Eventually, however, the surviving cuirassiers were routed, and they scattered in all directions. By that time, they had lost their commander, as Colonel Crabbé had been mortally wounded in the melee. A single cuirassier, isolated from the rest, galloped so far along the ridge that he ended up behind Pack’s men, who were deployed in line beside the sunken lane. Enraged at seeing his path obstructed in this way, or perhaps simply because he’d lost his head, the Frenchman charged the infantry, wheeling his saber. Since he was coming upon them from behind, there was a chance that he might get through; but a soldier shot the cuirassier’s horse dead, ran out of line, killed the man with a few bayonet thrusts, searched him quickly, stole his purse, and ran back to his comrades.
As they were chasing the cuirassiers, the British dragoons suddenly came upon the flank of Aulard’s brigade, which was already having difficulty staving off Kempt’s counterattack. Again this time, the psychological effect was immediate and catastrophic: Overrun first by their own fleeing cuirassiers and then immediately afterward by multitudes of British dragoons, whirling their sabers in hot pursuit, the two battalions of the Fifty-first Ligne, which had been in the front line since the beginning of the battle and had already suffered heavy losses, as well as the two battalions of the Nineteenth Ligne, which were deployed to the right of the Fifty-first, allowed themselves to be seized by panic and ran headlong from the field. From the walls of La Haye Sainte, the German fusiliers enthusiastically greeted the arrival of the dragoons, who galloped along the perimeter of the farm, sweeping aside everything in their path. Lieutenant Waymouth of the Second Life Guards had enough time to recognize an officer of the King’s German Legion whom he knew by sight, Lieutenant Graeme, at his post on the roof of the piggery. Shortly thereafter, Graeme and his men went down into the courtyard, opened the gate leading to the road, and issued forth to mop up the French, who threw away their weapons and surrendered voluntarily rather than face the saber-strokes of the cavalry.
Captain Kincaid and his riflemen also watched with immense relief as the cavalry rode into the midst of their enemies and put them to flight. The captain was mounted on his mare in a gap in the hedge, and a moment before he had noticed, to his alarm, that some cuirassiers were coming straight at him; but when he tried to draw his saber, he found that the rain of the previous night had rusted it into his scabbard so tightly that he was unable to pull it out. Although Sir James Kempt in person had ordered him not to move from his position, Kincaid was hastily considering the pros and cons of disobeying, when suddenly the cuirassiers were overwhelmed by the British cavalry and thrown back among their own infantry, transforming it at once into a throng of fugitives. Recognizing the helmets of the Life Guards, Kincaid admitted to himself that they were real soldiers, after all, and not—as he had sometimes thought—just manikins good for nothing except parades in Hyde Park. The French column had been routed in an instant. “Hundreds of the infantry threw themselves down and pretended to be dead, while the cavalry galloped over them, and then got up and ran away,” Kincaid later recalled. “I never saw such a scene in all my life.”
The rout of the French infantry was not total everywhere; some soldiers rose to their feet and started firing at the backs of the British cavalry, and here and there a rider was dragged from his horse and hauled away as a prisoner—for example, Lieutenant Waymouth, who fell badly wounded by a saber blow from a cuirassier and remained a prisoner in enemy hands for several weeks. While Captain Irby of the same regiment was returning from the charge, his horse was killed under him and he was captured and taken away; the next day he managed to escape from a cellar where he and other prisoners had been confined. On the whole, however, the charge had been a complete success, and Aulard’s brigade had practically ceased to exist. Over the course of the day, the Fifty-first and Nineteenth Ligne regiments lost a total of seventeen officers killed and twenty-four wounded—that is, nearly half of the regiments’ officers, an extremely high percentage.
The other squadrons of the Household Brigade, having driven the cuirassiers toward the chaussée, the cobblestone main road, continued charging down the slope with Lord Uxbridge at their head and attacked the skirmishers of Schmitz’s brigade, who were stationed near the enclosure of La Haye Sainte. Uxbridge observed that all the enemy troops in his front gave way immediately. As unlikely as it was that a line of skirmishers would have so much as considered standing up to a force of six or seven hundred cavalry, coming down upon them from higher ground at increasing speed, nevertheless, the fire of the French skirmishers, who hid amid the stubble and along the walls of the farm, must have been horribly efficient. Sir Robert Hill, commander of the Blues, saw the commanding officer of the First Life Guards fall dead from a musket shot while leading his men at the beginning of the charge. The colonel of the King’s Dragoon Guards was also killed almost immediately, and his body was later found a short distance from La Haye Sainte; in launching the charge, he had cried out to his men, “On to Paris!”
Perhaps the loss of so many officers can partly explain why the British dragoons, having routed Crabbé’s cuirassiers, kept on charging, not because they had received precise orders to do so, but from sheer force of momentum. They swept away isolated skirmishers, but they never came upon any objective that could justify prolonging the action. “After the overthrow of the Cuirassiers,” Lord Uxbridge wrote, “I had in vain attempted to stop my people by sounding the Rally,” but no one heeded the call. As often happened in such cases, the charge had broken up into a vast number of isolated combats, which occasioned a few strange episodes. Lieutenant Story, who had recently returned to service after having been a prisoner of the French for a full seven years, was about to strike an enemy soldier with his saber when the man threw away his musket and begged for mercy, assuring Story that he knew him well. The incredulous lieutenant recognized a French soldier he had known when he was a prisoner in the fortress of Verdun. Story spared him and his companion and sent them to the rear as prisoners.
The net result of the extended charge was that the surviving tirailleurs got themselves under some kind of cover, Schmitz’s battalions formed square near the orchard of La Haye Sainte, and the cavalry found itself at the bottom of the slope with blown horses—all force of impact gone—and exposed to the accurate fire of the enemy massed on the opposite slope. At that moment, by his own later admission, Lord Uxbridge realized that the commander in chief of all the Allied cavalry should not have been where he was. For the moment, though, his troubling premonitions were quelled by the extraordinary success of the charge, and by shouts of triumph coming from the other side of the main road, indicating that the Union Brigade, whose charge had begun a little later, had met with the same success.
THIRTY - EIGHT
THE CHARGE OF THE UNION BRIGADE
Like Somerset’s men, Ponsonby’s had also been obliged to pass through the ranks of their own infantry before coming into contact with the enemy. Often, it was rather the case that the infantry, already in full retreat, withdrew to the rear, passing through the intervals between one squadron and another. In places where the infantry was still holding its position, the heavy cavalry went right over them; when the Scots Grays moved through the ranks of the Ninety-second, for example, the exultant cries of the highlanders mingled with the curses hurled at them by the soldiers their horses knocked down. Through the din of the charge, the bagpipes’ familiar lament augmented the Grays’ excitement; one of them recognized the Gordons’ piper, who was standing on a hillock a little apart and playing the old Scots song “Johnny Cope, Are Ye Wakin’ Yet?” The story that some of the infantry, in a frenzy of enthusiasm, caught hold of the cavalry’s stirrups and charged with them into the fight, shouting “Scotland forever,” forms part of the patriotic mythology of the Battle of Waterloo.
Once through the infantry, it was not necessary for the Union Brigade’s squadrons to get across the chemin d’Ohain and reorder their line before charging, because the French were mostly past the sunken
lane when the British troopers suddenly appeared out of the smoke, whirling their sabers above their heads. Assaulted frontally and without warning by about a thousand cavalry, the divisions of Quiot and Marcognet disbanded rapidly. Lord Uxbridge later wrote, “My impression is that the French were completely surprised by the first Cavalry attack. It (our Cavalry) had been rather hidden by rising ground immediately before their position. I think the left wing of our Infantry was partially retiring, when I determined upon the movement, and then these 19 Squadrons pouncing down hill upon them so astonished them that no very good resistance was made, and surely such havoc was rarely made in so few minutes.”
Sir William Ponsonby’s aide-de-camp, De Lacy Evans, was so struck by the speed of the catastrophe that he concluded that the French columns must have been composed of inexperienced recruits. “The Enemy’s Column, near which I was, on arriving at the crest of the position seemed very helpless, had very little fire to give from its front or flanks, was incapable of deploying, must have already lost many of its Officers in coming up, was fired into, close, with impunity, by stragglers of our Infantry who remained behind. As we approached at a moderate pace20 the front and flanks began to turn their backs inwards; the rear of the Columns had already begun to run away.”
In truth, however, d’Erlon’s was a solid infantry, with a large proportion of veterans, enthusiastically devoted to the emperor. The first of the two regiments of Bourgeois’s brigade, the 105th Ligne, was in fact noted for its fanaticism: On the march to the Belgian border, the men of the 105th had assaulted and demolished a newly constructed house decorated with paintings of the Bourbon lilies, and the local authorities had been obliged to arrest the unfortunate owner in order to calm the soldiers’ fury. But in these circumstances—faced with a massed cavalry charge, deployed in a formation unsuited to such an attack, and having just emerged from a debilitating firefight—any infantry would have been routed.
The first regiment of the Union Brigade, the Royals, fell on the 105th Ligne, which had got through the hedge and were pushing back the Belgians of the Seventh. Each of the three squadrons of the British regiment spanned some fifty yards, and thus they attacked the French line, no more than eighty yards long, in both front and flank. When the French realized their danger, the cavalry was less than a hundred yards (and therefore only a few seconds) from impact; Captain Clark, who commanded the central squadron of the charging cavalry, saw the enemy give signs of panic but nevertheless fire a volley that brought down some twenty dragoons. This feat, performed under such extreme conditions, offers a final confirmation of the effectiveness of the French musketry. Then, since there was no time to do anything else, the infantry took to their heels, seeking the safety of the hedge and the sunken lane. An instant later, the dragoons were upon them, sabering their victims without pity, even though at that point many of the French had thrown down their weapons and were trying to surrender. According to Clark’s account, the whole French column got “into one dense mass, the men between the advancing and retiring parts getting so jammed together that the men could not bring down their arms, or use them effectively, and we had nothing to do but to continue to press them down the slope.”
The captain had been in the melee for some minutes when he saw the officer who bore the Eagle of the 105th Ligne trying to carry it to the rear and safety. The loss of an Eagle was considered a disaster for an imperial regiment, and capturing one was the fervent desire of all who fought against Napoleon. Captain Clark immediately ordered his squadron, “Right shoulders forward, attack the Colour,” and spurred his horse in that direction. Upon reaching the French officer, who was turned the other way, Clark ran him through with his sword. When the man fell, the captain reached for the flag, but his fingers only grazed the fringe, and he gave a frenzied cry: “Secure the Colour, secure the Colour, it belongs to me.” One of his men, Corporal Styles, seized it before it fell and turned it over to Clark. In the excitement of the moment, the captain tried to break the Eagle off its pole so he could put the trophy inside his coat, but the corporal said to him, “Pray, sir, do not break it,” and the captain, regaining some of his composure, agreed to desist, saying, “Very well, carry it to the rear as fast as you can, it belongs to me.”
The Royals’ charge sealed the destruction of Bourgeois’s brigade. At the end of the day, the 105th Ligne would mourn the loss of twelve officers killed and twenty wounded out of a total of about forty; Colonel Genty, who commanded the 105th, was wounded and taken prisoner, and both battalion commanders were killed. The Twenty-eighth Ligne, which was slightly behind the 105th, fared little better. Having avoided capture by the skin of his teeth, Corporal Canler was limping to the rear, stopping every now and then to rifle the pockets of some dead officer, without making any distinctions between Britons and French. As he made his way, Canler came upon his colonel, who was galloping back and forth and shouting, “To me, 28th! To me!” in hope of gathering together a few of his men. His efforts, however, were unsuccessful; no one, not even the corporal, paid him any attention. A little later, while wandering “somewhat randomly” with a couple of comrades, Canler encountered a general, who stopped them and asked where they thought they were going. To avoid trouble, the men declared that they were trying to rejoin their unit, but the general shook his head. “It’s useless,” he told them. “Your regiment is scattered.” Unlike the losses suffered by the 105th, those of the Twenty-eighth comprised more fugitives than dead and wounded, but in any case, Bourgeois’s brigade was hors de combat.
In the center, the Inniskillings obtained a rather less triumphant success, because their charge was directed against the other brigade of Quiot’s division, the one commanded by Colonel Charlet, which had stayed back in support. This meant that the Inniskillings had to cross the sunken lane and then go partway down the slope before they made contact with the French, who thus had more time to prepare some resistance or to run away. In fact Charlet’s two regiments, the Fifty-fourth and the Fifty-fifth Ligne, made little attempt to resist, and the Inniskillings, howling their wild Irish “Hurrah!” routed them. Though heavy, the losses in Charlet’s regiments did not compare to those in Bourgeois’s, which were literally cut to pieces by the British sabers.
The combat included dramatic moments for soldiers on both sides. Muter, the Inniskillings’ colonel, saw “an Infantry French soldier on his knees, deliberately taking aim at the Adjutant of the Inniskillings, who was close to me, in the midst of one of the French Columns, and sending his bullet through his head.” The Inniskillings took fewer prisoners than the other regiments in the Union Brigade, and it was the only one of the three that did not capture an Eagle from the French. Writing many years later, Colonel Muter still couldn’t get over this failure, and his chagrin was increased by the legend that was repeated around the regimental table, namely that a trooper of the Inniskillings had indeed seized an Eagle, but then naively allowed himself to be tricked out of it by a corporal from another regiment.21
The most dramatic charge of all was that of the Scots Grays. Mounted on their powerful gray steeds, made to appear even more impressive by their bearskin caps, the Scottish dragoons bore down upon the men of Grenier’s brigade, who were crossing the sunken lane. For a moment, the French infantry, and particularly its leading regiment, the Forty-fifth Ligne, seemed able to repulse the attack with the massed fire of its muskets, and the Grays’ advance—made at a moderate trot because of the nature of the terrain—gave some companies enough time to fire more than one volley. Lieutenant Wyndham remembered noticing “the extraordinary manner in which the bullets struck our swords as we ascended,” saw several of his men shot from their horses, got through the hedge, and shortly thereafter was wounded himself. Another officer turned to Captain Cheney and blurted out, “How many minutes have we yet to live, Cheney?” The captain coldly replied, “Two or three at the very utmost, most probably not one.”
The majority of the French troops, however, found that the cavalry was upon them before the
y saw it coming, as Captain Martin of the Forty-fifth Ligne related: “A hollow road, lined with hedges, was the only obstacle still separating us from them. Our soldiers didn’t wait for the order to cross it; they hurled themselves at it, jumping over the hedge and breaking ranks in order to rush upon the enemy. Fatal recklessness! We struggled to bring them back into order. We brought them to a halt in order to rally them…. Just as I finished pushing a soldier back into his rank, I saw him fall at my feet, struck down by a saber blow, and I quickly turned around. The British cavalry were charging us on all sides and cutting us to pieces. To avoid the same fate, I could only rush into the midst of the crowd. We found ourselves defenseless, exposed to a ferocious enemy. They even cut down the boys who served as our pipers and drummers.” Actually, though, many French troops were able to surrender, throwing their muskets to the ground and unfastening their crossbelts—or perhaps the Grays’ blades were not as sharp as they once were. At the battle’s end, Grenier’s brigade counted only three officers killed and fifty-nine wounded, an exceptional disproportion. An officer of the Gordons, from his position on the high ground, watched the Scots Grays as they “actually walked over this Column,” and this is probably the most objective description of what happened; in the end, therefore, the death toll wasn’t extremely high—partly because of the smoke, which covered everything in an instant—but Grenier’s brigade was nonetheless crushed.
The Battle Page 19
