The same thing happened to the British artillery that had happened to the Grande Batterie a short while before, further testimony to the terrifying impact on gunners of a cavalry charge. In at least two cases at Waterloo, the battery commanders themselves, seeing the cavalry advance, gave the order to limber up the guns and transport them to the rear. One of these, Captain Sinclair, had already lost four guns in a clash with the French in Spain two years previously, and the consequences for his career had been distinctly negative. There was no lack of extenuating circumstances, but Wellington remained furious. A few months later, when there was talk of giving the artillery officers who had been present at Waterloo a cash reward, the duke expressed his unequivocal opposition to the idea.
Having routed skirmishers and artillery, the French cavalry was in possession of the Mont-Saint-Jean ridge. The uphill charge had surely tired their horses and disordered their ranks, and then, in front of them, were Wellington’s squares, each one formed by a troop of a few hundred men crowded close together around a flag or banner, all with fixed bayonets, those in the first two ranks down on one knee, the others on their feet. We do not know exactly what orders the cavalry generals had been given, nor whether Marshal Ney had ridden that far with them (though in all probability he had), but they could scarcely have been told anything other than that they had to break up those squares. At that moment, they were more than three thousand strong, the cavalry of the Grande Armée, the most famous mounted force in the world. The officers of the cuirassiers, of the chasseurs à cheval, and of the lancers dressed the ranks of their men, brandished their sabers, and led them forward.
For almost all the squares, the first attacks were the ones that came closest to causing panic. Many soldiers in the British and German squares were young recruits under fire for the first time. An officer of the Royal Engineers who had taken refuge in one of the squares remarked, “The first time a body of cuirassiers approached the square into which I had ridden, the men—all young soldiers—seemed to be alarmed. They fired high and with little effect, and in one of the angles there was just as much hesitation as made me feel exceedingly uncomfortable.” Private Morris of the Seventy-third wavered for a moment when a “considerable number of the French cuirassiers made their appearance, on the rising ground just in our front, took the artillery we had placed there and came at a gallop down upon us.” Morris was so awestruck by the sheer size of the men and the horses, by the shining helmets and the steel cuirasses, that he thought, “we could not have the slightest chance with them.”
The same sentiment prevailed among people who were much more experienced than the nineteen-year-old Morris. In the yard at La Haye Sainte, Major von Baring ordered his fusiliers to fire at the serried ranks of cavalry riding past the farm, but he watched the enemy horsemen continue their advance “without even noticing” this fire and boldly attack the squares. “I could see all this going on, and I’m not afraid to admit that my heart sank more than once,” Baring later recalled. Some distance away, on the high ground behind Hougoumont, Captain Mercer was still talking with Colonel Gould when he saw the enemy cavalry come back up the slope and overwhelm the guns of the batteries posted in the first line, and for an instant he had the impression that the infantry squares, too, had disappeared under the countless whirling sabers. “The only objects were a few guns standing in a confused manner, with muzzles in the air, and not one artilleryman,” Mercer wrote. “And now we really apprehended being overwhelmed, as the first line had apparently been. ‘I fear all is over,’ said Colonel Gould, who still remained by me. The thing seemed but too likely, and this time I could not withhold my assent to his remark, for it did indeed appear so.”
But if the squares were not broken or at least pushed back, the capture of the guns meant nothing, and a charge against a line of squares, more than just blind momentum, rather resembled a risky psychological game. The French cuirassiers were assembled in plain view on the crest of the ridge, little more than a hundred yards away from the nearest squares, far enough that it would have been useless for the infantry to start shooting at them. When a squadron had chosen its objective and was ready to move, it set out at a walk, superior officers in front, their sabers unsheathed. If, at this point, the men in the square started to fidget a bit too much, the cuirassiers’ officers could risk accelerating the pace to a trot, which meant that the infantry had time to fire one volley only. Should that volley be fired badly—too soon or too high—the cavalry could pass to a gallop, and then the infantry soldiers, in all probability, would lose their nerve and clear off, and the inevitable result would be a massacre. However, if the infantry, kept in place by the blows and curses of its officers and sergeants, remained steadfast and held its fire until the last possible moment, the cavalry would usually slow its pace, veer to the right or left before impact, and ride off in search of another target. In this case, the soldiers in the squares could shoot with impunity, and the cavalry would receive the full force of the infantry’s fire.
Yet for an infantry square, victory meant only a moment’s breathing space before another cavalry squadron appeared, while defeat meant destruction and death. By contrast, a squadron could lose many such games before its offensive capacity would start to be seriously reduced by the weak fire of the squares. But the balance was redressed in favor of the defenders in that the cavalry—considered in purely physical terms, as a striking force—did not have the slightest chance of breaking up a square by dealing out saber-strokes; horses could not be persuaded to plunge into the midst of bayonets. “The horses of the first rank of cuirassiers, in spite of all the efforts of their riders, came to a standstill, shaking and covered with foam, at about twenty yards distance, and generally resisted all attempts to force them to charge the line of serried steel,” wrote Ensign Gronow, who spent several hours in the square of the 3/1st Foot Guards. All in all, the final outcome depended exclusively on the courage of the infantry: If it kept its nerve, nothing could happen to it, while the courage of the cavalry, in and of itself, was not enough to guarantee victory.
Between four and six o’clock in the afternoon, on the slope that descended from the north side of the chemin d’Ohain to Mont-Saint-Jean, countless games of this type were played out, and the British and German infantry—thanks to tough training, the energy of the officers, and the courage of the men—held fast for the duration. Captain von Scriba described how the officers were able to compel their recruits to hold their fire until the cuirassiers were only twenty or thirty paces away; the ensuing volley, though ineffective in terms of accuracy, was enough to disperse them and force them to withdraw. The French quickly regrouped and began to advance again, but this time, when they reached the same distance from the square as before, the foot soldiers, miraculously restrained by their officers, continued holding their fire, unnerving the cuirassiers so thoroughly that they changed direction and rode away harmlessly along the sides of the square.
Sometimes, this psychological game took on comedic rhythms. The Duke of Wellington recalled having seen some squares which “would not throw away their fire till the Cuirassiers charged, and they would not charge until we had thrown away our fire.” But variations were introduced into the game. Having realized that the squares’ tactic was to hold their fire until the very last moment, the cuirassier commanders started to send individual riders forward. These urged their horses very close to the enemy and took aim with the short carbines they all carried. A cuirassier did this at serious risk to his own skin; had a square responded to his aggression with an exasperated volley, he would surely have been cut down. But that was exactly what the French officers wanted, for it would give their men an opportunity to charge the infantry before they had time to reload their muskets. The British and German officers found it necessary to send some selected marksmen out of the square—with all the risks such exposure entailed—in an attempt to keep the cuirassiers and their carbines at a distance.
Everywhere, the commanders’ abilities, as well as
their nerves, were stretched to the limit by this type of combat. Not far from La Haye Sainte, a cuirassier squadron charged the square of the Fifth KGL several times. Repulsed every time, the riders took shelter in a fold of the ground while their commanding officer quite coolly remained in the open, riding around the square, on the lookout for the favorable moment to order a fresh attack. Colonel von Ompteda, commander of the Second KGL Brigade, who had taken refuge in this square, asked several of the battalion’s elite marksmen to shoot the French officer down, but they all missed him. Finally, after the square had been charged for the fifth time, a rifleman from another regiment, John Milius, who had been wounded in no-man’s-land and dragged to the relative safety of the square, offered to try his hand. One of his legs was broken, and he had lost a great deal of blood; but he had himself carried to the front rank, got the French officer in the sights of his Baker rifle, and killed him with one shot.
Though the French cavalry was not making much progress, Wellington’s situation was precarious. The enemy had overwhelmed his defensive line, his guns were temporarily lost, and he and all his generals were compelled to seek protection inside the squares, from where it inevitably became more difficult to exercise command. As Wellington remarked a few weeks later in a letter to Lord Beresford, the enemy cavalry were moving among the Allied troops as though they were their own. If at this moment Napoleon had sent forward the infantry of the Imperial Guard, which constituted the principal reserve force still available to him, the line along the ridge could have been definitively occupied and the Allied guns rendered useless, and in all probability the French would have won the Battle of Waterloo.
The emperor has always been criticized for not having used his reserves in support of the cavalry; in the end, it has often been said, this excessive caution cost him the battle. Concern for the Prussian columns that were approaching from the east may have played a part in his failure to act; at that moment, the vanguard of those columns was just beginning to emerge from the Fichermont wood. In light of what happened later, it is also probable that as long as Hougoumont and La Haye Sainte were still putting up resistance, the emperor intended to postpone the final attack; he knew how risky it would be to insert the bulk of his forces into such a narrow space while at their back those two bastions remained in enemy hands. But perhaps an even more convincing reason for his inaction lies in the fact that the fighting around the squares took place on the side of the ridge that Napoleon could not see. Until Marshal Ney or the cavalry commanders communicated with him, the emperor was unable to know what was going on. A few years previously, Napoleon would have jumped on a horse and gone to see for himself; but he was forty-six years old, and he was tired. He remained seated on his camp chair near La Belle Alliance, chewing on straws and waiting for news.
FORTY - SIX
“WHERE ARE THE CAVALRY?”
The only force that could try to drive the French cavalry from the ridge and give the squares a chance to breathe was the Allied cavalry, and Lord Uxbridge engaged it without reserve. Between La Haye Sainte and Hougoumont, the cavalry brigades of Grant, Dornberg, and Arentschildt had seven regiments in all, four British and three KGL; there were, as well, the Brunswick contingent’s Hussar regiment and a regiment of Hanoverian volunteers, the Cumberland Hussars. Collaert, the commander of the Netherlands cavalry, had another seven regiments; most of these, however, had already been battered in their recent charge. All the same, the total number was imposing: more than six thousand sabers, of which at least half were still fresh. Yet almost all of Uxbridge’s troopers were light cavalry, and he could not have hoped to engage them in large numbers against the cuirassiers or the lancers of the Old Guard. He preferred to post his horsemen behind the squares, near enough for the infantry to feel their reassuring presence; then, when the occasion presented itself, in the moment when the enemy cavalry could be surprised, when it was scattered and falling back after an unsuccessful charge, he would launch a few squadrons in a counterattack.
In more than one instance, these counterattacks were successful, even though the Allied cavalry, both British and German, continued to demonstrate the same dauntless contempt for orders and the same lack of foresight that their colleagues had shown earlier in the battle. At one point in the conflict, General von Dornberg decided to attack a cuirassier regiment with two regiments of his own, the Twenty-third Light Dragoons, a British unit, and the First Light Dragoons of the King’s German Legion; his forces, therefore, outnumbered the enemy by two to one. Should the French begin to fall back, Dornberg cautioned his commanders, only one squadron from each regiment was to pursue them; the others were to re-form their ranks and stay under cover. The first squadrons of the French regiment, attacked on both flanks, were indeed put to rout, whereupon Dornberg’s entire cavalry, forgetful of his orders, dashed after the fleeing enemy.
But the French colonel, unlike his adversary, was holding some squadrons in reserve, and these broke up the Allied pursuit; immediately thereafter, while the British and German cavalry were remounting the slope in disorder and on blown horses, a fresh cuirassier regiment appeared and blocked their way. Dornberg’s squadrons launched a desperate charge; the French came to a halt, drew their swords, and awaited the enemy unmoving. At the moment of impact, the light dragoons realized that their curved sabers were no match for the cuirassiers’ long swords, nor could they penetrate the French cuirasses. Seeing that his men were losing heart, General von Dornberg tried to lead some of them against the enemy flank. “At this point, I was pierced through the left side into the lung. Blood started coming out of my mouth, making it difficult for me to speak. I was forced to go to the rear, and I can say nothing more about the action.”
Dornberg’s depressing account recalls the Duke of Wellington’s caustic comments about his cavalry’s ability to maneuver, and it was echoed by others. Major von Goeben of the Third KGL Hussars tells how Lord Uxbridge in person ordered two squadrons to attack two regiments of French cavalry that were remounting the slope: “This attack was made, and that part of the enemy force that the two squadrons could reach was brought to a standstill and then violently thrown back. However, since the enemy line was so much stronger, these same squadrons were then outflanked on both sides and suffered a considerable loss in officers, men, and horses.” When the German regiment, which had begun the day with at least 500 sabers, re-formed its ranks behind the protection of the squares, no more than 120 men were still in their saddles.
Both the material superiority of the French cuirassiers, with their heavy armor, and the tactical ignorance of too many British and German officers were regularly confirmed in almost all the conflicts. Not content with the previous action, Captain von Kerssenbruch—who had succeeded to the command of the Third Hussars after a cannonball killed their colonel—wished to attack the flanks of several cuirassier squadrons. Kerssenbruch’s men, however, quickly got the worst of the encounter, the captain was killed, and the surviving Hussars, together with the cuirassiers pursuing them, ended up among the squares. The Allied infantry fired, persuading the French to fall back, but many of them, carried along by their own momentum, passed beyond the enemy lines. When the Hussars attempted to regroup and re-form their ranks, they discovered that there was a cuirassier in the midst of them; since he refused to surrender, they tried to cut him down with their sabers, but his stout helmet and cuirass resisted many blows, and it was a good while before he finally fell.
This phase of the battle proved to be rather frustrating for many officers of the Allied cavalry. Captain Robbins of the Seventh Hussars, Lord Uxbridge’s pampered personal regiment, remembered little else but that he and his men, having dismounted in order to offer a less conspicuous target, had been moved back and forth several times, always under the fire of the enemy artillery. “Much annoyed by shot and shells, and still seeing no Enemy, yet losing many men and horses, we were again moved.” Robbins and his men took cover in the sunken lane, but not even this was safe: “Some guns of the Horse A
rtillery had just been obliged to withdraw, the Enemy’s Guns having exactly got their range and doing great execution.” The regiment was finally ordered to mount and engage the enemy cavalry, which was advancing near Hougoumont château. There was barely time to see that their adversaries were the lancers of the Imperial Guard, deployed in three ranks, moving forward “as steadily as if on a field day,” and then the Hussars charged. In this attack, Robbins says, he “was wounded and fell.” Thus “obliged to leave the field,” he was “unable to give any account” of what happened after that.
Not surprisingly, the Allied cavalry eventually began to lose heart. The few remaining squadrons of the Household Brigade were sent forward in yet another disastrous charge, after which they were obliged to form up in the rear, deploying in one line instead of two, in order to “make an impression.” One of a small number of surviving officers confessed, “Fortunately for us, nobody attacked us.” Shortly thereafter, Lord Uxbridge rode over to Trip’s brigade and ordered it to charge, then unsheathed his saber and set off at a trot. His adjutant, Captain Seymour, hurried after him to point out that no one was following him. Infuriated, Uxbridge turned back, but despite his efforts, he could not persuade the Netherlanders to move.
A little while later, Uxbridge saw the Cumberland Hussars showing clear signs of agitation and beginning to fall back without having received any order to do so. The earl immediately sent Seymour to see what was going on. The Hussars were an all-volunteer German unit, in their first battle. They had remained under the artillery bombardment for a long time, but it had not occurred to their officers—who were as inexperienced as they—that they could reduce casualties by having their troopers dismount. Lieutenant Waymouth of the Second Life Guards remembered seeing them sitting motionless in their saddles at a point in the battle when the entire British cavalry had dismounted and taken shelter under their horses; the captain wondered in amazement what was wrong with the German cavalrymen, allowing themselves to be slaughtered like that. Now, however, the Hussars had had enough; their commander, Colonel von Hake, explained to the incredulous Seymour that since his men were volunteers and their horses were their own property, he didn’t think he could compel them to remain in the battle line. The captain ordered them to halt but achieved no result; he spoke of the honor of the regiment, grabbed the bridle of the colonel’s horse, told him through his teeth what he thought of him, and finally implored him at least to deploy his men in the rear, out of range of the enemy guns; but nobody listened to Seymour, and the regiment dispersed. A number of officers and men, outraged by the cowardice of their comrades, left their ranks and attached themselves to other regiments; the rest abandoned the field and galloped all the way back to Brussels.
The Battle Page 24
