about 175 casualties, both dead and wounded, over the entire day at Waterloo—a great many, to be sure, but still fewer than half of those who had answered roll call that morning.

  Apparently, the results obtained from the tests conducted on parade grounds and firing ranges had little to do with reality, and during a real battle, operating under severe stress and completely enveloped and blinded by the smoke from their own muskets, the majority of soldiers fired without hitting anyone. In England a historian calculated that the most plausible number of target hits at 100 yards was not 75 percent, as in the tests, but more like 5 percent. Someone else reached the conclusion that, over the course of a whole battle, one musket ball out of every 459 fired struck a man; as small as this number may seem, it’s probably not far from the truth. Another student of the battle, considering that the opposing forces at Waterloo engaged in many short-range firefights, figured there was one casualty for every 162 shots fired. In addition to these calculations, Perponcher’s division used up more than five hundred thousand cartridges in the course of the battles of Quatre Bras and Waterloo and suffered around 2,200 casualties, which means it took one casualty for every 227 shots fired, and this figure doesn’t allow for the large percentage of casualties that were actually caused by artillery.

  When two battalions engaged one another in such circumstances, the result was not their immediate mutual destruction (which explains why a firefight at relatively close range was even considered possible, and even more, why the troops’ entire training was aimed at developing an optimal rhythm of fire and the ability to resist panic in such circumstances). Instead, the soldiers kept shooting at each other for rather a long time, all the while completely hidden by smoke, while each battalion lost, perhaps, three or four men per minute, until the feeling that the enemy’s fire was more effective and that the danger level was getting a bit too high spread through one or the other of the two battalions, causing it to begin a disordered retreat. The fact that Bourgeois’s men, having reached the hedge, opted for a firefight instead of a bayonet assault is perhaps less strange than it appeared to Scheltens; after all, the French generals had decided to send their men forward in line for just this eventuality. Moreover, although the Belgian officer could not know this, Quiot’s other brigade, the one commanded by Charlet, was already mounting the slope a little farther to the right and would go into action in a few minutes, opening fire or leveling their bayonets and advancing on the enemy’s flank. The center of Picton’s line would probably not have been able to withstand this new pressure, since this was exactly the type of situation in which soldiers, realizing that the odds were changing in the enemy’s favor, would usually decide to save their skin.

  A British brigade was deployed nearby, practically elbow to elbow with the Belgians, under the command of General Sir Denis Pack, and three-quarters of its troops were Scottish veterans; but Marcognet’s entire division was advancing upon them. It, too, was deployed in two columns, commanded by Grenier and Nogues. Like Kempt’s, Pack’s men had lain down at some distance from the sunken lane and remained there for a long time, but then they had deployed in line, four ranks deep, with the front of each battalion extending no more than fifty or sixty yards, and advanced to one side of the hedge, while the French were approaching it from the other. Grenier’s infantry, with the Forty-fifth Ligne at the head of the column, reached the hedge with their muskets still on their shoulders. Having got through, they were crossing the lane when they realized that the enemy infantry was deployed in their front. The Scots fired a volley before the French could level their muskets, and for a moment the head of the column seemed to break up; but the French fired an answering volley almost at once, and theirs was equally deadly.

  The first Allied battalion, part of the Scottish Forty-second Regiment (the Black Watch), advanced almost as far as the hedge, stopped short, and renounced the idea of crashing through it. Afterward, one of the regiment’s sergeants explained that the Scots, whose legs were naked under their kilts, had not dared plunge into the thick, thorny bushes. A more likely explanation is that they were stopped and even thrown back by the enemy’s fire, because Pack, who was advancing in the midst of the following battalion, the Ninety-second (Gordon Highlanders), began to shout: “Ninety-second, everything has given way on your right and left and you must charge this column.” But the Gordons, who like all the brigade’s other battalions had lost nearly two-thirds of their officers at Quatre Bras, had already spent too much time exposed to artillery fire and seen too many comrades killed without having yet fired a shot. Rather than advance with lowered bayonets as their general hoped, they too opened fire, inevitably getting the worst of the exchange, so that they started to fall back in disorder, while the men of the Forty-fifth Ligne burst through the hedge en masse, yelling in triumph.

  From his chair on the heights of Rossomme, Napoleon could see nothing of this, except for the white smoke that enveloped the entire ridge. Around La Haye Sainte, where the fighting had been going on longer, the smoke was not moving forward; there, evidently, the Allies were putting up a stiffer resistance. But farther to the right, the combat had advanced beyond the sunken lane, and it was clear that the French had captured the crest of the ridge and were gradually pushing the enemy back. Excited, the emperor decided that the time had come for him to draw a little closer to the battlefield. He mounted his horse and prepared to move, with all his aides-de-camp, his chair, his table, and his map, to the high ground at La Belle Alliance, about a mile and a quarter ahead and a little more than three-quarters of a mile from the enemy lines. The unfortunate De Coster was obliged to go along, and when a few stray balls started whizzing by not far from them, he began fidgeting and squirming to such a degree that the emperor scolded him: “Come, my friend, don’t lurch around like that. A musket ball can kill you from behind just as easily as from in front, and the wound it makes is much worse.”16

  When the emperor dismounted at La Belle Alliance and went back to surveying the battlefield through his telescope, things seemed to be turning out as he had predicted. Almost everywhere, and more and more clearly as the eye swung from left to right, the smoke was advancing, a sign that the pressure being exerted by d’Erlon’s troops was proving irresistible. Despite the iron discipline of the British army, each of Wellington’s men engaged in the combat on the Allied side of the sunken lane must have already realized that the possibility of his being the next to fall dead or maimed was increasing every minute, while his cartridge-pouch was becoming steadily lighter. When a comrade was wounded, those near him felt more and more strongly the temptation to drop everything and help him to safety behind the lines. It wouldn’t have taken much for this urge to gain the upper hand of an entire battalion or possibly even of a brigade, and had Picton’s men begun to disband, there would have been no troops to take their place, because Wellington had not massed any reserves in that sector. At two o’clock in the afternoon, along the chemin d’Ohain between La Haye Sainte and Papelotte, the French were winning the Battle of Waterloo.

  THIRTY - SIX

  THE INTERVENTION OF THE BRITISH CAVALRY

  In that critical moment on the ridge, while Bijlandt’s and Pack’s troops were starting to fall back and disperse under the French fire, the most senior general present was the Earl of Uxbridge. Wellington was not far away; by then, he had reached his command post, under the elm at the crossroads behind La Haye Sainte, and he would remain there for a great part of the afternoon. But from that position, in the midst of the gunpowder smoke that was now spreading its grayish-white tentacles everywhere, and while the shells of the Grande Batterie were exploding at an implacable rate all around him, the duke could not fully assess what was happening to his left. His attention must have been mostly absorbed by the attack on La Haye Sainte, by the tirailleurs, who had already surrounded the farm and seized the kitchen garden, and by the cuirassiers, who had made a threatening advance to the crest of the ridge. Until
someone arrived with the news, Wellington could not know that Picton had been killed, nor that his entire left wing, whose weakness was due to his dispositions, was on the point of breaking up under the pressure of d’Erlon’s columns.

  The Earl of Uxbridge, too, was a recent arrival in that part of the field, having come from inspecting the cavalry deployed behind Hougoumont—another indication that the British generals were concentrating all their attention on their right flank. The insertion of cavalry into a battle required, above all, firsthand observation and a sense of timing, and the prompt decision of an officer in the field could count for more than the judgment of his commander in chief. Knowing this, Wellington had explicitly authorized Uxbridge, as commander of the cavalry, to employ it without waiting for instructions or permission. Shortly after his arrival on the high ground above La Haye Sainte, west of the Brussels road, Uxbridge saw Crabbé’s cuirassiers advance close to the Allied squares. Avoiding a direct clash with them, the French turned, went back down the slope, and set about sabering Sir Hew Ross’s gunners. Without any more reflection than was absolutely necessary, the commander of the Allied cavalry decided that his men must charge and throw back the enemy; since the strongest of his ten brigades was close at hand, deployed behind Ompteda’s and Kielmansegge’s squares, Uxbridge galloped over to its commander, Lord Edward Somerset, whose men made up the Household Brigade, so called because it was constituted of Guards regiments. Uxbridge ordered Somerset to wheel his troops into line and prepare to charge.